Jonathan Haidt is a man with a mission. In his day job, he’s a professor of ethics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. But outside academia, he’s a compelling campaigner. His mission: to alert us to the harms that social media and modern parenting are doing to our children. And his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, pulls no punches. It is, said the New York Times, “erudite, engaging, combative, crusading”, which possibly explains why it has been on the newspaper’s nonfiction bestseller list for 14 weeks (it is now at No 2).
Haidt writes of a “tidal wave” of increases in mental illness and distress beginning around 2012. Young adolescent girls are hit hardest, but boys are in pain, too, as are older teens. He sees two factors that have caused this. The first is the decline of play-based childhood caused by overanxious parenting, which allows children fewer opportunities for unsupervised play and restricts their movement. This translates into low-risk childhoods in which kids don’t have the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. The second factor is the ubiquity of smartphones and the social media apps that thrive upon them. The result is the “great rewiring of childhood” of his book’s subtitle and an epidemic of mental illness and distress.
Haidt’s prescriptions for these ills include banning smartphones from schools, giving children more independence and suggesting that parents should learn from Alison Gopnik’s insightful vision that they should think of themselves as “gardeners” (interested in cultivation, growth and development) rather than “carpenters” (seeking to control, design and shape their children).
The book’s huge sales suggest that people have been paying attention, at least to the phone-control question. Schools are starting to ban smartphones, for example, and young toffs rolling up to Eton next term will be obliged to hand in their iPhone 15 Pros and make do with a crummy Nokia that can only do calls and texts. And where Eton goes, other posh establishments will surely follow. Not many American academics have that kind of impact.
But here’s the puzzle: Prof Haidt’s academic peers are deeply unconvinced by his evidence that social media are at the root of the epidemic of mental illness among teens. Reviewing his book in Nature, for example, Candice Odgers, a leading American expert on the relation of social media to teen mental health, wrote: “The book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental health crisis in young people.”
The complaints of Haidt’s critics fall into two categories. The first is that much of the research upon which he builds his case is methodologically deficient, in the sense that it doesn’t meet the standards of normal scientific research into causal factors. It isn’t proper science, in other words. The second criticism is that the phenomenon he describes may be what used to be called a first world problem – implying that adolescent girls from rich, individualistic and secular societies who are less tightly bound into local communities are accounting for much of the crisis. That critique seems to be supported by a study on the impact of Facebook adoption on the wellbeing of nearly a million individuals from 2008 to 2019 in 72 countries, which found “no evidence suggesting that the global penetration of social media is associated with widespread psychological harm”.
But these methodological quibbles are trivial given the magnitude of the problems posed by social media. After all, you don’t have to be a statistician to know that, say, Instagram is toxic for some – perhaps many – teenage girls. For instance, ever since Frances Haugen’s revelations, we have known that Facebook itself knew that 13% of British teenage girls said that their suicidal thoughts became more frequent after starting on Instagram. And the company’s own researchers found that 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. These findings might not meet the exacting standards of the best scientific research, but they tell you what you need to know – that a corporation that profits from exploiting young people in this way is the unacceptable face of digital capitalism.
So maybe what Haidt’s critics should remember is that, as some sage once observed, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
What I’ve been reading
Senior moment
Effects of Ageing is an entertaining blogpost by David Friedman on being nearly as old as Joe Biden.
Double jeopardy
Lawrence Freedman’s Substack article Israel’s Two Front War is a sobering analysis of the state’s looming problems by a distinguished scholar.
Repair service
How to Fix “AI’s Original Sin” is a perceptive and imaginative proposal by Tim O’Reilly on dealing with intellectual property in an AI-dominated world.
