METERMy sister, who works at a specialized university, recently told me that phones are the number one problem she and her colleagues struggle with. Students have them outside at all times, clutched in their hands like shiny black security blankets. Your class will message each other from across the room during lessons, browse social media, or listen to music; Meanwhile, she desperately tries to regain his attention and get them to interact with the real world.
Screens and teenagers: It's a combination that has become increasingly difficult to manage in the last decade. The shift from what I consider “analog” phones (those with buttons but no internet) to smartphones, compounded by an increase in digital living during pandemic lockdowns, has resulted in 46 percent of teens reporting they are in “almost constantly” line. . According to Ofcom data, around 97 per cent of children have a smartphone by the age of 12.
In February, new battle lines were drawn in this ongoing war. Government ministers confirmed plans to ban them in schools in England, and the Department for Education (DfE) issued guidance to help teachers with the rollout. Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, said the DfE believed the guidance would “empower” headteachers to exorcise these digital demons and “send a clear message about consistency”.
“You go to school, you learn, you make friends, you talk to people, you socialize and you get educated,” he told BBC Radio 4. Today program. “Don't sit in front of your cell phone or send messages while you can talk to someone.”
St Albans, in Hertfordshire, has taken a substantial step further and has just announced its intention to become the first British city to ban smartphone use for under-14s. Parents have received a joint letter from the primary school consortium encouraging them to delay purchasing devices for their children.
The reason this is so pressing is not simply that tweens and teens are not paying enough attention in class. It has a much more sinister impact on the mental health of children and young people, according to a new book, The anxious generation, written by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. It makes the compelling argument that the increase in time spent online has coincided with an alarming mental health crisis around the world.
Between 2010 and 2015, suicide rates among girls and boys ages 10 to 14 increased by 167 and 92 percent, respectively. Rates of self-harm among teenage girls in the UK have soared by 78 per cent. Anxiety diagnoses among people ages 18 to 25 increased 92 percent. During this same five-year period, smartphones reached the majority of American homes: they were adopted faster than any other communication technology in human history. There's also a tangible link between screen time and poor mental health, Haidt reveals: Nearly 40 percent of teenage girls who spend more than five hours on social media a day have been diagnosed with clinical depression.
Childhood and adolescence have been “reprogrammed,” says Haidt. Referencing the shift that began at the turn of the millennium, when technology companies began creating a suite of world-changing products based on exploiting the rapidly expanding capabilities of the Internet, Haidt paints a deeply troubling picture.
“The companies had conducted little or no research on the effects of their products on the mental health of children and adolescents, and they did not share data with researchers studying the health effects. When faced with mounting evidence that their products were harming young people, they primarily engaged in denial, obfuscation and public relations campaigns,” he says.
Business models that relied on maximizing engagement using psychological tricks were the “worst offenders,” he says, adding that they hooked children “during vulnerable stages of development, as their brains rapidly reconfigured in response to incoming stimulation.” For girls, one of the greatest damages was caused by social networks; For children, video games and pornographic sites had the most chilling impacts.
“By designing a firehouse of addictive content that entered through children's eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socialization, these companies have reconfigured childhood and changed human development on a scale almost unimaginable,” Haidt writes damningly. The companies are accused of behaving like the tobacco and vaping industries, designing highly addictive products and skirting laws to sell them to minors.
These companies have reconfigured childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.
It is a terrifying read. Developmentally, children's brains are not at all adapted to cope with all of the above. The reward-seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, but the frontal cortex, responsible for self-control and willpower, doesn't fire into full gear until the mid-20s, creating a dangerously toxic cocktail when advanced algorithms are added. enough to hold adults' attention hostage for hours at a time.
Haidt tells the story of a Boston mother, representative of many of the parents she has worked with, who said she felt like she had “lost” her 14-year-old daughter, Emily. She told how she and her husband had tried to reduce the amount of time Emily spent on Instagram. “In one harrowing episode, she accessed her mother's phone, disabled the monitoring software and threatened to kill herself if her parents reinstalled it.”
Lest it be thought that the sudden deterioration in young people's mental health is due to current events (e.g. political crises, the rise of populist and right-wing movements, Brexit, Donald Trump and everything in between) , Haidt compared a number of countries that were quite similar culturally but experienced different major news events during the same time period, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Nordic countries. They all experienced a nearly identical change starting in the early 2010s.
There are four fundamental “harms” caused by the new “phone-based childhood,” Haidt says: social deprivation, lack of sleep, fragmentation of attention and addiction. The first is obvious. “Children need a lot of time to play with each other, face to face, to foster social development,” Haidt says. According to research, teenagers who spend more time in person with their peers have better mental health, while those who spend more time on social media are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. But the percentage of 17- to 18-year-olds in the United States who said they went out with their friends “almost every day” dropped sharply starting in 2009. Time spent interacting with people online has replaced their in-life equivalents. real, and the mental health of adolescents has plummeted.
The second is less clear, but an increase in sleep problems (which had plateaued in the early 2010s but continued on a steep upward trajectory in 2013) has been linked to phone-based childhoods. According to a review of 36 correlational studies, there are “significant associations” between high social media use and poor sleep. A data set from the United Kingdom found that heavy screen use “was associated with shorter sleep duration, longer sleep latency, and more mid-sleep awakenings.” Adolescents need more sleep than adults, especially during puberty; Those who are sleep deprived do not concentrate or retain information as well as those who have slept eight hours a night.
Adults will be very familiar with number three: the fragmentation of attention. Double-digit tabs and the constant pinging of Slack and countless WhatsApp groups are pretty difficult to handle as an adult. One study found that the average teenager receives 192 alerts or notifications per day from social media and communication apps, the equivalent of 11 per waking hour, or one every five minutes. “No matter how difficult it is for an adult to stay committed to a mental path, it is much more difficult for a teenager, who has an immature frontal cortex and therefore a limited ability to say no to exit ramps,” Haidt writes. She argues that the endless stream of interruptions “takes a toll on young people's ability to think and can leave permanent marks on their rapidly rewiring brains.”
And finally, addiction. This is because app creators design products that provide variable “rewards,” triggering doses of dopamine that make us feel good. They use “all the tricks of psychologists to hook users as deeply as slot machines hook players.” Teenagers are much more susceptible to these “tricks” than adults, due to the aforementioned frontal cortex, which does not mature until age 20 or older.
With all this at stake, is it any wonder that Generation Z and those who came after are in crisis? And is there a way to break this hugely damaging pattern? Yes, according to Haidt, but firm and collective action will be needed to delay the age at which children get smartphones and social media accounts, making the shift from a phone-based childhood to a play-based one.
No matter how difficult it is for an adult to stay committed to a mental path, it is much more difficult for a teenager.
Voluntary coordination can be a useful tool in this case; For example, a group of parents at a school may collectively decide that none of their children will be allowed to use phones until a certain age. This group decision means that children do not feel excluded in the same way. If you can reach critical mass, not having a phone becomes the norm – Which is why St Albans' coordinated effort to ban smartphones to children under 14 across the board could be so powerful.
Haidt also highlights technological solutions, such as introducing better “basic” phones to avoid giving smartphones to children; lockable phone cases; and quick and easy age verification methods. Finally, governments must intervene. Laws such as requiring all social media companies to verify the ages of new users and policies requiring schools to enforce the “phones in lockers” rule during the school day could have a big impact.
The main thing to note is that it's not too late to make a change, says Haidt: “When new consumer products are found to be dangerous, especially to children, we remove them from the market and keep them off the market until the manufacturer correct the design. In 2010, teenagers, parents, schools, and even technology companies didn't know that smartphones and social media had so many harmful effects. Now we do it.”
'The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Driving an Epidemic of Mental Illness' by Jonathan Haidt is published March 26 by Allen Lane for £25
