Kids These Days

I have been worried about the younger generations for a while. I have monitored and observed their mental health statistics with greater and greater alarm. We’re all pretty de-sensitized to alarming news. Since we are told everything is a crisis worth panicking over, we all use various defense mechanisms to respond to the world and the news. I do not wish to be alarmist, however, if there is one issue that should greatly concern all of us, it is that: for some reason Gen Z has very troubling rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide. In other words, Gen Z is suffering profoundly. The future of our world, our youth, our young people, are deeply struggling. Rather than accuse them of being weak or spoiled, shouldn’t we look for answers as to why so many of them feel hopeless, lonely and depressed? Shouldn’t we look on them with compassion and search high and low for ways to help them learn resiliency, find joy, and build strong communities? These are our children after all!

In, The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt, he does just that. While doing research for a different project, he came up against statistics he couldn’t ignore and changed the trajectory of his work. This book should be read by every parent, every teacher, everyone who works with youth or young people in any capacity, and anyone who wishes to have insight into a generation to whom we, as a culture, have accidentally caused serious and real damage. Haidt explains how several cultural trends since the 80s culminated with the rise of the smart phone and he explains how the consequences of these cultural trends have caused substantial damage to the growing child’s brain development. I hope you will read the book yourself, because it has so much beneficial information, but I will do my best to summarize the most important points.

In the introduction Haidt explains:

“Gen Z (those born after 1995) 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—as I will show—unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness—perpetually–to managing what became their online brand…They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviors that are essential for successful human development. The members of Gen Z are, therefore, the test subjects for a radical new way of growing up, far from the real-world interactions of small communities in which humans evolved” (6).

Haidt doesn’t blame everything on the smart phone, however. His central claim is that, “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation” (9). He defines what he means by the ‘real world’ and the ‘virtual world’ and I think his definitions are important to quote, because I can see how problematic the differences are between those worlds before he even gets to the problem.

Real world relationships and interactions are:

1. They are embodied, meaning that we use our bodies to communicate, we are conscious of the bodies of others, and we respond to the bodies of others both consciously and unconsciously.

2. They are synchronous, which means they are happening at the same time, with subtle cues about timing and turn taking.

3. They involve primarily one-to-one or one-to-several communication, with only one interaction happening at a given moment.

4. They take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen.

In contrast, virtual relationships and interactions are:

1. They are disembodied, meaning that no body is needed, just language. Partners could be artificial intelligences.

2. They are heavily asynchronous, happening via text-based posts and comments. (A video call is different; it is synchronous.)

3. They involve a substantial number of one-to-many communications, broadcasting to a potentially vast audience. Multiple interactions can be happening in parallel.

4. They take place within communities that have a low bar for entry and exit, so people can block others or just quit when they are not pleased. Communities tend to be short-lived, and relationships are often disposable (9-10).

In Chapter 1, he focuses on the data of mental health among adolescents. I’ll just mention a few of the studies and statistics he gathered. Teen girls saw a 145% increase in depression from 2010-2020. Anxiety in college students saw a 134% increase in that decade. Lest you say, well maybe more teens are self-diagnosing and skewing the statistics, emergency room visits for self-harm rose 188% in adolescent girls and suicide rates rose 91% in adolescent boys. These statistics should alarm us. Childhood should be characterized as a time of being carefree, adventurous, and  optimistic. Yet, more and more, it is becoming the opposite for far too many of our children and teens. What has changed to cause such distress? Haidt’s theory makes perfect sense to me.

Haidt describes what he calls, the decline of the play-based childhood. As a former teacher and camp counselor, I was already well aware of the necessity of free-play, but Haidt’s list of benefits is concise and the studies are fascinating. Mammals, like rats and monkeys, deprived of play become aggressive as adolescents. Children learn countless physical, social, emotional, and interactional skills by playing. “It is in unsupervised, child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts and play fair. Children are intrinsically motivated to acquire these skills because they want to be included in the playgroup and keep the fun going” (53). One of the main harms that has come from so much time that children and teens spend on screens is that so much less time is spent outdoors, with others, freely playing. I was reminded repeatedly of another book that made similar types of claims, “Last Child in the Woods,” by Richard Louv. Another book I would highly recommend. In both books, I can see so clearly how so many things are related: if a child is spending a majority of time on screens, they are not outdoors in the natural world, if they are not outdoors in the natural world, moments of awe, wonder and curiosity are lessened, If they have less time playing and interacting with peers in unstructured settings, their ability to interact, read social cues, and learn resiliency is lessened. The longer this continues, the scarier it becomes to interact with peers and be outdoors and the default to turn to screens is exacerbated! Haidt and Louv have studies, surveys and all kinds of interesting data to back up these claims, but with me they were preaching to the choir. I have a decade’s worth of memories as a camp counselor, where I witnessed time and time again the benefits of being outdoors with peers in a free play environment. I saw my campers do scary and challenging things like, sleep outdoors, hike a mile, and balance on a tight rope with their cabin mates for support. There was a particular hike that I loved because it always followed the same course of events: someone would start crying because it was too steep and they couldn’t go on, the rest of the girls would encourage her, “we’re almost there, you’ve made it so far already!” the girl would take a breath and step by step keep going and we would finally altogether make it to the top with cheers and exclamations of “we made it! Look at the view!” The main girl would walk a little taller the rest of the week, having accomplished something she truly believed she couldn’t, and the rest of the girls were also changed by having supported someone else, and the bond between them all was strengthened. Resiliency comes from overcoming challenges. Outdoor play is the BEST place to overcome challenges.

With less time spent outdoors playing, another cultural trend was emerging in the 80s: overprotection. The age children were generally allowed to be unsupervised in the neighborhood rose from 6 to 14 over the generations. The fear of “stranger danger” became a common topic. Parents before the 80s used to assume other adults, including strangers, would help supervise, reprimand, and help out if their child had a problem, but starting in the 80s parents didn’t feel they could interfere with other people’s children and other adults couldn’t be trusted. These studies follow the U.S., Canada and Britain. “The idea that responsible parenting means the continual supervision of children is a peculiarly Anglo-American one” (87). Playgrounds that had even slight possibilities of hurts were eliminated. Parents and teachers became very involved in all aspects of play: creating rules that were meant to make sure no one got hurt, no one was excluded, no disputes between children were started, and if disputes did start, they would be resolved by an adult, eliminating any peer resolution practice. These types of environments send the message to children they can’t be trusted to resolve conflicts or overcome hurts. These types of environments create children who are “fragile.”

With the decline of the “play-based childhood,” Haidt then describes the rise of the “phone-based childhood.” There are 4 foundational harms, stemming from the smart phone, that are particularly damaging to an adolescent’s brain: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. “Children have been drawn powerfully to screens since the advent of television, but they could not take those screens with them to school or when they went outside to play… By 2015, more than 70% of American teens carried a touch screen around with them” (116-117). Learning to socialize, learning how to make friends and learning your place in the world and community are foundational to development in adolescence. Studies about the number of friends teens have and the number of times they spend with friends in a week declined significantly from 2012-2019 while studies about teens who feel they are lonely, have no friends, and who report hours spent on social media and/or smart phones increased greatly. The studies on teens who get less than 7 hours of sleep greatly increased during those years while studies about the effects of sleep deprivation and poor mental health are abundant and clear: the negative consequences are many.

The third foundational harm of attention fragmentation, I found especially interesting. I know I can relate to the feeling of attention fragmentation-I, myself, have probably checked my phone 50 times while trying to write this book summary. I can make myself crazy when: I want to know the time, so I look at my phone, but then I see a text, somehow I decide to check my email, which reminds me I meant to google something I had thought about earlier, for some reason I’ll find myself logged into facebook, and 25 minutes later I still don’t know what time it is! If this is happening to me, I can only imagine what is happening in the brains of our children and adolescents whose prefrontal cortex is not even developed yet.

Addiction is the fourth foundational harm of a phone-based childhood. Not every teen who has a smartphone or social media will become truly addicted, but many will. We have age laws about other addictive substances and behaviors, it seems completely reasonable to me to have rules and guidelines relating to ages when it comes to smartphones. The worst part of addiction is how an “addicted person’s brain adapts by counteracting the effect of the drug, the brain then enters a state of deficit when the user is not taking the drug. If dopamine release is pleasurable, dopamine deficit is unpleasant. Ordinary life becomes boring and even painful without the drug” (135). Although smartphone addiction is different from a chemical addiction, it is still leading to ‘ordinary life becoming boring and even painful’ without it.

Haidt has an interesting section explaining the ways that these trends in smart phone use and mental health decline are different for boys than girls. Girls tend to be more affected negatively by social media use, whereas boys tend to be harmed by excessive video game and porn use. I plan on writing a whole blog on what Haidt calls, ‘the long decline of males,’ because it is another trend I have been following closely and have read about from multiple sources, so for now, I’ll just bring up a couple points. “Boys get lower grades, they have higher rates of ADHD, they are more likely to be unable to read, and they are less likely to graduate from high school, in part because they are three times as likely as girls to be expelled or suspended along the way (177). As boys become men the statistics are also disturbing. We all know about men who have ‘failed to launch’ ie failed to grow up. Easily accessible pornography use has hijacked boy’s minds. As boys were growing up, their “sex drive increased, it motivated boys to do things that were frightening and awkward, such as trying to talk to a girl, or asking a girl to dance at events organized by adults (187). If boys are satisfied by porn, the motivation to do those risky things goes down. Speaking of risky things, the decline of risky outdoor play starting in the 80s that I already mentioned, seems to have affected boys more than girls.

Haidt shares that he is an atheist, but spends a whole chapter describing common spiritual practices from the major world religions that elevate a person and community. He laments that the virtual world is very much in contrast to these spiritual practices. Embodiment, stillness and silence, self-transcendence, being slow to anger and quick to forgive, and finding awe in nature are a few of the spiritual practices that he believes would help relieve some of  the harms from the virtual world.

Haidt doesn’t just leave us with the magnitude of the problem without offering several practical solutions. First, he explains what he means by, a collective action problem. We can decide individually that our child won’t have a smartphone until high school, but if they walk into their 6^th grade homeroom and everyone else is on their phone, they still won’t be able to make small talk with their peers. If no one else in the neighborhood allows their children to play “unsupervised” it can feel scary to be the only one. He recommends ‘voluntary coordination’ ie teaming up with other  parents and families to collectively decide on norms around technology. We can change the social norms and expectations as a community. Adults are just as likely to succumb to peer pressure as teens, in my opinion, so let’s create good peer pressure around things like technology use, unsupervised play, and even creating ‘risky’ challenges for our kids and teens to overcome. He would love to see governments create real laws with age verification for certain technologies. He greatly encourages phone-free schools, completely phone-free, not just banning phone use during class time, which is basically useless. He also has recommendations, with data backing him up, on adding more play into schools. Parents can trust their children and expect their children to do things without adult interference- both in play and in chores and responsibility. He lists many other practical and rather simple suggestions that would have big impacts on the mental health of Gen Z. We as elders of a society have made some mistakes in raising this generation. Let’s humbly work together to bring healing and wholeness to a generation that has had their brains rewired. Gen Z are becoming adults right now, but many are floundering. We can give them the footing, assurance and real world communities that will help them thrive. We must begin now.