One thing I haven’t seen you address head on that is inextricably linked to both smart phones and social media is pornography. The rate at which teens (and younger, sadly) are not only stumbling upon but fully engaging with pornography is alarming. I have no data to back up my gut feeling, but I feel sure that children consuming pornography absolutely has a dramatic impact on their psyche. Especially today’s pornography which is nothing like the magazines or VHS porn of a generation ago. I have seen general stats in other places, but I’d love to see this topic expanded. I’m positive it is one of the causes (internationally as well as in the U.S.). As a mother of three teens, I cannot thank you enough for your incredible work.
you are right. We address it in the book -- the anxious generation. We are still assessing the evidence. But you are right it is very different from what it was, and surely much more harmful, to boys and to girls.
Most of what is finding its way to television is pornographic in some way.
If adults can't or won't control what their children see on the family's television, they have no right to complain about the effects. I haven't seen a child allowed their own media access outside of parental monitoring that didn't have behavioral problems eventually.
Oct 24, 2023·edited Oct 24, 2023Liked by Jon Haidt
Yes — it's totally worth calling more attention to the role pornography plays in all of this. The problem is not just social media (though it certainly is social media). It's any algorithm that hijacks dopamine to keep kids and teens and grownups hooked on a site.
I'm not sure how he can expand on this of there's no data available. Seems like an unwise use of effort by Dr Haidt when social media and loss of independence already explain a lot of the issue.
I personally don’t have all the data, but it exists and I can’t think of a better avenue to explore (as in collect even more data) as we seek to understand the impact of smartphones on kids. Pornography is a true danger to kids and it is most often accessed through mobile devices (that data I do know). Very clear connections here.
This generation are having least sex in recently recorded statistics. I suspect it's rather boring formulaic porn videos to blame. 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘥......
I think it's very unlikely that pornography has much to do with the mental health issue at all, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, wide availability of and access to porn really took off in the late 90s and early 00s, and there was no associated worsening of mental health. Sure, many people access porn on their phones, but is viewing porn on a phone really any worse than viewing it on a PC?
Secondly, if we're talking about the direct effect of porn on mental health (as most people here seem to be), surely we should expect it to affect primarily boys? But the mental health crisis is worst in girls. And surely we would also expect the worst affected group to be at least pubescent? But the worst problems are in 10-12 year olds.
Thirdly, I struggle to believe that a significant number of people, of any age, are actually using porn for more than, say, an hour a day. That's dwarfed by social media usage.
Smartphones changed the landscape on porn in 2 distinct ways. First, through sexting--once teens could take pictures of themselves or others, there was more pressure on girls to look a certain way. There have also been more straightforward cases of teens committing suicide immediately after pictures of them leaked around to school. There were even (and probably still are) secret Snapchat and Instagram accounts/group chats created by students at specific schools.
2. Ubiquity of porn. With a computer, for the most part the people who look at porn are the people (mostly boys) who want to look at porn. It's in a fixed place, often with filters and publicly visible at school. With smartphones, it's so much easier for kids to gather around one kid's phone and look at it, or just send it to each other. A girl who's curious about porn might not look at it using a home or school computer for fear of being seen or discovered, but if she's alone in her room at night and someone sent it to her or she wants to know what the boys like to look at? Much more likely.
Time spent watching porn doesn't necessarily correlate with its effect. Just a few minutes watching is enough to shape a young person's mind.
I believe pornography has a even greater impact on the body than the psyche, especially for boys. I am a long-term practioner of Sexual Kung-Fu taught by Mantak Chia. The core excercise is to not ejaculate and therfore learn the difference between ejaculation and orgasm in men. Most men don't know that orgasm and ejeculation are seperate events, with orgasm coming first. As a result, men can become multi-orgasmic.
The other amazing side-effect of minimizing ejaculation is an abundance of energy. A very telling French term for male orgasm is "Le petit morte" - the little death. It drains men of significant amounts of energy.
That's why traditionally, many spiritual teachings, encouraged men to abstain from sex. Spiritual awakening experiences almost always require a high energy level in the body. By ejaculating frequently, this treshold energy level is much more difficult to reach. Over time, the original purpose of sexual abstinence gave way to more moral reasons. But sexual abstinence is not a moral quest, it supports a spiritual quest to have experiences beyond the body-mind. Those experiences will profoundly shape a young man's character and purpose in life for the better. Through them, they will realize that they are more than just a physical-mental entity and it can open them up to a more spiritual life with many benefits to themselves and society.
The easy access to pornography will no doubt result in frequent arousal and ejaculation of young men, avoiding the build up of sexual energy required not only for spiritual awakening events to happen spontaneously, but also avoiding the build up of love towards women in order to create meanigful sexual love relationships, long-term comittment to a partner and producing functioning families. Sex energy is the coarse form and building-block for love energy, especially in men.
The other down-side of watching pornography is more obvious: It creates a certain blue-print in the mind of sexual behaviour and how to relate and what to expect from a woman. This will make future intercourse - if they ever get that far - much more difficult because the man doesn't tune into the woman's needs, desires and in-the-moment interactions anymore. Instead, the young man is inclined to simply reproduce and execute what he saw and memorized onling in a disattached mechenical way. Disattached from his own body and the woman's body and totally attached to mind-sex unrealted to what is going on at the moment.
Another significant harm is done by increasing guilt and shame in young men addicted to pornography. Using guilt and shame to change behaviour will always backfire in my opinion. This is a psychological-emotional harm on top of the others.
Thank you for doing so much to highlight these twin evils. I’m glad that Profs Twenge and Gray can ally their important voices rather than devolve into fighting over the problem. Do you remember those Reese’s commercials from the 80s, with the girl eating peanut butter running into the guy eating chocolate? I think of the loss of free play and the rise of screens as the peanut butter and chocolate in the Reese's cup of madness that has become modern childhood.
One thing to keep an eye on in the battle for screen free schools is the alarming extent to which school curricula are now screen-based. I’ll be writing about this in more detail soon but the short version is that all the kids’ reading/assignments/homework are now done on their school provided tablets, all day long!
Yes exactly! I would love to put my kid (HS senior) on a screen “diet” but 90% of the schoolwork needs to be done on a computer. Even those few assignments they get on paper have to be photographed and turned in electronically through Canvas. It’s ridiculous.
I think there's a major piece you are missing in this, and there is research backing it up: The pendulum swing of making everything about "mental health" and "mental health awareness" for children. It's not just that we are teaching kids to be oversensitive in areas of safe spaces and micro aggressions to the point that we are teaching kids to do the opposite of good mental health and CBT principles (as so perfectly discussed in The Coddling of the American Mind) but by constantly talking about mental health, encouraging kids to ruminate on their feelings, pathologizing and giving diagnostic labels to normal and often temporary human experiences, and having unqualified school personnel and social media influencers talking about, "supporting," and raising "awareness" of mental health, we are creating mental health problems. See the following studies to support this piece to the puzzle. They are about structured school programs, but consider the effects of children and teens constantly swimming in this "mental health awareness," pathologizing of normal experiences, and therapy speak both in real life (school, friends, all the therapy they are receiving) and in online spaces (see all the Instagram and TikTok mental health accounts). Talk with people who work with kids and ask about this specifically. You will see how frequently they see this and how common this concern is.
This doesn't really address the cross cultural component though; the rise in therapy speak varies widely across language groups on terms of timing and extent, but adoption of phones and social media does not.
That's why I said "a piece" is missing. I don't think there is a single silver bullet answer that explains all of this for all teenagers across all countries. I think it's a complicated mixture of several things that all came together in varying degrees and in varying mixtures in different countries and within different individuals teenagers. It probably takes more of one thing in one country as opposed to more of a different thing in another country. But the United States is also not the only country that is experiencing this mental health awareness and over-pathologizing pendulum swing. I love the work that the Substack is doing on the subject, I just think there is a little too much focus on finding a single answer that accounts for everything (or almost everything)
I had a long conversation with a handsome young actor several months ago. He had decided he would never have children because of climate change and a host of other societal concerns. It made me realize how harmful and prevalent is the guilt many young people feel and what I believe is a misplaced sense of responsibility to the planet.
I have noticed my own challenges in dealing with my smart phone over the past several years. I am in my 60s, but have found the temptation of constantly scanning for tantalizing new bits of information almost impossible to overcome. I know the focus is often on the dangers of social media, but I think just as dangerous is the smart phone itself. It behaves like an information slot machine. The constant hits of addictive videos, and articles and podcasts are demoralizing over time. We are not spending time thinking without distraction. Just thinking. Not to mention spending time with other human beings. That alone affects mental health.
My thoughts exactly. I can see in my own behavior with my phone that they are just bad for people generally. I can get 'hooked' scrolling on FB. I kill time checking emails and feeds. My husband is much worse than me about constant scrolling, checking, etc. He is more impatient, unhappy, etc. As for climate change and other huge gnarly societal issues, we have 'raised awareness' to an unhealthy degree. We have all the guilt and none of the control over a solution, a very bad combo for a healthy mental outlook. I'm convinced we have ruined a generation of kids with these things, maybe two. I'm in my mid 60s and I look back at my 20s through 40s as an age of innocence before I knew we were ruining the climate, infested with racism we can't remediate, damaging members of a host of marginalized groups with micro aggressions and worse every second, and hopelessly evil oppressors/colonizers. In my ignorance, I thought we were just supposed to be kind people, raise our families, contrbiute to society, help lift others up, pay forward some good, and pay our taxes. And we wonder why our kids are suffering.
I think most would agree that exercise and physical activity are one of the best ways to maintain mental and physical health. Over the past 4 decades, the average weight of Americans has increased dramatically. Now, approximately 70% of the public is obese. You have writtten about play deprivation contributing to increased mental health problems in adolescents. The convenience that Smartphones create has the unintended consequence of promoting less physical activity, which fosters worsening physical and mental health. Have you looked at the relationship of decrease physical activity and increasing obesity rates as it relates to mental health problems?
Wonderful work! While I think phones and especially social media are noxious, and suspect that photos are the prime culprit for two mechanisms: our status-sensitive sociometers are uniquely triggered by visual cues to compare and fall short, and shared photos make us constantly aware of the hundred things we're missing out on, putting the "paradox of choice" on steroids.)
I also suspect that the rise in teen anxiety and depression is partly attributable to a cultural trend to lean into rather than resist or seek to overcome fragility. Growing up in the 80s I was routinely expected to do uncomfortable things: swim in a cold lake, give a two-minute talk in church, play a piano piece at a recital in front of 100 people, pickup and play whatever sport someone wanted us to try, go apologize when I hurt someone's feelings. We weren't fragile, we were weak. Things that are fragile should be left alone to avoid harm, but weakness can be overcome with exposure, practice, and exercise, eventually turning weakness into strength. More commonly, of course, for most activities no one pursued them long enough to become strong or attain any kind of mastery, but we experienced enough growth to know we weren't fragile at all, and could do hard things. There is currently an epidemic of people misidentifying weakness for fragility.
Missing alternative: Wokism. Imagine being a young, compassionate white person these days told by teachers and peers you are irrevocably racist, and that your family are oppressors and colonizers. That would have depressed me if I believed it.
Wokism is mostly an Anglosphere phenomenon, yet (as shown under the "school shooting" theory) the rise in teen depression is very international. This includes places like Russia, Hong Kong, and Chile.
Most of the teen depressions is in Anglosphere countries far as I have seen, but if you have data showing it is equal in the non-Anglosphere countries of the world (of which there are a great number), please share.
Yes and 50 years of a post-60s Culture of Narcissism reaching a kind of critical mass post-2010. All its adolescent delusions of 'freedom' coming home to roost (excuse mixed metaphor)
Not arguing with the smart phone thesis by the way.... just (like you) broadening the diagnosis.
Thank you for this thought-provoking post. Question: What about iPads? Many kids have those, especially younger kids. Is the word "smartphone" a catch-all label in the data for all devices, or is it really about having a phone?
Seems it would be any portable computer - tablet, smartphone or even laptop. But the smartphone is really universal and required equipment for teens - often required by parents, but for sure a social requirement these days. So I'd say mostly the phones are the problem, as this describes.
Although playing outside with friends is best, it's worth highlighting here that the negative impacts of screen time are way more intense with regards to social media than video games (as I believe Haidt highlighted on an earlier post?)
The move away from “real work” and “real socialization” to screen based formats has to be examined. I see an increase of dissociative behaviors (and diagnoses), interacting through keyboards and screens is not necessarily a superior way to communicate. It may be easier and more convenient, but it’s rare that you will find a student or teacher that prefers this method.
Writing, with a pen or pencil, consolidates memories in a way that a keyboard or touchscreen never can. Much of what is “learned” is never retained after the assignment or test is completed.
Much of the communication we do with each other is also text-based. Voice conversations carry emotions, in person communication has a wealth of non verbal components including eye contact, body language and soft skills that can never be matched in screen formats, it’s like trying to communicate through a barrier.
Smart devices and computers may be good for the economy and specific tech companies but why force children into computer based “learning”? I’ve seen increases in literacy, but decreases in social skills and independence. Reading is only beneficial if the content is accurate and conveys important information that will help a child develop. I’ve seen far too many classrooms where they youth were given assignments that were based on information that was purely subjective, inflammatory or demoralizing. Useful skills like finances, building, gardening and wood shop/machine shop, cooking and sewing, child development and home economics are all useful life skills that can bring value to employers too.
Youth need aspirational goals. Avoiding teen pregnancy is one goal, but how about introducing the idea of positive outcomes, like planning for a healthy and successful family by discussing how to make healthy life choices and financial plans. Instead of allowing unfettered access to mind-melting pornography, discuss how this content is both extreme and not representative of a healthy and normal sexual relationship.
The idea that this is unsolvable is ridiculous. These devices are not necessary, and shame on schools for requiring electronic systems for participating in the public school system.
Reintroduction of real goals, measurable progress and actual end results (a beautifully designed term paper with hand drawn illustrations, a article of clothing sewn in class, a wooden bookshelf, a harvest of vegetables, a pan of brownies); all of these things, however small, enhance self esteem and a sense of accomplishment.
As always, brilliant analysis. I'm so glad you and Jon Haidt are leading this charge. (I'm going to publish this to my notes, so for those getting caught up, this is a response to Haidt and Twenge on the various explanations of the mental health crisis, and why it is most clearly and obviously phones and social media.)
Three additional considerations:
1. You argue that the effect size of the marginal hour of social media is larger than others find, and I like your argument. I agree. But I'm concerned that those who are on the other side of the argument are missing this: social media isn't the disease, it's the vehicle for the disease. It's the grimy subway railing that you touch that has a thousand pathogens. Measuring the effect size of touching the railing for an additional marginal minute isn't measuring the right thing.
What are the pathogens? Political extremism, comparisons, really bad ideas about sexuality, reverse CBT, you name it--all the terrible ideas and models that we get from social media. Our kids are getting exposed to those things on social media. (Lots of time scrolling ain't good either, but they are two different effects.)
This is complicated by the fact that my kids have neither phones nor social media, and yet my four year old knows who huggy wuggy is--from friends who have just such access. The pathogens are spreading, even to kids who don't have access to phones and social media.
We need to be careful about assuming that marginal consumption will measure social media's effects, but I'm also pointing to another implication: I want social media companies to feel some remorse for not having disinfected the railings. That's a longer-term issue, but I see the root cause of some of our most recent political polarization here--and plenty of other problems. At some point we will have to either eliminate--or learn to live well with--social media. If the latter, I'd really like to see a movement toward improving both the supply and demand sides of social media consumption.
2. I suspect that some of the impact on mental health is due to social contagion. It's not really a *different* category from the ones above, but is probably subsumed within it: we are seeing a wild uptick in mental illness *models* and people are mimicking them. And the data here is probably easy to observe too. My bet? We're probably seeing a huge increase in ADHD, ASD, Anxiety and Depression, and none in narcissism. We are not seeing increased rates of diagnosis for schizophrenia. I don't have that data, but it strikes me as relatively easy to find. My hunch is a strong one.
3. There's an underlying effect to all of these that concerns me: a turn away from risk-taking, structure, and authoritative parenting generally. I think the problem of social media has both caused and been caused by this change. When I asked a religious freedom expert why people were leaving religion, he said "they aren't. They're turning away from authority generally. Religion is just one example." I've been troubled and fascinated ever since. I agree with him. Some of what we are seeing is parents who are unwilling to tell their kids "no" when it comes to social media and phones.
What is causing this deeper cultural shift? I don't know. It's something I'm working on. But I think it's fair to say that compassion, empathy, and kindness are viewed as good, whereas authority, reproof, and strictness are viewed as bad. I'm concerned about how that will collide with parenting decisions on social media--and have my own reasons for wanting to pursue it further.
Thank you for the analysis, Jean and Jon-- very thorough and thought-provoking. As a candidate for complementary explanation #14, how about parental pressure and escalating perfectionism? Perfectionism has increased over time, predicted in part by rising perceptions of excessive expectations and harsh criticism from parents (Curran & Hill, 2019, 2022, Psych Bulletin). Perfectionism, in turn, predicts a host of mental health challenges (Limburg, Watson, Hagger, & Egan, 2017, J Clinical Psych). This wouldn't fully explain the spike since 2011, of course. But do you think it's a contributing factor, either directly or as an amplifier of smartphone effects?
Hi Adam, yes! I believe perfectionism is an important part of the story, for girls only. I have a section on this in ch. 6 of The Anxious Generation:
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Girls are especially vulnerable to harm from constant social comparison because they suffer from higher rates of one kind of perfectionism: socially prescribed perfectionism, where a person feels that they must live up to very high expectations prescribed by others, or by society at large. (There’s no gender difference on self-oriented perfectionism, where you torture yourself for failure to live up to your own very high standards.) Socially prescribed perfectionism is closely related to anxiety; people who suffer from anxiety are more prone to it. Being a perfectionist also increases your anxiety because you fear the shame of public failure from everything you do. And, as you’d expect by this point in the story, socially prescribed perfectionism began rising, across the Anglosphere nations, in the early 2010s.
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I would just add that we'd have to explain why perfectionism rose in tandem for girls in so many countries at the same time. Not surprisingly, my answer is: because they all moved onto smartphones and Instagram at around the same time. Thanks for bringing perfectionism into this conversation.
Great post! I do think there’s an obvious and significant contribution to teen/young adult social outcomes from mobile phone technology (i.e. digitally mediated socialization), and the general minimization of this set of alternative arguments seems reasonable. Nonetheless, there are other arguments not considered here: intersexual dynamics, intrasexual dynamics, obesity, sports participation, and a broader consideration of technological effects. Additionally, there is a lot complexity here that I’m not sure just pointing at the phone itself will solve (especially because I don’t think anyone will be convinced to give them up). The relevant causal relationships don’t just all flow in the same direction down from phones either. Even if phone tech is the x-factor here, there are going to be feedback loops and the meandering paths of indirect effects that have to be causally sketched if reasonable interventions can be found.
"Additionally, there is a lot complexity here that I’m not sure just pointing at the phone itself will solve (especially because I don’t think anyone will be convinced to give them up)."
This substack has fully convinced me to do whatever I can to keep smart phones out of my kids' hands until they're adults. Additionally, I would vote for local, state, and federal candidates who promised to write legislation to protect kids from these effects. Only by sounding the alarm can others slowly wake up to the problem, and I think these authors have done a great job in these and other posts making it very clear that smart phones and social media are a GIANT contributing factor, regardless of how many other ideas we can drum up to partially explain the depression, anxiety, etc.
I think it is certainly feasible to delay the age at which children actually own a smartphone and have regular access to social media/etc. It's a parenting goal of mine. However, it is nearly impossible to guarantee no exposure as some number of their peers will have access and will share, and it warps the socialization landscape indirectly (even without exposure). For instance, even among millennials who largely adapted to these technologies in their mid or usually late teens (count myself in this group - got a smartphone at 18 I think though the full-blown app world didn't materialize until a bit later), it can get you labelled as pretty odd to strike up conversation with strangers in social/dating settings. Twenge's data show too that Millennials grew up fairly happy but have struggled in young adulthood (despite material prosperity comparable or better than prior generations).
I really appreciate Jean’s research and yours. As a parent of younger children, The Coddling of the American Mind has directed our emphasis on more of a free range childhood, and feels like the first of two major parenting decisions we hope will help their mental health (the second being to delay smartphones/social media). Our oldest recently took the public bus home from Jr high for the first time and asked to take a phone for the journey. My response: “A phone won’t help you--looking out the window and asking questions will.” Thank you for the confidence to parent a little differently.
The most uncomfortable fact for the social media hypothesis is that, aside from the Anglosphere, suicides among young people in other countries have been stable or even declining, even though they all have smart phones. Perhaps there is some way to resolve this, but this seems like a significant piece of counterevidence that should be acknowledged more openly.
Perhaps, but the depression statistics are in line; we would need to see the methods of suicide historically used by country and whether those have been harder to get (such as making it harder to buy large doses of pills, which has definitely become more difficult in the UK with things like paracetamol being limited to two packets at a time most places).
Good thought. But if depression and anxiety are rising in a similar way (as Twenge and others have shown) and yet completed suicides are not, one would look to differences in environmental conditions that lead depressed people to commit suicide. In the U.S. at least, guns are cheap and prevalent. Prescription drugs (poison) are easy to come by. Those are the leading methods to complete suicide for boys and girl, respectively.
That should just cause the overall suicide rates to be lower. If the social media hypothesis were true, I would expect the *trends* (e.g. relative percent change since 2010) to be vaguely similar across countries.
As a school psychologist, I have been ranting about the correlation between social media/devices and many of the problems with our children for at least 8 years. It is impossible to go back in time, but we should start with banning personal devices in all schools and limiting use of technology in elementary/middle schools. Other settings where children are in groups (summer camps, sports activities, etc.) should also be technology free. People will be outraged, just like when cigarettes were banned in schools, but it would be a start.
Aren’t there studies showing that religious people tend to have lower rates of depression?
To have it drilled in your mind that religious folks are absolutely wrong to believe in more than this life (that there is nothing besides earthly lives and that everything that happens to you, good or bad, throughout history will ultimately not matter a bit) must take its toll. As a Christian, life is hard enough sometimes. I can’t imagine not having any ounce of hope that there will one day be an end to the suffering and trauma of this world, an end to wickedness, an end to my own weaknesses and all the ways that our collective bent toward selfishness harms ourselves and others… I can’t imagine having no hope that Jesus will return to make all things new and redeem every last cell in existence, that there will be justice for those who have been abused in unthinkable ways, etc.
I think having no hope and being told it’s only cool and acceptable to not believe in those “backwards”/“ancient” ideas is surely another factor. Believing that God loves me and loves every other human being on the planet is what anchors me, fills me with purpose, and keeps me going in tough seasons.
I know that the “enlightened” perspective for the modern age is that religious beliefs are ignorant or at least naive, but among the wide variety of friends and acquaintances I have known in my life (from alllll different cultures and countries, religious and nonreligious), my more traditional Christian friends are by far the most joyful, humble, selfless, thankful, content.
Personally, I think we shouldn’t be surprised when after continually telling young people that there is no hope for anything more than this life for them they act and think like that’s true.
One thing I haven’t seen you address head on that is inextricably linked to both smart phones and social media is pornography. The rate at which teens (and younger, sadly) are not only stumbling upon but fully engaging with pornography is alarming. I have no data to back up my gut feeling, but I feel sure that children consuming pornography absolutely has a dramatic impact on their psyche. Especially today’s pornography which is nothing like the magazines or VHS porn of a generation ago. I have seen general stats in other places, but I’d love to see this topic expanded. I’m positive it is one of the causes (internationally as well as in the U.S.). As a mother of three teens, I cannot thank you enough for your incredible work.
you are right. We address it in the book -- the anxious generation. We are still assessing the evidence. But you are right it is very different from what it was, and surely much more harmful, to boys and to girls.
Most of what is finding its way to television is pornographic in some way.
If adults can't or won't control what their children see on the family's television, they have no right to complain about the effects. I haven't seen a child allowed their own media access outside of parental monitoring that didn't have behavioral problems eventually.
Yes — it's totally worth calling more attention to the role pornography plays in all of this. The problem is not just social media (though it certainly is social media). It's any algorithm that hijacks dopamine to keep kids and teens and grownups hooked on a site.
I'm not sure how he can expand on this of there's no data available. Seems like an unwise use of effort by Dr Haidt when social media and loss of independence already explain a lot of the issue.
I personally don’t have all the data, but it exists and I can’t think of a better avenue to explore (as in collect even more data) as we seek to understand the impact of smartphones on kids. Pornography is a true danger to kids and it is most often accessed through mobile devices (that data I do know). Very clear connections here.
I think pornography is having a huge, negative impact on youth. For a thousand reasons.
This generation are having least sex in recently recorded statistics. I suspect it's rather boring formulaic porn videos to blame. 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘥......
I think it's very unlikely that pornography has much to do with the mental health issue at all, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, wide availability of and access to porn really took off in the late 90s and early 00s, and there was no associated worsening of mental health. Sure, many people access porn on their phones, but is viewing porn on a phone really any worse than viewing it on a PC?
Secondly, if we're talking about the direct effect of porn on mental health (as most people here seem to be), surely we should expect it to affect primarily boys? But the mental health crisis is worst in girls. And surely we would also expect the worst affected group to be at least pubescent? But the worst problems are in 10-12 year olds.
Thirdly, I struggle to believe that a significant number of people, of any age, are actually using porn for more than, say, an hour a day. That's dwarfed by social media usage.
Smartphones changed the landscape on porn in 2 distinct ways. First, through sexting--once teens could take pictures of themselves or others, there was more pressure on girls to look a certain way. There have also been more straightforward cases of teens committing suicide immediately after pictures of them leaked around to school. There were even (and probably still are) secret Snapchat and Instagram accounts/group chats created by students at specific schools.
2. Ubiquity of porn. With a computer, for the most part the people who look at porn are the people (mostly boys) who want to look at porn. It's in a fixed place, often with filters and publicly visible at school. With smartphones, it's so much easier for kids to gather around one kid's phone and look at it, or just send it to each other. A girl who's curious about porn might not look at it using a home or school computer for fear of being seen or discovered, but if she's alone in her room at night and someone sent it to her or she wants to know what the boys like to look at? Much more likely.
Time spent watching porn doesn't necessarily correlate with its effect. Just a few minutes watching is enough to shape a young person's mind.
I believe pornography has a even greater impact on the body than the psyche, especially for boys. I am a long-term practioner of Sexual Kung-Fu taught by Mantak Chia. The core excercise is to not ejaculate and therfore learn the difference between ejaculation and orgasm in men. Most men don't know that orgasm and ejeculation are seperate events, with orgasm coming first. As a result, men can become multi-orgasmic.
The other amazing side-effect of minimizing ejaculation is an abundance of energy. A very telling French term for male orgasm is "Le petit morte" - the little death. It drains men of significant amounts of energy.
That's why traditionally, many spiritual teachings, encouraged men to abstain from sex. Spiritual awakening experiences almost always require a high energy level in the body. By ejaculating frequently, this treshold energy level is much more difficult to reach. Over time, the original purpose of sexual abstinence gave way to more moral reasons. But sexual abstinence is not a moral quest, it supports a spiritual quest to have experiences beyond the body-mind. Those experiences will profoundly shape a young man's character and purpose in life for the better. Through them, they will realize that they are more than just a physical-mental entity and it can open them up to a more spiritual life with many benefits to themselves and society.
The easy access to pornography will no doubt result in frequent arousal and ejaculation of young men, avoiding the build up of sexual energy required not only for spiritual awakening events to happen spontaneously, but also avoiding the build up of love towards women in order to create meanigful sexual love relationships, long-term comittment to a partner and producing functioning families. Sex energy is the coarse form and building-block for love energy, especially in men.
The other down-side of watching pornography is more obvious: It creates a certain blue-print in the mind of sexual behaviour and how to relate and what to expect from a woman. This will make future intercourse - if they ever get that far - much more difficult because the man doesn't tune into the woman's needs, desires and in-the-moment interactions anymore. Instead, the young man is inclined to simply reproduce and execute what he saw and memorized onling in a disattached mechenical way. Disattached from his own body and the woman's body and totally attached to mind-sex unrealted to what is going on at the moment.
Another significant harm is done by increasing guilt and shame in young men addicted to pornography. Using guilt and shame to change behaviour will always backfire in my opinion. This is a psychological-emotional harm on top of the others.
We have to allow the disturbing thought that the easy wide-spread free access to pronography was deliberatley created as part of the "cognitive warfare" over our minds and hearts and is not solely due to commercial interests. (https://markusmutscheller.substack.com/p/how-to-defend-against-cognitive-warfare}
Pronography not only causes a moral and physical degradation of a whole generation of young men, but also a spiritual one.
YES
Thank you for doing so much to highlight these twin evils. I’m glad that Profs Twenge and Gray can ally their important voices rather than devolve into fighting over the problem. Do you remember those Reese’s commercials from the 80s, with the girl eating peanut butter running into the guy eating chocolate? I think of the loss of free play and the rise of screens as the peanut butter and chocolate in the Reese's cup of madness that has become modern childhood.
One thing to keep an eye on in the battle for screen free schools is the alarming extent to which school curricula are now screen-based. I’ll be writing about this in more detail soon but the short version is that all the kids’ reading/assignments/homework are now done on their school provided tablets, all day long!
Yes exactly! I would love to put my kid (HS senior) on a screen “diet” but 90% of the schoolwork needs to be done on a computer. Even those few assignments they get on paper have to be photographed and turned in electronically through Canvas. It’s ridiculous.
As promised, more on how school time is now synonymous with screen time:
https://gaty.substack.com/p/school-time-has-become-screen-time
I think there's a major piece you are missing in this, and there is research backing it up: The pendulum swing of making everything about "mental health" and "mental health awareness" for children. It's not just that we are teaching kids to be oversensitive in areas of safe spaces and micro aggressions to the point that we are teaching kids to do the opposite of good mental health and CBT principles (as so perfectly discussed in The Coddling of the American Mind) but by constantly talking about mental health, encouraging kids to ruminate on their feelings, pathologizing and giving diagnostic labels to normal and often temporary human experiences, and having unqualified school personnel and social media influencers talking about, "supporting," and raising "awareness" of mental health, we are creating mental health problems. See the following studies to support this piece to the puzzle. They are about structured school programs, but consider the effects of children and teens constantly swimming in this "mental health awareness," pathologizing of normal experiences, and therapy speak both in real life (school, friends, all the therapy they are receiving) and in online spaces (see all the Instagram and TikTok mental health accounts). Talk with people who work with kids and ask about this specifically. You will see how frequently they see this and how common this concern is.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/abs/evaluating-the-effectiveness-of-a-universal-ehealth-schoolbased-prevention-programme-for-depression-and-anxiety-and-the-moderating-role-of-friendship-network-characteristics/745721E4F8E63892095BB0551F267F7F
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s13034-017-0164-5.pdf
https://twitter.com/DrJackAndrews/status/1548925718746189824
This doesn't really address the cross cultural component though; the rise in therapy speak varies widely across language groups on terms of timing and extent, but adoption of phones and social media does not.
That's why I said "a piece" is missing. I don't think there is a single silver bullet answer that explains all of this for all teenagers across all countries. I think it's a complicated mixture of several things that all came together in varying degrees and in varying mixtures in different countries and within different individuals teenagers. It probably takes more of one thing in one country as opposed to more of a different thing in another country. But the United States is also not the only country that is experiencing this mental health awareness and over-pathologizing pendulum swing. I love the work that the Substack is doing on the subject, I just think there is a little too much focus on finding a single answer that accounts for everything (or almost everything)
This is a great point and it has been addressed in the new book “Bad Therapy” by Abigail Shrier.
https://www.thetruthfairy.info/p/please-meet-bad-therapy-why-the-kids
I had a long conversation with a handsome young actor several months ago. He had decided he would never have children because of climate change and a host of other societal concerns. It made me realize how harmful and prevalent is the guilt many young people feel and what I believe is a misplaced sense of responsibility to the planet.
I have noticed my own challenges in dealing with my smart phone over the past several years. I am in my 60s, but have found the temptation of constantly scanning for tantalizing new bits of information almost impossible to overcome. I know the focus is often on the dangers of social media, but I think just as dangerous is the smart phone itself. It behaves like an information slot machine. The constant hits of addictive videos, and articles and podcasts are demoralizing over time. We are not spending time thinking without distraction. Just thinking. Not to mention spending time with other human beings. That alone affects mental health.
My thoughts exactly. I can see in my own behavior with my phone that they are just bad for people generally. I can get 'hooked' scrolling on FB. I kill time checking emails and feeds. My husband is much worse than me about constant scrolling, checking, etc. He is more impatient, unhappy, etc. As for climate change and other huge gnarly societal issues, we have 'raised awareness' to an unhealthy degree. We have all the guilt and none of the control over a solution, a very bad combo for a healthy mental outlook. I'm convinced we have ruined a generation of kids with these things, maybe two. I'm in my mid 60s and I look back at my 20s through 40s as an age of innocence before I knew we were ruining the climate, infested with racism we can't remediate, damaging members of a host of marginalized groups with micro aggressions and worse every second, and hopelessly evil oppressors/colonizers. In my ignorance, I thought we were just supposed to be kind people, raise our families, contrbiute to society, help lift others up, pay forward some good, and pay our taxes. And we wonder why our kids are suffering.
Well said!! All of the guilt and none of the control. Powerlessness invites despair!
I think most would agree that exercise and physical activity are one of the best ways to maintain mental and physical health. Over the past 4 decades, the average weight of Americans has increased dramatically. Now, approximately 70% of the public is obese. You have writtten about play deprivation contributing to increased mental health problems in adolescents. The convenience that Smartphones create has the unintended consequence of promoting less physical activity, which fosters worsening physical and mental health. Have you looked at the relationship of decrease physical activity and increasing obesity rates as it relates to mental health problems?
Wonderful work! While I think phones and especially social media are noxious, and suspect that photos are the prime culprit for two mechanisms: our status-sensitive sociometers are uniquely triggered by visual cues to compare and fall short, and shared photos make us constantly aware of the hundred things we're missing out on, putting the "paradox of choice" on steroids.)
I also suspect that the rise in teen anxiety and depression is partly attributable to a cultural trend to lean into rather than resist or seek to overcome fragility. Growing up in the 80s I was routinely expected to do uncomfortable things: swim in a cold lake, give a two-minute talk in church, play a piano piece at a recital in front of 100 people, pickup and play whatever sport someone wanted us to try, go apologize when I hurt someone's feelings. We weren't fragile, we were weak. Things that are fragile should be left alone to avoid harm, but weakness can be overcome with exposure, practice, and exercise, eventually turning weakness into strength. More commonly, of course, for most activities no one pursued them long enough to become strong or attain any kind of mastery, but we experienced enough growth to know we weren't fragile at all, and could do hard things. There is currently an epidemic of people misidentifying weakness for fragility.
Missing alternative: Wokism. Imagine being a young, compassionate white person these days told by teachers and peers you are irrevocably racist, and that your family are oppressors and colonizers. That would have depressed me if I believed it.
Wokism is mostly an Anglosphere phenomenon, yet (as shown under the "school shooting" theory) the rise in teen depression is very international. This includes places like Russia, Hong Kong, and Chile.
Most of the teen depressions is in Anglosphere countries far as I have seen, but if you have data showing it is equal in the non-Anglosphere countries of the world (of which there are a great number), please share.
The data is already in this Substack article, where the authors dismiss the "school shooting" theory. As such, see the links under "Alternative #7".
EDIT: Or, see link here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140197121000853
Yes and 50 years of a post-60s Culture of Narcissism reaching a kind of critical mass post-2010. All its adolescent delusions of 'freedom' coming home to roost (excuse mixed metaphor)
Not arguing with the smart phone thesis by the way.... just (like you) broadening the diagnosis.
Thank you for this thought-provoking post. Question: What about iPads? Many kids have those, especially younger kids. Is the word "smartphone" a catch-all label in the data for all devices, or is it really about having a phone?
Seems it would be any portable computer - tablet, smartphone or even laptop. But the smartphone is really universal and required equipment for teens - often required by parents, but for sure a social requirement these days. So I'd say mostly the phones are the problem, as this describes.
Although playing outside with friends is best, it's worth highlighting here that the negative impacts of screen time are way more intense with regards to social media than video games (as I believe Haidt highlighted on an earlier post?)
The move away from “real work” and “real socialization” to screen based formats has to be examined. I see an increase of dissociative behaviors (and diagnoses), interacting through keyboards and screens is not necessarily a superior way to communicate. It may be easier and more convenient, but it’s rare that you will find a student or teacher that prefers this method.
Writing, with a pen or pencil, consolidates memories in a way that a keyboard or touchscreen never can. Much of what is “learned” is never retained after the assignment or test is completed.
Much of the communication we do with each other is also text-based. Voice conversations carry emotions, in person communication has a wealth of non verbal components including eye contact, body language and soft skills that can never be matched in screen formats, it’s like trying to communicate through a barrier.
Smart devices and computers may be good for the economy and specific tech companies but why force children into computer based “learning”? I’ve seen increases in literacy, but decreases in social skills and independence. Reading is only beneficial if the content is accurate and conveys important information that will help a child develop. I’ve seen far too many classrooms where they youth were given assignments that were based on information that was purely subjective, inflammatory or demoralizing. Useful skills like finances, building, gardening and wood shop/machine shop, cooking and sewing, child development and home economics are all useful life skills that can bring value to employers too.
Youth need aspirational goals. Avoiding teen pregnancy is one goal, but how about introducing the idea of positive outcomes, like planning for a healthy and successful family by discussing how to make healthy life choices and financial plans. Instead of allowing unfettered access to mind-melting pornography, discuss how this content is both extreme and not representative of a healthy and normal sexual relationship.
The idea that this is unsolvable is ridiculous. These devices are not necessary, and shame on schools for requiring electronic systems for participating in the public school system.
Reintroduction of real goals, measurable progress and actual end results (a beautifully designed term paper with hand drawn illustrations, a article of clothing sewn in class, a wooden bookshelf, a harvest of vegetables, a pan of brownies); all of these things, however small, enhance self esteem and a sense of accomplishment.
As always, brilliant analysis. I'm so glad you and Jon Haidt are leading this charge. (I'm going to publish this to my notes, so for those getting caught up, this is a response to Haidt and Twenge on the various explanations of the mental health crisis, and why it is most clearly and obviously phones and social media.)
Three additional considerations:
1. You argue that the effect size of the marginal hour of social media is larger than others find, and I like your argument. I agree. But I'm concerned that those who are on the other side of the argument are missing this: social media isn't the disease, it's the vehicle for the disease. It's the grimy subway railing that you touch that has a thousand pathogens. Measuring the effect size of touching the railing for an additional marginal minute isn't measuring the right thing.
What are the pathogens? Political extremism, comparisons, really bad ideas about sexuality, reverse CBT, you name it--all the terrible ideas and models that we get from social media. Our kids are getting exposed to those things on social media. (Lots of time scrolling ain't good either, but they are two different effects.)
This is complicated by the fact that my kids have neither phones nor social media, and yet my four year old knows who huggy wuggy is--from friends who have just such access. The pathogens are spreading, even to kids who don't have access to phones and social media.
We need to be careful about assuming that marginal consumption will measure social media's effects, but I'm also pointing to another implication: I want social media companies to feel some remorse for not having disinfected the railings. That's a longer-term issue, but I see the root cause of some of our most recent political polarization here--and plenty of other problems. At some point we will have to either eliminate--or learn to live well with--social media. If the latter, I'd really like to see a movement toward improving both the supply and demand sides of social media consumption.
2. I suspect that some of the impact on mental health is due to social contagion. It's not really a *different* category from the ones above, but is probably subsumed within it: we are seeing a wild uptick in mental illness *models* and people are mimicking them. And the data here is probably easy to observe too. My bet? We're probably seeing a huge increase in ADHD, ASD, Anxiety and Depression, and none in narcissism. We are not seeing increased rates of diagnosis for schizophrenia. I don't have that data, but it strikes me as relatively easy to find. My hunch is a strong one.
3. There's an underlying effect to all of these that concerns me: a turn away from risk-taking, structure, and authoritative parenting generally. I think the problem of social media has both caused and been caused by this change. When I asked a religious freedom expert why people were leaving religion, he said "they aren't. They're turning away from authority generally. Religion is just one example." I've been troubled and fascinated ever since. I agree with him. Some of what we are seeing is parents who are unwilling to tell their kids "no" when it comes to social media and phones.
What is causing this deeper cultural shift? I don't know. It's something I'm working on. But I think it's fair to say that compassion, empathy, and kindness are viewed as good, whereas authority, reproof, and strictness are viewed as bad. I'm concerned about how that will collide with parenting decisions on social media--and have my own reasons for wanting to pursue it further.
Thank you for the analysis, Jean and Jon-- very thorough and thought-provoking. As a candidate for complementary explanation #14, how about parental pressure and escalating perfectionism? Perfectionism has increased over time, predicted in part by rising perceptions of excessive expectations and harsh criticism from parents (Curran & Hill, 2019, 2022, Psych Bulletin). Perfectionism, in turn, predicts a host of mental health challenges (Limburg, Watson, Hagger, & Egan, 2017, J Clinical Psych). This wouldn't fully explain the spike since 2011, of course. But do you think it's a contributing factor, either directly or as an amplifier of smartphone effects?
Hi Adam, yes! I believe perfectionism is an important part of the story, for girls only. I have a section on this in ch. 6 of The Anxious Generation:
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Girls are especially vulnerable to harm from constant social comparison because they suffer from higher rates of one kind of perfectionism: socially prescribed perfectionism, where a person feels that they must live up to very high expectations prescribed by others, or by society at large. (There’s no gender difference on self-oriented perfectionism, where you torture yourself for failure to live up to your own very high standards.) Socially prescribed perfectionism is closely related to anxiety; people who suffer from anxiety are more prone to it. Being a perfectionist also increases your anxiety because you fear the shame of public failure from everything you do. And, as you’d expect by this point in the story, socially prescribed perfectionism began rising, across the Anglosphere nations, in the early 2010s.
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I would just add that we'd have to explain why perfectionism rose in tandem for girls in so many countries at the same time. Not surprisingly, my answer is: because they all moved onto smartphones and Instagram at around the same time. Thanks for bringing perfectionism into this conversation.
Great post! I do think there’s an obvious and significant contribution to teen/young adult social outcomes from mobile phone technology (i.e. digitally mediated socialization), and the general minimization of this set of alternative arguments seems reasonable. Nonetheless, there are other arguments not considered here: intersexual dynamics, intrasexual dynamics, obesity, sports participation, and a broader consideration of technological effects. Additionally, there is a lot complexity here that I’m not sure just pointing at the phone itself will solve (especially because I don’t think anyone will be convinced to give them up). The relevant causal relationships don’t just all flow in the same direction down from phones either. Even if phone tech is the x-factor here, there are going to be feedback loops and the meandering paths of indirect effects that have to be causally sketched if reasonable interventions can be found.
"Additionally, there is a lot complexity here that I’m not sure just pointing at the phone itself will solve (especially because I don’t think anyone will be convinced to give them up)."
This substack has fully convinced me to do whatever I can to keep smart phones out of my kids' hands until they're adults. Additionally, I would vote for local, state, and federal candidates who promised to write legislation to protect kids from these effects. Only by sounding the alarm can others slowly wake up to the problem, and I think these authors have done a great job in these and other posts making it very clear that smart phones and social media are a GIANT contributing factor, regardless of how many other ideas we can drum up to partially explain the depression, anxiety, etc.
I think it is certainly feasible to delay the age at which children actually own a smartphone and have regular access to social media/etc. It's a parenting goal of mine. However, it is nearly impossible to guarantee no exposure as some number of their peers will have access and will share, and it warps the socialization landscape indirectly (even without exposure). For instance, even among millennials who largely adapted to these technologies in their mid or usually late teens (count myself in this group - got a smartphone at 18 I think though the full-blown app world didn't materialize until a bit later), it can get you labelled as pretty odd to strike up conversation with strangers in social/dating settings. Twenge's data show too that Millennials grew up fairly happy but have struggled in young adulthood (despite material prosperity comparable or better than prior generations).
I really appreciate Jean’s research and yours. As a parent of younger children, The Coddling of the American Mind has directed our emphasis on more of a free range childhood, and feels like the first of two major parenting decisions we hope will help their mental health (the second being to delay smartphones/social media). Our oldest recently took the public bus home from Jr high for the first time and asked to take a phone for the journey. My response: “A phone won’t help you--looking out the window and asking questions will.” Thank you for the confidence to parent a little differently.
The most uncomfortable fact for the social media hypothesis is that, aside from the Anglosphere, suicides among young people in other countries have been stable or even declining, even though they all have smart phones. Perhaps there is some way to resolve this, but this seems like a significant piece of counterevidence that should be acknowledged more openly.
https://twitter.com/tednotlasso/status/1700174121743925477
I am wondering if you had any response to it?
Perhaps, but the depression statistics are in line; we would need to see the methods of suicide historically used by country and whether those have been harder to get (such as making it harder to buy large doses of pills, which has definitely become more difficult in the UK with things like paracetamol being limited to two packets at a time most places).
Good thought. But if depression and anxiety are rising in a similar way (as Twenge and others have shown) and yet completed suicides are not, one would look to differences in environmental conditions that lead depressed people to commit suicide. In the U.S. at least, guns are cheap and prevalent. Prescription drugs (poison) are easy to come by. Those are the leading methods to complete suicide for boys and girl, respectively.
That should just cause the overall suicide rates to be lower. If the social media hypothesis were true, I would expect the *trends* (e.g. relative percent change since 2010) to be vaguely similar across countries.
Ok, I’m convinced... now what do we do about it?
As a school psychologist, I have been ranting about the correlation between social media/devices and many of the problems with our children for at least 8 years. It is impossible to go back in time, but we should start with banning personal devices in all schools and limiting use of technology in elementary/middle schools. Other settings where children are in groups (summer camps, sports activities, etc.) should also be technology free. People will be outraged, just like when cigarettes were banned in schools, but it would be a start.
Aren’t there studies showing that religious people tend to have lower rates of depression?
To have it drilled in your mind that religious folks are absolutely wrong to believe in more than this life (that there is nothing besides earthly lives and that everything that happens to you, good or bad, throughout history will ultimately not matter a bit) must take its toll. As a Christian, life is hard enough sometimes. I can’t imagine not having any ounce of hope that there will one day be an end to the suffering and trauma of this world, an end to wickedness, an end to my own weaknesses and all the ways that our collective bent toward selfishness harms ourselves and others… I can’t imagine having no hope that Jesus will return to make all things new and redeem every last cell in existence, that there will be justice for those who have been abused in unthinkable ways, etc.
I think having no hope and being told it’s only cool and acceptable to not believe in those “backwards”/“ancient” ideas is surely another factor. Believing that God loves me and loves every other human being on the planet is what anchors me, fills me with purpose, and keeps me going in tough seasons.
I know that the “enlightened” perspective for the modern age is that religious beliefs are ignorant or at least naive, but among the wide variety of friends and acquaintances I have known in my life (from alllll different cultures and countries, religious and nonreligious), my more traditional Christian friends are by far the most joyful, humble, selfless, thankful, content.
Personally, I think we shouldn’t be surprised when after continually telling young people that there is no hope for anything more than this life for them they act and think like that’s true.