Preaching to the Choir

what everyone knows and no one wants to hear

About a month ago, I published an essay that offered what I thought was a fairly obvious, almost boring hypothesis: that parental smartphone use might be contributing — even a little — to the rise in autism diagnoses. It felt so self-evident, I worried the response would be underwhelming. Something like:

Yes, Holly. Obviously. Why are we not talking about it? For the same reason we don’t talk about rain causing people to get wet.

Still, I’ve been writing publicly in the thinking-out-loud genre long enough to know what tends to poke the bear. And suggesting — however gently — that parents might play any role at all in how their kids turn out? That always draws blood, unless it’s giving parents full credit for positive outcomes. So I was careful.

From the title (“So Obvious, I’m Probably Wrong”) to the caveat that I didn’t know the scope — maybe 5%, maybe 95%, who knows — I tried to frame it as a thought experiment, not an accusation.

Didn’t matter.

That piece generated more angry emails than anything I’ve written in years.

Before I get into the responses, let me be clear: everything I’m about to say is aimed at myself first.

That’s why this essay is called Preaching to the Choir.

Because that’s where I am — in the choir loft, waving back at you.

This isn’t their problem. It’s ours. Mine. I am not an innocent observer here.

I’m a repeat offender. Maybe a worse one than most.

What I Know About My Smartphone Use

Over the long weekend — which I extended with some personal time — I ran a small experiment on myself.

I hate the Substack app. But it’s the only way to reply to private chat messages; the web interface just shows a number. And I’m an anxiety-ridden freak. Is the chat from some stupid whore-bot that wants to try to seduce me, a straight woman? Or is it from a homeschooling parent who can’t afford a subscription asking me to comp them so they can use my math series to help their kids? I wouldn’t want to make the latter wait for days, but only the app allows responding from a phone.

So the compromise: I only install it when I’m away from my desk for more than a few hours.

Knowing I’d be at Josh’s for a few days, I put it back on my phone Sunday afternoon, and deleted it Tuesday night when I started winding down. About 54 hours total.

The only goal was to observe. Just track how often I checked it.

So I did. I texted myself.

Here’s what that looked like when I finally deleted the app.

44 times in 54 hours.

That’s what the final tally showed.

And given that I slept well both nights, that’s well over once an hour — which is already fairly pathetic.

But it’s actually worse than that. Because I spent most of that time with Josh.

Not every minute — we’re both introverts and quite comfortable with silence. I wake up earlier than he does, so I had a couple of solo hours each morning. He worked for stretches, and while he did, I read a book and did some drawing exercises from How to Draw What You See — I’m trying to get better at sketching from life.

Still, for the majority of those 54 hours, we were together. And we’re both usually good about staying off our phones when we’re with each other. Not perfect — sometimes Kevin needs to reach him about work, or one of my tutoring students is panicking about finals and I have to grab my iPad and solve a problem. But mostly, we’re present.

That is credit to him, not me. Josh is exceptionally polite, well-mannered, and attentive — and that rubs off on me. It’s a quiet kind of leadership, the kind you don’t notice until you catch yourself rising to meet it. I want to live up to the standard he sets without ever asking anyone to¹.

So recognizing that these happened during the solo time almost exclusively, let’s adjust. Realistically, it was more like 44 checks in 10 hours.

That’s once every 15 minutes.

Which is… appalling.

Sure, I could justify it. I could dress it up. My Substack pays my student loans — I could call it “working.” My iPhone controls my hearing aids, so I do have legitimate reasons to check it — battery level, background filter, ambient noise. And yes, it’s much harder to resist checking a social media app when your phone is already in your hand for other reasons.

But those would be excuses. And I know it.

The truth is simple.

I am just as addicted as the angry parents who emailed me.

Once the app was off my phone, I felt immediate relief. It was like sobering up after a bender — uncomfortable at first, but clarifying.

Without the app, it’s easy to manage. I keep only one window open in Safari on my iPhone — and it’s not Substack. To access Substack, I have to manually open a new tab, log in, and deal with two-factor authentication. It’s annoying enough that I rarely bother.

On my home computers, I’ve set up rigid controls — the same ones I described in my recent series on what social media is doing to us.²

So yes, my addiction is under control, for the most part.

But the infrastructure is still there. My brain still lights up when the slot machine hits. My nervous system still remembers.

The Elephant I Thought We All Recognized

I thought widespread smartphone addiction was common knowledge. Like, drunk-driving-level obvious. Two quick examples:

The photo at the top of this essay is from Unsplash, a site that provides images for social media. I pay for a membership — partly to access the full library, but mostly because I like supporting human-made work when I can.

I found the image by searching “choir loft.” But that wasn’t my first search.

My first search was “addiction.”

Roughly 70% of the top results were images of phones. Not drugs.

And then there’s the Teachers subreddit. I read it regularly because I find it fascinating — a kind of window into a world I care about but don’t inhabit. I love my job. Data science is intellectually engaging, financially stable, and never boring. But I also love mathematics. Teaching it, helping people fall in love with it. If there were a way to make the same money teaching math — without having to cram in Woke orthodoxy — I’d probably do it.

If you care about the state of public education, you should read that subreddit. The contrast between the average teacher’s stated politics (“Orange Man BAD!”) and their actual beliefs about what would improve schools — stricter discipline, real consequences, higher standards, parental responsibility, failing grades when that’s what kids earn — is wildly revealing.

And lately, I’ve noticed a shift. In the last six months or so, anytime phones come up, there’s a new thread running through the posts: teachers with economically diverse students are reporting that upper-middle-class parents are not giving their kids smartphones.

It's becoming a class divide.

The better-off parents — the ones who can afford therapy, tutors, and test prep — are opting their kids out. They know attention spans matter. And they’re acting accordingly. Here is a recent thread about that dynamic.

So yeah — I thought this was a known issue. An obvious one.

Then I checked my email.

The Choir Clapped Back

That post has clocked around 10,000 views and generated about forty emails — all but two or three of them determined to set me straight.

Six of them came from parents of autistic children who felt personally attacked, despite my many caveats. That wasn’t surprising in content — just in volume. I expected one or two. I got six. Every one of them read my careful phrasing as blame, even though I said explicitly (and repeatedly) that I don’t know what role, if any, this factor plays — only that it’s strange no one’s talking about it.

The other thirty-something emails? Either not from parents of autistic kids, or they didn’t say so. A few were phrased like thoughtful disagreement — “Hey, I think you’re missing X” — and I welcome that. But most weren’t thoughtful. Most were just digital yelling. They wanted me to know how insulting, ignorant, or stupid I was for even entertaining the idea.

How dare I suggest that smartphones could possibly be contributing to anything neurological!

They had no idea I was so reactionary. So shallow. So unscientific. A few seemed shocked I was ever taken seriously at all.

And yet — nothing in those emails remotely resembled an argument.

No counter-evidence. No alternative explanations. Just moral offense, framed as intellectual superiority.

But here’s the thing:

Of course smartphones are affecting kids. That shouldn’t be controversial — it should be foundational. You can’t stick a generation of children in front of caregivers who are constantly half-present, eyes flickering down to glowing rectangles, and expect zero impact on their development. Especially not on development that depends on subtle, high-frequency social feedback — things like facial expression, tone of voice, attunement, emotional mirroring.

That doesn’t mean smartphones cause autism.

But it’s absolutely reasonable to ask whether chronic, systemic distraction might be nudging some children in that direction — or mimicking some of the same traits. Especially when autism diagnoses have exploded, and when so many of the milder, fuzzier cases seem to cluster around disrupted social development.

This isn’t a moral panic.

It’s a rational question.

And it’s one we should be asking out loud — without getting screamed at.

Why Widespread Smartphone Addiction Matters

It matters because this isn’t just about autism.

It’s about what happens to a generation of children when none of the adults in their lives are fully present. It’s about what they miss — neurologically, emotionally, socially — when the foundational inputs of their early development are filtered through distraction.

Attention is oxygen for the developing brain. Not food. Not water. Oxygen.

We now have millions of toddlers growing up in a world where adults don’t make eye contact. Where a mother’s face is visible, but not responsive. Where a father’s voice is present, but half a second delayed — not because he’s cruel, but because he’s reading about the NBA playoffs or replying to Slack. These aren’t moments of abuse. They’re moments of absence — moments when a child experiences the dissonance of being physically near a parent who isn’t really there.

And they add up.

This isn't Luddite panic. I'm not railing against modernity. I like technology. I love that I can make a living doing cool data science projects from home, that I’ve helped people get A’s in precalculus in six of the fifty states, and that my hearing aids sync to my phone and let me hear conversations in noisy restaurants.

But we’ve crossed a line without noticing. We no longer treat attention as something sacred — we treat it as optional.

Something you give if, and only if, there’s nothing better on your screen.

And that shift has consequences.

Not for every kid, maybe. But for some? It could be life-altering.

For the most vulnerable children — the ones with genetic susceptibility, delayed development, sensory sensitivities, or early trauma — it might make the difference between a life of mild quirkiness and a formal diagnosis. Or between a diagnosis and a total shutdown.

And it’s not just about children.

Adults are suffering too — in ways we don’t always recognize because the symptoms now pass for normal. Fragmented focus. Low-level anxiety. Impulse control that masquerades as “just checking.” Social disconnection mislabeled as introversion. And maybe most corrosive of all, the slow erosion of our capacity for sustained attention — the thing that underlies deep work, real love, and moral courage.

We’ve built a culture that treats compulsive distraction as the baseline. We no longer notice how compromised we are — until we’re in the presence of someone who isn’t.

I mentioned Josh earlier — his innate courtesy, and the way he offers his full attention to the person he’s with. He models it without fanfare, quietly setting a standard I find myself wanting to meet.

What matters even more than how it shapes my behavior is the message it sends: that I matter. That I’m worth listening to. That I deserve focus.

I’m not a child, of course. It’s not the same. But I live alone, work remotely, and see only a few people regularly — Josh more than anyone. That kind of mostly-solitary life has made me sharply attuned to presence. I feel it when it’s there. I notice when it’s not. And for people whose childhoods were as barren as Josh’s and mine, you tend to notice when, as an adult, you’re given something you never got as a kid.

And the difference is real.

Being around someone who is fully present doesn’t just feel better — it feels nourishing. Like a full meal after weeks of vending-machine snacks. Like oxygen after holding your breath. It recalibrates your nervous system. It reminds you that you're a person.

Many, many children are growing up without ever experiencing that.

How can it not be affecting them?

We cannot afford to pretend that attention doesn’t matter.

Or that we’re giving enough of it.

Or that a parent scrolling Twitter or TikTok during bathtime is functionally the same as a parent who isn’t.

This is not about guilt. It’s about reality. And the longer we treat reality like a personal attack, the harder it will be to fix anything.

The Hymn We Forgot the Words To

We are a culture gasping for air.

Children need presence. So do we. Not half-attention. Not ambient proximity. Presence — the kind that steadies your breath, anchors your gaze, tells your nervous system it’s safe.

We talk a lot about safety these days. But there is nothing safe about growing up unseen.

There is nothing safe about trying to form a self while the people who are supposed to reflect it back to you are scrolling through something else.

If we want our kids to thrive — not just be fed and housed and schooled, but to thrive — we have to give them more than love.

We have to give them attention. Because for a child, attention is love.

It’s how they know they exist.

And if we start giving them something real to breathe — maybe, just maybe, we’ll remember how to breathe too.

I’m trying.

Josh is helping.

And if you’re still reading this — and not writing me an email about how your phone does not keep you from being a present parent, it absolutely does NOT, you and your kids bond over what’s on your phone, damn it!

Then maybe you are, too.

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1. There are few experiences in life more revelatory of how stupid the internet collectively is, and how deranging our digital lives are in general, than being a woman who is presently having a gracious, kind male friend who really listens, who takes your thoughts and ideas and opinions seriously, make you an excellent keto breakfast…while you’re scrolling on your phone and seeing the comment section call him a misogynist.

2. My recent series on what social media is doing to us is not paywalled. Part four, Defeating the Misery Machine, mentions the measures I have taken and links to the rest at the top.