Connect with us

Lifestyle

Have smartphones created an ‘anxious generation’? Jonathan Haidt sounds the alarm

Published

on

using mobile phone

A decade ago, parents could not have known the threats lying within the shiny new smartphones they presented to their excited teenagers. (Pexels Photo)

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation delivers an urgent call for action.

Haidt argues that the evidence is in. Teenagers’ widespread use of smartphones is causing a mental health crisis. Individual, collective and legislative action is required to limit their smartphone access.


Review: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Allen Lane)


Haidt begins his book with an allegory. Imagine someone offered you the opportunity to have your ten-year-old child grow up on Mars, even though there is every reason to believe that radiation and low gravity could greatly disrupt healthy adolescent development, leading to long-term afflictions. Surely, given the risks, you would refuse the offer.

A decade ago, parents could not have known the threats lying within the shiny new smartphones they presented to their excited teenagers. But the evidence is mounting that the children 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 daily smartphone use.

The kids aren’t alright

Haidt’s two central claims are that Gen Z is suffering from a major mental illness epidemic and that smartphones are largely to blame.

Readers should be wary about both these claims – not in the sense that we should resist believing them, but rather we should not be too eager to embrace them. After all, it is perilously easy to believe that the kids 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 host of different sources: not just 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 many Western countries, including Australia.

But do these findings constitute an epidemic demanding society-wide responses? Here the book would have benefited from systematically drawing together the science in easily understandable terms.

Haidt’s marshalled evidence consistently shows a rise, beginning around 2010 and starting with girls, in a host of adolescent mental health disorders and wellbeing concerns. Broadly speaking, the figures in the US show mental health issues that previously plagued around 5-10% of adolescents growing to afflict around twice that amount.

On the one hand, these data suggest the term “anxious generation” is somewhat misleading. A large majority of Gen Z do not have anxiety disorders – and of those who do, almost half would have done so irrespective of smartphone usage.

On the other hand, the numbers remain concerning. No parent would be comfortable handing their child any substance they knew had a one-in-ten chance of causing the child a mental disorder within a few years. There are also data suggesting that, even among those without disorders, children increasingly suffer from loneliness and other concerning outcomes.

Perhaps the most alarming part of the steep curves and precipitous falls in Haidt’s many graphs is not the current figures, but the current trajectories. In almost all cases, things are getting worse. It is possible we may be in the early days of an unfolding catastrophe.

Insert your ideological preference

If we accept there is a serious problem, then the question arises as to its cause. Again, we must resist intuitively appealing answers to this question. The worry is that we will all look into a “witch’s mirror”, seeing what we want to see or what our preferred ideology tells us we should expect. I am old enough to remember panics about heavy metal music and Dungeons & Dragons.

Indeed, it is possible that Haidt himself fell into this trap, at least in part. In a previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Haidt 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 remains a factor, but now recognises the hypothesis fails to fit the data. Specifically, he acknowledges the plummeting mental health of adolescents is evident in many 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 should 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 did not show similar mental health outcomes.

Ultimately, the problem is likely to stem from a mix of factors. Haidt argues the current situation was not caused exclusively by smartphone use. Recent decades have also seen the rise of “safetyism” – a term he and Lukianoff coined to describe 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 real world.

Haidt argues that parents became fearful of the healthy risks posed by the outside world, even as they catastrophically opened their children up to the unhealthy dangers of the virtual world.

Developmental concerns

Smartphones did not initially raise major developmental concerns for children. The problems started around 2010 when they combined with other factors like social media, high-speed internet, 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 gradually but profoundly rewired their maturing brains. Haidt thinks this rewiring gives rise to four “foundational concerns”:

  1. Social deprivation: a smartphone is an “experience blocker”, taking up hours a day that would otherwise be spent in physical play or in-person conversations with friends and family.
  2. Sleep deprivation: too many teenagers stay on their smartphones late at night when they need rest.
  3. Attention fragmentation: alerts and messages continually drag teenagers away from the present moment and tasks requiring concentration.
  4. Addiction: apps and social media are deliberately designed to hack vulnerabilities in teenagers’ psychologies, leading to an inability to enjoy anything else.

Building on these foundational concerns are ones specific to each 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 part of Haidt’s book is its account of the way smartphones became addictive and damaging.

Teenagers, like all humans, have several basic needs and emotional drivers: for social connection and inclusion, for a sense of individual empowerment and agency, for sexual fulfillment, and so on.

Haidt explains that, normally, for almost all human history and evolution, these incentives drove teenagers to do things in person, in the real world – things like making friends, playing games together, navigating disputes, getting tasks done, developing romantic attachments and taking physical risks.

While these activities can lead to injuries, tears and frustrations, they are nevertheless important for teenagers’ mental health and development. Children are antifragile: they need these types of risks and stressors to grow properly.

Smartphones – and their apps, games and social media – also provide responses to all these drivers. But they do so without prompting the above activities and the important outcomes they deliver, such as close friendships and resilience.

For example, a teenager might feel lonely and want connection, so they join Instagram or TikTok. Social media provides a type of connection and delivers a temporary dopamine hit. But it fulfils the teenager’s immediate need in a way that does not involve real world connections and challenges. This only makes them lonelier and more isolated in the longer term.

What can we do?

Even if we accept Haidt’s claims about the rise in anxiety fuelled by smartphones, it is not clear how we should respond. Perhaps radical solutions are unnecessary. In time, things might work themselves out, such as through further technological innovations.

Haidt’s view is that collective action is critical. As he sees it, the problem is not only that smartphones are intrinsically useful and alluring (which is why we all wanted them in the first place); it is not only that their apps are addictive. The problem – especially in a school setting – is that if most of a teenager’s peers have smartphones, then the ones who don’t have one risk being social outcasts, perpetually “left out” and never “in the know”.

For this reason, Haidt thinks actions by isolated parents are unlikely to be successful. Ironically, the same heightened parental concern for child safety Haidt has previously critiqued may prove to be a powerful force for change. At least some parents are likely to view their children’s future mental health as a non-negotiable good and treat smartphones as the modern-day hypodermic needle.

For his part, Haidt argues for four new norms, to be created by parents’ collective action alongside legislative and regulatory reforms:

  1. No smartphones before high school
  2. No social media before 16
  3. Phone-free schools
  4. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.

A deeper problem

Haidt’s book leaves the reader with a further, deeper worry.

Suppose he is right that the things that lead to human flourishing involve real world physical encounters with other people: family, close friends, romantic partners, neighbours, local community groups and members.

Such encounters are often unpredictable, messy, inconvenient and frustrating. Conversely, the online world is becoming easier, cheaper and more alluring every 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 may be that the real world can’t compete. The mental health concerns currently plaguing Gen Z might turn out to be ones that every generation will face.

If so, Haidt’s suggested reforms might mark the first foray in what will be a long battle between the human need for real-world experience and connection, and the powerful temptations of an online world that offers something we can’t possibly resist: “a little bit of everything, all of the time”.The Conversation

Hugh Breakey, Deputy Director, Institute for Ethics, Governance & Law, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'The Conversation
+ posts
xosotin chelseathông tin chuyển nhượngcâu lạc bộ bóng đá arsenalbóng đá atalantabundesligacầu thủ haalandUEFAevertonxosofutebol ao vivofutemaxmulticanaisonbethttps://bsport.fithttps://onbet88.ooohttps://i9bet.bizhttps://hi88.ooohttps://okvip.athttps://f8bet.athttps://fb88.cashhttps://vn88.cashhttps://shbet.atbóng đá world cupbóng đá inter milantin juventusbenzemala ligaclb leicester cityMUman citymessi lionelsalahnapolineymarpsgronaldoserie atottenhamvalenciaAS ROMALeverkusenac milanmbappenapolinewcastleaston villaliverpoolfa cupreal madridpremier leagueAjaxbao bong da247EPLbarcelonabournemouthaff cupasean footballbên lề sân cỏbáo bóng đá mớibóng đá cúp thế giớitin bóng đá ViệtUEFAbáo bóng đá việt namHuyền thoại bóng đágiải ngoại hạng anhSeagametap chi bong da the gioitin bong da lutrận đấu hôm nayviệt nam bóng đátin nong bong daBóng đá nữthể thao 7m24h bóng đábóng đá hôm naythe thao ngoai hang anhtin nhanh bóng đáphòng thay đồ bóng đábóng đá phủikèo nhà cái onbetbóng đá lu 2thông tin phòng thay đồthe thao vuaapp đánh lô đềdudoanxosoxổ số giải đặc biệthôm nay xổ sốkèo đẹp hôm nayketquaxosokq xskqxsmnsoi cầu ba miềnsoi cau thong kesxkt hôm naythế giới xổ sốxổ số 24hxo.soxoso3mienxo so ba mienxoso dac bietxosodientoanxổ số dự đoánvé số chiều xổxoso ket quaxosokienthietxoso kq hôm nayxoso ktxổ số megaxổ số mới nhất hôm nayxoso truc tiepxoso ViệtSX3MIENxs dự đoánxs mien bac hom nayxs miên namxsmientrungxsmn thu 7con số may mắn hôm nayKQXS 3 miền Bắc Trung Nam Nhanhdự đoán xổ số 3 miềndò vé sốdu doan xo so hom nayket qua xo xoket qua xo so.vntrúng thưởng xo sokq xoso trực tiếpket qua xskqxs 247số miền nams0x0 mienbacxosobamien hôm naysố đẹp hôm naysố đẹp trực tuyếnnuôi số đẹpxo so hom quaxoso ketquaxstruc tiep hom nayxổ số kiến thiết trực tiếpxổ số kq hôm nayso xo kq trực tuyenkết quả xổ số miền bắc trực tiếpxo so miền namxổ số miền nam trực tiếptrực tiếp xổ số hôm nayket wa xsKQ XOSOxoso onlinexo so truc tiep hom nayxsttso mien bac trong ngàyKQXS3Msố so mien bacdu doan xo so onlinedu doan cau loxổ số kenokqxs vnKQXOSOKQXS hôm naytrực tiếp kết quả xổ số ba miềncap lo dep nhat hom naysoi cầu chuẩn hôm nayso ket qua xo soXem kết quả xổ số nhanh nhấtSX3MIENXSMB chủ nhậtKQXSMNkết quả mở giải trực tuyếnGiờ vàng chốt số OnlineĐánh Đề Con Gìdò số miền namdò vé số hôm nayso mo so debach thủ lô đẹp nhất hôm naycầu đề hôm naykết quả xổ số kiến thiết toàn quốccau dep 88xsmb rong bach kimket qua xs 2023dự đoán xổ số hàng ngàyBạch thủ đề miền BắcSoi Cầu MB thần tàisoi cau vip 247soi cầu tốtsoi cầu miễn phísoi cau mb vipxsmb hom nayxs vietlottxsmn hôm naycầu lô đẹpthống kê lô kép xổ số miền Bắcquay thử xsmnxổ số thần tàiQuay thử XSMTxổ số chiều nayxo so mien nam hom nayweb đánh lô đề trực tuyến uy tínKQXS hôm nayxsmb ngày hôm nayXSMT chủ nhậtxổ số Power 6/55KQXS A trúng roycao thủ chốt sốbảng xổ số đặc biệtsoi cầu 247 vipsoi cầu wap 666Soi cầu miễn phí 888 VIPSoi Cau Chuan MBđộc thủ desố miền bắcthần tài cho sốKết quả xổ số thần tàiXem trực tiếp xổ sốXIN SỐ THẦN TÀI THỔ ĐỊACầu lô số đẹplô đẹp vip 24hsoi cầu miễn phí 888xổ số kiến thiết chiều nayXSMN thứ 7 hàng tuầnKết quả Xổ số Hồ Chí Minhnhà cái xổ số Việt NamXổ Số Đại PhátXổ số mới nhất Hôm Nayso xo mb hom nayxxmb88quay thu mbXo so Minh ChinhXS Minh Ngọc trực tiếp hôm nayXSMN 88XSTDxs than taixổ số UY TIN NHẤTxs vietlott 88SOI CẦU SIÊU CHUẨNSoiCauVietlô đẹp hôm nay vipket qua so xo hom naykqxsmb 30 ngàydự đoán xổ số 3 miềnSoi cầu 3 càng chuẩn xácbạch thủ lônuoi lo chuanbắt lô chuẩn theo ngàykq xo-solô 3 càngnuôi lô đề siêu vipcầu Lô Xiên XSMBđề về bao nhiêuSoi cầu x3xổ số kiến thiết ngày hôm nayquay thử xsmttruc tiep kết quả sxmntrực tiếp miền bắckết quả xổ số chấm vnbảng xs đặc biệt năm 2023soi cau xsmbxổ số hà nội hôm naysxmtxsmt hôm nayxs truc tiep mbketqua xo so onlinekqxs onlinexo số hôm nayXS3MTin xs hôm nayxsmn thu2XSMN hom nayxổ số miền bắc trực tiếp hôm naySO XOxsmbsxmn hôm nay188betlink188 xo sosoi cầu vip 88lô tô việtsoi lô việtXS247xs ba miềnchốt lô đẹp nhất hôm naychốt số xsmbCHƠI LÔ TÔsoi cau mn hom naychốt lô chuẩndu doan sxmtdự đoán xổ số onlinerồng bạch kim chốt 3 càng miễn phí hôm naythống kê lô gan miền bắcdàn đề lôCầu Kèo Đặc Biệtchốt cầu may mắnkết quả xổ số miền bắc hômSoi cầu vàng 777thẻ bài onlinedu doan mn 888soi cầu miền nam vipsoi cầu mt vipdàn de hôm nay7 cao thủ chốt sốsoi cau mien phi 7777 cao thủ chốt số nức tiếng3 càng miền bắcrồng bạch kim 777dàn de bất bạion newsddxsmn188betw88w88789bettf88sin88suvipsunwintf88five8812betsv88vn88Top 10 nhà cái uy tínsky88iwinlucky88nhacaisin88oxbetm88vn88w88789betiwinf8betrio66rio66lucky88oxbetvn88188bet789betMay-88five88one88sin88bk88xbetoxbetMU88188BETSV88RIO66ONBET88188betM88M88SV88Jun-68Jun-88one88iwinv9betw388OXBETw388w388onbetonbetonbetonbet88onbet88onbet88onbet88onbetonbetonbetonbetqh88mu88Nhà cái uy tínpog79vp777vp777vipbetvipbetuk88uk88typhu88typhu88tk88tk88sm66sm66me88me888live8live8livesm66me88win798livesm66me88win79pog79pog79vp777vp777uk88uk88tk88tk88luck8luck8kingbet86kingbet86k188k188hr99hr99123b8xbetvnvipbetsv66zbettaisunwin-vntyphu88vn138vwinvwinvi68ee881xbetrio66zbetvn138i9betvipfi88clubcf68onbet88ee88typhu88onbetonbetkhuyenmai12bet-moblie12betmoblietaimienphi247vi68clupcf68clupvipbeti9betqh88onb123onbefsoi cầunổ hũbắn cáđá gàđá gàgame bàicasinosoi cầuxóc đĩagame bàigiải mã giấc mơbầu cuaslot gamecasinonổ hủdàn đềBắn cácasinodàn đềnổ hũtài xỉuslot gamecasinobắn cáđá gàgame bàithể thaogame bàisoi cầukqsssoi cầucờ tướngbắn cágame bàixóc đĩaAG百家乐AG百家乐AG真人AG真人爱游戏华体会华体会im体育kok体育开云体育开云体育开云体育乐鱼体育乐鱼体育欧宝体育ob体育亚博体育亚博体育亚博体育亚博体育亚博体育亚博体育开云体育开云体育棋牌棋牌沙巴体育买球平台新葡京娱乐开云体育mu88qh88
Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Latest

police pogo police pogo
News25 mins ago

PAOCC monitoring ‘fake hospitals’ with POGO links

MANILA – The Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC) said Wednesday it is monitoring hospitals with supposed links to illegal Philippine...

Philippine Coast Guard spokesperson for the West Philippine Sea, Commodore Jay Tarriela Philippine Coast Guard spokesperson for the West Philippine Sea, Commodore Jay Tarriela
News44 mins ago

PCG: ‘Atin Ito’ WPS mission, win for PH

MANILA – The aid mission of civilian group ‘Atin Ito Coalition’ is already a victory for the Philippines even without...

water drops from faucet water drops from faucet
News1 hour ago

DILG to LGUs: Inspect water meters, report leaks immediately

MANILA – The Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) on Wednesday directed local chief executives and village officials...

News1 hour ago

PH Navy: 98 Chinese ships detected in WPS

MANILA – The Philippine Navy (PN) monitored 98 Chinese vessels of various kinds in the West Philippine Sea (WPS) from...

News2 hours ago

Japan assures delivery of more capital ships to PCG

MANILA – Japan Ambassador to the Philippines Endo Kazuya on Wednesday assured the support of the Japanese government in the...

News2 hours ago

PCG sends 2 more escort vessels for ‘Atin Ito’ convoy to WPS

MANILA – The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) on Wednesday dispatched two more vessels to escort the “Atin Ito” convoy to...

PCG response groups PCG response groups
News2 hours ago

PCG, DSWD tie up to improve children’s literacy in remote areas

MANILA – The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) and the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) have partnered to improve...

Senator Francis Tolentino Senator Francis Tolentino
News5 hours ago

Probe on alleged wiretapping ops of Chinese Embassy in Manila urged

MANILA – Senator Francis Tolentino on Wednesday urged the Senate Committee on National Defense to investigate the alleged wiretapping of...

News5 hours ago

PH accedes to UN convention on registration of space objects

MANILA – The Philippines government has deposited the instrument of accession to the United Nations (UN) Registration Convention, a treaty...

News6 hours ago

PAGASA warns of dangerous heat index in 37 areas

MANILA – The weather bureau on Wednesday warned of dangerous heat index levels in 37 areas, with the highest at...

WordPress Ads