Trying to be a Third-Way Thinker

Green nukes; more than just phonics; oh my

Here’s what I think we’re going for at Center for Teen Flourishing.

Not contrarianism. Not splitting the difference. We agree with one side that harm is real, while disagreeing with that same side about what to do.

Have you heard of Ted Nordhaus? Ecomodernist. This is not my area, but I think he fully accepts climate science, then breaks sharply with mainstream climate advocacy community on the solution. Restricting consumption, banning fossil fuels - he’s arguing that empirically it just has not worked. Hence the need for nuclear energy, for example. Nordhaus sometimes gets dismissed by the green left as a shill and ignored by the right as a climate alarmist.

Natalie Wexler is a longtime thinker about literacy. The reading wars had two camps: phonics on one side, whole-language romantics on the other. Wexler accepted the phonics research completely (as do I). But she turned to the phonics camp and said: Decoding is necessary but not sufficient, they need knowledge, what ED Hirsch said decades ago.

This is what the Center for Teen Flourishing tries to do in the debate over phones and teen flourishing. We buy the Screen Harm claims that spending 30, 40 hours a week is problematic. We admire their advocacy.

We’re not morally against one of their key solutions, the 3pm to bedtime bans by states and countries. But it doesn’t seeNom like those bans actually change screen consumption very much.

There’s a new study out. Cass Sunstein is one of the co-authors, as is Angela Duckworth. Title?

They surveyed 835 Australian teenagers four months after the country’s social ban for teens.

They wanted to know what percentage of those teens comply with the ban. What would you guess?

We find that only about one in four 14–15-year-olds comply. The social environment around use has barely moved: most banned teens believe that their peers are still using banned platforms and cite social reasons for continuing use. Sustaining high compliance requires two ingredients: the share of compliers must be high enough and those who comply must find it preferable to continue complying. The current ban achieves neither.

Teenagers report that they require roughly two-thirds of peers to stop using social media to stop themselves, far above the share currently complying. They also perceive compliers as less popular than non-compliers, so the more influential teens disproportionately stay on the platforms.

Together, these patterns suggest that compliance is more likely to diminish than to rise.

The title is Why Bans Fail: Tipping Points and Australia’s Social Media Ban.

Now look. It’s a survey. It’s not screen data itself. So take with a grain of salt.

Also: it’s not like we at CTF want to rain on the parade of people we admire who are promoting these out-of-school bans. We’re cheering for them to succeed in getting teens off screens and out of the house.

But we worry we’ll lose a few years as a society, as the ban proponents succeed in notching victories in various state governments (like here in Massachusetts), but fail in changing teen behavior .

Let’s at least commission some RCTs together to examine competing mechanisms to suppress teen screen use. Our CTF entrant is substitution over suppression: do the hard work of getting each teen to engage in “something” that productively eats up some hours each week.

Imagine an experiment where State XYZ passes the ban; 500 teens are recruited to follow carefully; half get “just the ban”; the other half get meaningful 1-1 coaching to help them try new stuff, like fitness and music lessons, then $$$ to allow them to do it. Let’s try a Third Way approach here.