How social media and phone addiction are robbing children of their youth and damaging young people’s mental health

Warning: The following article contains discussions of mental health, self-harm, suicide and mass shootings   A 2024 book is asking parents, educators and communities to grapple with the myriad ways social media and phone addiction are irrevocably damaging young people. While hyperbolic, unwarranted fears about new innovations are nothing new (people freaked out about the printing press, radio, television, video games, rap music, and even the stove) the things in question here have existed for decades (Facebook is more than 20 years old now), and the data is indisputable.  Young people are more anxious than ever before, their attention spans sapped, their ability to solve problems and overcome obstacles in the real-world exceedingly brittle. Millions of young people, particularly young girls, suffer from an array of mental health problems, their self-esteem in the hands of anonymous strangers and faceless bullies. The nuances of social and political thought are reduced to tweet-length slogans and TikTok images. A sense of self is determined by the likes and comments of fickle strangers. People trudge all the way into adulthood without ever reading a book from cover to cover.  Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness was one of Barack Obama’s favorite books last year, earning rave reviews from people across the political spectrum. In it, the author argues that giving young people unfettered access to social media during their formative years is the equivalent of letting them board an exploratory spaceship to Mars. Haidt, a social psychologist, writes: “My central claim in this book is that … two trends - overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world - are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became known as the anxious generation.” The author builds an ironclad argument that children are facing four foundational harms: sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. He shows that social media use does not just correlate with mental illness; it causes it.  “With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world,” wrote TIME’s Shannon Carlin, naming it one of 100 Must-Read Books of the year.  Not everyone is convinced. Just a few weeks ago, the New Yorker, always a bastion of working-class common sense, argued that people are probably only afraid that social media is robbing an entire generation of their mental health simply because people are overly wary of new technology. The magazine argued that having a debilitatingly short attention span is probably fine, and perhaps novelists, artists and journalists are the real problem because they are too “boring.” Take that, Tolstoy! But the harm done by social media is not anecdotal. It’s heavily documented in a sprawling library of scientific research. According to a study published by the National Institutes of Health, evidence from a variety of cross-sectional, longitudinal and empirical studies “implicate smartphone and social media use in the increase in mental distress, self-injurious behavior and suicidality among youth.” The more time young people spend perusing social media on their phones, the worse the effects are. The impact appears to be greatest among girls, the same paper shows.  Social media addiction can make it more difficult for people to learn, and it detaches them from the real-life relationships that can save a person’s life when they are experiencing depression or a mental health crisis. Just one of a litany of disturbing findings in one study was that “social media can negatively affect adolescents’ self-view and interpersonal relationships through social comparison and negative interactions, including cyberbullying; moreover, social media content often involves normalization and even promotion of self-harm and suicidality among youth.” In addition, “high proportions of youth engage in heavy smartphone use and media multitasking, with resultant chronic sleep deprivation, and negative effects on cognitive control, academic performance and socioemotional functioning.” The harm caused by social media hasn’t only been chronicled by critics. It’s even been detailed by the big tech companies that make billions of dollars peddling it. According to an internal TikTok report that became a matter of public record in a filing with the District Court of Lancaster County, Nebraska, “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” in addition to “interfer[ing] with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.”  Visionary author Karl Ove Knausgaard, who revolutionized the modern novel, wrote at great length about the tragedies that detachment from the real world can cause. In a 400-page essay about the Holocaust couched inside a 3,500-page, six-book novel, which also addresses a horrific mass shooting of children that occurred in Norway, he contends that detachment from the real, and being sucked into artificial representations of real things, mistaking images of those things for the things themselves, can be at the root of real-life suffering.  “Every shot he fired lodges in human flesh, every eye that closed was a real eye belonging to a real human being in real life,” Knausgaard wrote. “Only remoteness can make such an act possible, since in remoteness consequence ceases to exist, and the question we must ask ourselves is not what kind of political opinions this person held, nor if he was mad, but more simply how such remoteness could ever arise in our culture.” He continued: “My basic feeling is that of the world disappearing, that our lives are filled with images of the world, and that these images are inserting themselves between us and the world, making the world around us lighter and lighter and less and less binding. We are trying to detach ourselves from everything that binds us to physical reality; from the bloodless, vacuum-packed steaks in the refrigerated counters of our supermarkets, the industrially produced meat of cooped-up animals, to society’s concealment of physical death and illness, from the cosmetically rectified uniformity of female faces to the endless flow of news images that pass through us every day…” Or, if you prefer a comedian’s take on the matter, Ronny Chieng once stated: “Who knew all of human knowledge could make people dumber? In 50 years, we’ll look at the internet the same way we look at smoking right now. … In 50 years we’ll have special, designated areas outside of buildings where you can use the internet. Internet-designated zones. Don’t bring the internet indoors; secondhand stupidity is the real killer.” Haidt’s Anxious Generation lays out a constellation of evidence that social media is harming children and making big tech companies rich in the meantime, but he doesn’t stop there. He goes into detail about steps parents and educators can take to help stem the tide of this crisis.  Haidt, who has co-founded multiple organizations that apply social and moral social psychology, was named a top 100 global thinker by “Foreign Policy” magazine and in 2019 was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In The Anxious Generation, he “lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time.” He investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. He shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, stomped out by overly fearful parents, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development. The result, he argues, is children who have never been allowed to grow by experiencing acceptable levels of real-world danger, but who are awash in fear and anxiety due to their online experiences. While the default human experience for 100,000 years was boredom, for children who grow up using too much social media, their default emotion is now anxiety. He writes that while children used to get bruises from climbing trees and falling off their bikes, they now have emotional scars that are much harder to heal.