Rethinking Lifestyle

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me” is an age old saying that is proving to be incorrect. The more apt saying would be the one coined in 1839 by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, “the pen is mightier than the sword.”

I use these quotes as an introduction to a new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt. Dr. Haidt is a social psychologist studying the effects of Smartphones and social media on our youth. Along with the rise in social media is a decline in unsupervised play. Dr. Haidt says, “Parents are over protective in the real world and under protective in the virtual world”.

Initially, concern about interactive social media was dismissed as the same problem as watching too much TV. Then, as mental illnesses became associated with a rise in social media use, professionals everywhere started to sound the alarm. Something about this trend was disturbing. TV is a one way device, social media is interactive and judgemental.

Dr. Haidt shows that diagnoses of mental illness, especially anxiety and depression, have risen from a long term stable 10% of girls and 7% of boys to a doubling by 2010-2012 when smartphones, data plans and interactive social media became commonly available. By 2019, Covid exacerbated the problem and mental illness in girls rose to 30% and in boys to 17%.

According to Dr. Haidt, major social media platforms are the biggest cause because they are not telling stories, which have been a natural attraction to children for as long as we have been human, but they are addictive and mostly negative. They also provide feedback to the user about their own value in comparison to others who are almost always better than they are.

The loss of unsupervised play time results in children who do not know how to negotiate conflict, build friendships, respect each other, or manage risk.

So, what do we do about this crisis? Dr. Haidt says we can’t and shouldn’t ban social media; that will only make it more desirable, and it is impossible to control a ban. We could however start by using a third party customer authentication system. Each social media platform would have to embrace this with a required login process. This would allow regions, schools, parents, or other groups to restrict access in their space based on agreed parameters.

Any restrictions would need to be a collective action. That means everybody or nobody. Dr. Haidt sites numerous research studies that show that individual young people are not willing to give up social media by themselves, but if everyone agreed to give it up to a certain age, they would agree. If only a few parents restrict their children, those children will be the ones that are left out but if everyone agrees to restrict access then everyone is better off. Access to interactive social media that includes thumbs up or thumbs down judgements should be restricted to those persons who are older than 16 years of age. An age when their self esteem is mostly established.