Something remarkable has happened in the last couple of years.

Parents started pushing back. Schools banned phones. Legislators started passing real laws. Jonathan Haidt wrote a book that gave millions of families the language and the courage to say enough.

And it worked. Phone-free schools are spreading. Social media age restrictions are gaining traction. The cultural tide is turning.

But I want to say something that might be uncomfortable.

Taking the phone away is only half the battle.

If we take the device out of a kid’s hand and give them nothing in its place, we have not solved the problem. We have only removed the painkiller without treating the wound.

The Wound Nobody Talks About

The phone did not create the loneliness. The phone filled it.

Long before smartphones showed up, we had already disassembled the social architecture that made childhood rich. The neighborhood play. The youth groups. The Scouts. The church leagues. The summers where you rode your bike to a friend’s house and didn’t come home until dark.

All of that was disappearing decades before the iPhone.

Boy Scouts membership dropped from over four million kids in the early 1970s to roughly one million today. Girl Scouts fell from 3.7 million to about 1.7 million. Youth sports leagues shrank or got replaced by elite travel teams that cost a fortune and sort kids by talent instead of zip code.

Robert Putnam documented all of this years ago. We were bowling alone long before we were scrolling alone.

The phone just made the silence bearable.

What Actually Formed Us

Think about the people and places that shaped you when you were young.

For most of us, it was not a curriculum. It was not a lecture. It was a group of people in a specific place who did life together long enough for the real stuff to surface.

It was the older kid on the block who taught you how to throw a spiral. The youth pastor who stayed after everyone left because he could tell you were off. The neighbor who let six kids pile into her living room every Thursday for no particular reason.

Those environments did something no app can replicate. They gave children real roles. Real responsibility. Real conflict that had to be resolved face to face because you were going to see those same people tomorrow.

Research backs this up. Kids who participate in community-based groups for multiple years show measurable growth in trustworthiness, helpfulness, and what researchers call hopeful future expectations. Teenagers involved in local group life demonstrate higher civic engagement, lower rates of risky behavior, and stronger emotional skills.

None of that surprises me. I have watched it happen thousands of times.

What I Have Seen With My Own Eyes

For over 35 years, I have watched young people get dropped into community and completely transform.

On the World Race, we take 20-somethings and put them in teams. They travel to 11 countries in 11 months. They sleep on floors. They share everything. They serve in places that would break most adults.

And somewhere around month three, the masks come off.

The curated version of a person cannot survive three months of real community. The polished exterior cracks open, and what comes out is the real person. And if there are others in the room who have been trained to hold honest conversations with love, something beautiful happens.

The young person learns, maybe for the first time, that honesty is not the enemy of love. It is the deepest proof of it.

I have watched racers who came in lonely and anxious leave with a depth of belonging they had never experienced. I told the guys on one squad at the outset, “If we are to bond as a squad, it is up to you.” And I was so proud of the way they responded. They made that squad a safe place. One of the best examples of the body of Christ I have ever seen.

If the World Race teaches you anything, it teaches you that you need community. You need to be around people who get you and give you the space and encouragement you need to become the best version of yourself.

Phones cannot do that. Screens cannot do that. Only people can.

The Architecture We Need to Rebuild

So here is the question every parent, pastor, and community leader needs to sit with:

If we take the phone away, what are we putting in its place?

Because kids need more than empty hours. They need what those hours used to be full of. They need proximity. Frequency. Older kids leading younger ones. Adults present but not hovering. Shared challenges that cannot be completed alone.

They need groups that meet every week, not once a quarter. Research is clear: irregular gatherings cannot compete with the gravitational pull of a screen.

They need activities that start young and build continuity. Cross-age relationships. Shared norms. Shared memory. Streets and parks and basements that feel like stages for real life instead of empty transit zones between scheduled activities.

They need participation that feels ordinary. Not elite. Not expensive. Not something you audition for. Just something kids do because their friends do and their neighborhood is built around it.

In some countries, this still exists. In Israel, roughly 30 percent of students are part of youth movements. Kids meet multiple times a week. Older teens lead younger ones. Adults support but do not direct. It is not exotic. It is just childhood. And the developmental outcomes are remarkable.

We used to have something like that here. We can build it again.

A Word to Parents

I know what some of you are thinking. This sounds like one more thing you have to organize on top of everything else.

It does not have to be complicated.

It can start with your street. Your church. Your living room. Invite the neighborhood kids over every Thursday. Start a backyard league. Ask the teenager down the block to help run it. Give older kids real authority and watch what happens.

You do not need a program. You need proximity and permission. Permission for kids to be together without an agenda. Permission for older kids to lead. Permission for things to be messy and imperfect and real.

The most powerful thing you can do for your kid right now might not be taking their phone. It might be rebuilding the world their phone replaced.

The Real Invitation

An overwhelming majority of kids say they would rather be together in the real world than on screens.

Let that sink in.

The problem is not desire. The problem is that we tore down the infrastructure of togetherness and then blamed the kids for retreating into their devices.

We have a window right now. The phone bans are creating space. The cultural conversation has shifted. Parents are paying attention.

But space is not enough. We have to fill it with something worth showing up for.

Something local. Something regular. Something where kids are known by name and given real things to do and surrounded by people who will not let them hide.

That is what childhood used to look like.

That is what it can look like again.

And the good news is that we do not need to wait for Congress or Silicon Valley to make it happen. We just need a few courageous adults in every neighborhood to start showing up.

The phones are coming out of kids’ hands.

Now let us give them something better to hold on to.

References

Scouting America membership data: AP News reporting on BSA membership trends; Scouting America 2024 annual report.

Girl Scouts membership data: Associations Now and Girl Scouts of America organizational reporting.

Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

Tufts University longitudinal study on Scouting and character development (Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 2015).

Israeli youth movement participation: Rashi Foundation, experiential education research; Israel Ministry of Education.

Harris Poll / Jonathan Haidt survey: kids prefer real-world togetherness to screen time (2025).

Seth Kaplan, “We Took Away the Phones — Now What?” After Babel, May 2026.