A letter published in First Things outlining specific guidelines that can be taken to safeguard children and the family against the harms of technology is still making waves, especially as the new White House administration is gutting policies that impact everything from schools and sports to the economy. 

Co-written by five conservative thought leaders and signed by 28 others, the Ethics and Public Policy Center had several colleagues involved, including its president, Ryan Anderson, and Clare Morell, who has been at the helm of the organization’s Technology and Human Flourishing Project. An expert on all things Big Tech, especially within the arena of what is most harmful to children, Morell said the timing of the letter’s release was no mistake. 

“The impetus to put the letter together and get it out for the public was the new administration taking office, in a desire to help guide their governance of technology in a way that will flourish the family,” Morell told the Register. And the meat of the matter has actually been on the horizon since 2023, she explained, “borne out of conversations from a roundtable that EPPC hosted in October 2023.” . 

Advances in new technology have opened “a lot of moral and ethical and political questions, and we felt like there needed to be some type of cohesive vision on the right for how to govern technology.” 

Entitled “A Future for the Family: A New Technology Agenda for the Right,” the letter was written to help contain the so-called Wild West of the tech industry and explore ways to govern the progress towards the flourishing of the family, as Morell detailed. 

Because technological progress is somewhat “unrestrained,” it “does not always result in the best result for human beings and the family. It can often just be what result gives businesses the most profit. And so we felt like it was a really pivotal time to try to get this out — and particularly to try to get a pretty wide range of signatories on it, to really try to actually form a broader coalition.” 

Disturbing Statistics

The letter points to the harm screens and social media can have on a child’s education and the ability to think critically, but one of the most egregious issues facing families when it comes to technology is the rampant pornography that pervades so many sites. And given her extensive research on the topic, including an article entitled, “Tik Tok is digital fentanyl,” Morell said we are experiencing “a generational crisis.” 

“I’m honestly worried that there is a generational crisis about to happen because if these kids are growing up on pornography, they won’t actually be able to form a relationship with another real human being, to form a marriage, to form a family. And we know that the family is the building block of our society, of our government, of civilization, and we are literally allowing that to be eroded and undermined by this online-pornography epidemic,” Morell said. 

It’s not just computers, Morell warned, as with smartphones, kids have round-the-clock access, and parental control does not always work. 

“It’s impossible for parents to effectively shut this all down on a smartphone when there are hundreds of apps; every app has an in-app browser to the internet. Often, external filters that parents control don’t operate inside of apps. And the kids are so smart, they have all these workarounds to get to these things, and they often don’t even go looking for it. I think there was a statistic: It said 58% of kids surveyed had stumbled across it accidentally. It was fed to them on social media.”

And the ages just keep getting younger for this type of exposure, Morell explained this week on an EWTN Radio show produced in tandem with The Catholic Association. 

“I think the average age of porn exposure is now close to 10, and porn is also extremely addicting,” she said, adding, “The social-media model has really come to pornography. These algorithms are very sophisticated, and it will continue to feed you more and more, kind of increasingly, escalating content. And so the kinds of things kids are seeing is just, it’s absolutely horrifying, very degrading and dehumanizing and violent.”

And this content is also creeping into the classroom, where many schools have gone all-in on technology. 

“Over a third of kids have seen pornography during the school day; 44% of that amount was on a school-issued device, which is also part of the problem. Now, Chromebooks and laptops and tablets are in every classroom, and those are very difficult for a teacher to completely oversee effectively, when they have 20-something students in a class, to make sure a kid isn’t accessing something on the school-issued device. And so we’ve surrounded children with devices that just have thousands of portals to the internet, where these things are so accessible, and it’s just become like the Wild West, and we’ve just given our kids access to these things.”

Morell is not only one of the first researcher to mine the studies on these issues, but also a trailblazer when it comes to implementing changes to safeguard children, as well as work on legislation that ultimately aims for ethics to be restored into these online arenas. 

As she told the Register: “The main legislative solutions I have worked on are state laws that help back parents up and give them more oversight over children’s online experiences, namely age-verification laws for pornography websites that provide a critical layer of support to parents and parental-consent-for-social-media laws that require platforms to obtain parental consent for minors to form accounts. Other pieces of federal legislation I have supported have focused on making companies liable for harms to children so that they can be held accountable through litigation.”

Forthcoming Book: The Tech Exit

Those are just a few examples of ideas that Morell is spearheading at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her book on these topics is forthcoming: The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens From Smartphones.

She gave the Register a sneak peek, explaining: “The book is a practical road map to free kids from the harms of digital technology and to recover the beauty, wonder and true purpose of childhood. It is so crucial for families to completely opt-out, because the current strategies of trying to manage the dangers of tech through parental controls and screen-time limits are not working for parents or kids; and, instead, a better way is possible — even if your children are already using smartphones or social media, it’s never too late to exit.”

The book draws on “dozens of interviews with experts and with families who have gone tech-free, as well as my own work as a policy expert in this area.” 

Morell also invites families to reclaim family time by doing a “digital detox” together, walking readers through “five core principles of how to exit digital technologies for children over the long term.”

She also has a dedicated chapter directly engaging with schools and what they can do to “support parents in giving their children a low-tech childhood.” 

“The book is positive, practical and possible,” she stressed. “It shows parents how exiting digital technologies is not only possible, but also fundamentally positive. The Tech Exit is a positive No to screens, because it is a Yes to so much more in life.”

WATCH: Catch Clare Morell on EWTN News In Depth this evening at 8 p.m. ET on EWTN TV.