A mostly forgotten footnote in the development of modern transportation is that early railroad passengers were often locked into their carriages. In retrospect, it seems obvious that bolting people into combustible and accident-prone vehicles was a bad idea, but the railroad is a useful reminder that humans are not always good at anticipating the effects of novel and powerful technologies.
This tidbit from the history of railroad safety is also a rejoinder to one of the laziest criticisms of The Anxious Generation, a new book from New York University professor Jonathan Haidt on the pernicious effects of social media and smartphones on children and teenagers. Critics note that adults have been complaining about young people since time immemorial, often looking silly in the process as new practices prove benign or even helpful. This one-sided account doesn’t include people complaining about the locked train cars, though a more accurate telling of the past would. It also doesn’t include the 1920s and ‘30s fad for radium jars designed to infuse drinking water with healthful radioactivity or the “Great Binge”-era notion that virtually everyone should have a bit of opium. A complicated process of negotiating norms and making scientific discoveries has led to everything from unleaded gasoline to the idea that adults can drink some alcohol and coffee, but children should avoid both.
Which brings us to Haidt and his critics. A professor previously famous for his book about the emotionally dysregulated politics of a generation of “coddled” minds, social media has blessed Haidt with yet another subject that is both controversial and about which he is patently right. Naturally, not everyone agrees. Haidt may have assembled a wealth of data indicating that social media makes children more fragile, more anxious, and less prepared for adulthood. But if you agree with his view, you are in mortal reputational danger of becoming a fuddy-duddy, as I learned as a high school teacher during an interminable lecture on classroom technology from a blue-haired psychologist. Armed with a slideshow and the blithe confidence of someone who cannot imagine that anything new and exciting could ever be bad, she assured the assembled teachers, all of whom had been required to stay late to listen to her, that smartphones were really nothing to worry about.
“The Great Rewiring,” Haidt’s term for the early 2010s spread of smartphones and social media among adolescents, is actually the culmination of certain long-term trends in parenting and child-rearing. Since the mid-1980s, adults have become excessively protective of children, depriving them of important opportunities for free play in the real world. Perversely, this trend toward “safetyism” has been recently augmented by an incredibly permissive approach to digital media.
There are several counterarguments to Haidt’s thesis. The silliest is that rising rates of teenage suicide and mental illness are an understandable response to the problems of racism, sexism, white supremacy, global warming, or whatever fashionable left-wing cause happens to be grabbing headlines. This is easily dispensed with. If teenagers in the 1910s had been livestreaming tours of their trenches or those of the 1950s had been posting about backyard fallout shelters, I suspect they would have experienced a rash of psychological problems too.
Another less obviously stupid rejoinder is that greater awareness of mental health problems combined with better diagnostic techniques explains growing rates of depression and other psychological problems. In other words, we’re better at noticing the problem, but the problem isn’t actually new. There are two problems with this argument. The first is that the mental health crisis Haidt identifies is a relatively recent occurrence. It neatly correlates with the introduction of smartphones and social media, but the connection to better mental health awareness or more precise diagnostic practices is less clear. Then there are the dramatic increases in teenage suicide and self-harm discussed at length in The Anxious Generation, worrying indicators that are not subject to methodological or diagnostic changes.
A third objection is that countries outside the Anglosphere do not seem to be experiencing similar problems with mental health and smartphones. This is an interesting point and a worthwhile reminder that cultural differences, even within the West, still matter when designing public policy. However, it’s not particularly surprising that the United States, the epicenter of the modern tech industry, and the countries most exposed to American culture see the most profound effects of the social media revolution the soonest. Haidt also notes that while free play has declined in English-speaking countries, it is still encouraged in places like Italy and Scandinavia. This likely insulates children from the worst of digital life.
The eagerness of Haidt’s critics to defend Big Tech is a bit odd, especially when these same companies seem quite aware that they’re selling addictive and anxiety-inducing products. Haidt notes that tech executives often send their children to special Waldorf Schools to spare them from excessive screen time. There are also damning quotes from industry insiders and whistleblowers, all of whom acknowledge the economic incentive to hook people on digital validation at a young age.
Haidt has a variety of suggestions to protect childhood, from barring children from social media platforms until they turn 16 to removing phones from schools to various measures to encourage free play, including pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods and better playgrounds. Yet the biggest barrier to reclaiming childhood is the collective action problem posed by social media.
If you are the only teacher in school who forbids smartphones, you are on your own for enforcement and will have to deal with a barrage of snotty complaints about why you’re so much stricter than everyone else. You will also have to teach students who have grown accustomed to checking phones in class. Parents face similar pressures as their children’s friends get smartphones and create social media accounts at younger and younger ages.
On the other hand, a school that enforces a robust no-phones policy removes the disciplinary burden from individual teachers and establishes a strong anti-phone norm. Similarly, a broad societal consensus that phones and social media are bad for young people would relieve pressure on parents and families.
So what do we have to lose? Every parent or teacher I’ve talked to has expressed vague but undeniable unease with how much time children spend staring at screens. It is profoundly depressing to walk into a classroom and see row upon row of students playing on their phones instead of talking to friends, arguing with classmates, or even scribbling late homework assignments. Regulating adult access to online platforms raises serious concerns about civil liberties, but the case for protecting adolescents is much less thorny. At the very least, universal, rigorously enforced bans on phones at school would send a message to parents and communities that these devices should be treated with caution.
Americans seem strangely unwilling to pluck this low-hanging fruit. Maybe it’s our deeply encoded faith in technological progress. Maybe it’s the celebrity aura of tech entrepreneurs and other futurists. Or maybe, much like that blue-haired psychologist, some people just can’t imagine that whatever new things the children are into might be bad.
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Will Collins is a lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.
