They feel like the genie is out of the bottle. What I found since the book came out is that almost everybody sees the problem. Nowadays, in families across America, one of the biggest and most prevalent dynamics is fighting over technology. And the data on rates of mental illness shows us that most of the increase was in place long before Covid-19 arrived. Now we’re a few years past Covid-19, past the school closures, past the masks, and what has become clear to everyone is that kids are not all right. Then Covid-19 happened, and that obscured previous trends. In 2019, the debate was really getting started. Haidt: I think that this year is the tipping point for several reasons. Related article Social media presents ‘profound risk of harm’ for kids, surgeon general says, calling attention to lack of researchĬNN: You’ve said we’re at a tipping point in this crisis? Why? That’s one of the biggest increases in markers of mental illness that we see in all the data that I’ve reviewed. In the 2010s, hospital emergency room visits (for self-harm) for 10 to 14-year-old girls nearly tripled. It used to be that (self-harm) was not a thing that 12- and 13-year-olds were doing, it was more older girls. Self-harm is a way that some girls have historically coped with anxiety, and those rates also went way up in the early 2010s. Girls’ levels of anxiety go up a lot in this period (the tween and teen years), as soon as they get hyper-connected to each other via social media. They talk about their feelings more, and they’re more open to each other. Haidt: The basic facts about gender differences are that when everyone got a smartphone in the early 2010s, boys went for video games and YouTube and Reddit, while girls went more for the visual social media platforms, especially Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr.Ī second difference is that girls share emotions more than boys do. Related article Outside the US, teens’ social media experiences are more tightly controlledĬNN: Does this mental health crisis affect boys and girls differently? Matt Cardy/Getty Images Europe/Getty Images We were wrong on both points.Ī 12-year-old boy looks at an iPhone screen showing various social media apps including TikTok, Facebook and X, on Decemin Bath, England. And for both halves of that, you can see how we did that thinking that it was going to be OK.

The basic argument of the book is that we’ve overprotected our children in the real world and we’ve under-protected them online. Because most of us were techno-optimists, we didn’t really raise alarms when our kids started spending four, five, six and now seven to nine hours a day on their phones and other screens. It was going to make our children smarter. In the 1990s, we thought the internet was going to be the savior of democracy. What arose to fill all that time was technology. Jonathan Haidt: Kids always had play-based childhoods, but we gradually let that fade away because of our growing fears of kidnapping and other threats in the 1980s and 1990s. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.ĬNN: How did we get ourselves into this predicament? CNN recently talked with Haidt about his data, the book and what lies ahead for parents and teens alike. Stern School of Business, has spent countless hours publicizing the book’s message since its March 26 release. Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Leonard N. The association says burden shouldn’t be entirely on parents, app stores or young people - it has to be on the platform developers.īut parents probably can’t count on developers, which leads to Haidt’s jarring conclusion: We’re at a tipping point as a society, and if grown-ups don’t take action, they could risk the mental health of all young people indefinitely. The American Psychological Association echoed his concern in a new report that calls out social media platforms for designs that are “inherently unsafe for children.” The APA’s report, released Tuesday, says that children do not have “the experience, judgment and self-control” to manage themselves on those platforms. While some have questioned the science behind Haidt’s thesis, Haidt argues the perspective is informed by years of research - investigations that depict climbing mental health struggles among American tweens and teens, and statistics that indicate many teenagers in the United States already are depressed or anxious in some way.

Dave Cicirelli, Courtesy of Penguin Press 'The Anxious Generation' argues kids should have little or no access to smartphones or social media till they're 16.

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