Will someone please think of the children?!!!

What hysterical headlines can teach us about ourselves.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a new book out - The Anxious Generation - which has generated lots of headlines about “the dangers of raising a generation of zombies” weaned on smart phones and social media. He has penned a long article outlining his thesis in The Atlantic, and he’s been all over the podcast circuit. He cites lots of studies and graphs about mental health that go up and to the right, starting around the time everyone got smartphones. Like this…

I struggle to manage my screen time and it definitely feels like my attention span has shortened over the last decade of smartphone use. For my wife and I, managing the screen time of our 12 and 9 year old sons across different devices is a bit like playing a really shit version of whack-a-mole (if the moles also looked like you and slammed doors whilst shouting insults when it was time to turn the screen off).

Despite this daily struggle, I’ve long been skeptical of claims that social media or smartphones are to blame for a mental health crisis or increased levels of anxiety. Partly because everyone hates tech companies and so this makes them a good target right off the bat, with headlines for a few years now about how harmful phones are for kids, based on nothing more than anecdotes from Silicon Valley nannies. Whilst robust studies that find no link tend to be ignored.

In response to the huge publicity Haidt’s new book has generated, a number of scholars who have studied this for a long time have issued rebuttals, including this fairly damning article by Candice Ogders in Nature:

"Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers."

"These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence."

Ouch.

Another academic went through the studies cited in the book and didn’t find a great deal of evidence that they were even citing the right kind evidence:

"Haidt cites 476 studies in his book that seem to represent an overwhelming case. But two-thirds of them were published before 2010, or before the period that Haidt focuses on in the book. Only 22 of them have data on either heavy social media use or serious mental issues among adolescents, and none have data on both."

I think part of the problem is how hysterical and one-dimensional Haidt’s argument is. To say that smart phones and social media have “rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale” is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. And despite the just-so narrative that plays into many of our suspicions and fears, the evidence doesn’t seem to be there. At least not yet.

He also raises red flags for me when he seems to rule out any redeeming features of social media (or gaming) whatsoever, and suggests a lack of understanding of how kids actually use them. In a great interview and debate with economist Tyler Cowen, Haidt argues the halcyon era of wholesome gaming is over:

"I’m thinking about children, children who desperately need to spend hours and hours each day with other kids, unsupervised, planning games, enforcing rules, getting in fights, getting out. That’s what you need to do."

"Instead, what’s coming?—?it’s already the case for boys especially, that they can’t go over to each other’s houses after school because then they can’t play video games. When you and I were young, video games were coming in, and you’d go over to someone’s house, and you’d sit next to each other, and you’d play Pong or whatever. You’d play a game, and you’d joke with each other, and you’d eat food, and then you’d do something else."

"Video games used to be fairly healthy, but once they became multiplayer, you wear your headphones, you’ve got your controller, they’re incredibly immersive. Now, you have to be alone in your room in order to play them. Now, you bring in virtual AI girlfriends and boyfriends. Already, Gen Z?—?those born after 1995?—?are completely starved of the kinds of social experiences that they need to grow up."

Maybe this reflects some families. But to me, these comments suggests he’s not actually spent much time watching young people use technology. When our kids’ friends come over to play, if they’re not playing football in the garden then they’re gaming. Together. If you’ve watched kids play Fortnite (or heard them screaming through the walls), you’ll also know there is plenty of enforcing rules, getting in arguments, resolving conflict, and negotiating going on.

Sure, unlimited gaming time is a bad idea, and if I let them, our kids would undoubtedly game until their eyes bled and their thumbs wore away into tiny stubs. But by and large they want to game with their friends, remotely and in-person, rather than on their own. But Haidt doesn’t account for any of this nuance, and neither does he seem to distinguish between, say, TikTok and Instagram on the one hand and YouTube on the other. Or recognise that there can be very different content within a single platform. Instead he jumps straight to lonely gamers and AI girlfriends.

I don’t think all of what Haidt is saying is hysterical nonsense. You don’t have to agree with his premise that social media is literally rewiring the brains of teens or changing the mental and emotional development of children to think some of his policy recommendations - like banning smartphones in schools and insisting social media companies enforce age limits on their platforms - are sensible.

He also feels on solid ground when blaming overprotective parenting and a fear of stranger-danger for paving the way for screens to play a larger and larger role in the lives of our children, something he explores in detail in his previous book The Coddling of the American Mind. You may recall this map that became internet famous over 15 years ago (from an article in the Daily Mail!), visualising how physical freedom for children has declined over the decades and linking this to a decline in mental health, based on a report by Natural England and the RSPB.

This reflects a long term trend in over-protective parenting and a noticeable shift from the 70s/80s to the 90s/00s which saw a 25% reduction in unstructured play time in the US, shorter school breaks to fit in more lessons, and more organised sports and clubs after school as parents carefully constructed the future CVs and university applications of their children. The phrase “helicopter parenting” entered popular culture.

It’s complicated

My final beef with Haidt’s thesis is the fact he doesn’t acknowledge or reference the work of other scholars - people like Amy Orban, Andrew K Przybylski and Candice L. Odgers - who have spent their careers studying these issues.

For a rich and nuanced take I highly recommend following danah boyd, an academic that has studied the relationship between technology and society for a couple of decades, founded the research institute Data and Society and is a researcher at Microsoft. She also famously sounded the alarm about VR headsets like Oculus Rift making women motion sick. Her 2014 book “It’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens” was the result of 166 in-depth interviews with teens between 2007-10, back when Facebook and MySpace were all the rage. Her book’s central thesis is that teens have always gathered in shared spaces, in order to see and be seen, by other teens. Think milkshake parlour, local sports event, shopping mall. These shared spaces, or “publics”, provide “a space and a community for people to gather, connect and help construct society as we understand it”. Social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Reddit as well as gaming platforms like Fortnite are the modern day equivalent - “networked publics” - critical to teens because they are one of the few remaining ways they can participate in public life.

"Teens want access to publics to see and be seen, to socialise, and to feel as if they have the freedoms to explore a world beyond the heavily constrained one shaped by parents and school. ?By and large, just as society formally wrote women out of civic life, we now prohibit teenagers from many aspects of public life. ?Adults justify the exclusion of youth being for their own good or as a necessary response to their limited experience and cognitive capacity."

"Many American teens have limited geographic freedom, less free time, and more rules. In many communities…the era of being able to run around after school so long as you’re home by dark is over. Many teens are stuck at home until they’re old enough to drive themselves. For younger teens, getting together with friends after school depends on cooperative parents with flexible schedules who are willing to chauffeur and chaperone."

"Teens told me time and again that they would far rather meet up in person, but the hectic and heavily scheduled nature of their day-to-day lives, their lack of physical mobility, and the fears if their parents have made such face-to-face interactions increasingly impossible."

This was written in 2014, but could just as easily be written today. She was also interviewed recently by Taylor Lorenz and it’s the most intelligent and erudite response I’ve seen to the hysterical headlines.

Are we the anxious generation?

Rather than our kids, perhaps it’s parents like me who are ‘the anxious generation’, scheduling every spare minute of their days with sports and clubs, being too scared to allow them to roam outside with friends (for those of us lucky enough to have welcoming public spaces nearby), prioritising SATs and other exams, plus the odd mention of homes being washed away due to existential climate catastrophe.

But fixing these aspects of our culture and the way we parent is complex, and much more difficult than just blaming big tech bros.

Lastly, rather than ‘just saying no’ to smartphones and screens, perhaps the headlines and hysteria provide a chance to teach our kids a valuable lesson about nuanced arguments, unpicking signal from noise, and not falling for the first headline you come across, regardless of how familiar it might feel. As we enter a world of ubiquitous misinformation and AI spambots, perhaps the skill to determine what is real or fake, true or false, and robust or flimsy will be one of the greatest gifts we can give our children. As blogger Scott Alexander puts it:

"Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias - our tendency to interpret evidence as confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of changing our minds."

This article was first published in the newsletter Curious Behaviour, a regular dose of insight and inspiration focused on human behaviour, technology and business. You can sign up here.