Her new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” essentially calls for a revolution in the way parents manage smartphones and social media with their teens.
Simply put, Haidt writes that children should have little to no access to any of them until they turn 16.
While some have questioned the science behind Haidt’s thesis, Haidt maintains that the perspective is based on years of research: research describing growing mental health problems among American tweens and teens, and statistics indicating that many teens in the America is already depressed or anxious in some ways.
The American Psychological Association echoed their concerns in a new report charging that social media platforms have designs that are “inherently unsafe for children.” The APA report, released Tuesday, says children do not have “the experience, judgment and self-control” to navigate these platforms. The association says the burden should not fall exclusively on parents, app stores or young people: it has to fall on the platform developers.
But parents probably can’t count on developers, leading to Haidt’s jarring conclusion: We’re at a tipping point as a society, and if adults don’t take action, they could put the mental health of all of America’s young people at risk. indefinitely. .
Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, has spent countless hours publicizing the book’s message since its March 26 publication. CNN recently spoke with Haidt about his story, the book, and what’s in store for parents and teens alike.
This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
CNN: How did we get to this situation?
Jonathan Haidt: Children always had a play-based childhood, but we gradually let that fade due to our growing fears of kidnapping and other threats in the 1980s and 1990s. What emerged to fill all that time was technology. In the 1990s, we thought the Internet was going to be the savior of democracy. It was going to make our kids smarter. Since most of us were techno-optimists, we didn’t really raise the alarm when our kids started spending four, five, six, and now seven or nine hours a day on their phones and other screens.
The basic argument of the book is that we have overprotected our children in the real world and underprotected them online. And in both halves, you can see how we went about it thinking everything would be fine. We were wrong on both points.
CNN: What are some of the most surprising data you found?
haid: What immediately comes to mind was the discovery that teenagers used to have by far the highest rates of bone fractures before the big rewiring of childhood. Before 2010, teenagers were much more likely than any other group to go to the hospital because they had broken a bone. Once we hit the early 2010s, their hospitalization rates plummet, so that teens are now slightly less likely to break a bone than their parents or grandparents. They spend most of their time in front of their computers and video games, so they are physically safe. But I would argue that this comes at the cost of healthy childhood development.
CNN: Does this mental health crisis affect boys and girls differently?
haid: The basic facts about gender differences are that when everyone got a smartphone in the early 2010s, boys opted for video games, YouTube, and Reddit, while girls opted more for visual social media platforms , especially Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr.
A second difference is that girls share emotions more than boys. They talk more about their feelings and are more open with each other. Girls’ anxiety levels rise a lot in this period (the preteen and teen years), as soon as they hyperconnect with each other through social media.
Historically, self-harm is a way that some girls have coped with anxiety, and those rates also went up a lot in the early 2010s. It used to be that (self-harm) wasn’t something that 12-year-olds did. 13 years old, but more like older girls. In the 2010s, hospital emergency room visits (for self-harm) by girls ages 10 to 14 nearly tripled. That’s one of the biggest increases in markers of mental illness that we see in all the data I’ve reviewed.
CNN: Have you said that we are at a turning point in this crisis? Because?
haid: I think this year is the turning point for several reasons. In 2019, the debate was really starting. Then Covid-19 hit, and that overshadowed previous trends. Now we are a few years into Covid-19, school closures, masks, and what has become clear to everyone is that children are not well. And data on mental illness rates shows us that most of the increase occurred long before Covid-19 hit.
Today, in families across America, one of the most important and prevalent dynamics is the fight over technology. What I’ve discovered since the book came out is that almost everyone sees the problem. The parents are in a state of despair. They feel like the genie is out of the bottle. They say, “You can’t put toothpaste back in a tube, can you?” To that I say, “If you really have to do it, you will.”
When we look at the debris of adolescent mental health, and we look at the increases in self-harm and suicide, we look at the decline in test scores since 2012 in the United States and around the world, I think we have to do something. My book provides a clear analysis of the many problems of collective action and the four simple rules that will solve them.
CNN: What are the rules that will resolve this crisis?
haid: No. 1: Don’t use smartphones before high school. We must get them out of secondary and primary school. Just let the kids have a flip phone or watch when they become independent.
No. 2: There will be no social media until age 16. These platforms were not made for children. They appear to be especially harmful to children. We must especially protect early puberty as this is when the most damage occurs.
No. 3: Schools without telephones. There is really no argument for allowing children to have the greatest distraction device ever invented in their pockets during school hours. If they have phones, they will text during class and be focused on their phones. If they don’t have phones, they will listen to their teachers and spend time with other children.
No. 4: More independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. We need to roll back phone-based childhood and restore play-based childhood.
CNN: Rethinking smartphone privileges is a big change for many families. How to convince parents to accept?
haid: Primary school is easy. If you’ve already given your child a phone or their own iPad, you can take it away. Just be sure to coordinate with the parents of your child’s friends so your child feels like he’s not the only one. They can still have access to a computer; They can still text their friends on a computer. But if your kids are in elementary school, commit to not giving them these things until middle school.
High school is harder. Most middle school kids are completely immersed in smartphones and social media. The key in high school is to have very severe time restrictions. The problem is going from a couple hours of access a day to potentially having access all day. That’s what worries many children. Half of American teens say they are online almost constantly. If your kids already have these devices, I think you should set some strict rules about when they have access to them.
CNN: What do you think will happen if we don’t change soon?
haid: As rates of mental illness, self-harm and suicide continue to rise, we don’t know where the line is. We don’t know if it’s possible for 100 percent of our children to be depressed and anxious. We are already approaching the halfway mark for girls; We are already in the range of 30% to 40% who have depression or anxiety, and about 30 percent currently say they have thought about suicide this year. Things are already really bad and levels could continue to rise to the point where most children are depressed, anxious and suicidal.
This also has huge social implications. Because children are somewhat segregated by online sex (they interact less with children of the opposite sex), the situation is not conducive to heterosexual dating and marriage. I think the separation between boys and girls and their rising rates of anxiety are going to cause heterosexual marriage and childbearing rates to fall much faster than they have been, and have been falling for decades.
Lastly, I think there could be huge economic implications. There are already dozens of state attorneys general suing Meta and Snapchat over the large amount of money states spend on psychiatric emergency services for teens. Another economic implication is that if we have one, two, or three anxious generations in which young people are afraid to take risks, our free market economy, our entrepreneurial culture, and all the things that make the American economy so vibrant and dynamic will be will be affected. That’s why I think we have no choice. (We must) put an end to this now.
Matt Villano is a writer and editor living in Northern California. Learn more about him at Whalehead.com.