Give kids more to do than going online

In January, I had the odd experience of nodding along with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who can usually be relied on to be wrong, as he berated supervillain Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, about the effect its products have on kids. “You have blood on your hands,” Graham said.

That evening, I moderated a panel on social media regulation whose participants included New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. Her position wasn’t that different from that of Graham. There is a correlation, she pointed out, between the proliferation of addictive social media algorithms and the collapse of young people’s mental health, including rising rates of depression, suicidal thoughts and self-harm.

Because alarm over what social media is doing to kids is broad and bipartisan, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is pushing on an open door with his important new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” The shift in kids’ energy and attention from the physical world to the virtual one has been catastrophic, especially for girls.

Female adolescence was nightmarish enough before smartphones, but apps like Instagram and TikTok have put popularity contests and unrealistic beauty standards into hyperdrive. (Boys have more problems linked to overuse of video games and porn.) The studies Haidt cites should put to bed the notion that concern over kids and phones is just a modern moral panic akin to previous generations’ hand-wringing over radio, comic books and television.

The question in our politics is less whether these new technologies are causing widespread psychological damage than what can be done about it.

The federal Kids Online Safety Act has the votes to pass the Senate but hasn’t even been introduced in the House. In the absence of federal action, both red and blue states have tried to enact laws to safeguard kids online, but many have been enjoined by courts for running afoul of the First Amendment.

There are, however, small but potentially significant steps local governments can take to get kids to spend less time online. Phonefree schools are an obvious start, although, in a perverse American twist, some parents object to them because they want to be able to reach their kids if there’s a mass shooting. More than that, we need a lot more places where kids can interact in person.

In “The Anxious Generation,” Haidt argues that while kids are underprotected on the internet, they’re overprotected in the real world. For a whole host of reasons — parental fear, overzealous child welfare departments — kids generally have a lot less freedom and independence than their parents did.

But it’s hard to make them go outside when there are no other kids around. One of my favorite days of the year is my Brooklyn neighborhood’s block party, when the street is closed to traffic and the kids play in packs, most ignored by tipsy parents.

As I was finishing “The Anxious Generation,” a book that partly overlaps with it arrived in the mail: “Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be.” The author, Timothy P. Carney, is a conservative Catholic father of six. Carney cites a 2023 paper from The Journal of Pediatrics concluding that a “primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.”

If we want to start getting kids offline, we need to give them better places to go instead.