The Anxious Generation is making me anxious

The scapegoat is too tidy

A lot of people have asked me what I think about Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, and because it’s a really chill week (lol, last day of school/no childcare, launching a new app, consulting on a new project), I’ve tried to capture assorted feelings below. I will caveat this with the fact that others have done much deeper assessments on the data, and that my kids are not yet of phone-bearing or social media age, so this is based on 1) my reaction to the book 2) my professional / personal experience working in tech 3) my experience as a parent 4) my observation of peers with older kids. Read on, if you wish to hear my extremely long take!

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I like to joke that I’m a Haidt-er, though I’m the first to say that I think he’s very good at messaging his point. He’s like a deft politician with a knack for cranking out bestsellers and talking points that tap into a wide swath of the population’s hunger for a folk psychological explanation around the ills that are affecting society—in this case, the youth.

For the uninitiated, Haidt’s primary thesis is that the rise of the smartphone, and a generation of kids spending vast amounts of time on their phones and social media, have 1) not set them up to thrive as adults and 2) have created epidemic levels of mental illness, particularly in adolescent girls. He points to trend lines starting with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and labels the transformation of technology that has [adversely] “shaped children’s minds” between 2010-2015, “The Great Rewiring.” He is beyond eager to point to phones as THE MAIN CAUSE that’s contributing to “destroying a generation,” as academics like Jean Twenge, who inspired Haidt’s work, have put it. Smartphones are the demise of us, he posits, unless we can return to, or preserve, a “play-based childhood” and compares a child venturing onto the phone akin to being dropped on Mars.

His book—as I put it to a friend yesterday—has Big Debate Club Energy. Bold Hypothesis! Argument 1! Argument 2! Argument 3! Argument 4! Irrefutable Conclusion! This is followed by neatly bulleted talking points to sum up all the arguments at the end of each chapter, which are often comically reductive. It’s easily quotable, with most arguments founded in some snippet of truth—as the best political messages are—but whose flaws are often in the conclusions that are posited as undeniable.

The tricky part is that many start with premises I find myself nodding in agreement with—around more unstructured play, less scrutiny of parents who encourage more risk and independence IRL, and that phones/the Internet are distracting with potential dangers. But, the argument goes off the rails with generalizations around entire populations of children, generalizations about the technology itself, lack of nuance around the vast geographic and socioeconomic differences in which kids grow up and how that impacts phone usage, and by introducing false binaries where there is certainly more gray space.

I am also inherently skeptical of anyone who lands on a fairly monocausal explanation for an entire generation’s mental health crisis. If it can be so straightforwardly explained, I think it warrants a lot of questioning. Monocausal explanations about the demise of a generation have a historically convenient role, particularly with regard to technology, where there’s a long track record of demonizing entire mediums that also reflect the unknowable future. The many decades long debate over TV, and how much TV, and accusations of TV rotting our brains, have persisted for decades (and segued into screens more broadly), but as any millennial can tell you, our brains did not in fact rot. It also really depends what TV and screens we’re talking about and what we mean by screen-time at all.

Similarly, when we talk about the smartphone, as a behemoth, we’re not really being specific enough about what the problem is. Yes, there’s social media. Yes, there are apps and games. But also, there’s connection, face time, education, learning to meditate, music, social play, etc. I’m not here advocating for this to all happen on phones, but I am encouraging everyone to interrogate what they actually mean when they say “The Phone.” Everyone loves a tidy scapegoat and Haidt has certainly found one.

That said: First I’ll start with the stuff I agree with:

1. The benefits of a play-based childhood. I agree that kids almost everywhere, but particularly in wealthy, developed, Anglo countries, would benefit from much more unsupervised play, more risk, more danger, more thrill, and more autonomy. Part of the reason, Haidt argues, we’ve lost this, is the culture of fearful parenting and alarms about “real-world” dangers that have often led to policy creation and social norms that insulate and overprotect kids. 100% co-sign. (The 2014 article in The Atlantic, The Overprotected Kid, is a great piece about this).

2. I agree that these social norms around safety and overprotection are both limiting important child development and create a tremendous amount of judgement towards parents, especially in the United States, where parents are expected to uphold the both explicit and unspoken rules that their peers/community have agreed to around supervision. This is often at odds with budding independence and an ability to advocate for oneself.

3. Haidt advocates for designing more spaces with children in mind. I believe it’s necessary to build both play spaces, safe social spaces, and institutional spaces that consider how the needs of kids is different from others. Libraries are a great example of places that do this. There are not enough!

4. I agree with kids getting smartphones and social media as late as possible, and that a lot of what makes this difficult is peer pressure. In New York and other urban areas where kids commute to schools via public transport on their own, safety and being able to communicate with your child is also a critical factor.

5. Tech companies do need to be accountable for designing digital products with the safety of children and adolescents in mind and encouraging literacy on their products and platforms, just as IRL places should as well.

6. Approaching both acquisition of phones and social media with caution makes complete sense for 1,000 reasons.

7. Even though my kids are not at the age where the prevalence of phones in school is a problem yet, I do believe that phone-free schools are important, for the entirety of the school day.

As you can see, nearly all of this falls along the line of being pro-play, more recess, less structure, and advocating for better playgrounds and social spaces for children. I think it’s important that these be accessible, without high barriers of entry (financially or logistically). In this way, I think we identify many of the same potential benefits, and how parental anxiety has driven towards a type of overprotective parenting tendency.

Now, my beefs:

1. Haidt is not a clinical psychologist, psychiatrist, or practitioner with expertise on mental health! He’s a social psychologist who has cherry-picked clinical data from specific Anglo countries in support of the arguments he’s making that don’t hold up when you look more broadly at global data and trends (around mental health diagnoses, and suicide, primarily). There is scant clinical research actually done with the adolescents he purports to be at the center of this supposedly “anxious generation.” Candice Odgers’ piece, The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, goes into the lack of studies that actually include adolescents and mental health issues caused by social media.

2. Haidt presents a false binary between a “play-based childhood” and a “phone-based childhood.” He describes “systematic deprivation of a play-based childhood” that is fully replaced by a phone-based childhood between 2010-2015. I think most of us recognize that kids exist somewhere between ideal, unstructured play, and fully entrenched in phones all day. We didn’t go straight from an analog, agrarian society to smartphones. Before phones there were computers, vast amounts of television, the internet, and all manner of other electronics mediating childhoods. An entirely play-based childhood wasn’t the norm pre-2010, so suggesting a switch flipped entirely in the year 2010 re-narrativizes the context we’re coming from. This binary acts in service of his argument, but presenting extremes as the norm reflects few people’s realities.

3. Haidt’s conclusions ignore diagnostic inflation. Society’s understanding mental health diagnoses has expanded dramatically in the last 15 years. Yes, there have been massive rises in reported mental health disorders in the US and other similar Anglo countries (though not all). There has also been a lot of de-stigmatization that leads more people to seek mental health support, changes to diagnostic codes as a result of the Affordable Care Act that led to new recommendations around mental health screenings in teens, so adolescents are also being screened in unprecedented numbers. This is not to say that there haven’t been actual increases; it’s to say there are multiple reasons for increases in diagnostic rates and that this is not a monocausal story. (Science journalist David Wallace-Wells has a good piece that gets deeper into this: Are Smartphones Driving our Teens To Depression?) 

4. Universalizing the impact of a multi-faceted piece of technology is extremely reductive and discounts for the vast number of things you can do using that piece of technology without fully assessing for the fact that EVERY TECHNOLOGY HAS PROS AND CONS. Here’s an example of one of his bullets:

   

   Determining that content is “trivial and degrading” based on the delivery mechanism alone is very problematic.

5. Haidt fails to acknowledge structural inequities behind who is online and getting phones earlier. In potentially the most infuriating paragraph in the entire book, he argues that “smartphones are exacerbating educational inequality by both social class and race.” Naw, dude, I hate to break it to you, but capitalism, racism, and the patriarchy are exacerbating educational inequality. In the US, where the average cost of keeping 2 kids in childcare is more than the average cost of rent in all 50 states, providing off screen supervision is becoming a privilege of the wealthy. Childcare, and thus any degree of supervision, is an economic issue that we’ve made a nuclear family problem.

   

6. Many of his recommendations for a play-based childhood are extremely privilege coded. Giving your child more unsupervised free play, spending time coordinating in a pact with your child’s peers so they don’t feel excluded, sending them to technology-free sleepaway camp (hello: $$$), an exchange program, a summer wilderness camp. I will say: that sounds nice! But there’s a true lack of consideration of what is being exacerbated for whom, and a real onus put on individuals to have or come up with the means to insulate the child.

When we get hyper-focused on smartphones as the primary cause or explanation for mental health issues of children and adolescents—as Haidt does here and others have done before him—we start to overlook or turn a blind eye to a whole lot of other potential factors that also contribute to kids’ well-being.

In her article in the Atlantic, Odgers states it well:

… the problem with the extreme position presented in Haidt’s book and in recent headlines—that digital technology use is directly causing a large-scale mental-health crisis in teenagers—is that it can stoke panic and leave us without the tools we need to actually navigate these complex issues. Two things can be true: first, that the online spaces where young people spend so much time require massive reform, and second, that social media is not rewiring our children’s brains or causing an epidemic of mental illness. Focusing solely on social media may mean that the real causes of mental disorder and distress among our children go unaddressed.

All said, I’m not mad I read the book, and curious about others’ reactions, and interested in the heightened responses it provokes. But, like almost everything in my life, think approaching “the answer” with nuance, curiosity, caution and a bit of healthy skepticism is bound to serve us all. Please discuss!