The Great Rewiring in a Nutshell: Why Childrens Mental Health Today are Less Happy and Successful Than Yesterday, Even During the Early Years
The early 2010s were crucial, Haidt argues, because that was when smartphones really began to transform childhood into something unrecognizable. In June 2010, Apple introduced its first front-facing camera, and a few months later Instagram launched on the App Store. This was a fateful combination for Haidt. Children were suddenly always online, always on display, and connected in ways that were often detrimental to their well-being. The result was a “tidal wave” of anxiety, depression, and self-harm, mostly affecting young girls.
Of course, our current understanding is incomplete, and more research is always needed. I have studied childrens and adolescents mental health for the past 20 years, and I appreciate the frustration and desire for simple answers. As a parent of adolescents, I would like to know the source of sadness and pain this generation is reporting.
The arguments are familiar to you from the author of The Coddling of the American Mind. It’s not just that American children are experiencing worse mental health than before, Haidt suggests, but that their transition to adulthood is now stymied by modern parenting and technology. “Once we had a new generation hooked on smartphones before the start of puberty, there was little space left in the stream of information entering their eyes and ears for guidance from mentors in their real-world communities during puberty,” Haidt writes in his latest work.
This is Haidt’s Great Rewiring in a nutshell: Childhood has switched from being predominantly play-based to being phone-based, and as a result, young people are less happy as children and less competent as adults. They are also, Haidt seems to argue, more boring. US high school seniors today are less likely to have drunk alcohol, had sex, have a driving license, or worked than their predecessors. Young people are not going into adulthood in a healthy way because they are wrapped in cotton wool by their parents and absorbed by their online lives, argues Haidt.
Hundreds of researchers have searched for the effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. There is a majority of data that is correlationive. The associations suggest that young people who already have mental-health problems use social-media in different ways than healthy people and that it’s not the cause of depression.
There are no simple answers. Genetics and pollution are some of the factors that cause the start and development of mental disorders. For the past 20 years, the suicide rate among most age groups in the United States has increased. Access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse are some of the leading contributors.
The current generation of adolescents was raised in the aftermath of the great recession of 2008. Unemployment has gone down so that the resulting deprivation can’t be a factor. But analyses of the differential impacts of economic shocks have shown that families in the bottom 20% of the income distribution continue to experience harm9. In the United States, close to one in six children live below the poverty line while also growing up at the time of an opioid crisis, school shootings and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence.
More young people are talking about their mental-health issues than ever before, the good news. There are insufficient services available to address their needs. In the United States, there is, on average, one school psychologist for every 1,119 students10.
The Elephant Rides. Three Truths about Emotion, Morality and the Third Truth: Why We Need Better Science and Where We Need More Evidence
His work on emotion, culture and morality has been influential, despite his lack of expertise in clinical psychology, child development or media studies. In previous books, he has used the analogy of an elephant and its rider to argue how our gut reactions (the elephant) can drag along our rational minds (the rider). Subsequent research shows that it’s very easy to support our initial gut reactions to an issue. That we should question assumptions that we think are true carefully is a lesson from Haidt’s own work. Everyone used to ‘know’ that the world was flat. The rider being dragged along by the elephant can be prevented if the assumptions are tested against data.
The third truth is that we are in a serious crisis and need the best science and evidence-based solutions. Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need, and deserve, more.
The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes.