The skills that every teen should learn before they ever get a cellphone

Being a teenager is like waking up every morning in a house of mirrors. You're everywhere and nowhere at once, trying to pinpoint which version of yourself is the most authentic.

For the past decade, teens have navigated this tumultuous period of their lives with a smartphone in their hand. We know the power of connectivity can be liberating, especially in adolescence. We also know how our craving for that connection often leaves us longing for more — incomplete without one more scroll or an extra like.

What we don't know yet is how that constant whiplash effect of moving from elation to despair or creative engagement to mindless distraction changes young minds. I've been writing about this subject for a year, studying the research that suggests a link between screen time and poorer mental health, talking to experts worried about the inevitable moral panic that comes with every new technology, exploring the positive aspects of being online, and even urging young people to reclaim their lives from the thrum of social media.

Now I come to you with a proposal: If adults are going to put smartphones and tablets into the hands of children and teenagers, we have an obligation to first show them what it means to be alone with their thoughts and how to identify and observe the flood of emotions that a person can feel on any given day.

In other words, they should learn mindfulness, a practice of focusing non-judgmentally — and with kindness and curiosity — on the present moment so that we might choose our behavior instead of being swept up in our feelings.

Young people's baseline experience of what it means to grow up has changed radically in the past decade, and so the support they get should evolve, too. This isn't about forbidding them from trying technology or shaming them for enjoying it, but instead giving them practical skills to help them make intentional decisions about how they'll use it.

The truth is that most adults could stand to learn mindfulness, and the scientific research suggests we'd feel the benefits of reduced stress, improved focus, increased relationship satisfaction, and less emotional volatility.

Yet anyone who became an adult before the advent of the iPhone in 2007 made their journey through adolescence without a handheld device designed by engineers to distract them from the present moment, providing countless diversions from cultivating resilience — and an inner life. Whether or not young people who grew up pre-iPhone were successful at finding peace amidst the turbulence of being a tween or teenager, they weren't inundated with the same level of digital noise, much of it verbal or visual echoes of someone else's life.

Former tech insiders and executives understand that persuasive design they helped invent and sell to the masses has a dark side. That's why earlier this year several of them, including former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris and tech investor Roger McNamee, founded the Center for Humane Technology, to confront how "technology is hijacking our minds and society."

Amy Saltzman, a holistic physician and mindfulness coach who works with families online and in the Bay Area, says one of her goals is to help young people be alone with themselves — and like the company they keep. I can't think of a better antidote to the poison teens sometimes encounter on their phones or the internet.

When Saltzman teaches mindfulness in classrooms, she often conducts an exercise that adults might find difficult to complete. In a minute, she says, I'm going to say something, and I want you to notice your thoughts and feelings. And then she delivers the news: I'm going to put your phone in this basket.

I'm going to return your phone, she says, and give you specific instructions for how to use it. Feel the phone in your hand and notice your thoughts, feelings, urges, hopes, and fears. Then she lays out the next steps: Press the home screen button and notice your thoughts, feelings, urges, hopes, and fears. Now simply open one social media app and look at only the first three posts. Notice your experience, your thoughts, and feelings. Turn your phone over and notice again your thoughts and feelings.

After the students have briefly interacted with their phones, the class discusses how it felt. Saltzman explains how much of the internet is designed to be addictive by intermittently triggering the release of the chemical dopamine, which keeps us coming back for more. (Think about the tiny thrill of getting an email from a friend, seeing likes on your Insta post, or buying a pair of shoes in less than a minute.)

Saltzman wants students to understand how their bodies and brains are drawn into the internet, for better or worse, and how that dynamic can influence their feelings.

Saltzman, however, isn't singularly focused on applying mindfulness only to digital technology. Rather, she sees her work with tweens and teens as an opportunity to equip them with skills that last a lifetime, and all the better if they can use those to effectively moderate their relationship with technology.

"Ideally, I would love every child to get mindfulness not just for tech use, but for living in the world," says Saltzman.

Her classroom exercise is actually an adaptation of David M. Levy's work. Levy, a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, teaches an elective course called Information & Contemplation.

The 10-week class is designed to help students develop a healthier relationship with their digital devices and apps. Levy assigns his students exercises that ask them to become more mindful of their behavior and how it affects them when they're online. One goal is to learn how to decide what to pay attention to in the face of repeated interruptions.

"I couldn’t imagine how I could continue to plumb the depths of what it is to be human if I were simply running from one thing to another and not allowing myself the time to be deeply reflective and contemplative," says Levy, who wrote the book Mindful Tech: How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives.

Yet Levy is also realistic about how those of us with the best intentions can have trouble sticking with new habits, even if we know they're good for us. That's why he believes teaching mindfulness in educational settings can be useful, especially if you sign up for a class and must complete it to receive credit.

Mindfulness skills are already taught in many schools. There are also skeptics unsure of what it means to bring mindfulness into classrooms. They tend to worry that it's really a cover for controlling or disciplining kids or that it amounts to mandating a form of prayer — mindfulness' roots are in Buddhism — for students. These objections should be carefully considered, and it's important to acknowledge that the Department of Education, currently helmed by Betsy DeVos, is unlikely to ever encourage schools to adopt mindfulness curricula.

But classroom education isn't the only answer. Mindfulness can be explored at home and learned independently through books, local classes, and, yes, apps and online resources. Even items like The Stress Reduction Workbook for Teens: Mindfulness Skills to Help You Deal with Stress and Mindful Kids: 50 Activities for Calm, Focus and Peace (both $14 on Amazon) are inexpensive ways to introduce the concept to young minds.

While personal coaches are costly, often similar in expense to college prep tutoring, their selling point is offering parents and children a one-on-one relationship with someone who can help them navigate various challenges. Claudia L'Amoreaux, an educational consultant in Berkeley, California, founded a coaching business called Mindful Digital Life about a year-and-a-half ago to specifically focus on the application of mindfulness to internet and device use.

L'Amoreaux helps families write mission statements that outline their broader values and how technology use reflects those principles. She works with parents to identify and change their own potentially addictive or distracted behavior when it comes to their digital devices. L'Amoreaux engages tweens and teens in conversations about their tech use, encouraging them to become "investigators" who perform their own experiments to better understand their relationship to the internet.

"If you have a conversation about technology, you have a conversation about the world," says L'Amoreaux.

We need more of these thoughtful discussions, and preferably in settings that are accessible to everyone, regardless of their income.

If we hope to actually prepare children for what happens when the world breaks open on the internet — beyond just limiting their time on devices and exposure to potentially harmful content — then mindfulness should be among the tools we turn to first.