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Are Cell Phones Really Destroying Kids’ Mental Health?

Are Cell Phones Really Destroying Kids’ Mental Health?

Those who agree
with Haidt appreciate his well-crafted anecdotes and easy prescriptions. His
critics, meanwhile, tend to point out a tendency to overlook the wider context
and jump to conclusions. (Haidt “is a gifted storyteller,” developmental
psychologist Candice Odgers wrote in her review in Nature, “but his
tale is currently one searching for evidence.”) What few have noted, however, is
Haidt’s intellectual journey away from a broad conception of society as a
source of connection, exploration, and even relief. Instead of confronting the
variety of effects of all this social, economic, and technological change,
Haidt since his first book has offered us a narrow and desiccated sense of the
social.

The Anxious
Generation
opens with a thought experiment: Would readers
be willing to send their 10-year-old daughters to live in a colony on Mars? “The
company behind the project is racing to stake its claim to Mars before any
rival company,” Haidt writes, invoking the mad dash for innovation and
domination that drives Silicon Valley culture. “Its leaders don’t seem to know
anything about child development and don’t seem to care about children’s
safety.” Add to these concerns the atmospheric and gravitational differences
between Mars and Earth, plus the social and emotional consequences of
experiencing adolescence in a radically new environment run by a private
company, and Haidt makes the rather obvious case that no reasonable parent
would make such a choice. Yet, Haidt declares, this is not too far from the
choice we have made for our children by giving them smartphones loaded with
applications designed to warp their behavior and capture their attention.

His book’s argument has two main parts. First, he
argues that risky, unsupervised play is essential for rich and resilient psychological
development. He describes what he sees as an overprotective parenting style,
often referred to as “helicopter parenting,” and makes a connection to the
mental health crisis. Haidt then describes real-life stories and research on
the severe consequences of bullying and online harassment. And he outlines four
ways that what he calls “phone-based childhood” disrupts development: through sleep
deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. “Between
2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved largely onto
smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and
other internet-based activities,” Haidt wrote. “This Great Rewiring of
Childhood, I argue, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of
adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s.”    


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