Jonathan Haidt Blamed Tech for Teen Anxiety.
Managing the Blowback Has Become a Full-Time Job.
The bestselling author is calling on parents to take
away their children’s phones. He also is confronting allegations of junk
science.
Are Smartphones Driving Our Teens to Depression?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/opinion/smartphones-social-media-mental-health-teens.html
Overall, when you dig into the country-by-country data, many places seem to be registering increases in depression among teenagers, particularly among the countries of Western Europe and North America. But the trends are hard to disentangle from changes in diagnostic patterns and the medicalization of sadness, as Lucy Foulkes has argued, and the picture varies considerably from country to country. In Canada, for instance, surveys of teenagers’ well-being show a significant decline between 2015 and 2021, particularly among young women; in South Korea rates of depressive episodes among teenagers fell by 35 percent between 2006 and 2018.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/opinion/smartphones-social-media-mental-health-teens.html
Overall, when you dig into the country-by-country data, many places seem to be registering increases in depression among teenagers, particularly among the countries of Western Europe and North America. But the trends are hard to disentangle from changes in diagnostic patterns and the medicalization of sadness, as Lucy Foulkes has argued, and the picture varies considerably from country to country. In Canada, for instance, surveys of teenagers’ well-being show a significant decline between 2015 and 2021, particularly among young women; in South Korea rates of depressive episodes among teenagers fell by 35 percent between 2006 and 2018.
Teens see social media algorithms as accurate
reflections of themselves, study finds
Generation Anxiety: smartphones have created a gen
Z mental health crisis – but there are ways to fix it
Thus, the generation born after 1995 – gen Z – became
the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their
pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative
universe that was exciting, addictive and unstable. Succeeding socially in that
universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness to
managing what became their online brand, posting carefully curated photographs
and videos of their lives. This was now necessary to gain acceptance from
peers, the oxygen of adolescence, and to avoid online shaming, the nightmare of
adolescence. Gen Z teenagers got sucked into spending many hours of each day
scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances and distant
influencers. They watched increasing quantities of user-generated videos and
streamed entertainment, fed to them by algorithms that were designed to keep
them online as long as possible. They spent far less time playing with, talking
to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families,
thereby reducing their participation in social behaviour that is essential for
successful human development.
First He Came for Cancel Culture. Now He Wants to
Cancel Smartphones
The N.Y.U. professor Jonathan Haidt became a favorite
in Silicon Valley for his work on what he called the “coddling” of young
people. Now, he has an idea for fixing Gen Z.
This Is Our Chance to Pull Teenagers Out of the
Smartphone Trap
Meanwhile,
New numbers show falling
standards in American high schools
Low-achieving pupils may suffer the most.