Social media’s grim fairy tale
Each generation seems to come with its own cultural craving. For boomers, it was television. The next generation became absorbed with video everything — movies and games, the addictive powers of which couldn’t have been imagined based on early iterations. Pac-Man (remember him?), created in 1980, was designed as an antidote to violent arcade games.
I wrote then about watching my little boy playing a game, wild with nervous energy and jerking spasmodically. I worried about what was happening to his brain. This is a kid who, when he was 10 and I suggested he run outside and play, said, “Mom, there’s something you need to know about me. My idea of being outside is standing outside Blockbuster Video.”
Today’s craving, of course, is the smartphone and its free pass into the universe of social media. For kids now, social media is a mix of innocent fun and cruel torment.
Cravings, of course, often lead to addiction. Today, phone addiction and social media have led to a global crisis in youth mental health, according to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in a new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” Haidt cites the startling rise in childhood depression, self-harm and suicide, especially among girls, who spend a great deal more time on their phones than their male counterparts. This isn’t breaking news, of course. Last year, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued a formal warning about social media’s effects on youth mental health.
What is new is the data Haidt has gathered to link cause and effect: Excessive use of social media through smartphones leads to mental illness in children. Today’s childhood environment, he says, is hostile to human development. Amen, brother.
Haidt says 2010 was the year “something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents.” Depression rates and anxiety, which were fairly stable in the 2000s, rose by more than 50% from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate increased by 48% for ages 10 to 19. For girls 10 to 14, it rose 131%.
Other manifestations of declining mental health — loneliness and friendlessness — have surged during the great smartphone experiment, while academic performance has fallen. Haidt found that what began as problems in childhood continued into young adulthood. Members of Gen Z, some now in their late 20s, date less, have less sex and less interest in having children, and are more likely to live with parents. Also, as boomers have experienced, they’re harder to work with.
I’m not here to regale the virtues of “back in my day,” but times and child-rearing practices were undeniably different. If you ask people raised in the 1950s and ’60s, you’ll hear similar stories. We weren’t allowed in the house after school until we were called home for supper. We came in hot, sweaty and dirty from playing.
As technology has advanced, play time has been drastically reduced and has moved indoors. This is partly because of fear of child abduction but also because the indoors offers entertainment that doesn’t make you sweat. Face-to-face time has been replaced by screen time with everything from harmless games to pornography to violence, all of which take up residence in the not-yet-fully formed brains of children and teenagers.
Good parents obviously don’t want their children exposed to online abuse or toxicity. Even now-adult children who grew up in the phone culture largely agree with Haidt’s suggestions for regulations or raising age limits for access to the digital world.
But parents are, nevertheless, flummoxed by social pressures and endless arguments from determined children. Parents often watch with sadness and helplessness as their teenagers disappear into a phone universe, evolving quickly from outgoing innocence into self-critical introspection.
Three mothers I spoke with approached the dilemma in different ways. One never gave her teenage daughter a phone, and she somehow managed to muddle through high school into Princeton. Another gave her eldest daughter — a reserved, careful girl — an iPhone on her 12th birthday. She watches carefully, and she and her daughter regularly review the girl’s Snapchat account. Is this enough?
Finally, a mom who first didn’t allow any of her six children to watch television and kept the family computer in a common area surrendered to her youngest child with a smartphone at age 17. Even though he’s now a happily married father of two, she still regrets her decision. “He is part of the anxious generation,” she said. “He is doing great now, but we saw the change.”
The risks of phone culture aren’t limited to potential predation or online bullies. Perhaps most important is the effect on brain development. Children and teenagers don’t play enough. Play teaches us to be creative and to be good sports, to estimate risk, to fail and jump back up. Deprived of play, children can grow into anxious and risk-averse adults.