Screenagers and The Anxious Generation

Welcome to the first post in a series of essays I'll be writing about the critical relationship between technology, culture, and our psychology.

What age did you get your first smartphone?

I received my first smartphone at age 11. I consider this to be quite young. When I recently asked my parents why they chose to let me have a smartphone at this age, they replied, “Well, all the other kids your age were starting to get one, so we wanted you to have one too. And in case we had to call or get a hold of you.” But they explained how they were never worried about possible problems I might develop with screen time. Back then, screen time was still an nascent concept. 

Fast forward to today. Much of my own research is centered around how technology has changed us. This is an especially personal area of research for me, as someone whose formative years were spent growing up in the digital age.

These days, most of life happens on our screens. Research finds that a third of teens say they are on one of the major social media sites “almost constantly,” and 45% of teens report that they use the internet “almost constantly.” But even if a teen reports that they spend a leisurely 7 hours a day on a screen, in the time they’re not on one, they still might be actively thinking about what they’ve seen on social media while multitasking in the real world. This makes it easier to understand how teens are spending a whopping 16 hours of their day not fully present in what’s going on around them.

The smartphone is indeed a useful piece of technology. But it’s become synonymous with social media. The phone and social media are in some ways a physical extension of our body. My phone and smart watch are a neural piece of me. This technology stores our personal information, it hosts most of our daily entertainment, and without it, we feel a physical drain or piece of us missing.

When you think about your relationship with technology, how do you assess it? I like the person I am when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I spend a lot of time on social media. I’ll be honest and admit that at times, I can be a “screenager”. The word “screenager” first appeared in the Oxford dictionary in the 1990s, used to describe “a young person who spends a lot of time watching television or using a computer, smartphone, etc.” Since then, it’s been used primarily as a pejorative term quickly identified with Generation Z or those born between the late 1990s and early 2010s. I myself have used it laughingly to make fun of my friends when I see them on their phone screens, left feeling ignored.

By now, we all know that spending too much time on our phones is bad. It makes us feel “icky”. But it has also fundamentally rewired the way we’ve grown up, socialize with our friends, and get work done. 

I’ve followed much of the discourse on how smartphones are changing our brain chemistry, and want to disseminate my learnings. Last month I read Jonathan Haidt’s latest book, The Anxious Generation. It’s sparked a greater debate on whether we can draw the correlation between smartphones and the malaise in teenage mental illness. I’ll try to distill the arguments and share some applications.

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The Anxious Generation

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book is built on the argument that parents are increasingly overprotective of the physical world while the digital world is severely under regulated. This has ramifications for how children socialize, play, and learn. And the culprit for all this developmental disarray is the smartphone or social media. 

I’ve thought long and hard about this, and even talked to my parents about what they saw during my adolescence. My childhood was filled with memories of running up and down my block with friends in my neighborhood. We’d play games of pretend, make up imaginary characters, and climb trees as we tested how high up we could go or what branch could sustain our weight. And where were our parents during this period? At home, work, or out doing errands. We were left unsupervised, and that was okay. 

Today if you go to a park or public playground you’ll see kids on structures being supervised by parents circling the area. Many of them will also be on screens. But they’re still there, waiting in case their child falls off of a swing or gets into a playful fight. They’ll be watching, sometimes talking to their kid telling them not to engage in any risky behavior. Once the safety net of a parent is always around, kids don’t learn to judge for themselves. This has resulted in what Haidt calls risk deprivation. 

Parents are becoming more and more overprotective, hesitant to let their kids make their own mistakes. Sometimes, they need to fail or get hurt so they can learn to become more careful. But I’ve never been a parent, so I can only reflect on the experiences from my childhood that helped me build resilience.

Is it the phones?

Critics will disagree with Haidt’s ‘smartphones/social media is causing all of our problems’ thesis. Haidt’s book points to a lot of trends in mental health that show depression, anxiety, and suicide rates—to name a few—are on the rise.

Before I go on, I think it’s important to remember that Jonathan Haidt and his longtime collaborator, Jean Twenge, are social psychologists—not clinical psychologists. This is where I remind myself that it’s difficult to extend psychological phenomena to social and cultural events. 

The first compelling counter to the smartphone thesis is that we’re measuring mental health completely differently than we used to. Programs and investments to study mental health have drastically advanced. In 2011, during the roll out of the Affordable Care Act, it was recommended for the first time that physicians screen teenage girls for depression annually. That started a chain reaction where we not only saw the rates for depression diagnosis go up, but also in doctors prescribing treatments for depression.

Haidt leans on lots of research that charts declining mental health, rates of happiness, and an increase in anxiety among young people, particularly young girls, since 2010. In 2006-2010, happiness among young people (aged 15-24) fell sharply in North America. According to the CDC, from 2009 to 2021, the share of American high-school students who say they feel “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 44 percent. Youth happiness also declined in Western Europe, but less drastically.

This issue is specific to America and English-speaking countries

By contrast, happiness at every age has risen precipitously in Central and Eastern Europe—which includes the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Asia. In all these places, smartphones exist, but the rise in teenage anxiety does not seem to be a global crisis. The places where mental health is declining most rapidly are the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia to a certain extent. All English-speaking countries.

Journalist David Wallace-Wells attributes this to the fact that English-speaking countries tend to be closer culturally. It’s likely that in these countries, mental health are talked about in similar terms and awareness is probably at comparable rates. Care for mental health may be moving in parallel, whereas mental health culture in South Korea and Japan or sub-Saharan Africa may be totally different. Which leads me to my next question.

Are we talking about mental health too much?

Mental health is routinely conflated with mental wellbeing, perfectionism, OCD, and depression. When journalists and academics say we are in the midst of a mental health crisis, we are primed to believe them because we talk about it so often.

A group of British researchers have studied this phenomenon, positing that it’s because we talk about mental disorders so much. Dr. Lucy Foulkes has attributed the rise in mental health diagnosis with our loosening of language. It’s part of the hypothesis termed the “prevalence inflation.” We hear others talk about their mental health struggles which makes us in turn more prone to self-label as anxious or depressed. But research shows that young people who self-label as having anxiety or depression are more likely to develop poor coping skills, such as avoidance or rumination.

Co-rumination appears to be higher in girls, who tend to be more attuned to their friends. Girls get together and may be unintentionally making things worse for each other by internalizing disorders. Across ages, cultures, and countries, girls and women suffer higher rates of internalizing disorders. I suspect that this is because women are more emotionally expressive and effective at communicating mood states within friendship pairs. Women get coffee or drinks with their friends and talk about their feelings. When men get together, they are more likely to do things rather than talk about what they are feeling. Usually this involves sitting on a couch where they watch football or play video games. Women have face-to-face relationships. Men are in side-by-side relationships.

A generation is growing up fluent in the language of mental health. They are also growing up in a period of unparalleled social change. Smartphones and social media have enabled this generation to unprecedented levels of activism, carried out mostly in the virtual world. In a separate study, researchers showed that those who are politically active nowadays usually have worse mental health.

From the outside, those not in Generation Z like to talk about this new generation as doomed for an unmatched set of future psychological problems. That the advent of new technology has caused irreversible damage to the brains of young people. It’s what’s known as “The Kids These Days” Effect: the idea that every generation thinks the new generation is deficient–a tendency tracing back to at least 624 BCE. After all, these studies and books are all written by people who are at least millennials or older.

Back to the book discussion.

Now let’s review Haidt’s proposals:

1. No smartphones before high school

2. No social media before age 16

3. Phone-free schools

4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence

I think the first two are Haidt’s most controversial. The current minimum age set by Meta (which owns Instagram) to open an account is 13—though it is loosely enforced. If you give a middle schooler a phone, they will download Instagram or TikTok, just as I did when I first received mine. But in 2012, we used Instagram mainly to post silly selfies we took with our friends or pictures of palm trees glossed over with an atrocious, overly-saturated filter. Instagram has radically changed in recent years, switching from a chronological feed to an algorithmic arrangement in 2016. Instagram used to be an app to freely express our amateur photography skills. Now it’s a carefully curated grid of photos that we use to compare ourselves to others. 12-year olds don’t need Instagram or TikTok to “connect” them with strangers when they can see their friends in person. This justifies a minimum age for opening social media accounts. 16 might be an ambitious age, and Haidt’s advocacy for parental controls on smartphones has me wary. But I really think it will be up to the parent and should be specific to the child.

Phone-free schools are good for learning and well-being. In a recent study on Norwegian middle schools, when schools ban smartphones, students, particularly girls, have less mental health issues and improved GPAs. But it can’t be a soft ban. Most schools who say they ban phones usually mean just during class time. This is an ineffective policy because it incentivizes students to hide their phone use during class and increase their phone use after class. Phones are also extremely distracting in a classroom setting.

I’m sure many of us have sat in a classroom or lecture and seen a student online shopping in the middle of class or having numerous text conversations going while the teacher is talking. This has had disastrous effects on our attention, to the point where the average American is now distracted every 3 seconds. Yes, 3 seconds. That’s terrifying to think about. It’s no wonder ADHD rates have skyrocketed. It’s also not helping our anxiety. There is strong scientific evidence that says if you are anxious, your attention will suffer.

Haidt declares that a better policy would be for high schools to go phone-free the whole school day. To have students lock away their phones in a designated locker. I remember in my high school AP Government class, Ms. Nielsen made us put our phones into a tub at the beginning of class. During brunch and lunch, my friends and I weren’t glued to our phones checking notifications that we had missed during class. In retrospect, I think this was beneficial for us. For the purposes of our attention span and maintaining healthy social relationships, eliminating the phone from our most social time of day is a grounded idea.

To wrap up

This book has made reflect a lot on my childhood, and how grateful I am for my early friendships. For how much unsupervised free play we had to grow our imaginations and creativity. As Johann Hari writes, “free play has been turned into supervised play, and so—like processed food—it has been drained of most of its value.”

Using social media as our primary mode of interaction has increased the superficiality of our relationships. We are now defined more by what we say, than what we do. What we comment, rather than the time we spend in person together. Words, unlike acts of service or quality time, are easier to counterfeit. What we need is more face-to-face interaction. Sure face-to-face relationships can be more slow and at times boring, but that’s the natural rhythm of how humans are supposed to interact. We should be more tolerant of being bored. Technology has conditioned us to expect the next dopamine hit at exceedingly accelerant rates when that’s just not how we were made to function.

My suggestion for the next time you get a notification is to increase the time between stimulus and response. Does that notification require your immediate attention? Will it still be there waiting for you in 5 minutes? 10 minutes? If the answer is yes, then you most likely don’t need to pick up your phone right away.

I suspect that in the long run, our self-control will be powerless to Big Tech when it comes to social media and our phones. The solutions must be on a policy level. But we can try to return the childhood of free play—in neighborhoods and at schools—and let kids govern their own social time and make their own mistakes. I’m writing this to my generation. Because we don’t have to pass down our anxiety to our future children.