A girl, sad, with her face illuminated only by the light of her smartphone, immersed, almost sunk in a sea of emojis. The American publishing house that published Jonathan Haidt’s latest book managed to bring out from the cover the thesis that the social psychologist who teaches social psychology at the Stern School of Business at New York University has been pursuing for years: the increasingly widespread use of devices and social media from the 2010s onwards is significantly correlated with progressive increases in levels of depression, anxiety and self-harm among adolescents.
The book, entitled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illnesscites various university research to support his thesis.
In the United States Depression and anxiety rates in the United States – fairly stable in the 2000s – increased more than 50% from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate increased by 48% for adolescents aged 10 to 19. For girls aged 10 to 14, it increased by 131. Unfortunately, Italy confirms the trend: from the beginning of the pandemic to today, for example, there has been a 40% increase in access by young and very young people to the Baby Jesus emergency room for anxiety or suicide attempts.
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According to Haidt much of this surge in data is due to the growth in the use of smartphones and to the pervasive diffusion of a overprotective approach to parentingboth facts that contribute to the gradual reducing the time young people spend offline. This scenario could be responsible for a sort of “remodeling” of synaptic connections during early life and adolescence, leading to an increase in mental disorders.
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In his latest book the psychologist goes so far as to argue that today’s young people – in particular those belonging to the Generation Z – are “damaged products of a huge change in childhood culture.” Born in the late 1990s to fearful and overprotective parents, they would have grown up, unlike the baby boomers and Generation almost constant adult supervision. They became the first generation of preteens and teenagers to spending adolescence under the dominion of smartphones, forming their identities in the largely unregulated and little-understood universe of social media. The toxic combination of “over-protection in the real world and under-protection in the virtual world” (Haidt’s words) has made them super-anxious. Time spent in front of screens and away from in-person interactions has contributed to isolation, depression, lack of sleep, fragmented attention, and left them addicted to the dopamine hits of likes, retweets and comments.
“Generation Z,” he writes, “became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their breast pocket beckoning them away from those close to them and into an alternate universe that was exciting, dependent, unstable” and “not suited to children and adolescents”. The great reconditioning of childhood, in which telephone-based childhoods have replaced play-based childhoods, is the leading cause of the international epidemic of adolescent mental illness.”
Ma Haidt’s theories are not appreciated by much of the scientific world who accuse him of combining countless pieces of research at random to support his beliefs.
But even if you question the details of how Haidt analyzes and slices his data (to generate those impressive numbers on depression, for example, he includes data from 2020 and 2021 – years of off-scale stress due to the onset of pandemic), there is no doubt that today’s young people are experiencing a mental health crisis unprecedented in scope and severity. The latest statistics are terrible: according to the 2022 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, for example, almost 1 in 5 of adolescents aged 12 to 17 in the US have had a major depressive episode in the last year.
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Ma proving causation (rather than mere correlation) is an uncertain proposition. It’s especially risky for Haidt in the face of a large body of academic literature on the psychological harms of social media that is ambiguous at best.
According to an article in Washington Post the psychologist recognizes all this and tries to get around the problem with the sheer amount of related evidence he collects and combines with laboratory experiments conducted with Twenge. He also allows himself one convenient way out, saying he is “sure to be wrong on some points”; he has even set up a research site that he will maintain, inviting other researchers to comment. A’clever marketing strategy. In “The Great Reconditioning” – adds the WP journalist – Haidt dedicates the first two thirds of the book to writing defensively, as if she were addressing an audience of detractors waiting to catch her out.
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In fact, these detractors exist: over the years Haidt has accumulated quite a group of them (the crowd that says “the kids are fine”, he calls them) who have accused of choosing ad hoc examplesto adapt old and tired arguments about “today’s youth”, and to fuel “moral panic” on new technology to inflate their egos and keep Generation Z down.
Candice L. Odgersvice dean and professor of psychological sciences and computer science at the University of California, writes in an article in the scientific journal Nature: “Haidt claims that the great reconfiguration of children’s brains occurred through “engineering a flood of highly addictive content that entered through children’s eyes and ears.” And that “replacing physical play and in-person social interaction, these companies have reconfigured childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.” Such serious claims require equally serious evidence.”
The psychologist and writer does not fail to respond to those who criticize him: “I am a social psychologist who is always cautious when faced with single-factorial explanations for complex social phenomena. In my new book I show that we moved on from a play-based childhood that involved a lot of unsupervised risky playessential to overcome fear and fragility, to a telephone-based childhood which blocks normal human development by taking time away from sleep, play and in-person social interaction, as well as causing addiction and submerging children in social comparisons they cannot overcome. So this is not a single-factor story, but is about what I believe is the single largest and only factor that can explain why the epidemic began so suddenly, around 2012, in multiple countries.”
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– 2024-04-16 07:13:42
