Two Things Breaking Our Kids
A bestselling book explains why phones and overprotective parenting are a devastating combination
More than 1 out of every 5 students in East Penn is now officially classified as disabled, and the vast majority of these are mental rather than physical disabilities. Many more students suffer from mental health challenges that haven’t been formally recognized, and so aren’t even included in this statistic. East Penn isn’t alone; kids both nationally and around the world have shown an alarming rise in mental health disorders. The question is...why?
Answering this question is the goal of The Anxious Generation, a best-selling book by New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt. I recently got together with a small group of community members to read and discuss the book. Haidt’s answer lines up with what a lot of the research shows:
The significant and widespread increase in mental health disorders among kids has been caused by two different things that have come together at the same time:
The rapid rise of social media use by kids, primarily on their cell phones
The growing norms of overprotective parenting that reduce the amount of free, unsupervised play available to kids (he calls these norms “safetyism”)
Childhood use of social media is harmful because it’s deliberately addictive, exposes kids to adult content (such as graphic violence, pornography, gambling) at very young ages and without restriction, replaces role models in their real life with unrealistic and manufactured personas from so-called ‘influencers,’ and isolates them from the direct, face to face relationships required for healthy child development.
Free play works because it involves some physical and emotional risk—and that’s exactly what makes adults nervous about it.
The new culture of overprotective parenting is harmful because it robs children of experiencing and learning how to understand nonverbal cues from peers, make independent decisions, develop and maintain human relationships, and more. Free play works because it involves some physical and emotional risk— and that’s exactly what makes adults nervous about it. “Children can only learn how to not get hurt in situations where it is possible to get hurt,” he explains. Developing brains require play, and emotional and psychological development depend on children learning social skills like self-governance, joint decision making, accepting the outcome when you lose a dispute, and other things that come from free play rather than planned activities structured and supervised by adults.
The result of these two things together is more mental health problems and less success in school. The graphs below, recently shared by one of Haidt’s colleagues, show how social media is impacting both. The trend they demonstrate is unmistakable: Both loneliness and academic performance have worsened in lockstep with cell phone adoption, and it’s worse for heavy users than others:
Not all researchers agree with Haidt’s interpretation of this data— this is an active and sometimes heated area of research— but the weight of the evidence is moving in his direction. And he doesn’t just focus on his own viewpoint; he also anticipates and addresses potential objections reasonable people might have to his arguments. So, for example, he points out that we now have a growing body of experimental data that suggests the relationship between childhood social media use and mental health disorders is causal and not just correlational. And he notes too that any alternative explanation needs to account for the fact that the rise in childhood mental health disorders happened not just in the United States but throughout the world where there has been widespread smart phone and social media adoption.
Both causes of the current epidemic of anxiety and mental health problems among young people can be fixed.
While Haidt paints a bleak picture of the current situation, his book is ultimately a hopeful one. Both causes of the current epidemic of anxiety and mental health problems among young people can be fixed. To do so, he argues we need:
Government regulations that restrict social media use by children, who should have no access until they are 16. He likens such restrictions to those society already has around children’s access to alcohol.
Schools with full “bell to bell” bans on cell phone use, and more recess time for kids all the way through middle school. Prohibiting cell phones only during instruction, or only during class time, miss the point. The harm caused by social media use is more profound than mere distraction during school lessons. Cell phone bans that apply only during class times mean students are more likely to have their faces— and thus their brains— buried in them at other times in school, rather than interacting with each other.
Families that make agreements with other neighborhood parents to prohibit their kids from cell phones and social media until a certain age, that create clear and explicit rules about phone and social media use by their teenagers that include times and places where neither are used, and that develop regular habits— like Sunday dinner together, for example— that give kids great opportunities to make human connections with others in their homes and in their communities.
Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is an alarming but easily accessible call to action to all parents, grandparents, and educators. To be sure, it doesn’t tackle every social problem that contributes to growing anxiety, including stagnant wages, growing inequality, school shootings, and a changing climate. But it does ask us to confront—together— some key things standing between our kids and the meaningful, happy lives they deserve.
Related:
I absolutely believe social media has harmed kids and there have not been sufficient measures to ensure children are protected online. There is not enough focus on the shift schools have made toward digital curriculum—schools have shifted to 1:1 technology without safeguards on the electronics they issue. It has been a nightmare trying to protect my child from what is accessible on her school-issued computer. I take major issue with claiming parents are overprotective. That is an oversimplification of what it is to parent at this time. Particularly when parenting children who have free-reign access to the internet from school issued devices—and then schools have the audacity to claim phones are an issue. My children have lockdown and active shooter drills and have a device that they use during the school day and take home. And yet parents are causing anxiety?! There are a lot more layers to this. There is a mental health crisis amongst adults—teachers and parents and everyone else—who do not have the time to manage it because we are all walking an economic tightrope and doing what we can to survive. You need to also consider the current political climate and the affects on marginalized populations on multiple fronts. Not to mention we experienced a pandemic and NO ONE TALKED TO KIDS about it. Schools went back like nothing happened. Unprocessed trauma and grief weighs on our kids—and many adults. There are so many layers to this and while we might want to point a finger at a group of people (i.e. parents), that is a dangerous and unfair approach. It also suggests that if parents just parented better all of this would go away. No. If we don’t consider it more holistically, then we won’t be able to find meaningful ways of improving things. Parents letting kids play more will not “fix” kids. There are so many factors affecting mental health. What of the schools that take recess away from kids as punishment? Or the active shooter drills that start in Kindergarten? Or the fact that there was a ghost gun found in a kid’s backpack on EHS’s campus? Or broader— the lack of economic security and job instability that has eliminated a stable middle class leaving families struggling? Or the current government restrictions on LGBTQIA, immigrant, and other marginalized communities? There are so many things going on and kids do not have much say or control in it. To not consider how that impacts their mental health is simplistic.