Protecting youth from online harm

Jonathan Haidt begins his new book about the mental health crisis among young people — “The Anxious Generation” — with a provocative thought experiment.

Imagine, he says, that when your daughter turns 10 a visionary billionaire chooses her to join the first human settlement on Mars. She’s eager to go; all her friends have signed up and it sounds like a great adventure.

But it turns out the billionaire hasn’t studied the risks of plopping kids on another planet. He’s in a race with other tech lords to claim space on Mars and doesn’t care about children’s development or safety. Would you let her go? “Of course not,” writes Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University. “You realize this is a completely insane idea.”

Then why, he asks, have parents allowed their children to move en masse to another kind of alien world designed by tech giants without concern for their safety — the universe defined by smartphones and social media? The risks to their health — sky-high rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm — are now clear for all to see. Yet parents and governments alike can’t figure out how to stop the damage.

The problem, as Haidt sees it, isn’t just the kind of harmful online content the Trudeau government wants to protect kids from. À la Marshall McLuhan, it’s the medium itself. Gen Z, those born in the mid- to late 1990s, “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.”

The result, says Haidt, is a “great rewiring of childhood,” a shift from a “play-based” to a “phone-based” childhood with implications we barely understand. The proof is that all the negative indicators of mental health turned sharply upward in 2010 to 2015, with the mass adoption of smartphones and social media and well before the negative effects on kids of COVID lockdowns.

There’s a lively debate over all this. Some experts push back against the idea that smartphones/social media actually caused the epidemic of mental illness that characterizes the “anxious generation.” There may be strong correlation, but they say proof of causation isn’t there.

There’s never been a time free of outside threats and it can’t be a coincidence that the same noxious trends appear wherever online culture takes over young minds; Haidt draws on scores of studies from Canada to Europe and beyond. And he makes the very reasonable point that we needn’t wait for conclusive proof to act. The standard should be that of public health — a preponderance of evidence.

But what to do? Haidt would like to see far less “safetyism” — the kind of nervous parenting that limits kids’ freedom in the real world in the name of shielding them from every conceivable danger — and a lot more concern about safety online.

He’d stop kids from having smartphones before high school; prevent them from opening social media accounts before 16; ban phones from schools entirely ; and encourage far more unsupervised play.

Canadian governments are grappling with these issues, so far without much success. But young people (and not-soyoung people) are so enmeshed in the world of social media that it’s awfully hard to push back.

But some things can be done. Governments could, as Haidt suggests, raise the age of “internet adulthood” (when a kid can sign a contract with a company to share their data) from 13 to 16. And tech firms could make it easy for parents to designate a device as one used by a minor so young children can’t open their own accounts.

But the evidence of harm is too big to be brushed aside. Time to bring the kids back from Mars.