'The Anxious Generation' Review: Apps, Angst and Adolescence - WSJ

Last edited Fri Mar 29, 2024, 05:03 PM - Edit history (1)

In 2012, the satirical Onion News Network ran a faux TV story about a smartphone-obsessed teenager capable only of rolling her eyes and texting. The reporter intoned: “Caitlin Teagart was a beautiful, lively girl who loved laughing and playing outside, but all that changed when she was 12.” Now, hooked on technology, the girl is pallid and unresponsive. Caitlin’s parents have decided to have her euthanized. “We can give her eyes,” says the actor playing her father, “to someone who would actually use them to read a book.”

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In “The Anxious Generation,” Mr. Haidt lays out in pitiless detail what happened to the children of Generation Z when life moved online. For this cohort, the first to go through puberty with constant access to the internet, it was not merely that playing and socializing had shifted to phones, tablets and gaming consoles but that real-life pleasures and risks were also disappearing: rough-and-tumble outdoor activities, opportunities for physical independence, unsupervised recreation. Free play had been in retreat and technology on the march since the 1980s, Mr. Haidt observes, but it took the invention of the smartphone, which permits users to be online 24/7, to complete the mutation of childhood from “play-based” to “phone-based.” In words that chill the parental heart, he writes that giving smartphones to young people en masse constitutes “the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.” The experiment has been a disaster.

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While all this was happening, parents (who were hypnotized by their phones, too) were hearing about, and sometimes seeing at home, children succumbing to real distress—depression, anxiety, self-harm, even suicide. In the maelstrom it seemed probable that smartphones and social media were playing a role, but parents were hard-pressed to know, exactly, how quantifiable the problem was. Even six or seven years ago, researchers could see that teenagers who spent long hours on their smartphones were more likely to be depressed than teenagers who socialized face-to-face but couldn’t say with certainty that the inputs produced the outcomes.

Now, thanks to Mr. Haidt, we can glimpse the true horror of what happened not only in the U.S. but also elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Starting in about 2010, suicide rates for young adolescents in the U.S. shot up (increasing 91% for boys ages 10-14 and 167% for girls). The rate of self-injury almost tripled between 2010 and 2020. In the U.K., too, more children than before were using self-harm to cope with severe anxiety and depression; in Australia, rates of hospitalization for mental health showed a sharp increase for both boys and girls.

Ironically, the creation of social media—with their promise of “connectedness”—has left young people lonelier and with fewer friends. For girls, the apps have proved toxic, Mr. Haidt writes: “Social media use does not just correlate with mental illness; it causes it.” Boys are less susceptible to the dangers of social media but more vulnerable to the harms of online pornography. Retreating behind their bedroom doors for screen-based virtual lives has put boys at greater risk of malaise, apathy and “failure to launch” into the responsibilities of adulthood.

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He will be a guest on Bill Maher this evening