We Keep Looking for One Cause

Wanting one thing to blame is a reflex, and it fails us with teenagers and with stalled AI programs alike.

Phones or play

Phones or play. That's how the argument about teenagers usually goes, and it's a comfortable one because you get to pick a side.

Then I read a book review in Education Next that took apart both sides at once. It covers Peter Gray's Restoring Childhood, which blames the loss of unsupervised play and pushes back on Jonathan Haidt's phone story. The reviewers, Richard Weissbourd and Kiran Bhai, agree play matters. They just don't think any single cause carries the weight. Then they said two things that stopped me. In their surveys, teens aged 12 to 17 are less likely to struggle with anxiety and depression than adults in their twenties and thirties, and young adults are more than twice as likely as teens to. And 34 percent of teens report lacking meaning, purpose, or both, with family life the largest single factor in a kid's mental health.

The second reflex

I have a freshman at Texas State and a youngest who tried something last year that didn't go well. I wrote before about my reflex to stop the fall. This review showed me a second reflex: wanting one thing to blame. A phone is easy to blame. So is a school policy. Both give us something to confiscate or something to rail against, and then we feel like we did something. Like we made a difference or progress. Unfortunately, they also feed vicitim language.

I see the same instinct at work. When an AI adoption program stalls, someone wants one root cause. The tool, the training, the vendor, the employee. It's almost never one cause (and the real answer is usually slower and more personal than anyone wants to hear).

What actually helps

What the reviewers land on is hard precisely because it can't be bought: a sturdy relationship with at least one adult, something that feels like meaning, one area where you're good, and the sense that you matter to someone. That list can't be delivered by a rule or a device. It's delivered by showing up, which is the thing I wrote about in Love With Your Presence and still fail at on busy weeks.

One caution: I'm quoting a review, and the reviewers have their own view in this fight (both are at Harvard's Graduate School of Education), so read it for yourself and decide how much of the data you trust.

What to do

If my kid, or someone on my team, were asked to name the adult who steadies them, would they say my name? And if not, what am I too busy fixing?