‘The Anxious Generation’ argues against social media for kids

The central thesis of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, is that:

“Over the course of many decades, we found ways to protect children while mostly allowing adults to do what they want. Then quite suddenly, we created a virtual world where adults could indulge any momentary whim, but children were left nearly defenseless.”

The book has four main recommendations, three of which are reasonably well-founded, but they’re all presented with a strange bias.

Right away Anxious Generation provides a barrage of hyperbole, with an introduction titled “Growing Up On Mars.” Haidt wants so badly for us to believe that smartphones, the internet, and social media are unnatural, that he literally compares children’s experience with these technologies to a thought experiment where they’re shipped off to another planet. But let’s steelman his argument — how are these two things similar? We don’t really know how either will or would ultimately affect children, but we can reasonably imagine there are unknown risks in both cases.

When Haidt describes a hypothetical Mars mission, he’s talking about a possible scientific experiment. He wants us to think of parents giving their children smartphones as one as well; so parents can feel bad about experimenting on their children. The big difference is that parents use smartphones every day for a multitude of tasks, including communication, recreation, dating, chores, work, news, and more. Humans have been in this supposed experiment for decades. Technology, in some loose sense, is quite natural to humans, and we’ve all grown up with it in one form or another.

There’s another common manipulative technique in Anxious Generation: the Gish Gallop. This is when someone throws out so many statements and ideas that eventually you can’t make your way back to the underlying problems in the argument. I do think Haidt has important things to say, but to get to them, you have to navigate not only the hyperbole and appeal to nature informal fallacies, but also some vague metaphors and analogies which sound related but actually may not have any direct bearing on the topic.

That said, some of the correlations Haidt finds in the data are genuinely alarming. In particular, significant increases in depression and anxiety in teens in anglophone countries, especially in girls, all starting during the same time period around 2012. How much of that is due to increased attention and cultural references to pop psychology we can’t say. Nevertheless, other alarming trends documented in public schools, like harassment, fights, and abuse where smartphones play a significant role, do present a picture where these technologies are having a negative impact on children.

The fact is, most of this technology is adult-first and focused on profit maximization. The parental monitoring tools, where they exist at all, are often over-complicated, while simultaneously being inflexible and sometimes downright useless. Consider even streaming apps like Youtube and Spotify, where my daughter quickly ended up with videos and podcasts about unhealthy adult relationships, and ads for the worst conspiracy theories.

The four “foundational reforms” to protect children that The Anxious Generation recommends are:

1. No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children’s entry into around-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (roughly age 14).

2. No social media before 16. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers.

3. Phone-free schools. In all schools from elementary through high school, students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked pouches during the school day. That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers.

4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

There’s fine support for recommendations one 1-3. Conversely, Haidt argues for #4 with appeals to antiquity or nature, which are informal logical fallacies and suggest he has a bias. At one point in Anxious Generation he says, “When people are raised in a community that they cannot easily escape, they do what our ancestors have done for millions of years: They learn how to manage relationships, and how to manage themselves and their emotions in order to keep those precious relationships going.” This fallacy neglects far too much in its unrealistic simplicity. The fact is, smartphones are ubiquitous. So why is Haidt trying to manipulate us with the hollow, emotional appeals that are in vogue right now?

Ultimately, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness is an important book for bringing some disparate information together and identifying significant correlations, even if not all the arguments Haidt makes are compelling.

Every February, to help celebrate Darwin Day, the Science section of AIPT cranks up the critical thinking for SKEPTICISM MONTH! Skepticism is an approach to evaluating claims that emphasizes evidence and applies the tools of science. All month we’ll be highlighting skepticism in pop culture, and skepticism *OF* pop culture.

AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.