In Jonathan Haidt’s compelling new book, The Anxious Generation, there is a black and white photograph (date unknown but probably the 1920s) of a terrifying Texan playground. The playsets over which young boys are swarming are about 7 or 8m high.
Haidt contends that since the 1980s, parents have become increasingly concerned about everyday dangers. Thankfully, such a playground could never exist today. However, children may be forbidden to run in school playgrounds, missing out thereby on essential developmental stages.
In contrast to the excessive concern about providing safe environments for children, since the early 21st century, we have set our children loose in a virtual playground where the playsets might as well be 20m tall, with no protection.
Haidt describes this as a move from a play-based childhood to a phone- and device-based childhood. The year 2010 marked a turning point towards a phone-based childhood, with the advent not only of internet-enabled phones but of front-facing cameras.
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Almost a quarter of Irish six-year-olds own smartphones and 45 per cent of 10-year-olds use them unsupervised in bedrooms.
Play is the work of childhood and is essential for proper development. Haidt says unsupervised, child-led play matters most “where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair”. Modern children have few opportunities for that kind of play.
There are four big consequences of phone-based childhood: deprivation of real-world interaction with friends, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and quasi-addiction to devices.
Haidt sets out to prove that the current upswing in youth mental health distress is not just due to living in terrible times but comes directly from a phone-based childhood.
Other generations lived through world wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Nor is it down to more awareness or over-diagnosis. Increases in admissions of young girls for self-harm to US emergency departments nearly tripled from 2010 to 2020. Girls gravitate to social media and are more prone to develop anxiety and depression. Boys are more attracted to online gaming and porn, both of which are potentially addictive and impede real-world interactions. Neither gender is doing well.
Social media designers cynically exploit conformity bias (the pressure to conform) and prestige attraction (the developmental need to see who has prestige and copy them) to keep young people surgically attached to devices. Constant focus on their phones drowns out normal adolescent social learning.
Technology has inspired extraordinary advances. It is also gobbling up obscene amounts of energy in data centres, facilitating dire working conditions to produce the cheap, landfill-destined rubbish that we order online to fill our emptiness
Are there any solutions? First, Haidt counsels against despair; norms change. We removed lead from paint, and added seat belt laws to protect children. It requires collective action by parents, governments and companies, which is a high bar but not impossible.
He has four primary suggestions: no smartphones before age 14 and instead, only dumb or brick phones; no legal social media sign-up before 16; completely phone-free schools; and more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.
There is much more in the book than can be covered here, including a fascinating section where Haidt, an atheist, explores spiritual approaches to counteract phone-based harms, everything from meditation to spending more time in nature.
While an excellent book, the situation is both better and worse than Haidt describes. The children growing up online may be most affected, but our world has changed irreversibly in such important ways that tacking the downsides seems impossible.
Chances are high that you are reading this on a digital device. What did Haidt launch in conjunction with the book to showcase the key points of his work? A website, anxiousgeneration.com.
Denying young people access to social media until the utopian ideal of 16 does not solve the underlying problems created by the dominance of Big Tech, which is so big as to be almost invisible. It seamlessly facilitates us finding our way to new places, booking blood tests, or staying in contact with friends thousands of miles away.
Unless we do something as unlikely as introducing a social norm that we meditate for 15 minutes a day for every hour spent online, it is hard to see on an individual level how we will ever be anything except dazed and mesmerised by the technological beast.
Being constantly online is one reason why so many adults report languishing rather than thriving.
The societal effects are even more far-reaching and much harder to tackle. Sure, it is possible to mitigate the dangers of a car-based lifestyle by the legal requirement to use seat belts. However, while seat belts save lives, they do not address the impact of car-based commuter lifestyles on climate change and the depletion of non-renewable fossil fuels.
Technology has inspired extraordinary advances. It is also gobbling up obscene amounts of energy in data centres, facilitating dire working conditions to produce the cheap, landfill-destined rubbish that we order online to fill our emptiness and creating toxic levels of polarisation. It has become our sky, horizon and air. Haidt’s suggestions are good and even noble, but no one has yet suggested an antidote for adults to the effects of Big Tech on democracy, patterns of consumption and attention spans.