The Anxious Generation
How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
Jonathan Haidt.
Penguin Press, New York, 385 pages.
The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt investigated the alarming rise in mental health problems in youth and Gen Z in particular. This phenomenon started at the beginning of the 2010s and is significantly correlated with the introduction of the smartphone.
His findings make unsettling reading and this book should be in every household with preteen or teenage children.
His thesis is well researched, and a mere review won’t do it justice, so to oversimplify: the main culprit (but not the only one) is social media, personified in the algorithms contained in smartphones and screen time. Tech companies make their money by selling their users’ attention to advertisers. The self-perpetuating loops on smartphone apps are exquisitely designed to capture and hold the attention of mostly (but not exclusively) teenagers. Frequent smartphone use severely disrupts a critical neurocognitive stage in adolescent brain development – the great rewiring, as Haidt calls it.
“Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable and – as I will show – unsuitable for children and adolescents.”
We also know that “… what causes generations to differ goes beyond the events children experience (such as wars and depressions) and includes changes in the technologies they used as children (radio, then television, personal computers, the internet, the iPhone)”
Teenagers have of course been wedded to their screens ever since home computers and cellphones appeared on the scene, but the crucial difference, as referred to above, is that a smartphone can be put in someone’s pocket and taken anywhere – to school, on a visit to a friend, to picnics or restaurants and so on. The result is that these little oblongs have become ubiquitous and voracious devourers of attention, anywhere and anytime.
Some children spend as much as 40 hours a week on their smartphones – the equivalent of a whole working week. Not hard to imagine how many other activities are neglected. In the process it disrupts sleep and attention and deprives children of interaction with the real world — interaction with real people.
Smartphones are the ultimate experience blockers, keeping users away from other enriching activities: “… connecting them to everyone in the world and disconnecting them from the people around them.”
Haidt cites a meta-analysis of 26 studies showing that the risk of depression increases by 13 per cent for each hour per day spent on social media. He also describes a randomised controlled trial which showed that reducing social media activity by just 30 minutes a day and combining it with physical activity result in significant decrease of depressive symptoms.
One consequence of social media use is that children have much less opportunity for unsupervised play, for risk-taking and adventure. Helicopter parents (often also wedded to their own smartphones) do not help at all, and loss of these activities are extremely harmful for development of the preteen brain.
Social media harms girls more than boys, with higher rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm and other disorders. Research has clearly shown that social media is a cause of this and not just a correlate of social media use.
Boys are also often the victims of anxiety and depression, but they are more likely to habitually visit porn sites.
Haidt omits discussion of the strategy followed by tech companies, that would probably require a much longer book, but focusses instead on the results of their business model.
For some critics, the book smacks of a moral panic, ascribing many social ills to only a few root causes. Haidt is careful, however, to address the other factors at play. His claims seem to stack up and objections that he confuses correlation with causation or disregards diagnostic creep do not withstand scrutiny.
The last portion of the book describes Haidt’s recommendations for addressing the problem, summed up as follows on his website:
- Give children far more time playing with other children. This play should ideally be outdoors, in mixed age groups, with little or no adult supervision (which is the way most parents grew up, at least until the 1980s).
- Look for more ways to embed children in stable real-world communities. Online networks are not nearly as binding or satisfying.
- Don’t give a smartphone as the first phone. Give a phone or watch that is specialized for communication, not for internet-based apps.
- Don’t give a smartphone until high school. This is easy to do, if many of your child’s friends’ parents are doing the same thing.
- Delay the opening of accounts on nearly all social media platforms until the beginning of high school (at least). This will become easier to do if we can support legislators who are trying to raise the age of “internet adulthood” from today’s 13 (with no verification) to 16 (with mandatory age verification).
Anyone interested in reading more about the subject should visit Haidt’s website at https://www.afterbabel.com/
