Have Kids Been Made Mentally Ill by Cell Phones and Social Media?

I mean, the answer is "obviously yes," but let's pretend it's a more interesting question.

Pew survey: Nearly three quarters of teens say they feel happy and peaceful when they don't have their cell phones.

The survey comes as policymakers and children's advocates are growing increasingly concerned with teens' relationships with their phones and social media.

...

Despite the increasing concerns, most teens say smartphones make it easier be creative and pursue hobbies, while 45% said it helps them do well in school. Most teens said the benefits of having a smartphone outweigh the harms for people their age. Nearly all U.S. teens (95%) have access to a smartphone, according to Pew.

Majorities of teens say smartphones make it a little or a lot easier for people their age to pursue hobbies and interests (69%) and be creative (65%). Close to half (45%) say these devices have made it easier for youth to do well in school.

People I know who seem very phone-focused justify the omnipresence of the phone with the claim "I need to be plugged in all the time for work."

Which sounds to me like an addict attempting the justify the addiction.

About half of the parents said they spend too much time on their phone. Higher-income parents were more likely to say this than those in lower income buckets, and white parents were more likely to report spending too much time on their phone than Hispanic or Black parents.

AWFLs are addicted to their phones and social media? You don't say.

Schools are starting to ban cellphones during the school day. I have no idea why this rule isn't universal.

In Akron, Ohio, teens and tweens show up to school every day with their homework, their textbooks ... and a special magnetic pouch that renders their smartphones useless during the day.

The Akron schools are part of a growing movement across the US and Europe to ban phones in schools or require them to be locked up in pouches made by a startup named Yondr. School districts in at least 41 states have bought the pouches in recent years, a response to behavior issues as well as concerns about students' mental health and learning, which have ramped up since the pandemic.

"The results for us were just a game-changer," Patricia Shipe, president of the Akron Education Association, which represents teachers and other educators in the district, told me. Fights in the schools have decreased since the bags were introduced to all middle and high schools in 2022, and kids report engaging with their friends more.

More schools have been banning phones since the lockdown -- I assume the reason is the learning-loss experienced by students thanks to cowardly teachers. With kids now a half year to a year and a half behind where they should be, they certainly cannot be permitted any easy distractions from a phone.

There's also reason to believe that using cellphones in class is bad for learning. Studies on doctors, nurses, and others have shown that "multitasking during learning interferes with the long-term processing and retention of what you learn," said Megan Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Some research suggests that curbing smartphone use in the classroom could help students stay focused on their lessons.

No shit, really? "Multitasking" -- dividing your singular focus of attention between several tasks near-simultaneously -- results in poor performance at those tasks?

Really?

I'm floored.

Jonathan Haidt is arguing that the combination of cell phones plus social media has destroyed what we knew as "childhood" for 100,000 years and resulted in anxious, perpetually frightened, and generally mentally-unhealthy children.

Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you've likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States--fairly stable in the 2000s--rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to "The Nation's Report Card," scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley's preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. "Something has really gone wrong," Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly----if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations----then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online--particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction.

...

What is childhood----including adolescence----and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

He thinks that kids were ready to become internet-based shut-ins due to the overprotective, over-sheltering helicopter parenting that began in the 1980s.

The very late 1980s, I assume. I don't remember hearing about this phenomenon until the later nineties.

Though he notes that this trend exploded into the rule by the 2010s.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There's an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

The combination of panicked-parent overprotecting these snowflakes has turned them very averse to physical risk or any other kind of risk. They're snowflakes that melt in a sunbeam, in other words.

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail--often--in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.

The irony here is that kids are avoiding playing and roughhousing, which involves minor risk of low consequences -- at worst, you'll need some stitches -- and opting instead to expose themselves to the jackals of the online world. Apart from such dangers as grooming, the fact is that mistakes made online are often not "low consequence." Long-lasting reputation destruction is a common result of any mistake. Or no mistake at all -- a lot of people just go online for the express purpose of destroying someone, or cheerleading someone who's being destroyed.

No wonder so many of them are basket-cases.

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities....

And then we changed childhood.

...

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police....

Eventually, tech companies got access to children 24/7. They developed exciting virtual activities, engineered for "engagement," that are nothing like the real-world experiences young brains evolved to expect.

...

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007)--and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn--that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens said they were online "almost constantly."

...

[P]erhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people's time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

There's another reason that kids now suffer from widespread mental illness: leftwing political propaganda. Even leftwing political propagandist Matthew Yglesias is pushing this as a contributor to youthful mental illness.

I want to talk about... a 2021 paper by Catherine Gimbrone, Lisa Bates, Seth Prins, and Katherine Keyes titled "The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs." The CDC survey doesn't ask teens about their political beliefs, but Gimbrone et. al. find not only divergence by gender, but divergence by political ideology. Breaking things down by gender and ideology, they find that liberal girls have the highest increase in depressive affect and conservative boys have the least. But liberal boys are more depressed than conservative girls, suggesting an important independent role for political ideology.

I think the discussion around gender and the role of social media is an important one. But I also don't believe that liberal boys are experiencing more depression than conservative girls because they are disproportionately hung up on Instagram-induced body image issues -- I think there's also something specific to politics going on.

Some of it might be selection effect, with progressive politics becoming a more congenial home for people who are miserable. But I think some of it is poor behavior by adult progressives, many of whom now valorize depressive affect as a sign of political commitment. The thing about depression, though, is that it's bad. Separate from the Smith/Levitz project of arguing about recent political trends, I think we need some kind of society-level cognitive behavioral therapy to convince people that whatever it is they are worried about, depression is not the answer. Because it never is.

I think John Sexton has reported in the past that Matthew Yglesias has some personal intuition about this, because he was depressed, and knows the role that persistent negative rumination plays in depression.

And leftist politics are, of course, nothing but persistent negative rumination.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:00 PM

| Access Comments