Internet Book Club: The Anxious Generation

Is too much screen time and too little real world play screwing up kids?

Previously in Internet Book Club:

• Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz

• Filterworld by Kyle Chayka

• So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

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I don’t want to bury the lede - this book is fantastic. It’s a well-researched, thorough examination of what smartphones and social media are doing to kids. I find the main argument extremely convincing, and the book as a whole to have more depth than I thought it would. At times it echoes almost verbatim points I’ve made here.

I’d recommend it to anyone with kids and most people without. Let’s jump in.

Kids These Days

The book starts by documenting that something has gone terribly wrong with kids these days.

Starting around 2010, depression and anxiety began to rise significantly in both teen boys and girls - but especially amongst girls. There’s a major mental health crisis underway, it seems to have happened right under our noses in the last 15 years, and it’s concentrated amongst the young. Older Americans show little or no increase in depression or anxiety, but younger generations show startling increases.

And this isn’t just self-reported, self-diagnosed, therapy-is-trendy stuff. Emergency room visits for self-harm have skyrocketed. Suicide rates have doubled for boys and more than doubled for girls. This is real. And almost every trend begins accelerating between 2010-2015.

I wrote a piece a few months back called It’s Always Smartphones. In that piece, I noted the same odd timing for a wide variety of trends relating to young people:

When you see one of these strange new trends - and especially when it’s a trend involving young people - there’s usually an inflection point somewhere between 2007 and 2014. 2007 is when the first iPhone released, and by 2014 we had firmly entered the age of all-consuming social media.

It's Always Smartphones

Let me tell you - when I read this section of The Anxious Generation I literally jumped up and started pacing/muttering to myself “I told you! I told you!” like a crazy person. Haidt dates the time period of the shift slightly differently but comes to the exact same conclusion I did. Smartphones and social media are what’s going on here.

He builds his case meticulously. It can’t be uniquely American factors, because this same shift is happening in countries all around the world - everywhere hitting young people hardest and young girls especially hard. It can’t be economic factors, because the trends don’t correlate whatsoever with the state of the economy. The overriding trends only match one thing - social media and smartphone usage.

The End of Play and The Rise of Screens

I bought the book expecting it to be a broadside against smartphone usage for kids. And it is! But I didn’t realize that Haidt would actually build his argument upon two main pillars - the rise of smartphones and the decline of free play.

According to Haidt, children need play. Specifically, they need free and unstructured play, play that allows them to explore and build and create things on their own without constant adult supervision. Children are always learning about the world, and this kind of unstructured play has a number of advantages. It forces kids to relate to others - if there’s a conflict, they need to work through it without running to Mom or Dad. They learn to cooperate, share, and be a good friend. They can build things or make up rules as they go, and learn to explore boundaries and push past them. They can take risks, which are also good. You don’t want your kid taking the kind of risk that will get them seriously hurt, but you do want them taking risks that might earn them scrapes or bruises. Those kind of risks are good risks, ways for kids to grow and learn. Kids are antifragile in the Talebian sense - they actually benefit from risk.

Free play, according to Haidt, is not just good - it’s vital. He walks through the brain chemistry and child psychology for why it’s so vital, and I find his arguments compelling. So what’s been happening with free play over the last few decades?

Kids these days get much less free play then ever before. Starting in the 90s and continuing to the present day, kids are much less likely to meet up with friends in person. They’re less likely to spend time away from their parents. They get less free play time, and are more scheduled and supervised than ever. Parents are fearful of supposed dangers (or just of social disapproval) and so they don’t let their kids wander far from them. One survey asked parents at what age it was appropriate to let a child play unsupervised in their own front yard, and the average answer was ten years old. Haidt thinks this is crazy and that it’s damaging our kids.

At the same time parents were allowing less growth than ever in the real world, they were allowing kids virtually unfettered access to the virtual world. Screen time skyrocketed. Social media usage became the primary way that pre-teens and teens related to one another, not in person conversations. Haidt lists four ‘foundational harms’ from child social media usage: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Probably the most important and the one he spends the most time on is social deprivation. We’ve substituted real world exploring and interaction with virtual exploring and interaction.

Why is that so bad? Kids may not be doing it in the real world, but they’re still interacting and learning, right? Haidt gives several reasons. Real world interactions are embodied - you can’t just click away when you’re upset. You have to own what you say and navigate uncomfortable situations. They’re typically more lasting as well. You are likely interacting with a classmate, a neighbor, a friend, a family member. Participants have to maintain a relationship over the medium or long run, and learn to deal with each other. It’s synchronous, happening in real time, and requires you to adapt and learn on the fly.

By contrast social media interactions are asynchronous. It’s easy to block or navigate away if you’re upset or if you are rude. It often involves strangers who you don’t have any long term commitment to. It’s more prone to toxicity and addiction. It’s all fleeting and shallow.

In short - real world interactions build deeply rooted and stable communities. Virtual interactions build loose and asynchronous networks. These networks are not a viable substitute for the role that real world communities play in child development. Kids are suffering because they don’t learn the communication or social skills that real world interactions build.

What To Do About It

There’s a lot more content in the book - Haidt spends a lot of time discussing various studies, he breaks down the differences between how girls and boys use technology and how that impacts them, etc. There’s a lot here, so let me just share one more of my favorite tangents he wanders down. A few weeks ago I wrote a piece called Technology Profanes the Sacred. To quote myself:

Humans crave this kind of ritual, this kind of sacredness. They find meaning in these social connections and cultural practices. It’s a way to link yourself to something important - whether it be a wider community, a holy text or a God, other people that you love, a beautiful and breathtaking physical space, or a cultural tradition that goes back generations. And social media by its nature degrades that kind of practice.

After all, imagine a sacred ritual you’re undertaking with other people. It could be a wedding, a religious service, etc. What’s the most embarrassing, thoughtless thing you could do during the middle of it? Have your smartphone loudly ring and buzz, repeatedly. Or use your phone in the middle of the ritual, paying little attention to those around you.

We instinctively recognize, even if we don’t always put it into words, that some places are not meant to be profaned with technology.

Technology Profanes the Sacred

Here’s Haidt, talking about the importance of rituals for community building:

Again, there are parts of this book I read while practically fist-pumping. Haidt even makes the same point I made that ‘sacred ritual’ doesn’t have to be about religion - it could be a high school rite of passage, a big sports event, a concert, etc. It’s very nice to see that you’re onto a trend early.

Like most non-fiction books of this nature, the latter part of the book is dedicated to Haidt’s recommendations for what to do about all this. Haidt has a lot of opinions here, on topics big and small. But he calls four core recommendations:

• No smartphones before high school

• No social media before age 16

• Strict phone free schools

• Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence

I find myself agreeing with most of these. One small weakness in the book is that Haidt doesn’t reckon with how difficult some of these would be to implement, or specify exactly how strict he thinks enforcement should be. Phone-free schools are a pretty easy policy to implement, but ‘no social media before 16’ isn’t. Should this be enforced by tech companies, the government, or families? If it’s enforced legally, how would you do that without invading the privacy of adults? What should penalties be when some teens inevitably sneak through the filters? These are hard questions, but Haidt only explores them a bit.

Backlash to the Backlash

The media’s reaction to The Anxious Generation has been interesting. It’s mostly positive from what I can tell, and the book has been widely praised. But there’s a subtle nuance to some of that positivity that you might miss if you’re not steeped in online politics. A lot of the praise is reluctant, almost grudging. This review from the New Yorker is a good example. The author at times seems very defensive that she actually liked the book.

This is likely because Haidt, in previous books, spent time punching left at what he sees as the downsides of leftist cultural practices (primarily in The Coddling of the American Mind). Therefore there are a lot of left-leaning intellectuals and critics reluctant to agree with him on anything. It’s deeply uncool to like Jonathan Haidt’s research. That’s the source of discomfort - Haidt is making an argument that theoretically leans left (regulation of Big Tech!) but from a more moderate or even somewhat conservative perspective.

Of course, some reviews are more directly negative.

The most substantial criticism has come from this essay in Nature. The author makes arguments about how correlation is not causation, and how complicated meta-analysis studies don’t support Haidt’s thesis. That’s fine in theory - social science is messy and that kind of criticism should always be welcome.

But the first problem is that Haidt actually does reference many studies that directly measure causation, not just correlation. These are both direct experiments and quasi-experiments that show social media and smart phone usage.

The second problem is that immediately after criticizing Haidt for being too hand-wavey and not strict enough with the evidence, the author throws a bunch of unsubstantiated word salad at you and hopes you don’t notice none of it makes sense.

A complex problem

There are, unfortunately, no simple answers. The onset and development of mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression, are driven by a complex set of genetic and environmental factors. Suicide rates among people in most age groups have been increasing steadily for the past 20 years in the United States. Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation as leading contributors…

…In the United States, close to one in six children live below the poverty line while also growing up at the time of an opioid crisis, school shootings and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence.

This, to be clear, is hogwash. You can’t criticize Haidt for being overly loose with research standards and then just throw out a dozen ‘maybe it’s this other thing!’ guesses like a rank amateur. And so many of these supposed causes can be disproven with just a few seconds of thought. How are school shootings - a uniquely American problem - responsible when the same trend is happening in dozens of countries? The same goes for the opioid epidemic and ‘racial unrest’ - even in countries where these aren’t major problems, we still see the same trends. You can’t criticize a study showing a correlation between smartphones and depression and then throw out economic hardship as an alternative, when that shows no correlation whatsoever.

I find these criticisms incredibly weak. I’ll link both the criticisms (above) and Haidt’s response and let you decide for yourself, but I am thoroughly unimpressed with the quality of his detractors. They seem more nakedly ideological than scientific.

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As I said from the outset - I loved this book. If you have kids I’d heavily recommend you pick it up. It’s not just that I find the central premise correct - it’s that the book builds a fully-fleshed out theory of why this is happening. Haidt pulls from brain development, child psychology and centuries of social traditions to build a basic set of common sense theories about how and why children thrive and grow. He shows in detail how that process has been corrupted by the twin factors of decreased real world play/exploration and increasing screen time and social media usage. The Anxious Generation is the most thorough book of its kind I’ve read, and with any luck it will become part of the national conversation about how to combat the teen mental health crisis.