Is social media harming teens? Yes and no.
Over the past decade or so, The Atlantic has published a series of articles warning of the harm that social media and smartphone apps are doing to teenagers. These articles have had headlines like “The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood,” “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks,” “The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls,” and “Get Phones out of Schools Now.” These articles have one other thing in common: they were all written by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a coauthor of the 2019 book The Coddling of the American Mind. Now Haidt is out with a new book (whose themes will be familiar to readers of his Atlantic articles), The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. After 2010, there was a sharp increase in depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide among young people, Haidt writes; rates of depression and anxiety in the US, for example, rose by more than 50 percent over the following decade, a figure that rises to 130 percent for girls between the ages of ten and nineteen. Haidt observed similar patterns around the same time in other countries, including Canada, the UK, and Australia. And he says that they were caused by smartphones and social media. Giving young people smartphones in the early 2010s was “the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children,” he writes in The Anxious Generation, adding that we may as well have sent “Gen Z to grow up on Mars.”
In both The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation, Haidt argues that social media and smartphones prevent children from understanding how to behave and survive in the “real world.” According to Haidt, a “variety of measures” show that members of Gen Z (children born after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, and related disorders “at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.” Not only that, he argues, but these problems carry over into adulthood: Haidt says that young adults are “dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children” than prior generations, and that coworkers say they are also more difficult to work with. Concerns about the dangers of social media are nothing new.
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