‘Be more engaging than the algorithm’ — Why the mom behind the ‘Opt-Out Family’ movement is causing a stir

A few years ago, Erin Loechner and her husband installed a rope ladder in their yard, hoping that neighborhood children would enjoy it as well as their own family. One day, she watched as a young girl approached the ladder and began to climb it. But Loechner was dismayed at what happened next: The child reached into her backpack and pulled out an iPhone. “For the next twenty minutes, I watched her pose: snapping selfie after selfie, finding every one of them lacking. ... She was eight years old,” Loechner wrote in her new book “ The Opt-Out Family .”

The story is a devastating portrait of the way in which technology is changing childhood in ways that few would argue is for the better. Speaking to podcaster Greg McKeown recently, Loechner described the time she was waiting in an airport and noticed that almost every child in the waiting area was staring at a device, save for one family whose children were playing with paper airplanes.

But screens aren’t just stealing our children’s attention. The U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, has called for warnings on social media that advise parents that use of the platforms may harm the mental health of adolescents. The rise in social media use has tracked with the rise of depression and anxiety among children, and even at its most benign, smartphones and other devices are taking time away from family, education and other worthwhile pursuits. Children now spend more time on social media than they do on homework .

Loechner, a homeschooling mother of three, is at the forefront of a movement to reclaim our kids, and she is leading by example. A former influencer who had a million followers and earned a six-figure salary from her online presence, Loechner decided to go radically retro and deleted her social media accounts. When she finally returned to the internet three years later to do research for her book, she wrote of how she was perplexed by Stanley cups and disturbed by the rise of young people posting videos of themselves crying in cars.

Most of all, as she concluded, although FOMO — the fear of missing out — drives many people to social media, she really hadn’t missed anything in her break from the internet. She still has a website, and the icons for Facebook, Instagram and X are still there, but when you click on them, you get the message that the accounts no longer exist.

“There is no healthy way to use social media,” Loechner says.

For years, Loechner and her husband had been trying to find a way to keep their family from becoming ensnared — as she told Steph Thurling on the Christian Parenting podcast, the couple discussed, “How are we going to make our family so connected, so engaged, that they’re not going to want to sneak away to TikTok in the laundry room?” They decided their goal wasn’t just saying no to technology, but to say yes to something better. They came up with a family motto: Be more engaging than the algorithm.

That’s a challenging task for anyone, given that tech companies make money off our attention and benefit from our incessant scrolling . And it’s especially challenging when you’re an author trying to sell books in a publishing environment that relies on social media to help drive sales. But Zondervan accepted Loechner’s terms, and she is doing a limited amount of media for “The Opt-Out Family,” using her technology of choice — an old-fashioned land line, and a cellphone that she’s modified so she can just use it for calls, texts and occasional navigation.

She understands that not everyone will be comfortable opting out altogether, but encourages people to be thoughtful about the ways that they can reduce their tech use in order to proactively build a better future for our children rather than being led to a future shaped by technology companies.

Loechner, who lives in the Midwest but prefers to keep her location private, took a break during a mountain outing with her family this week to speak with the Deseret News about what an “opt-out family” is, why she believes so many influencers are unhappy, and how a social-media free life can work despite the pressure to be online.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Deseret News : What kind of pushback have you gotten for your work?

Erin Loechner : The (tech) companies have been completely silent, unsurprisingly; I think they have bigger fish to fry with legislation at this point. But I was really surprised by how little pushback I received, and I think it’s because people are ready for something new

I’ve talked about this for many years, and (in the past) when I talked about lighter tech usage, thinking about the way we’re using these devices, I would get a lot of questions like “Why? What is really so wrong with the phone? What’s so bad about having your phone out at dinner? This is the way I connect with people.” But I’m not getting the “Why?” anymore — I’m getting the “How?” I’m getting “I hear you.”

Mostly the credit (goes) to all of the fantastic research that’s been done, and I know Jonathan Haidt’s book was a huge shift in this direction, outwardly saying these devices are not healthy for children, and they’re probably not even healthy for adults, to be honest.

The question now is “How do we do this?” And I think that’s why this book matters deeply right now, because I think we’re all sort of collectively looking for solutions until these businesses change. We need to control what we can control, which is really just what happens under our own roof.

DN: In the book, you talk about how your social media accounts were hacked, and sharing horror stories like that can be one way to get people to reconsider social media. But for a lot of people, it seems that social media is largely benign — how do you convince them that they need to pull back?

EL : I think if technology was all bad, we wouldn’t be using it. We know that there are benefits, and we know that there are some real drawbacks. It’s not my mission to get people to change their lives. I’m interested in the families that are saying we’ve had enough. We don’t want to tango with this anymore. What are our options here? If we truly believe that it is easier to parent without a device than with one, then what does that even look like? How do I wrap my head around that?

I don’t know many people who have a kid and a device at home and aren’t seeing a lot of these negative effects. But there’s no pressure to completely reinvent your life. Opting out is a big spectrum and you can take really small steps toward change in a healthy direction, no matter where you are.

DN: How do you deal with pushback from your peers, even as an adult, when your friends are all on social media and want to interact with you that way?

EL : One of the benefits of advocating for this lifestyle is you’re steadily training the people around you to recognize that you’re just not participating in the world the same way that they are. And I think that’s OK. For us as a family, it’s been a drum we’ve been banging for long enough that no one bothers to send us a TikTok video at all. I believe we train the people around us on how we will respond — how long it takes us to respond to a text, or how often we call them on the phone. We’re a big phone-call family. We would rather pick up the landline and call and see how someone’s doing; you can hear the cadence in their voice. You know, we get dopamine hits from people’s voices.

We’ve had people come over for dinner, and people who don’t know us will inevitably check their phone in the middle of dinner and will want to bring up a vacation photo or something — and because our kids are usually around us, we’ll just say, hey, can you actually tell us about it? We’d love to see the photo, but we want to hear from you what you liked about it, how it felt to be in that space that you were in. That way our kids don’t feel as if they’re not engaged in the conversation because they’re not passing photos around.

It’s just a slight shift. There are so many studies of language barriers, things we’re missing out on because we’re saying, here, watch this video, look at this TikTok. We want to be family that explains what’s behind (something meaningful), because that’s where the connection is. It’s not, “let’s watch this funny video” — it’s “this is why this engaged me.” And that’s where we want to start as a family.

DN : Is there one social media platform that, in your mind, is particularly sinister, or are they all equally bad for us?

EL: I don’t know that I can speak to that since I’m not really involved in them anymore, and they do change so quickly. But I do know that the ones that I heard, from kids, that were the hardest to disengage from were Snapchat and TikTok — Snapchat because it has the streaks . You don’t want to lose your streak and start over. TikTok because of the level of engagement and the addictiveness — it has autoplay, you just open the app and you’re met with something engaging right away that is perfectly suited and tailored to you and what the app thinks you will appreciate the most.

And I also hear a lot about YouTube, and I know a lot of people don’t consider that social media, but with the algorithm itself, I think it could very easily fall into that same category of shaping an identity. You’re being led down a path that you might not have proactively chosen. That matters, too.

DN : In a piece you wrote called “ What I saw when I came back to the internet, 3 years later ,” you said “The Influencers are Not OK.” What do you mean by that?

EL : Nearly every influencer I spoke with talked about the mental load, the mental labor, involved in influencing. You’re getting pressure from all angles. You’re getting it from the brands you’re working with, you’re getting it from the audience who wants one thing and you may be delivering another. You’re having to toe the line between being authentic and relatable and not sharing absolutely everything; you want to keep some things sacred for your family.

But you sort of have to sell portions of your life. You’re attempting to be friends with your audience and yet you’re working in this social media algorithm space where everyone’s kind of manipulating each other even though we don’t realize it. It’s a very rocky foundation to build a business on. It’s a lot of pressure to perform in an arena you can’t control.

DN: You are speaking, though, as someone who already is a brand, so to speak, having worked in this space for years as a writer and a personality on HGTV. What do you say to young people who are just starting out in their careers who are being told that they need a social media presence?

EL : It is a very layered, tricky thing. I remember having a moment where I thought, can I even speak to this? I did build a business on social media, although I had built a business before social media — on HGTV.com and writing. My advice to people just starting out who want to be entrepreneurs or become online creators is to build your business on land that you own. When we build followings on social media, it’s rented space. We don’t own that. At any moment, they can change the rules, and they do, often, right? They change the algorithms so your work isn’t even seen by the people who want to see it.

I always recommend, get a website — do what we did before social media. Get a website that you own, that you can control, that you can shut the lights off when you want to and turn them on when you want to. And then never underestimate the power of word of mouth, of a personal connection.

DN : I would assume you support the schools that are starting to ban cellphones . What do you say to parents who are upset about this, who say they need to get in touch with their children in an emergency?

EL : I interviewed a law enforcement officer and a security specialist about this and did research as well, because I think it’s a legitimate concern. They drilled down the idea that the safest place for your child, if there is a horrific event like a school shooting, is to be in the care of a trained adult and to be listening to that trained and present adult. What happens (in an emergency) when every child is under their desk on a phone texting their parents? They stop listening to the instructions. Then you have them in a completely unsafe environment where everyone is sort of listening to their parent instead of the person that’s actually there. I would just defer to the authorities in that situation; I’ve never been in that situation, but people who have recommend staying calm and very present and not being half attentive. Having everybody together and on the same page is very important in that situation.

DN : You offer a lot of tips for parents in the book. What is one you would like to highlight?

EL : Parental controls are not just for kids. They’re for parents, too. You have to model the behavior you want to see. So I always recommend that instead of ditching your phone completely and buying something new, you can also dumb down your own iPhone. We have a tutorial of how to do this on our website; in two minutes or less, you can go and depersonalize your device, you can make it almost like a land line.

You can take the camera off — all apps removed. For me, what it became was a phone, and not my phone. I made the screen black. I have the ability to call and text, and if I want to, I can navigate through maps in a new area. You can really customize it to reframe your brain and teach you that you don’t have to carry your phone around all the time.

Once it becomes a phone, and not your phone, then you will find yourself leaving it on the kitchen counter when you’re out running errands because you don’t need it. It’s just a phone to reach people. That was a really important shift in my own thinking. So I would suggest that at least one parent in the household should dumb-down their device. ... Go first. Do it first, and see what happens and see what you notice, and talk about it as a family.

We are not victims to these tech companies. We do have a lot of agency. We have a lot of power in our families to shape our own culture, and I also really believe that kids and teens, as much as we throw them under the bus by saying they’re addicted to their phones, they want something different, too. There wasn’t one teen that I spoke with who said, “yeah, I love this phone world we’ve created.” They are very aware that there are serious drawbacks. They want eye contact. They want relationships. They want connection. They can’t get those things on their phones.