august 1993

Like many parents, Jason Newland, a pediatrician at Washington University in St. Louis and a dad to three teens ages 19, 17, and 15, now lives in a mixed-vaccination household. His 19-year-old got vaccinated with Johnson & Johnson’s shot two weeks ago and the 17-year-old with Pfizer’s, which is available to teens as young as 16.

The 15-year-old is still waiting for her shot, though—a bit impatiently now. “She’s like, ‘Dude, look at me here,’” Newland told me. “‘Why don’t you just tell them I’m 16?’” But because certain pharmaceutical companies set certain age cutoffs for their clinical trial, she alone in her family can’t get a COVID-19 shot. She’s the only one who remains vulnerable. She’s the only one who has to quarantine from all her friends if she gets exposed.

Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes—car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle—that it almost seems easier to list the things they don’t mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.

Even so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It involves kids’ development, but it’s probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents.

Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend more time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly low-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children’s lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned. To be clear, I’m not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn’t have survived infancy if I’d had a smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago.

There’s a scene in the second episode of Mare of Easttown, HBO’s new crime series, that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I watched it. Mare, the show’s titular police detective (played by Kate Winslet), visits a rural spot where a girl’s body has been found and prepares to inform the girl’s father. “I’m on my way over to Kenny’s right now to tell him, and I want John and Billy to meet me there,” she tells her best friend on the phone. “Probably good to have his cousins there for him, you know?” When Kenny (Patrick Murney) learns what has happened, he closes his eyes, shakes his head, then explodes, smashing random objects around him and shoving the other men as they half-hug, half-restrain him. Mare watches them from a distance, her gaze sympathetic but unsurprised. She knew exactly how Kenny would respond, and understood, too, that she would not have been safe with him and his grief.

In January, The New York Times published an alarming article about teen suicides during the pandemic. The story featured heartbreaking quotes from parents who had lost children, and was illustrated with photos of an empty classroom and a teenager sitting alone on his bed. The school district of Clark County, Nevada, the story said, had recorded the deaths of 18 students from suicide from mid-March 2020 to the end of December—twice as many as the district had in all of 2019. “There’s a sense of urgency,” the superintendent told NPR, when the same local crisis made national news again in February. “You know, we have a problem.”   

The prospect of a wave of suicides has loomed over the national debate about COVID-19 restrictions from their very beginning. Just days after the first stay-at-home orders were put in place, Donald Trump predicted “suicides by the thousands,” and reports emerged of increases in calls to suicide hotlines and emergency-room psychiatric visits. Fears about the mental-health toll on kids were particularly acute: What would happen if they couldn’t go to school, or play sports, or hang out with their friends? While the coronavirus appeared far more worrisome for adults, the harm that the shutdowns posed was another story: Teenagers seemed to be at the greatest risk.

The top entries in the 2021 Sony World Photography Awards have been announced, and the organizers were once more kind enough to share some of the winning and shortlisted photos from the Professional, Open, Student, and Youth competitions with us, gathered here. Captions below have been provided by the photographers.