Kindling a Fire: More Greentime, Less Screentime

Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation has been the talk of the education world for the past six months, and deservedly so. It has launched an overdue conversation about teen anxiety, smartphone addiction, and loss of childhood independence. And it appears to be leading real change around smartphone habits, with many local schools instituting smartphone bans this fall.

At Country Day, we have long been believers in this philosophy. That’s why we removed all smartphones from students over a year ago. But while I welcome the increasingly crowded bandwagon, I want to draw attention to a less well-developed aspect of Professor Haidt’s research on smartphones: opportunity cost.

As Haidt correctly points out, one of the dangers of smartphones is not just what kids do while using them (though there’s plenty to worry about); it’s what kids are not doing while using smartphones. That opportunity cost – what kids are missing out on – is enormous. By some measures, teens spend 30% of their young lives on smartphones. Think of the books to be read, sports to be played, and friends to be made that are missed by today’s relentless technology use. For this reason, some observers have perceptively referred to smartphones as “experience blockers.”

Of all the potential alternative uses for screentime, it is “greentime” that I find most important. Haidt argues persuasively that children need far more unstructured and unsupervised play than they receive in today’s world. Such experiences are not just fun; they are an important antidote to hypervigilant and overprotective parenting, which hinders children’s ability to develop resilience, emotional regulation, and problem-solving skills.

Nature is often the best location for this kind of play. We have frequently observed on our campus that for all the newest playground equipment we may invest in, students still gravitate to woods, fields, and streams. A pile of leaves or a climbing tree are often the best playgrounds for kids, especially because they demand some element of creativity and imagination.

But nature is a powerful influence on kids beyond simply being a location for play. Many studies show that contact with nature leads to significant cognitive and emotional benefits, including increased brain activity, improvements in mental health, and better sleep.

Significantly, students are not just happier and more relaxed in nature, but they also improve their performance on academic tasks and creative projects when exposed to even small doses of the natural world. This result is thought to be the product of improved working memory, restored attention, and better executive function. As a result, more and more research supports incorporating nature into deliberate instructional strategies to drive academic achievement.

Finally, the natural world has a unique power in activating the brain’s default mode network. This area of the brain is engaged when a person is mentally at rest. It promotes reflection, makes sense of memories, contemplates the future, and connects thoughts in an effort to find high-level meaning. In sum, it is essential for a person to have a sense of self and coherence about life. But it is precisely this mode of thinking that has been crowded out by the “always on” nature of modern life and its technological temptations. A glowing tablet disrupts the default mode network; a green field activates it.

We are blessed to have 60 acres of nature surrounding our school. We’ve long known that this natural setting is an important part of our identity; in fact, it was one of the founding ideas of the school. But new research suggests that it’s more important than it’s ever been. So this year, we’re going to make sure we’re not just limiting screentime. We are going to maximize our students’ “greentime” every chance we get.

"Kindling a Fire" is a column submitted regularly to Indian Hill Living by Head of School Rob Zimmerman '98. This ran in the October 2024 edition of the publication.