The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s latest book The Anxious Generation delivers an urgent call for motion.
Haidt argues that the evidence is in. Teenagers’ widespread use of smartphones is causing a mental health crisis. Individual, collective and legislative motion is required to limit their smartphone access.
Haidt begins his book with an allegory. Imagine someone offered you the chance to have your ten-year-old child grow up on Mars, though there may be every reason to imagine that radiation and low gravity could greatly disrupt healthy adolescent development, resulting in long-term afflictions. Surely, given the risks, you’ll refuse the offer.
A decade ago, parents couldn’t have known the threats lying throughout the shiny latest smartphones they presented to their excited teenagers. But the evidence is mounting that the youngsters who grew up with smartphones are struggling.
Haidt calls the period from 2010 to 2015 the “great rewiring”. This was a period when adolescents had their neural systems primed for anxiety and depression by extensive each day smartphone use.
The kids aren’t alright
Haidt’s two central claims are that Gen Z is affected by a significant mental illness epidemic and that smartphones are largely guilty.
Readers ought to be wary about each these claims – not within the sense that we must always resist believing them, but somewhat we must always not be too to embrace them. After all, it’s perilously easy to imagine that the children aren’t alright. Elders routinely despair of the younger generation.
Haidt explicitly acknowledges that other experts have argued against claims of widespread teenage anxiety. In response, he cites recent evidence from a number of various sources: not only self-reports of problems, but hard data on self-harming, suicide rates, diagnosed mental disorders and mental health hospitalisations.
While Haidt focuses on the US, he observes concurrent shifts in youth mental health in lots of Western countries, including Australia.
But do these findings constitute an demanding society-wide responses? Here the book would have benefited from systematically drawing together the science in easily comprehensible terms.
Haidt’s marshalled evidence consistently shows an increase, starting around 2010 and starting with girls, in a number of adolescent mental health disorders and wellbeing concerns. Broadly speaking, the figures within the US show mental health issues that previously plagued around 5-10% of adolescents growing to afflict around twice that quantity.
On the one hand, these data suggest the term “anxious generation” is somewhat misleading. A big majority of Gen Z shouldn’t have anxiety disorders – and of those that do, almost half would have done so no matter smartphone usage.
On the opposite hand, the numbers remain concerning. No parent can be comfortable handing their child any substance they knew had a one-in-ten likelihood of causing the kid a mental disorder inside a couple of years. There are also data suggesting that, even amongst those without disorders, children increasingly suffer from loneliness and other concerning outcomes.
Perhaps probably the most alarming a part of the steep curves and precipitous falls in Haidt’s many graphs just isn’t the present figures, but the present . In just about all cases, things are getting worse. It is feasible we could also be within the early days of an unfolding catastrophe.
Miller Center, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Insert your ideological preference
If we accept there may be a significant issue, then the query arises as to its cause. Again, we must resist intuitively appealing answers to this query. The worry is that we are going to all look right into a “witch’s mirror”, seeing what we wish to see or what our preferred ideology tells us we must always expect. I’m sufficiently old to recollect panics about heavy metal music and Dungeons & Dragons.
Indeed, it is feasible that Haidt himself fell into this trap, a minimum of partially. In a previous book, The Coddling of the American MindHaidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff argued that harmful worldviews and beliefs prevalent in US educational settings were priming young people for worrying mental health outcomes.
Haidt thinks this coddling stays an element, but now recognises the hypothesis fails to suit the info. Specifically, he acknowledges the plummeting mental health of adolescents is clear in lots of countries, and across all educational levels and social classes.
Are there alternative hypotheses that fit this data? Perhaps kids today are anxious and depressed because they be anxious and depressed? After all, they inherit a world facing runaway global warming, systemic injustices, insecure work futures and more. Yet Haidt rightly observes that past generations with dire prospects didn’t show similar mental health outcomes.
Ultimately, the issue is prone to stem from a mixture of things. Haidt argues the present situation was not caused by smartphone use. Recent a long time have also seen the rise of “safetyism” – a term he and Lukianoff coined to explain the preferencing of individual safety ahead of other values – and helicopter parenting. These phenomena have increasingly shielded children from the vital development provided by physical play and unsupervised exploration of the true world.
Haidt argues that folks became afraid of the healthy risks posed by the surface world, at the same time as they catastrophically opened their children as much as the unhealthy dangers of the virtual world.
Developmental concerns
Smartphones didn’t initially raise major developmental concerns for kids. The problems began around 2010 once they combined with other aspects like social media, high-speed web, a backward-facing camera (encouraging selfies), addictive games, easily accessible pornography, and free apps that maximise profit by cultivating addiction and social contagion.
This toxic technological mix allowed smartphones to take over children’s lives. Usage rates averaging seven hours a day steadily but profoundly rewired their maturing brains. Haidt thinks this rewiring gives rise to 4 “foundational concerns”:
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: a smartphone is an “experience blocker”, taking on hours a day that will otherwise be spent in physical play or in-person conversations with family and friends.
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: too many teenagers stay on their smartphones late at night once they need rest.
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: alerts and messages continually drag teenagers away from the current moment and tasks requiring concentration.
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: apps and social media are deliberately designed to hack vulnerabilities in teenagers’ psychologies, resulting in an inability to enjoy the rest.
Building on these foundational concerns are ones specific to every gender. Girls proved more vulnerable to the damaging effects of social media, while boys retreated into online gaming and pornography.
Dangers to adolescent mental health
An intriguing a part of Haidt’s book is its account of the smartphones became addictive and damaging.
Teenagers, like all humans, have several basic needs and emotional drivers: for social connection and inclusion, for a way of individual empowerment and agency, for sexual achievement, and so forth.
Haidt explains that, normally, for just about all human history and evolution, these incentives drove teenagers to do things in person, in the true world – things like making friends, playing games together, navigating disputes, getting tasks done, developing romantic attachments and taking physical risks.
While these activities can result in injuries, tears and frustrations, they’re nevertheless vital for teenagers’ mental health and development. Children are : they need most of these risks and stressors to grow properly.
Smartphones – and their apps, games and social media – also provide responses to all these drivers. But they accomplish that without prompting the above activities and the vital outcomes they deliver, resembling close friendships and resilience.
For example, a teen might feel lonely and wish connection, so that they join Instagram or TikTok. Social media provides a sort of connection and delivers a short lived dopamine hit. But it fulfils the teenager’s immediate need in a way that doesn’t involve real world connections and challenges. This only makes them lonelier and more isolated in the long term.
Tint Media/Shutterstock
What can we do?
Even if we accept Haidt’s claims in regards to the rise in anxiety fuelled by smartphones, it just isn’t clear how we must always respond. Perhaps radical solutions are unnecessary. In time, things might work themselves out, resembling through further technological innovations.
Haidt’s view is that motion is critical. As he sees it, the issue just isn’t only that smartphones are intrinsically useful and alluring (which is why all of us wanted them in the primary place); it just isn’t only that their apps are addictive. The problem – especially in a faculty setting – is that if most of a teen’s peers have smartphones, then those who don’t have one risk being social outcasts, perpetually “unnoticed” and never “within the know”.
For this reason, Haidt thinks actions by isolated parents are unlikely to achieve success. Ironically, the identical heightened parental concern for child safety Haidt has previously critiqued may prove to be a strong force for change. At least some parents are prone to view their children’s future mental health as a non-negotiable good and treat smartphones because the modern-day hypodermic needle.
For his part, Haidt argues for 4 latest norms, to be created by parents’ collective motion alongside legislative and regulatory reforms:
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No smartphones before highschool
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No social media before 16
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Phone-free schools
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More independence, free play, and responsibility in the true world.
A deeper problem
Haidt’s book leaves the reader with an additional, deeper worry.
Suppose he is correct that the things that result in human flourishing involve real world physical encounters with other people: family, close friends, romantic partners, neighbours, local people groups and members.
Such encounters are sometimes unpredictable, messy, inconvenient and frustrating. Conversely, the web world is becoming easier, cheaper and more alluring each day. Innovations and algorithms continually hone our experience, as profit-driven industries work ever more aggressively to capture and keep our attention.
In the face of all this, it might be that the true world can’t compete. The mental health concerns currently plaguing Gen Z might change into ones that each generation will face.
If so, Haidt’s suggested reforms might mark the primary foray in what can be an extended battle between the human need for real-world experience and connection, and the powerful temptations of a web-based world that provides something we are able to’t possibly resist: “a bit little bit of all the things, all the time”.