The kids aren’t all right. Are phones really to blame?
If you follow the always abundant literature of What’s Wrong With Today’s Kids, then you’re already familiar with the work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.
A professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, he’s most widely known for his 2018 bestseller, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” in which he and co-author Greg Lukianoff excoriated the new campus culture of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings,” and tied the emotional fragility they believed underlay those developments to soaring rates of depression and anxiety in college students.
In the years since, Haidt has been a frequent research and sometime writing collaborator of Jean Twenge, the prolific and controversial psychologist whose Atlantic cover story in 2017, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?,” set the tone for their work.
Along the way, Haidt has picked up a cadre of haters (the “kids are alright” crowd, he calls them) who have accused him of cherry-picking examples, retrofitting tired old arguments about “kids today,” and stoking “moral panic” about new technology to puff himself up and keep Gen Z down.
His new book, “The Anxious Generation,” is not going to make his life any easier.
In it, Haidt builds on his previous work and beefs it up, arguing that young people today — specifically those belonging to Gen Z — are damaged products of a massive shift in the culture of childhood. Born in the late 1990s to fearful and overprotective parents, they were raised, unlike the baby boomers and Generation X, with almost constant adult supervision. They became the first-ever cohort of tweens and teens to go through adolescence under the thrall of smartphones, forming their identities in the largely unregulated, ill-understood universe of social media. The toxic combination of “overprotection in the real world and under-protection in the virtual world” (Haidt’s italics) made them super-anxious. Time spent on screens and away from in-person interactions layered in depression-inducing isolation, deprived them of sleep, fragmented their attention, and got them addicted to the dopamine hits of likes, retweets and comments.
“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 “unsuitable for children and adolescents,” Haidt writes.
By his calculations, technological innovation after innovation — “hyper-viralized” social media; front-facing, “selfie”-enabling phone cameras — added up to disaster: a 145 percent increase in depression among teen girls from 2010 to 2021, a 161 percent rise among boys in those same years, with big hikes in anxiety disorders, self-harm and suicide, too. “The Great Rewiring of Childhood, in which the phonebased childhood replaced the play-based childhood, is the major cause of the international epidemic of adolescent mental illness,” Haidt writes. And with that one tricky word, “cause,” he stakes his latest claim — and opens himself up to what’s likely to be a world of pain.
Even if you question the specifics of how Haidt slices and dices his data (and I do, up to a point: to generate those showstopping depression numbers, for example, he includes data from 2020 and 2021 — years of off-the-charts stress due to the onset of the pandemic, during which data collection methods dramatically changed), there’s no doubt that young people today are in the throes of a mental health crisis that’s unprecedented in scope and severity. The latest statistics are terrible: According to the 2022 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, for example, almost 1 in 5 of 12- to 17-year-olds had a major depressive episode in the past year, while nearly half of 18- to 25-year-olds had either a substance use disorder or a mental illness.
But proving causation (rather than mere correlation) is an iffy proposition. It’s especially risky for Haidt in the face of a large body of scholarly literature on the psychological harms of social media that’s ambiguous at best.
He acknowledges this, and tries to get around the problem with the sheer amount of correlational evidence he pools together and combines with laboratory experiments he ran with Twenge. He also gives himself a convenient out, saying he “will surely be wrong on some points”; he’s even set up a research site that he will maintain, inviting other researchers to weigh in.
That’s all well and good — clever marketing, for sure — but unfortunate for the book as a reading experience. For one thing, in assiduously working to prove quantitatively his very likely unprovable “Great Rewiring” hypothesis, Haidt spends the first two-thirds of the book writing defensively, as if speaking to an audience of straw-man detractors just waiting to score a gotcha against him. This results in a lot of artless rigidity: too much repetition, refining and redefining of dates and definitions.
Haidt’s investment in his “Great Rewiring” theory also leaves him with some blind spots. His call for anxious adults to let kids roam assumes that all overprotective parents live in areas that are basically safe, where kids can bike around or run errands or go house to house to play without, say, having to cross a sixlane highway. He misses the mark when he writes of Gen X parents “gleefully and gratefully” recalling their childhood independence; the kind of loud laughter he hears when he raises the topic, in my experience, is often more angry than nostalgic, children of the 1970s parenting as they do in reaction to the emotional absenteeism of their own parents.
And his recollection of free and fun suburban childhood overlooks the fact that growing up is brutal for many — above all for kids who don’t fit the norms that prevail in their communities. To mock, as Haidt does, a playground sign at an elementary school in Berkeley that includes “Tag Rules” like “Include everyone,” “No ball tag” and “If a player doesn’t want to play tag, then other players must respect that,” is to ignore that when children “manage their own affairs,” it’s often a “Lord of the Flies”-like experience.
Haidt could have done a lot with all that material. Because, when he steps away from his data — when he writes, as he puts it, “less as a social scientist than as a fellow human being” — his book can be quite wonderful.