'Childhood has been rewired': Professor Jonathan Haidt on how smartphones are damaging ... - 0 views
www.spectator.co.uk/...ones-are-damaging-a-generation
social media smartphone kids suicide mental health psychology culture crisis policy
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Something strange is happening with teenagers’ mental health. In Britain, the US, Australia and beyond, the same trend can be seen: around the middle of the last decade, the number of young people with anxiety, depression and even suicidal tendancies started to rise sharpl
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He argues that the tools of social media are just too sharp for young minds. On digital platforms teens parade themselves, often to an audience of strangers, and this is leading to addiction, paranoia and despair
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For girls, the effect is especially acute. ‘What we’re seeing is a very sharp, sudden change in girls’ mental health all around the Anglosphere and the Nordic countries,’ he says. A big change was evident from 2013, when physical friendship groups started to be supplanted by smartphones and online chat. ‘But you cannot grow up in networks. You have to grow up in communities.’
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But if you’re a secular liberal girl, you’re probably more than twice as likely to have a mental health problem.’
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a University of Michigan survey into ‘self-derogation’ – i.e., how likely teenagers are to say they are ‘no good’ or ‘can’t do anything right’. Figures had been stable for years but started rising sharply ten years ago – except for among boys who identified as conservative and said that religion was important to them.
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irls simply use social media more. But Professor Haidt also thinks they are more likely to buy into what he calls the ‘three great untruths’ of social media
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boys who have religion in their lives seem to be less susceptible. ‘If you’re a kid who’s a religious conservative, on average, your mental health is not really much worse than it was ten years ago
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And finally, that society is one big battle between victims and oppressors. All this, he says, is the subtext to social media discourse.
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So we had playdates in childhood, up until around 2010.’ In Britain, he says, the number of children who went on real-life playdates then fell sharply.
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Social media is a bit of a misnomer, he says. It’s no longer about connecting people, but ‘performing on a platform’. Perhaps this is fine for grown-ups, but not for children, ‘where they can say things in public, including to strangers, and then be publicly shamed by potentially millions of people
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Children should not be on social networks. They should be playing in person. Social media platforms should never be accessed by children until they’re 18. It’s just insane that we let kids do these things.’
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if you get your news from social media (which many people do – in the UK, Instagram has overtaken all newspapers as a news source), this can change your view of the world, especially as the algorithms tend to promote the most provocative views.
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‘TikTok is probably the worst for their intellectual development. I think it literally reduces their ability to focus on anything while stuffing them with little bits of stuff that was selected by an algorithm for emotional arousal. Not for truth.’
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If asked to choose whether they side more with Israel or Hamas, ‘the great majority of Americans side with Israel, except for Gen Z, which is split 50-50’,
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‘There was a Twitter thread recently showing how if you look at what people are saying on TikTok, you can understand why
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TikTok and Twitter are incredibly dangerous for our democracy. I’d say they’re incompatible with the kind of liberal democracy that we’ve developed over the last few hundred years.’
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Might it just be the case, I ask, that there’s less of a stigma around mental health now, so teenagers are far more likely to admit that they have problems?
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why is it, then, that right around 2013 all these girls suddenly start checking into psychiatric inpatient units? Or suicide – they’re making many more suicide attempts. The level of self-harm goes up by 200 or 300 per cent, especially for the younger girls aged ten to 14
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we see very much the same curves, at the same time, for behaviour. Suicide, certainly, is not a self-report variable. This is real. This is the biggest mental health crisis in all of known history for kids.’
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he increased number of suicides since 2010 is so large that I suspect this is among the largest public health threats to children since the major diseases were wiped out
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What should parents do? They know that if they try to remove their teenager’s smartphone, their child will accuse them of destroying his or her social life. ‘That’s a perfect statement of what we call a collective action problem,’
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‘Any one person doing the right thing is in big trouble. But why do we ever let our kids on social media? It’s only down to the dynamic you just said.’ New norms are needed, he says. And his book will suggest four.
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In Britain, suicide rates started rising in 2014, up about 20 per cent for boys (to 420 a year) and 60 per cent for girls (to 160 a year).
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finally: more unsupervised play. ‘Both of our countries freaked out in the 1990s, locked up our kids because we lost trust in each other. We thought everyone was a child molester or a rapist.’ Children and teens could do with six or seven hours each day out of contact with their parents, he argues. Keeping them inside risks more harm than the outside world would pose.