On Raising Dinosaurs

What happens when your child is the only one without a phone, and why "right" is not the same as "painless."

Leaping Laelaps by Charles R. Knight, 1897

The stereotype says homeschool children are the weird ones. Unsocialized, awkward, missing something. We heard this before we began homeschooling, and we have heard versions of it ever since. The assumption runs so deep in the culture that it barely requires defending: Children learn to be human by being around other children, and if you take them out of that system, something in their social development will be stunted.

We have now spent enough years in this to say with some confidence: Our children are different. But the direction of the difference is not what the stereotype predicts.

Our children play. They run around. They talk to adults without freezing. They argue with us about things they have read, negotiate with their siblings, and, in the case of our youngest, narrate elaborate stories to anyone who will listen. They are genuinely social in a way that we have noticed, with some unease, many of their peers no longer are. At birthday parties, in restaurants, at baseball games, we watch other children drift toward their screens within minutes of arriving. The screens are not a supplement to the social experience. They are a replacement for it.

The Thing That Was Supposed to Connect Them

The research on smartphones and adolescent social development has been accumulating for a decade. Jean Twenge’s work, which drew on large longitudinal surveys of American teenagers, found that the rise of smartphone ownership from roughly 2012 onward correlated with sharp increases in loneliness, anxiety, and depression among adolescents, particularly girls, but boys too.¹ Jonathan Haidt has more recently synthesized the evidence across multiple countries in The Anxious Generation, arguing that the smartphone did not just change how teenagers communicate but replaced the unstructured, embodied social time that adolescent development actually requires.² The argument is not that phones are evil tools. It is that they were handed to children before anyone understood what they were replacing.

What they replaced was presence. Not connection, exactly. These children are connected constantly, in a technical sense. But the presence that comes from sitting in the same room with a person and having no option but to be there, to be bored together, to figure out how to be with each other. That kind of presence has become rare. And children who have grown up with phones have largely stopped expecting it.

Our children do not have phones. We have made this decision deliberately, and we have made peace with the fact that it is not a permanent decision. They eventually when, when they begin driving. But not yet, and not simply because everyone else has one.

The Bus

There is a particular story we keep coming back to.

Our twelve-year-old had a baseball game recently. He was excited about it. Not the game exactly, though he loves baseball. The bus ride. His friends were going to be there. He was going to get to spend time with them in that particular way that kids do on buses, slightly out of range of adult supervision, free to talk about whatever they wanted. He was looking forward to it.

He came home quiet.

Every one of his friends had a phone. The bus ride was forty-five minutes each way. And so the boy without a phone sat alone in his seat, surrounded by his friends, while they disappeared into their screens. There was no conversation to join. There was no version of the bus ride that included him. He was present and invisible at the same time.

He did not say much about it. But we could see it.

The bitter irony does not require much explanation. The thing that was supposed to connect these children, the device that parents hand over for the sake of their child’s social inclusion so he will not miss out, has become the mechanism of exclusion for the child who does not have it. He is isolated not because we sheltered him from social experience but because we withheld the device that has made real social experience increasingly impossible for the children who do have it.

He is the dinosaur. Not because he lacks something, but because the world shifted while he was not looking, and now his way of being is the anomaly.

Normal Has Changed

Here is the thing about the homeschool socialization argument that we have been turning over for some time now: It assumes a fixed definition of socialized. The conventionally schooled child is, by definition, socialized. He has been in the system. He has learned how to navigate the norms. The homeschooled child is suspect precisely because he is outside that system.

But what happens when the system itself changes what socialization looks like?

A decade ago, the concern about homeschooled children was that they would not know how to handle a locker room or a lunchroom, the ordinary social friction of institutional life. That concern was always somewhat overstated, but it was at least coherent. The skills being measured were real skills: Navigating peer pressure, reading social cues, holding your own in a crowd.

Those skills still matter. But what the bus ride shows us is that something else has happened alongside the smartphone adoption. The default social mode of a group of twelve-year-olds is now individual screen consumption in the same physical space. The conversation, the shared boredom, the negotiation over what to talk about. Those are not the default anymore. They are the exception. They happen when phones are put away, which requires a reason, or an adult, or a deliberate decision that most children do not make on their own.

Our children are, genuinely and without irony, more practiced at unmediated human interaction than many of their peers. This is not because we are exceptional parents. It is because we removed the thing that would have displaced that practice. They can hold a conversation. They know how to be bored with another person and find something to do about it. They have had years of practice at being in a room with people and actually being with them.

The Cost Is Real

We want to be honest about what this costs him, because it would be easy to write that last section as though the story ends there. Our child has something other children lack, and that is enough.

But it is not enough for him right now.

He knows he is different from his friends in a way that is starting to matter to him. He does not have a “group chat.” He does not know what they talked about over the weekend because the conversation happened somewhere he could not reach. He is not excluded deliberately. His friends are not cruel boys. But the social infrastructure of twelve-year-old boyhood now runs primarily through a device he does not have, and exclusion does not require cruelty. It can be entirely structural. It can happen while everyone around you is being perfectly kind.

There is a category of right decision that comes with a cost, and pretending otherwise does not honor the cost. We believe we are doing what is best for our son. We believe the research supports us. We believe that in ten years, he will understand and perhaps even be grateful for this season. We hold all of that with reasonable confidence.

And we watch him come home quiet from a bus ride, and we know that reasonable confidence is not the same as no cost.

C. S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain that God “whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.”³ We do not think his bus ride is a catastrophe. But we think it is trying to tell us something, and we are trying to listen. Not to reverse course. We have not reversed course. But to see clearly. To resist the temptation to explain away our son’s loneliness as the price of virtue, as though naming it correctly makes it hurt less.

It hurts. He is our son, and he sat alone on a bus while his friends were somewhere he could not follow.

What We Are Learning

We did not set out to raise dinosaurs. We set out to raise children who could read, think, converse, and be present with the people around them. We read the studies. We watched our children flourish in ways we did not fully anticipate. We made a decision we still believe in.

But our son is teaching us something we did not fully account for: The cost of countercultural childhood is not paid by the parents. It is paid by the child. He bears it in the ordinary social moments that add up over time: The bus rides, the group chats, the inside jokes he does not have context for. We made a decision for him, because we are his parents and it is our job to make decisions for him, and he is living inside that decision in ways we only partially see.

We think it is worth it. We would make the same decision again. But we hold that conviction more carefully now, more aware that it is ours to hold and his to live.

If you are making the same decision in your home, we want you to know: You are probably right, and it will probably cost your child something, and those two things are both true at the same time. The right choice is not always the comfortable one, and comfort is not the thing we are aiming for. But keep your eyes open. Watch your child on the bus. Ask him how it went.

Listen to what he does not say.

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1. Jean M. Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood (New York: Atria Books, 2017). Twenge’s analysis drew on the Monitoring the Future survey (begun 1975) and the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, comparing adolescent responses before and after 2012, the year smartphone ownership among American teenagers passed 50 percent.

2. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin Press, 2024). Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff argue that the shift from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood” has been the primary driver of the adolescent mental health crisis documented across multiple Western countries from approximately 2012 onward. The book draws on data from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Scandinavia.

3. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940), Chapter 6: “Human Pain.” The full passage reads: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”