May 23, 2023

Tuesday, May 23, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

Fact Sheet: Biden-Harris Administration Announces New Actions to Tackle Nation's Mental Health Crisis | The White House.

Actions include $200 million to scale up 988 suicide and crisis lifeline and new resources for school-based mental health services

This Mental Health Awareness Month, we honor all those experiencing mental health challenges and celebrate the mental health professionals, families, and caregivers who support them. It is clear that our country is facing an unprecedented mental health crisis impacting people of all ages. In 2021, two in five American adults reported experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression and forty-four percent of high school students reported struggling with persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, social media, and gun violence. The Biden-Harris Administration is firmly committed to addressing this crisis.

As part of his Unity Agenda, President Biden released a comprehensive national strategy to transform how mental health is understood, accessed, treated, and integrated in and out of health care settings. Across the federal government, thanks to the President’s American Rescue Plan (ARP) and Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), the Administration has already invested unprecedented levels of funding to expand access to mental health services. The President’s FY24 budget goes further, proposing tens of billions more to transform behavioral health services for all Americans. 

Today, which is recognized as Mental Health Day of Action, and throughout Mental Health Awareness Month, the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing additional critical actions to advance the President’s mental health strategy across its three key objectives: strengthening the mental health workforce and system capacity, connecting more Americans to care, and creating a continuum of support.

Strengthen the Mental Health Workforce and System Capacity
Addressing the mental health crisis requires that we confront the severe shortage of mental health professionals and strengthen the capacity of the behavioral health care system. As a result, the Biden-Harris Administration is taking new actions this month to:

Increase the size and diversity of the behavioral health workforce. Thanks to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), the Department of Education (ED) has awarded more than $280 million in funding to bolster the pipeline of mental health professionals serving in schools and expand school-based mental health services and supports. Earlier this week, ED announced $95 million of this total was awarded in grants across 35 states to increase access to school-based mental health services and strengthen the pipeline of mental health professionals in high-needs school districts. Grantees from ED’s mental health programs project that these funds will create more than 14,000 new mental health professionals in U.S. schools – including school psychologists, counselors, social workers. This month, ED also announced new fundingfor a center that will provide technical assistance to grantees working to address the critical need in prekindergarten-12 schools for school-based mental health service providers. This summer, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) will announce a new Behavioral Health Workforce Education and Training (BHWET) funding opportunity for approximately $8.4 million to support 16 awards to recruit and train providers to provide behavioral support to children and adolescents.

Expand access to peer support. A peer worker is someone with lived experience with a mental health and/or substance use condition, and who works with other people with similar conditions in a wide range of non-clinical activities including advocacy, navigation and linkage to resources, sharing of experience, social support, and more. In the coming weeks, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) will release the National Model Standards for Peer Support Certification. The new standards are designed to improve consistency across peer certifications and promote quality of the growing number of peer workers across the nation.  

Enhance crisis response. To ensure those in crisis have access to services, SAMHSA announced the availability of more than $200 million for states, territories, call centers, and Tribal organizations to continue strengthening 988 operations. Through the SAMHSA supported 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, the network receives approximately 100,000 calls, chats, and texts each week. Later this month, SAMHSA will also announce more than $9 million in awards in cooperative agreements for community crisis response partnerships. This funding will support mobile crisis response teams to ensure adults and youth experiencing mental health crises in high-need communities receive faster access to trained mental health professionals.  

Expand proven models of care. To build capacity to meet the mental health needs of Americans, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded 15 one-year state planning grants to help states develop the necessary capacity to compete to participate in the Certified Community Behavioral Health Center (CCBHC) Medicaid Demonstration. CCBHCs provide 24/7, comprehensive behavioral health care – including crisis care – to the most vulnerable Americans regardless of their ability to pay. Thanks to BSCA, we are working to expand these clinics and help more states enter the program. 

Connect More Americans to Care
Even when services are available, barriers like cost, cultural bias, and inconvenience often prevent people from accessing the care they need. On average, it takes 11 years after the onset of mental health symptoms for someone to seek treatment. To help remove these barriers, the Biden-Harris Administration is taking new actions to:

Make it easier to find help. It is simply too hard to know where to start when you or a loved one experiences a mental health challenge. That’s why HHS launched FindSupport.Gov, a brand-new, easy-to-access, free-of-charge, and user-friendly online resource for all Americans to learn how to get support for mental health, drug, and alcohol issues.

Provide mental health services in schools. To help address student mental health needs, today, CMS released an updated Medicaid School Claiming and Administrative Guide and ED released a proposed rule that would revise processes on Medicaid billing under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, both of which are intended to make it easier for schools to provide health services to students with Medicaid. In addition, the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) initiated a Behavioral Health and Wellness Program to provide indigenous focused, evidence-based, and trauma-informed behavioral health and wellness services and resources, including an expanded tele-behavioral health BIE specific 24/7 crisis hotline, to students and staff at all BIE-funded schools, colleges, universities, dormitories, and programs.

Support mental health of workers. Work related stress and burnout can lead to mental health challenges for America’s working families. To help address workplace mental health, earlier this month, the Department of Labor (DOL) launched a Mental Health at Work Initiative to promote key resources in support employees and employers. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) also rolled out the Workplace Stress Toolkit to provide guidance and tips for employers, training resources, and outreach materials to reduce stress and burnout among workers.

Reduce stigma for service members and veterans. Service members and veterans are at increased risk for mental health challenges. Earlier this month, the Department of Defense (DoD) issued a new policy that makes it easier for Service members to seek support by self-initiating a referral for a mental health evaluation through a commanding officer or supervisor. This policy, based on the Brandon Act, allows Service members to seek confidential help, reducing stigma associated with mental health issues. This month, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is also leveraging its Today I Am Campaign, to showcase veterans’ stories of getting help to inspire other veterans to proactively seek support and resources.

Deliver mental health services to caregivers. To help address the stress of family caregiving, this month, VA launched a pilot program to provide mental health services to caregivers enrolled in the Program of Comprehensive Assistance for Family Caregivers. This new program will address the unique mental health needs of veteran caregivers by providing evidence-based services centered around couples, family therapy, and the individual needs of the caregiver.

Reduce disparities in maternal mental health. Too often, postpartum depression and anxiety go undiagnosed. This month, HRSA will announce awards for more than $65 million to 25 HRSA-funded health centers to implement innovative approaches to improve maternal health outcomes and reduce disparities for women from underserved backgrounds by supporting health centers to partner with patients and the community to develop and pilot innovative, patient-centered, scalable models of care delivery that address the clinical and health-related social needs of health center patients at highest risk of maternal morbidity and mortality. HRSA also just marked the one-year anniversary of the maternal mental health hotline.  The 24/7 hotline, 1-833-TLC-MAMA, provides support before, during and after pregnancy and is currently staffed by more than three dozen call-takers, including nurses, doulas, and lactation consultants. During the first year, the hotline received more than 12,000 calls and texts. 

Promote behavioral health equity. Earlier this month, SAMHSA launched a Behavioral Health Equity Challengewhich will provide up to ten awards to community-based organizations for innovative outreach and engagement strategies that help members of underserved racial and ethnic communities engage in culturally and linguistically responsive services across the continuum of care for behavioral health, including mental health promotion, substance misuse prevention, and treatments and supports that foster recovery.

Create Healthy and Supportive Environments

In addition to investments in the health care system, we must also build environments that promote wellness and recovery and prevent mental health challenges from occurring in the first place. This month, the Biden-Harris Administration is taking new actions to:

Improve youth resilience. Unlike ever before, our kids are facing the consequences of multiple crises at once, from COVID-19 to gun violence among other key issues. HHS announced the new Children and Youth Resilience Prize Challenge, which will award $1 million to innovative community-led solutions to promote resilience in children and adolescents affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and other disasters.

Promote the importance of social connection. Social isolation and loneliness are far too common. People from all walks of life have been forced to grapple with increase social isolation and loneliness, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this month, the U.S. Surgeon General released a new Advisory on Addressing Loneliness and Promoting Social Connection. And, CDC also launched a new website for adults, which provides key suggestions on how to combat loneliness by improving social connectedness.

Invest in early childhood mental health. Like with physical health, it is important for us to start taking care of the mental health of our children as early in their lives as possible. Later this month, SAMHSA will award $9.7 million in grants through the infant and early childhood mental health program to improve outcomes for children from birth up to 12 years of age via improved interventions and treatment services.

Improve suicide prevention efforts. Beyond scaling up 988, the Administration is also taking additional actions to better prevent suicide. The Indian Health Service (IHS) will implement a system-wide suicide prevention training for all staff to increase recognition and response to suicide within American Indian and Alaska Native populations. Later this month, SAMHSA will award $6 million in suicide prevention grants across multiple programs to support states and tribes with implementing youth suicide prevention and early intervention strategies in schools, institutions of higher education, juvenile justice systems, substance use and mental health programs, foster care systems, and other child and youth-serving organizations.

Launch public call-to-action to support research. This month, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy called on non-profit organizations, advocacy groups, academic institutions, companies, and other research funders to share their actions and collaborations to help advance national mental health research priorities. This builds on the first-of-its-kind White House Report on Mental Health Research Priorities, which outlined a set of critical and timely needs and opportunities in mental health research.

Improve employee wellness. Americans spend much of their lives working, so it is critical that we foster healthy mental health practices even at work. Later this month, the Administration’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will release an Employee Wellness Program Guidance for agencies on best practices for providing wellness services to federal employees. The Administration also launched an interagency Mental Health and Well-being Community of Practice to continue to identify best practices and develop a government-wide toolkit for agencies containing metrics, data, insights, and options for agencies to use to understand and promote employee well-being and mental health.

Expand access to recovery. Treatment works and recovery is possible, and the Administration is committed to supporting all living in recovery. In the coming weeks, SAMHSA will announce $5.4 million in grant awards for building communities of recovery to support mobilization and connection of community-based resources to increase access to and quality of long-term recovery support for people with substance use disorders and co-occurring substance use and mental health disorders.

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Don’t believe there are MAGA Republicans and regular Republicans.

Yes, some might accept the results of an election, but name one who objected to the separation of children and parents.

Here are 2024 Republican Presidential candidate.Tim Scott’s positions. He shouldn’t be near the Oval Office.

It seems not just Justice Thomas knows Harlan Crow. Here is Kevin McCarthy, Tim Scott, and Chris Christie at the Harlan Crow Library.

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Happening in the States.

Delaware.

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In case you are making travel plans….

We will miss visiting with my sister and brother-in-law, but we no longer will travel to Florida.

Spread the word.

If Disney is on your mind, please consider Anaheim.

https://twitter.com/mollyploofkins/status/1660243167558377475?s=61&t=I_Od53CbnPTsbLcD0baXPg

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Latino civil rights organization; Equality Florida, a gay rights advocacy group; and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) have all issued advisories warning against travel to Florida. “Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals,” the NAACP said. “Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.” (Source. Heather Cox Richardson, Letter from an American).

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Trump has been warned. Now comes the payback.

Look for this.👇

The Week Ahead. by Joyce Vance.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump will attend a hearing in front of Judge Juan Merchan in Manhattan, by video. The hearing is part of the Manhattan DA’s criminal prosecution of Trump. The judge set the hearing for a very specific purpose: he wants to review his order regarding restrictions on sharing, with third-parties or the public, information revealed by the government to Trump in discovery.

He will likely go over his order regarding access to and use of (i.e. no social media posts) evidence revealed by prosecutors to Trump in discovery. That’s a nice way of saying the judge is setting up Trump for contempt if he violates the order, by reviewing it with him, and confirming in court, on the record, that Trump understands the obligations the court has imposed and has the opportunity to respond and clarify as appropriate.

The protective order Judge Merchan entered provides that “any materials and information provided by the People to the Defense in accordance with their discovery obligations ... shall be used solely for the purposes of preparing a defense in this matter.” Trump is singled out in the order. He is limited to reviewing some materials in the presence of his lawyers and cannot be shown others, like witnesses’ cellphone records, without prior court approval.

There’s no doubt that an order like this creates a potential issue on appeal for Trump if he’s convicted. He will argue it violates his First Amendment rights, especially as a political candidate. Judge Merchan acknowledged Trump’s “special” status as a former president and a current candidate, and made clear at a prior hearing that the protective order was not a gag order and did not prevent Trump from speaking publicly about the case.

Protective orders like this are used when a defendant’s conduct threatens the safety and well-being of witnesses, victims, or anyone else related to the case. Prosecutors argued Trump’s history of making “harassing, embarrassing, and threatening statements” about other people in his various other legal disputes merited this action. Judge Merchan scheduled the hearing that requires Trump’s virtual attendance the day after Trump appeared on CNN’s town hall and lied, offered fake excuses, and insulted people. He called the prosecutors’ indictment in the Manhattan case a “fake charge.”

Prosecutors argued they needed “safeguards that will protect the integrity of the materials,” saying the “risk” that Trump would use them “inappropriately is substantial.” The Judge agreed, but noted, “I’m bending over backwards and straining to make sure that he is given every opportunity possible to advance his candidacy and to be able to speak in furtherance of his candidacy.” He said, “The last thing I want to do is infringe on his or anybody else’s First Amendment rights.” The question of whether he has succeeded in that goal will be answered by an appellate court if Trump is convicted.

The hearing is a bit of a watershed moment among efforts to hold the former president accountable. Judge Merchan is drawing a red line Trump can’t cross without finding himself in serious trouble. This sort of treatment of Trump by the judiciary is long overdue.

The prosecution will move forward in state court even as Trump’s lawyers try to move it to federal court. U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, to whom the matter is assigned, has set a schedule that suggests there will not be a decision on that request before late June at the earliest. Absent a move to federal court, this case is currently on track to go to trial next February or March, meaning the country may be treated to the spectacle of Trump on trial as he is competing in Republican primaries—more “firsts” for the former president. The first line of his obituary, which already will inevitably reference his status as the first twice-impeached, indicted former president, is getting more and more crowded. (Joyce Vance).

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Cheer for E. Jean.

E. Jean Carroll Seeks New Damages From Trump for Comments on CNN.

E. Jean Carroll, who this month won $5 million in damages from former President Donald J. Trump, is now seeking a “very substantial” additional amount in response to his insults on a CNN program just a day after she won her sexual abuse and defamation case.

Ms. Carroll’s filing Monday in Manhattan federal court seeks to intensify the financial pain for Mr. Trump. The jury in her civil case found him liable on May 9 for sexual abuse and defamation. It ordered him to pay Ms. Carroll, a former advice columnist and fixture in Manhattan’s media circles, $2 million for the sexual abuse and $3 million for the defamation.

Monday’s filing came in a separate defamation lawsuit that Ms. Carroll had filed in 2019 against Mr. Trump, 76, which is before the same judge who presided in the civil trial. The older case stemmed from comments Mr. Trump made that year, shortly after she said that he had raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. That lawsuit had been sidetracked by appeals, but is still pending.

In a separate letter to the judge, Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, revealed with little elaboration that Mr. Trump has threatened to file a lawsuit against Ms. Carroll “in retaliation and possibly to seek sanctions.”

On May 10, Mr. Trump, who is seeking to regain the presidency, went on CNN and echoed his earlier denials about the episode, calling her account “fake” and a “made-up story.” Despite a photograph showing them together, he claimed again that he had never met Ms. Carroll, 79, called her a “wack job” and said the recent civil trial was “a rigged deal.”

The court filing on Monday argues Mr. Trump’s defamatory statements following the May 9 verdict “show the depth of his malice toward Carroll, since it is hard to imagine defamatory conduct that could possibly be more motivated by hatred, ill will or spite.”

“This conduct supports a very substantial punitive damages award in Carroll’s favor both to punish Trump, to deter him from engaging in further defamation, and to deter others from doing the same,” the filing says.

Mr. Trump continues to fight the jury’s decision. After the verdict, his lawyer Joseph Tacopina filed a notice of appeal.

Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Ms. Kaplan, said in a brief interview Monday that Mr. Trump’s statements on CNN — “literally the day after the verdict” — made it all the more important for Ms. Carroll to pursue the pending defamation lawsuit.

“It makes a mockery of the jury verdict and our justice system if he can just keep on repeating the same defamatory statements over and over again,” Ms. Kaplan said.

She declined to comment on the reference in her letter to Mr. Trump’s threat of a lawsuit against Ms. Carroll.

In an extensive interview two days after the verdict, Ms. Carroll said of Mr. Trump’s CNN comments: “It’s just stupid; it’s just disgusting, vile, foul; it wounds people.” She added that she had been “insulted by better people.”

Her filing on Monday asks the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court, to let her revise her 2019 defamation lawsuit to include the fact of the jury’s verdict against Mr. Trump as well as his statements on CNN and others he made about Ms. Carroll on his Truth Social platform.

Ms. Carroll has said that after Mr. Trump raped her in the dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store, she kept the encounter a secret, other than confiding in two close friends, for more than 20 years. Ms. Carroll first disclosed the episode in a 2019 book excerpt in New York magazine.

At the time, Mr. Trump vehemently denied Ms. Carroll’s allegation, calling it “totally false” and saying he could not have raped her because she was not his “type.” (New York Times).

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Phone addiction. Some take action.

Are you considering this? 👇 You are not alone.

The Parents Saying No to Smartphones.

Every time one of his classmates gets a smartphone, Jhett Rogers thinks to himself: There goes another one. 

“It kind of feels like I’ve lost a friend. Whenever I’m with them, they’re zoned out and always on their phone.” 

But Rogers, a middle schooler in Salt Lake City, says he still can’t shake the desire to join the club. Six months ago, the only other holdout in his 30-strong group of friends got an iPhone.

“It kind of made me feel left out and jealous,” he says. “But later I don’t want one because I know what happens.”

He says kids in the hallways now bump into each other, with everyone staring down at their phones. Teachers have started giving up on his school’s no-phone policy, knowing students hide their devices up their hoodie sleeves and pull them out as soon as no one’s looking. At lunch hour, he says, everyone eats alone, scrolling TikTok while they chew. 

At 13, Jhett is part of a small, but growing, minority group of holdouts. By age 12, seven out of ten American kids own a smartphone. They also spend about eight hours online a day, inhaling TikTok trends, toggling between texts, and turning their daily lives into Snapchat and Instagram content. Most will have seen pornography by age 12, with three in four teenage boys saying they watch adult content at least once a week.

Meanwhile, a growing body of research shows that smartphones are at least partly to blame for skyrocketing rates of teenage anxiety and depression. As author Jonathan Haidt, reporting on a recent worldwide study on smartphone use among nearly one million youths, put it: “The younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health the young adult reports today.” 

For years, the risks have been clear as day among Silicon Valley’s brightest minds, including Bill Gates and Google’s Sundar Pichai, who famously kept smartphones away from their own kids, and Steve Jobs, who limited his children’s screen time altogether. But it has taken the Covid-19 pandemic for ordinary Americans to come to the same conclusion: that their kids had become dependent on their phones, and their school work suffered as a result. This year, an increasing number of school districts—in Ohio, Maryland, Colorado, and other states—have banned the devices in class. And in July, the state of Florida will enforce a new phone fatwa, barring their use during instructional time at all public schools.

In 2018, Lance Black, a Utah father of six, became a founder and investor in Gabb Wireless—a company making internet-free smartphones. The devices, which start at $150, are aimed at kids 5 to 15 and loaded only with the essentials: features for texting, calling, and a GPS tracker for parents. (Call them dumbphones.)

“It has a touchscreen, and you can call and text, so kids aren’t embarrassed to pull it out,” Black tells me, adding that it runs on an Android-based operating system.

Since Gabb launched in 2019, Black said the company has raised about $42 million in funding. While he won’t reveal specific sales, he said every year has significantly outpaced the previous year, adding, “We have hundreds of thousands of customers across the United States.”

One customer is Jhett’s father W. Pratt Rogers, who bought a Gabb phone for his son last year.

Rogers said he hopes Jhett’s dumbphone will take him all the way through high school. While he admits it’s hard denying his son a privilege all his friends enjoy, and he admits the situation is “an arms race,” he says it’s imperative that parents resist putting the internet in their kids’ pockets for as long as possible.

“How you help them learn to be present, in a task or with a relationship, is one of the top challenges of our generation,” says Rogers, a 40-year-old mining professor at the University of Utah. “Part of that is going to be saying no.”

Brooke Shannon said no to phones years before it grew into a movement. 

In 2017, she was driving past a middle school in her neighborhood when she saw a sea of kids, all staring into their palms. 

“It just made me sad,” she told me. “This was going to be life for my kids—either they’re going to be one of the only kids with their heads up, or they’re going to have a phone in their hands staring down with the rest of these kids.”

That inspired her to launch the nonprofit Wait Until 8th, in which parents pledge to keep smartphones away from their kids until eighth grade, or 13 to 14 years old—the longest she felt like she could get parents to hold off in a community that already had teched-up first- and second-graders. Shannon designed the pledge to go “active” once ten parents in a single grade sign on. 

“Then you can share with your kid like, ‘Yes, you’re waiting, but so are Johnny and Sam and Alison, or whoever it is,’ ” says Shannon, a 41-year-old raising three daughters in Austin. “There’s strength in linking arms with other parents.” 

But she admits she faced objections when she first started collecting signatures at her children’s school six years ago.

“Some people were like, ‘Oh no, that’s not for us—I’m totally fine with them having a phone. I did this for my older kid when they were in fifth grade or sixth grade, and it’s fine.’ ” The majority, she says, just give kids phones because they don’t have enough time—or the will—to push back.

Even so, her Wait Until 8th pledge has “spread like wildfire” to all 50 states in the last six years, with about 45,000 parents now having signed on, she says. Sign-ups slowed during the pandemic, Shannon says, when “nobody really wanted to hear about screen time.”

“But since the pandemic is behind us, there’s definitely been an uptick and more interest in the pledge,” she says. 

That includes Phil Funk, an Indianapolis father of four young kids, who says he’s persuaded “45 percent” of the parents in his children’s Catholic school to sign the pledge since he started a campaign last fall. But though he’s had “tremendous success” with parents of kids in grades K–5, he’s struggling with people who have kids in middle school, when the “vast majority” of students already have phones. 

“This is one of the most difficult parenting questions that we’re going to face,” says Funk, who received his first cell phone in college—“and that was a flip phone and there was no internet access.”

“We have to prepare them for the world as it is today,” he admits. But “we want to do it in a controlled way.” 

Tim Carney, a Virginia father of six, is waging his own campaign at his children’s schools but says his demands are “more radical” than the Wait Until 8th pledge. That’s because he wants his kids—and their peers—to wait until they’re 18 before joining the world of smartphones.

“Social media can change the way you see yourself so that you’re always imagining a second self looking at you,” the 44-year-old writer says. “You know, like ‘How would this moment come across? How can I tweet this out? How can I write about this?’ ”

Studies show some teens check their phones “almost constantly,” a fact that alarms Carney.

“I’m not afraid of my kids being exposed to screens,” he says. “I don’t want their understanding of themselves to be changed by having social media accounts, or by constantly being attached to a smartphone.”

But Riley Nicholson, a 12-year-old on Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, says she’s already comparing herself to her peers—not because she has a phone, but because there’s only one other kid in her entire seventh-grade class without one. 

“Everyone else is always talking about texting each other and stuff and I’m just like, ‘um. . . ’ ” Nicholson says.

Her mother, Brittany Nicholson, 40, worries about her daughter feeling “left out” but also believes “really strongly that she’ll have a better experience in life without a smartphone.” The third-grade teacher says she’s waiting as long as she can before buying the devices for her daughter and two sons, ages 7 and 8. 

“I want her to experience life through her own experiences, not comparing herself to what other people are doing on their phones. Or to do things just to take a picture of it so that she can show it off on social media,” the mother says. 

Many parents told me they don’t want their kids to develop the same dysfunctional relationship with technology that they have. 

Erika Ahern, a 42-year-old website editor living in Connecticut, says she often checks her phone late at night if she doesn’t make an effort to put it away first thing after work. She wants to raise her six homeschooled kids to choose “real life” over their screens. 

“Kids should be able to run outside this time of year and see things growing and see spring happening and to be totally entranced and enchanted by the world,” she says. 

“My biggest fear is that they grew up to be slaves to an addiction,” adds Ahern. “I think it’s like, ‘Are you the master of technology or is it the master of you?’ ”

Nicholas Kardaras specializes in treating young adults aged 17 to 25 with screen addictions at the Omega Recovery treatment center in Austin, Texas. Kardaras says the first hurdle is often convincing patients they’re actually addicted. 

“They don’t realize that they have a problem even though they’re on their device for 18 hours a day and flunking out of school because most addicts don’t see their addiction as a problem when they’re in the middle of it,” he tells me. 

Kardaras says his patients are often convinced they’re dealing with other issues, like Tourette syndrome or borderline personality disorder, which they’re introduced to through “psychiatrically unwell influencers” on social media. 

He said he knows these patients are actually suffering from “social contagion” instead, because the treatment—forbidding access to cell phones and the internet for a short period of time—is usually the cure, which “shouldn’t really happen with genuine borderline personality disorder or genuine gender dysphoria.”

Paradoxically, Kardaras says that almost all of his young patients were raised by “helicopter parents,” many of whom did their best to keep their kids away from smartphones or heavily monitored their internet use. 

“A lot of the young people I’ve worked with will say, ‘I don't feel a sense of control in my life,’ ” he says. “They feel like they’re being smothered and being told what to do all the time. But if they take out their phone, and maybe go on a gaming platform, then they feel like they’re conquering fantasy worlds. They feel a sense of empowerment and control.”

Kardaras, who authored a book on tech addiction, endorses the Wait Until 8th pledge, saying 13 is the sweet spot when children are old enough to “handle” some of the internet’s toxicity. He says his two identical twin boys had to hit that age before they were given smartphones. 

“If I kept them Amish until 18, they would go crazy at 19,” he says.

Saying no to phones might get easier for parents now that lawmakers are passing new rules and regulations. Last fall, California’s governor Gavin Newsom enacted a law mandating “robust privacy protections” for social media users under 18, which will be the strictest of its kind in the U.S. when it goes into effect next year. Some New York State lawmakers want tech companies to provide a 911-style helpline whenever a child’s data is compromised. Over in Utah, and now Arkansas, social media companies must receive parental consent before minors can join their platforms. On a national level, a bipartisan group of senators are trying to pass legislationrequiring digital platforms to “prevent and mitigate” mental health disorders and “addiction-like behaviors.” 

Meanwhile, Big Tech continues to roll out features they say make their products “safe” for kids, with Snapchat introducing its first parental controls this past year and TikTok planning to establish similar measures.

Parental controls are sometimes the last resort for parents who have already given their children smartphones. One couple in Inwood, an enclave of Upper Manhattan, is still reeling from the decision to give their daughter Helena, now 13, a device for Christmas two years ago. 

“It’s all been downhill from there,” according to Helena’s mother, Milly Hernandez, a 43-year-old operations manager. 

Now, she said, Helena hardly touches her violin. 

“I’ve tried to take the nice approach,” Hernandez says. “I say, ‘Oh, can you please put it away’ or ‘You’ve had the phone for too long, darling,’ or ‘Your poor eyes’ or ‘Your brain needs rest.’ ”

She leans in, as though confessing to a priest: “I think I’m going to go batshit.” 

This spring, Hernandez and her husband Troy Gordon, a 41-year-old accountant, plan to install controls on Helena’s iPhone that will expand or limit her use based on how much time she’s devoting to other, more creative activities like music and artwork. 

“In about three months from now, if we’ve gone ahead and done that, I think she will turn around and say, ‘You know what, I am much happier,’ ” her father, Gordon, says. “I think it will all end well.”

Then he pauses: “Maybe I’m deluded.

“If it were up to me, I’d flush it down the toilet.” (The Free Press).

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Yesterday, I reread Countee Cullen’s poem and wondered at his insights, language and pain.

Yet I do marvel

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Countee Cullen, "Yet I Do Marvel," from Color. Copyright 1925 by Harper and Brothers; renewed 1953 by Ida M. Cullen.

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