Many parents (including yours truly) regularly voice their concerns about kids camping out on screens for hours a day, with specific worries around real-life activities kids do not do when tethered to their phones and pads. Kids who spend chunks of their lives on screens miss out on hanging out with friends, learning how to communicate (verbal and non-verbal), resolving conflicts, and a host of interpersonal experiences and interactions. To what extent do these changes with kids today impact their overall mental health? A new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, written by social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, attempts to answer precisely that question, and his findings may do more than just minimally grab your attention.
Childhood brain transformation
Jonathan Haidt’s new book takes a deep dive into how kids use smart phones today, and the impact smart phones are having on mental health. Unlike generations previous that spent long periods of time outside and with friends, today’s kids spend a lot of time in solitude using Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and countless more social media pages (and online gaming). Seemingly overnight (actually, since the late 2000’s and early 2010’s when smart phones and social media really took off) kids became inundated with countless apps to keep up with, and with only 24 hours in a day something had to give. Today, most kids go from app to app reading posts, viewing pics, making comments, or simply swiping through hours and hours of brain-rot, pointless videos. What is the cost associated with this seismic change in the ways kids not only spend their time, but interact with the world around them? According to Haidt (and countless mental health clinicians like myself), it is not a healthy or productive trade to make with respect to mental health.
Haidt discusses how smart phones essentially “changed the game” when it comes to how we interface with technology today, especially as this applies to impulse control and the urge to constantly check updates and share stories on social media. Long gone are the days of keeping your head up and observing what is around you during those slow moments in life, replaced today by a mini computer/phone in your pocket that offers access to a variety of interactive social media apps. The result? Over time, neural connections in the brain physically change as we change our activities and interactions, and for kids this can be quite significant as they have yet to fully develop.
More than anything, I think Haidt’s book moves the narrative about kids and the dangers of technology forward, as he points toward the spike in mental illness in kids the last ten years that moves at about the same rate as the emergence of smart phones and the increase of social media. We are past the mild concerns we had just a few years ago wondering about the potential cost of so much technology, to where we are now with experimental and longitudinal research findings providing empirical data illustrating the very real potential damage to mental health, and overall human development. This is important for all parents to think about when their kids never seem to be off screens, can’t find value in doing things outside of screens, and appear to be struggling with self-esteem and overall mental health due to limited life experiences and interactions with others. Haidt calls this period for kids “the great rewiring,” with respect to children’s social and neurological development, leaving a generation of kids vulnerable to attention problems, loneliness, anxiety, social comparisons, and depression.
Final thoughts
While there are no easy answers for how parents should manage how their kids use smart phones and social media, it is important to take these experiences seriously by talking to kids about their screen usage — especially as this applies in relation to doing real-life things. We now know that yes, there are significant biological and mental health changes occurring in our kids’ brains as they use smart phones, with the greatest concerns directed to kids who spend most of their days in front of their smart phone. Keep talking with your kids, role model pro-social behaviors, and provide ideas for things your kids can do instead of looking at their phone.
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