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.

In short, the book delves into the psychological damage of “a phone-based life.”

In collaboration with the Mount Horeb Area School District, the Mount Horeb Public Library has stocked extra copies of The Anxious Generation so that anyone who wants to can read the book can examine these issues and come to their own conclusions.

For Youth Services librarian Hannah Klapperich-Mueller, this is part of the library’s larger mission to help people develop information literacy. The library doesn’t tell people what they should read, watch or listen to, and it doesn’t tell people what to think, but it does strive to give people the skills they need to ingest information and make their own decisions about it.

“The question is out there of how libraries can help people with information literacy,” Klapperich-Mueller explained.

Melissa Roelli, the library’s Adult Programming librarian, who gave up social media for Lent and said their goal is simply a meaningful, nuanced conversation about the claims made in the book.

“I don’t think we come at our programming with the intent of getting people off social media,” Roelli said. “But there is always going to be a people-centric aspect to what we do. We want to get people together, face-to-face, to talk, share ideas and learn.”

When the library recently learned that the Mount Horeb Area School District wanted the community to read The Anxious Generation, they jumped at the chance to provide both the book and a constructive space to talk about it.

“It’s about inviting people to have the conservation,” said Klapperich-Mueller.

While the library was careful not to tell anyone how to parent their own kids, they did say they have witnessed some of the problems Haidt writes about firsthand. The ability to focus, the ability to forge connections, and the simple ability to stay with a task for more than a few moments can all be compromised by young people’s social media and screen time. Both Klapperich-Mueller and youth services assistant Amy Kalchik said in recent years they have seen young children that lose interest in playing, even playing outdoors, and grow bored within mere minutes rather than hours.

Kalchik suspects one of the problems with social media is its tendency to make the world, and other people, seem more harmful than they really are. She says the real-life experiences of patrons at the library each day are full of light and compassion, belying social media’s morose atmosphere. She even sees it in her own children. Her teenaged son chose to stop using social media recently, and she instantly saw a change in him.

“He’s lighter,” Kalchik said. “He’s more creative.”

The initiative began when, over the winter break, Dr. Steve Salerno, superintendent of the Mount Horeb Area School District, contacted the library about The Anxious Generation. He proposed a community reading, and Roelli agreed wholeheartedly.

“[She] told me there were 388 holds on this book,” said Salerno in a message to parents last week. “Clearly, our community has interest in this book, too. Melissa has agreed to purchase several more hard copies and increase the number of licenses available via Libby. All that is needed to borrow a copy is to obtain your library card.”

“The causal effects of unabated access to smart devices and students’ decline in mental health (depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation) are irrefutable,” wrote Salerno following the board of education’s meeting last week. “Despite these facts, there is good news. Working together, we can reverse the trajectory.”

Haidt offers four solutions to reverse these trends:

1: No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children’s entry into round-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 device 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.” “Surveys show that unstructured time with friends plummeted in the exact years that adolescents moved from basic phones to smartphones in the early 2010s.” Haidt contends, “Unsupervised outdoor play teaches children how to handle risks and challenges of many kinds. By building physical, psychological, and social competence, it gives kids confidence that they can face new situations, which is an inoculation against anxiety.”

He adds that coddling and helicopter parenting is, “correlated with …low self-efficacy.”

Community Book Discussion and Action Planning Session Tuesday, March 18, 6-8pm

A Community Book Discussion and Action Planning Session regarding anxiety in today’s young people will take place Tuesday, March 18, from 6-8 PM at the Mt. Horeb Public Library.  Together with the Mt. Horeb Area School District, library staff will lead a discussion of Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Anxious Generation,” which explores the decline of childhood play and the rise of screen time, and how these shifts impact youth anxiety. This event offers an opportunity for community members to share insights and collaboratively brainstorm strategies to support the well-being of young people. Childcare will be provided by MHASD. Copies of the book are available for checkout at the Mt. Horeb Public Library starting this week—ask for a copy at the Circulation Desk (quantities are limited).