5 Questions About Family Studies: Michael Toscano Introduces the Family First Technology Initiative

The Institute for Family Studies today officially launched the Family First Technology Initiative, consolidating several years of original research on the effects of smartphones, social media, and online pornography on children’s mental health and the quality of adult relationships. Our research has made the Institute a leader in developing model policies for state and federal lawmakers. In partnership with other groups, we’ve implemented more than a dozen laws nationwide to make the Internet safer for kids, and Americans are now thinking more about how technology can benefit, not harm, families and child welfare.

Over the next few years, the Family First Technology Initiative will produce original reports, develop model policies, and evaluate the impact of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, on American family life. I recently spoke with IFS Director Michael Toscano about this exciting new initiative. (The following interview has been edited for clarity).

Chris Bullivant: As Executive Director, you oversee the launch of the Family First Technology Initiative and are personally involved in the research and policy portions. Tell us what inspired this.

Michael Tuscany: In September 2019, IFS founder Brad Wilcox and I were invited to give a presentation to a group of mothers with children attending private schools in the Richmond area. Our remarks focused on discussing our classic research, and we concluded our talk by urging our hosts to become ambassadors for marriage. Afterward, a full six mothers engaged us, which completely surprised us. They politely thanked us for our work, but wondered if we “had a thing for social media and smartphones.” As we learned, their daughters and sons were seriously addicted to these technologies and worried that something was seriously wrong with them. That’s one of the things that piqued our interest in this topic and led to several of our reports on technology and family.

More generally, it is no longer possible to deny the radical effects of social media and smartphones on our children. We can all see it with our own eyes, but the research, including our own, has also reached a consensus on the issue. In her latest book, GenerationsPsychologist and IFS Fellow Jean Twenge assesses the mental health scores of Gen Z, the first generation of so-called “digital natives”. She finds that loneliness, self-harm, suicide attempts, anxiety, etc. have all risen dramatically since 2012, when access to smartphones and social media became the norm for life, even for children. “The (negative) trends are astonishing in their consistency, breadth and magnitude,” she writes. Her work is fully supported by a May 2023 advisory from the US Surgeon General, who declared that social media “poses a major risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents”. Likewise, Jonathan Haidt’s Fearful generation makes A compelling evidence, with a mountain of data, that early access to smartphones and social media is harmful to our children.

In the coming years, the Family First Technology Initiative will continue to evaluate how these devices and platforms shape our lives and our families.

Combative: What about the policy side? What is the history there?

Tuscany: Our policy work was inspired by our growing sense of concern that something needed to be done. So in June 2022, we convened a working group with Clare Morell of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), Adam Candeub of the Center for Renewing America and Michigan State University, Jean Twenge, Brad Wilcox, and myself. We developed ideas that we thought would give parents more power over what their children see and do online. Two months later, in August 2022, we published a policy paper and to our dismay, Governor Spencer Cox of Utah saw it online, was inspired by what he read, and it essentially became law there nine months later. Since then, several other states have followed suit.

Unfortunately, Big Tech lobbyists are trying to push this kind of legislation through the courts, although we believe we have a strong hand in the long run. In the meantime, we’ve made meaningful contributions to advancing laws requiring age verification on porn sites in 19 states. And we’ve helped develop model policies to make app stores safe for kids, which currently have traction at the federal level, with Rep. John James (R-MI) recently introducing an amendment to federal legislation along these lines. We’ve also had the honor of signing the Kids Online Safety Act (which the House should take up and pass in a manner faithful to the Senate bill). It’s been an incredible ride, to say the least, with much more to come.

The Family First Technology Initiative is a necessary response to help families in their “David versus Goliath” battle against Big Tech.

I have to emphasize that this has been a completely collaborative effort. We have worked closely with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Center for Renewing America, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, Protect Young Eyes, the Digital Progress Institute, the American Principles Project, and the Heritage Foundation, which generously awarded us and EPPC a joint Innovation Prize for this work, to name a few. I want to specifically mention the Family Policy Alliance, which has emerged as a champion of these issues and is committed to these policy ideas. We are up against Big Tech, an industry with power beyond comprehension. Getting this work done requires a collaborative effort.

Combative: Please explain in more detail how the Family First Technology Initiative fits into the Institute’s overall mission.

Tuscany: Ten years ago, the Institute for Family Studies was founded to analyze and improve the family crisis. At the time, we saw that marriage and the family were apparently in trouble, but what was really happening and why? Answering those questions is the core of our work. But in the years since, other critical challenges to the American family have emerged, and in response, we have broadened the scope of our work to address them: in this case, the technology crisis.

The Family First Technology Initiative is partly about helping parents raise children. It is increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to raise healthy children today because our children are immersed in electronics from an early age.

But there’s a problem for adult relationships, too. In a 2023 study, Wendy Wang and I found that married couples where one partner is a heavy phone user are more likely to divorce and experience a general sense of loneliness. So this is a problem for marriages, too. Phone-addicted parents (which is really all of us) have to be extremely disciplined to give our children the attention they deserve. Parents would rather scroll through spaceless electronic networks than be present with their families. This does extraordinary psychological damage to our children and to each other.

The Family First Technology Initiative is a necessary response to help families in their David versus Goliath battle against Big Tech.

Combative: As you know, we are in the midst of an era of change with some amazing yet frightening new technologies, such as AI. Will the Family First Technology Initiative have something to say about this?

Tuscany: Yes. The Family First Technology Initiative will do two things with respect to new technologies: conduct and publish research to diagnose how new technologies are affecting families, for better or for worse; and, in collaboration with leading technologists, evaluate the ways in which technologies can be designed and deployed to improve family life, empower parents, and, we hope, revitalize the domestic economy to give parents better professional options and the flexibility to implement their preferred childcare arrangements.

This great societal shift also presents an extraordinary opportunity, in which it might be possible to place the family at the center of our technological lives. Instead of technologies being developed solely for military and business advantage, and then, as a final consideration, commercialized for families, could families be the first thought in the minds of the technology industry, and could they design technology specifically to advance the family interest? What that would look like in principle and in detail is still open to question.

Combative: What can we expect from the Family First Technology Initiative in 2025 and 2026?

Tuscany: Well, Wendy Wang and I have a couple of new pieces of research coming out based on a survey about technology with YouGov. After that, we’ll be publishing new data on AI relationships, AI boyfriends and girlfriends, and how Americans feel about that.

We also have a big research paper with a great scientist – more on that soon – on the “Failure to Launch,” which will cover a wide range of topics, but will focus on addiction to electronics, specifically video games. Each year we’ll go deeper into the ways that immersion in the digital world has completely transformed us and our families. As for the policy side, I’d rather keep it a secret. Surprise is one of the few advantages we have.