Dear Perplexed,
So, you’ve just read Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. You say he blames rising teen mental illness on two social changes: the loss of childhood free play and the omnipresent Smartphone. You wonder if I agree and, if so, what do I think made us take that bad path?
Haidt says we’re infantilizing our kids, preventing them from becoming confident adolescents and individuals in their own right. Rates of teen anxiety, depression and suicide have sky-rocketed since the 2010s. These are distress signals: children aren’t maturing. I agree with Haidt, that our addictions to the Smartphone and other screens are both causes and consequences of our incapacity to bear tensions.
It’s human nature to coast. Throughout life, we fight the slide to instant gratification. We strain to build our abilities to delay gratification, to tolerate frustration, to negotiate with the real world, and to navigate real relationships. Technology’s seductions make the fight so much harder. And the tech giants’ virtuosity in exploiting and monetizing our attention has swung victory to the industry. Cyberlife cancelled the need to be with ourselves. Our Smartphones endlessly entertain us, keep us company, and reassure us that we’re “in the know.”
Actually, tension-hatred conquered parents-to-be in the 1990’s, and they’ve unwittingly passed it on to their kids. To achieve a dreamy reverie, in which parent and baby are mutually absorbed in a drifty timeless state, depends on the mother’s ability to be with herself and her baby, without compulsively checking her phone. As children grow, most parents use a screen as babysitter. That can work, if children get equal time to absorb themselves with a picture book or doll or legos. Creating one’s own stories, manipulating blocks that don’t magically yield to a simple screen-swipe, even at times feeling aimless—all build frustration tolerance and comfort with one’s inner life. But today we give kids fewer of these opportunities. When these kids enter the rough and tumble world of peers, hovering parents fear their kids aren’t resilient. This fear is actually the parents’ self-doubt. So, they can’t surrender parental control.
The technological umbilical cord ensnares both parents and kids. Screens instantly soothe and entertain, like a mechanical mother, feeding her baby on demand, postponing gradual growth of tolerance for the real world. One crisis that Haidt describes, the sharp increase in depression in pubertal girls coinciding with the Smartphone and social media, is perhaps the most disturbing consequence of the tech-driven enfeeblement of our minds. We’ve allowed tech to hollow out of our ability to be with ourselves and to teach this ability to our children. We’ve embraced technology to evade the hard work of real relating. Instead of talking about plans and building trust in our child’s growing judgement, we phone-track our kid’s location and text when we start to worry. Tech-enfeeblement is the air we breathe. We owe Haidt great appreciation for showing how cyber tech normalization is crippling our kids. And us.
This fall, many schools will ban cell-phones. That’s a hopeful response to Haidt’s work. As kids adjust to limits on their phones, we might all look for ways to limit our own use. Kids need us to model phone-free time. They need us to tell co-workers and friends that we’re not always available, that we have hobbies and family events. Kids need us to hang out and talk, drawing on what comes to mind, instead of reflexively turning to the limitless knowledge of Siri. They need us to admit that we’ve weakened, and that we’ll join them in growing stronger. It’s a worthy challenge for us all.
Thoughtfully yours,
Dr. Miriam