About three years ago all five granddaughters were in their downstairs bedroom at our house. It was about 6:00 in the evening and they were not making a sound. The girls were between thirteen and sixteen at the time, so that kind of quiet just didn’t seem right. I went downstairs and peeked in the door. There were all five, lying on two beds, quiet as a church mouse. Why? Because they were all on their smartphones.

Suddenly I knew why all five of them have phone-free hours set by their parents. Here were five girls who love nothing more than being together, but while they were bodily in the same room they were not looking at each other, speaking to each other, touching each other, or otherwise interacting.

I will say I do remember similar times with my cousins, when we’d all be in the same room reading Nancy Drew mystery novels. But that was after a creative day of play, and reading sessions like that were rare. But my children are aware enough of teen culture to know that if hours were not regulated, their girls would be tempted to look at their phones all day.

I’ve been reading a lot over the past year about the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and how our current culture, for about five centuries now, has rewarded left brain thinking and minimized the importance of right brain functioning. This is a shame, because the right hemisphere is the primary hemisphere of the human brain. The left is its emissary. We function best when the left hemisphere works at the direction of the right. The right hemisphere knows it needs the left. The left, unfortunately, believes it can get along just fine without the right.

The left hemisphere says I have a body. The right hemisphere says I am a body. The left is interested in what it knows, the right is interested in what it experiences. The left brain is interested in things, and the right in the relationships between people and things. The left brain is more mechanistic, the right more organic. The left brain focuses on analysis and categorization, the right on placing information in context. The left is more rational, the right more intuitive.

With that brief explanation you can see we have become a left brain dominant species. This left brain fixation plays out in a myriad of ways, some of them quite frightening. As I have been reading Jonathan Haidt’s latest book, The Anxious Generation, I have been fascinated by how much of the negative fallout of current teen culture is related to this left brain fixation.

Between 2010 and 2015 America went from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood. The shift is damaging our children. For centuries, children’s relational and social learning was embodied. It was synchronous, taking place in real time, where you learn to take turns and read the emotions of others. You were bodily in the same place with others, so it was in your best interest to learn how to get along. All of that is right hemisphere learning. It is necessary to learn empathy, to place information in context, and to develop a high emotional quotient.

Since 2015 and the mass adoption of smart phones, children’s relational and social learning is disembodied. It is asynchronous, not taking place in real time. There is no longer one to one communication or one to several, but one to many, even multitudes.

For girls, it takes place on social media. Girls are more relational and image conscious than boys. Unfortunately, when girls become aggressive on social media, they tend to destroy relationships and reputations. In an embodied community, they learn there is a price to pay for that kind of behavior. They become known as one of the mean girls. Online, there are no real consequences to destroying relationships and reputations.

For boys, their online activity is primarily video games, not played with a friend on a console, but online with others scattered all over the globe. If they are not playing video games, they are watching porn, which does not help them develop meaningful romantic relationships.

Cathy and I have both had teens in our counseling practice who have had suicidal ideation based on online attacks. We both can see that the problem is increasing.

All of us need embodied community. It is how we learn to be human together, how to do work together in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and where we maintain the social skills necessary to a healthy life.  What smartphones have wrought is a disengagement from embodied community. The price we are paying for that disengagement is just now being made manifest.

Our granddaughters were seldom on their phones while we were in Florida. We all interacted together with laughter, thoughtful conversations, play, and shared activities. It was a great week. We are all wired for deep human connections. We are an incarnate species. We cannot get those deep connections electronically. We must get them bodily.