The kids are not all right — and the device you are probably reading this on is to blame.
So argues the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Haidt insists that smartphones and social media are fueling a “surge of suffering” that’s inundating teens all across the Western world.
By Haidt’s account, smartphones and the addicting social media apps we download onto them have lured the world’s youths away from those activities that are indispensable to healthy child development — such as outdoor play, face-to-face conversation with friends, and sleep — and trapped them in a digital realm that saps their self-esteem, drains their attention spans, and forces them to put on a perpetual, high-stakes performance of their own personalities.
Smartphones have even hurt kids who don’t use them much, according to Haidt, because they’ve restructured communal life in […]
Although it is tempting to reduce complex problems to single causes, rarely are we able to accomplish this. Instead the data is clear, that in the United States mental health for youth is worse than in European countries. We must look at how our society is organized to account for the difference. As a society we: 1) spend more on weapons for external use, export, and internal use than the comparable European countries; 2) we are in charge of a world wide empire, which distorts domestic politics and economics; 3) As a consequence our social safety net is less robust than in Europe; 4) Our society does not support education for the young anywhere close to what is supported in Europe; 5) Political choice is far more robust in Europe than in the United States. It is overall how we have organized our society and allowed neo-liberal economics to dominate the policies and narratives of the country which marks our sickness. Smartphone use is one small element in a much larger picture.