By Michaela Gordoni
Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt once again sounds the alarm on tech.
At a recent development conference, he explained that in the same way trees grow around tombstones, Gen Z’s brains are shaping themselves around their phones.
In a way, their bodies are too.
Children are “growing hunched around their phone,” he said. He added screen overuse harms sleep and warps “eyeballs,” leading to myopia.
He referred to the time between 2010 and 2015, a time he calls the “great rewiring,” when Gen Z’s mental health collapsed. In that period, the rate of girls who committed self-harm “more than quintuples,” the social psychologist said. He credits this to the decline of play and the rise of screens.
“We have overprotected our children in the real world, and we have under-protected them online,” he described.
Related: This Country Urges Parents to Significantly Limit Their Kids’ Screen Time
Haidt argues that when children have mobile screens, they don’t flourish.
“Fifty years of progress ended in 2012,” Haidt said. The National Assessment of Education Progress stated there was a “broader erosion in the human capacity for mental focus and application,” which Haidt says is a “complete disaster for humanity.”
“We’re getting dumber exactly as our machines are getting smarter and taking over more areas of life,” he said. He quoted one of his students: “I open a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok.”
“If you’re spending five hours a day on social media, you’re not doing anything. Your life actually is meaningless,” he explained.
Haidt said boys and girls are hooked by different things. Girls’ pitfall is social media, while boys’ is porn and video games that continue to be made more and more addictive.
Haidt’s four-step solution is to delay smartphone use, prevent social media use before age 16, have phone-free schools and have more independence and play.
“Just as it would be strange to see a teenager drinking alcohol, we can collectively raise the age when kids are introduced to smartphones. We age-gate many, many products (alcohol, cigarettes, cars, pornography, guns),” Haidt wrote. “We need to age-gate smartphones and social media as well, because they are addictive technologies and because, in their current iterations, they offer far too many risks for kids (sextortion, drug sales, self-harm and eating-disorder-causing content).”
He says there is a “permanent echo of diminished potential,” but “it’s not too late for individuals if they make an effort and they make it collectively.”
Haidt explained on Instagram recently, “Social norms are held in place by participation — and any one person can buck a trend by being bold, original and a rebel.”
Let’s encourage our kids and ourselves to ditch our phones for real life.
Read Next: Screen Time is Creating an Anxious Generation, Studies Say
Questions or comments? Please write to us here.
– Content: +1Share:
– Content: +3