Subtitled “How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness”
(Penguin Press, March 2024, 385pp, including 90pp of acknowledgements, notes, references, and index.)
Here’s the latest by the author of one of my favorite books, THE RIGHTEOUS MIND (review ends here), whose past couple books have directly addressed current social issues. In 2018 there was THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, co-written with Greg Lukianoff, (review here). (Lukianoff went on to write THE CANCELLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND with a different coauthor, in 2023; I haven’t read it yet.) Now we have by Haidt alone this book, about the effects of smartphones and social media. As causing mental illness.
Right away I am skeptical. Anyone with a sense of history, particularly the history of technology, will recall moral panics about this or that new device or medium. Radio, TV, comic books, paperback books, video games, cable TV. Actually, all the way back to printed scrolls! Which, one of those ancient Greeks or another felt would undermined the ability of students to *memorize* what they needed to know. Yes all these things changed how some people led their lives. Were they reasons to panic? Only to conservatives, who want nothing to change, for whom the past is always idealized. Haidt’s target here is social media, especially through hand-held devices, and their affect on adolescents. Especially girls. Causes of mental illness? Certainly conservatives of the past foresaw moral evil in comic books, not to mention racy movies and TV shows. But illness?
On the other hand, the topic of how much screen time is suitable for kids has been in the conversation for years. Parents and TV hosts debate about what age their kids should get their first smartphones. Or be allowed to have social media accounts. Students are distracted by their phones during class, so some schools prohibit their use, asking students to check-in their devices during the day.
I’ll summarize Haidt’s the book with the stipulation that this is another book I sampled, carefully, but did not read every word of. Too many books, etc. Haidt made it easy since, like some other authors (Deutsch comes to mind), he helpfully summarizes each chapter with a page or so of bullet points at the end. So my methodology of going through this book was, for each chapter, to read the bullet points first, and summarize them in my own notes, then go back and page through the chapter alert for any colorful graphs, photos, or anecdotes, and sometimes take additional notes. It also helped that probably half the content here is similar to ideas in that CODDLING book.
I’ll mention that, to my surprise, this book has been on bestseller lists ever since it came out, some nine months now. On the latest NY Times hardcover fiction list, this week, it’s back at #1, after 41 weeks on their list. And it’s #3 on this week’s Publishers Weekly list, a list which helpfully tracks how many “units” the title has sold in the past week, and to date. This book has sold over 500,00 copies to date, more than any other title on the nonfiction list. So clearly the book and its concerns are resonating with many people.
So then, to give the author’s premise its due. Part 1 is about “the surge of suffering.” Haidt claims that data show a rise in teenage anxiety, depression, self-harming, and suicide beginning around 2010, among Gen Z, the first generation who went through puberty with smartphones. And has lots of charts, in this chapter, showing these data. So something more than moral panic is going on. He claims it’s all related to smartphones, particularly the release of the iPhone in 2008, and later the ‘like’ and ‘share’ buttons on social media sites.
Part 2 is about “the decline of play-based childhood.” We’ve evolved into cultural creatures, in which children need time to learn. Play is the work of childhood; puberty shouldn’t come too fast. Free play is necessary; mistakes are not very costly. Children use both a conformist bias and a prestige bias: peer pressure, and needing to stand out. (Aside: these are examples in which so-called psychological “biases” are not only useful, but crucial, so that children don’t have to learn the world entirely by themselves. It’s when adults never outgrow such biases that they become a problem. This conformist bias is what Adair meant in the item #1 in my review which references page 67.3.) Social media feeds on the prestige bias, indicated by likes, shares, and comments.
Children are by nature anti-fragile. (The Codding book covered a lot of this.) They need play, even risky play, yet parents (at least in the Anglo world) because more fearful, elevating safetyism above all else. Their ‘defend mode’ overrode children’s ‘discover mode.’ Early puberty involves much brain rewiring, and safetyism blocks experiences needed to learn to manage risk, and develop self-governance. As do smartphones. Meanwhile, the rites of passage that marked adolescent transition to adulthood have largely become eliminated in Western societies. Perhaps even a secular society might need such sets of milestones, beyond the traditional ones of ages when one can see certain movies, drive a car, buy alcohol and vote. Author proposes a set of milestones. Age 6: family responsibility. Age 8, local freedom, age 10 the age of roaming, age 12 apprenticeship, age 14 beginning of high school, 16, beginning of internet adulthood, 18 legal adulthood, 21, full legal adulthood.
Part 3 is about “the rise of the phone-based childhood.” The four foundational harms are social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. These are amplified by screens, which adolescents spend 7 hours a day looking at. Face-to-face time has dropped; sleep has declined in quality and quantity; smartphones create interruptions; and social media is designed to be addictive.
Girls are more affected by social media than boys; they’re more visually oriented, and motivated by communion; they’re concerned about reputation, and their aggression is often expressed as trying to harm the reputation of other girls. Boys are prone to “failure to launch”; Japanese men, to “hikikomori.” Social media allowed them to become internalized. And it provided them with unlimited hardcore porn. Some boys became addicted to videogames.
Haidt discusses Durkheim and the idea of a scale of divinity, along which people can feel lifted up, or pulled downward. The sacred or the profane. Phone-based life pulls downward, and is contrary to the practices of religious and spiritual communities, in several ways. There’s a “God-shaped hole” in every human heart, and phone-based life offers only trivial content. [[ Well I take exception to both points, as have others; on the second, you can find whatever you want via your phone, if you want to. ]]
Finally Part 4 discusses “collective action for healthier childhood.” Again I think some of this was covered in Coddling. There are four types of collective response: voluntary coordination; social norms and moralization; technological solutions; laws and rules. Laws overprotect children in the real world, under-protect them in the virtual world. Tech companies should develop better age verification features. Schools should encourage more free play and recess. And they might go phone-free. And parents should become gardeners, not carpenters, i.e. don’t try to mold children directly. Give kids unsupervised free play. Delay introducing phones; find tech-free camps, exchange programs, part-time jobs, a gap year. A free-range childhood is more likely to produce competent young adults, but it takes parents getting over their own anxiety.
\\
I don’t dispute most of the book, and we do hear of efforts by parents and schools to manage kids’ involvement with their phones. But the tech companies aren’t helping; if anything, just in the past couple weeks, they’re sucking up to Trump by making things worse. (Pretending that pointing out lies is somehow suppression of conservative views.)
And at the end, I’m still skeptical. Hasn’t human society gone through many shifts in lifestyle, and how children are raised, over thousands of years? Just imagine the transition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to living on a farm tending crops and raising animals. Wouldn’t the farmer’s kid envy the freedom of the free-reign child? (This is what some of the Bible stories were about; see here.) But human nature is flexible, and adapts as circumstances change, perhaps via what Wilson called “gene-culture coevolution,” which is to say that as circumstances change — e.g. new technology — there will be differential effects on various people, some better suited to the new order, others less. Followed by differential reproduction. Thus the growing cosmopolitan mentality, which might eventually overtake the tribal mentality (if humanity is to survive).
I still suspect this book amounts to a conservative screed about how life was better in the old days. Or, “Kids these days! They don’t know how good we had it”. But I’ll think about this a while longer. It’s certainly a book about how technological change affects people, which is a principal concern of science fiction. And think about examples of parents and kids in my own life.
