The greatest danger to our youth is not Covid, illegal drugs, or even climate change. The greatest danger to our youth is the cell phone in their hands – and the access it gives them to social media. That’s not my opinion; it’s the opinion of Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist. Before you dismiss his opinion as unqualified or radical, listen to what he has to say. Tunku Varadarajan, journalist for The Wall Street Journal, interviewed him for his Saturday column and found Haidt has a lot of insight into a real problem.
Mr. Haidt is a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and refers to the present generation gap of Generation Z as “a national crisis.” Gen Z is usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995, what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility. There has never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.” He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood. The latter was the subject of his most recent book, “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” (2018) with co-author Greg Lukianoff.
Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,“ but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” Naturally, you wonder what happened in 2012 to cause this change? Haidt says that was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.” Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12. The result was a generation of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. As a result, they were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.” The inevitable outcome of this overprotection by parents, coupled with an obsession with social media, is a generation that lives largely just through their cell phones. They no longer hang out together, they even drive less than earlier generations did.
Mr. Haidt is especially concerned about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%. In comparison, millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,” he says, but boys play videogames, often in groups: “Boys thrive if they have a group of boys competing against another group of boys.”
By contrast, most girls are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.” He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”
How widespread is this condition?
Zach Goldberg of the Manhattan Institute extrapolated from Pew Research Institute data and found that 56% of women 18 to 29 admit to having a mental condition. This condition may be real or just perceived – but Haidt says that’s the problem. “This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.” As a result, Haidt predicts that Gen Z women will be much less successful than millennial ones.
Interestingly, this problem is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.” This problem is already impacting the work force. The anxiety and fragility at the youthful end of the American workforce is making the labor force troublesome to work with. “This is something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” Therefore, it’s also difficult for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.
What’s the solution?
Take away their cell phones! Haidt agrees. He says, “I’d raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16 and enforce it.”Thirteen-year-olds can legally sign up for social-media sites, and millions of much younger children use them. “They just lie about their birthdays. The Internet teaches them that all you have to do is lie and you can go anywhere. That’s what we’ve taught kids so far, and it has to stop.”
Parents are expected to protect their children until they are old enough to make their own decisions – usually that means 18. Haidt says, “We have more than a hundred years of making things safe for children. We require car seats and seat belts. We eliminated cigarette vending machines. We have fences around pools.”
Ironically, it seems the children know they need parents to restrain them. Haidt says when he has addressed classes of seventh and eighth-graders on the perils of social media, he asks them, “Would you get off it on your own?” Many are afraid to do that. But when asked, “What if nobody could be on? Would that be better?” Most say yes. He reports that they wish they had childhoods more like those of their parents, in which they could play outside and have adventures with their friends. They agree that getting off social media would be better, says Haidt, “So long as it’s not just targeting one child but everybody, I believe they’d be supportive.” Sounds like it’s time for parents to be the grown-ups in the room.
