How phones broke children’s brains, a mental health emergency is hitting young people around the world

My sister, who works at a specialist college, was recently telling me that phones are the number one issue that she and her colleagues are struggling with. Students have them out at all times, clutched in their hands like shiny, black security blankets. Her class will message each other from across the room during lessons, or scroll social media, or listen to music; meanwhile, she’s desperately trying to claw their atention back and get them to engage with the real world. Screens and teens: it’s a combination that’s become increasingly tricky to navigate over the last decade. The switch from what I think of as “analogue” phones — those with butons but no internet — to smartphones, compounded by an upsurgeindigitallivingduringpandemiclockdowns, has resulted in 46 per cent of adolescents reporting they are online “almost constantly”. Some 97 per cent of children have a smartphone by the age of 12, according to Ofcom data. In February, new batle lines were drawn in this ongoing war. Government ministers confirmed plans to ban them in schools in England, with the Department for Education (DFE) issuing guidance to help teachers with implementation. Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, said the DFE believed the guidance would “empower” headteachers to exorcise these digital demons, and “would send a clear message about consistency”.

“You go to school, you go to learn, you go to create those friendships, you go to speak to people and socialise and you go to get educated,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “You don’t go to sit on your mobile phone or to send messages while you could actually talk to somebody.” The reason this is so pressing isn’t simply that tweens and teens aren’t paying proper atention in class. It has a far more sinister impact on children and young people’s mental health, according to a new book, The Anxious Generation, writen by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He presents the compelling argument that the uptick in time spent online has coincided with an alarming mental health crisis all over the world.between 2010 and 2015, suicide rates among 10 to 14-year-old girls and boys increased by 167 and 92 per cent respectively. Self-harm rates for teenage girls in the UK soared by 78 per cent. Anxiety diagnoses for those aged 18 to 25 jumped by 92 per cent. During this same five-year period, smartphones reached a majority of US households — they were adopted faster than any other communication technology in human history. There is a tangible link, too, between screentime and poor mental health, reveals Haidt: nearly 40 per cent of teenage girls who spend over five hours on social media a day have been diagnosed with clinical depression.

Childhoodandadolescencehavebeen“rewired”, claims Haidt. Referencing the shit that started at the turn of the millennium, when tech companies began creating a set of world-changing products based around exploiting the rapidly expanding capabilities of the internet, Haidt paints a deeply concerning picture. “The companies had done litle or no research on the mental health effects of their products on children and adolescents, and they shared no data with researchers studying the health effects. When faced with growing evidence that their products were harming young people, they mostly engaged in denial, obfuscation, and public relations campaigns,” he says. Business models that relied on maximising engagement using psychological tricks were the “worst offenders”, he says, adding that they hooked children “during vulnerable developmental stages, while their brains were rapidly rewiring in response to incoming stimulation”. For girls, some of the greatest damage was inflicted by social media; for boys, video games and harmful sites had the most chilling impacts.

“By designing a firehouse of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacingphysicalplayandin-personsocialising,these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale,” Haidt writes damningly. Companies are accused of behaving like the tobacco and vaping industries, designing highly addictive products and skirting laws in order to sell them to minors. It makes for terrifying reading. Developmentally, children’s brains are not at all adapted to cope with all of the above. The reward-seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, but the frontal cortex, responsible for self-control and will-power, isn’t operating on all cylinders till our mid-twenties — creating a dangerously toxic cocktail when you throw in algorithms advanced enough to even hold adults’ atention hostage for hours at a time.