A recent news story is titled “Young adulthood is no longer one of life’s happiest times“. What’s causing an increase in depression and anxiety among young people?

            Years before Covid, university support staff told me about a huge increase in the number of students with problems. What was causing it? Without a ready explanation, I assumed it was the breakdown of community, which I had read about.

            Most people used to live in families, neighbourhoods and workplaces that provided a stable structure for their lives. However, these stable social structures, which can be called community, gradually began to break down. To find jobs, people moved away from where they grew up, sometimes moving repeatedly. This meant, in many cases, moving away from childhood friends, grandparents and long-time neighbours. Arguably, the market economy has been the primary driver behind the breakdown of community. People were less connected with those around them.

            Without the moorings of old-fashioned community, what came next? For some, this was a liberation from narrow-minded conservatism, one that held people back, forcing them into rigid social roles. But for others, the new fluid society was unnerving and threatening, giving rise to mental problems.

            There are other explanations for the increase in young people’s problems. The role of the media is one. With television, children began seeing vastly more graphic images of violence. Another factor is the increasing awareness of climate change, an existential threat to human thriving, felt especially by the young who bear little responsibility for it.

            Richard Eckersley alerted me to the high levels of distress among young people, and the importance of figuring out why this is occurring despite material affluence. Through a series of publications, he has tried to raise awareness about youth unhappiness as a window into deeper problems with Western societies.

Jonathan Haidt’s view 

Years ago, when I was co-ordinating a class on happiness and doing some research in the area, I read quite a few books and articles about happiness, looking especially for ones grounded in research. One of my favourite books in this area was by Jonathan Haidt: The Happiness Hypothesis.

Jonathan Haidt

He surveyed “ancient wisdom” from religious and spiritual traditions in China, India and Europe, examining them in relation to current psychological research. Overall, the past ideas stand up very well. They still provide valuable guides to a life worth living.

            It was with this background that I obtained Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, in which he offers a bold explanation for young people’s distress. Its basic ideas are straightforward, and are in two distinct areas.

            The first idea concerns growing up in the real world, face-to-face, offline. Haidt argues that children in the US, increasingly since about the 1970s, have been overprotected. Compared to previous generations, parents are more likely to drive their children to school, oversee their play, arrange a heavy schedule of activities overseen by adults, and in general never let children out on their own without adult supervision. Haidt calls this safetyism, and argues that it prevents children from learning how to manage risks, organise activities with other children, and overcome anxiety.

            Ironically, many of the parents who hover over their children had very different upbringings, walking or cycling to school and spending hours in unsupervised play. In Wollongong, there is traffic congestion around the time schools let out in the afternoon due to parents driving to pick up their children.

            Haidt argues that children need to undertake activities on their own, including ones with some degree of danger, for full development of their capacities. By taking risks, within reason, people learn to judge what risks are worth taking. By learning from failures, people develop resilience. Haidt is not talking about big risks like jumping off a building but smaller ones like falling while riding a bicycle, and relationship risks too.

            The concept of overprotection is well known in disability circles. People with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities, certainly need protection from dangers, but they also need opportunities to explore the world, to go shopping, ride buses and trains, meet people, get out of the house. Living a full life requires taking some risks, with one’s body, career and relationships.

Online dangers

Haidt’s second main idea is that children are being exposed to too many risks online, before they are ready. Social media companies are driven by the search for profits, mostly from online advertising. The longer users spend on a site, the more money the company makes, so they design apps to keep users hooked.

            What’s the real problem here? It’s not using a telephone to talk with a friend. It’s using a phone to go online, and this started in about 2010 to 2015, when smartphones swept the world. This is when it started to be common to see people of all ages staring at their phones while walking. It’s when people started checking their phones first thing in the morning and the last time at night, and hundreds or thousands of other times. Social media apps are designed to be addictive, and many people succumb.

            Years ago, when riding the bus or train, most passengers would be talking with friends, staring out the window, or reading. Now most of them are on their phones. I’ve seen parents wheeling a baby in a pram while staring at their phone. Sometimes the baby has a phone too.

            Haidt argues that being online, on social media apps, can be bad for mental health. There are many reasons for this, including social comparison, cyberbullying, pornography and video game addiction. But not everyone is at the same risk. Youngsters, ages 10 to 15, whose brains are still developing, may be most vulnerable.

            “My central claim in this book is that these two trends — overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world — are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.” (p. 9)

            “We are misallocating our protective efforts. We should be giving children more of the practice they need in the real world and delaying their entry into the online world, where the benefits are fewer and the guardrails nearly nonexistent.” (p. 83)

What to do?

If widespread use of social media is harmful to young people, or at least some of them, what should be done? Haidt covers a range of possibilities, including government regulation, school policies and parents’ initiatives. Many of these are likely to be contentious.

            On the surface, the challenge seems impossibly large. Smartphones are widely used, including by ever younger children. Furthermore, when so many adults are addicted to their phones, modelling behaviour for their children, the task seems even more formidable.

            Haidt sees the challenge as a collective action problem. Individuals acting alone face enormous obstacles. When a young student doesn’t have a phone because their parents won’t allow it, and all the other students have one, the phoneless student becomes an outcast, and only the most psychologically strong can persist as a nonconformist. It’s far easier if a group of parents deny phones to their children, so they can form a phoneless friendship group. And easier still if the school bans phones entirely, as some have, with positive results, Haidt reports.

            Haidt presents four key reforms:

“1. No smartphones before high school
2. No social media before 16
3. Phone-free schools
4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence” (p. 290)

            Here I’m not going to try to assess these and other proposals presented by Haidt, many of them in collaboration with Lenore Skenazy, who deserves to have been listed as a co-author of several chapters. No doubt some will defend smartphone use and social media participation. The challenge for critics of Haidt’s proposals is to explain the many trends he reveals showing a sharp uptake in anxiety and depression among young people, especially girls. Here is one of the many graphs presented by Haidt.

            The Anxious Generation will succeed to the extent that it helps trigger a debate about young people’s mental health, and what can be done to improve it. Meanwhile, I would encourage parents and grandparents to read the book themselves. Yes, it’s a long book, but it is well written, often engaging. It might be worthwhile to obtain a print copy and spend the time to read and ponder it, all the while having a respite from staring at a screen. However, screen-lovers can turn to https://www.anxiousgeneration.com.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Richard Eckersley and Anita Johnson for useful comments.