I'm a retired teacher (ret. Dec. 2018). I saw the same trend in my final years of teaching. I was competing for their most precious classroom asset -- their attention.
My competition? The high IQ's and salaries of brilliant app developers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. And I was losing. Badly. I wrote about it in one of my first pieces on Substack about 18 months ago (see link above). I concluded we need a 12-Step program for phone addiction. The first people who should do the 12-Step ... the parents.
First, the academic pressure assertion is more dangerous thinking that contributes to unpreparedness for adulthood. What an insidiously infantilizing assertion! Of course being overwhelmed and overworked can make one depressed, but there’s a goal in this case, and pressure can be very useful towards getting there. Making too much of pressure is only going to discourage teens from rising to the occasion.
This insidious line of thought correlates to what on social media is destroying young minds. Catastrophic ideation. All men are rapists. White people are evil oppressors. The planet is dying. Being female is a lifetime of trauma. If grabbed by a guy you should be traumatized for life....on and on and on. These ideas are CRUEL and peddled by useful idiot teachers....not just social media, often feminist unmarried childless teachers ironically living their best life while destroying the minds of our youth.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claims about what “useful idiot teachers” or the “feminist unmarried childless teachers” are saying in their classrooms? You should have some receipts if you are going to denigrate teachers & women so aggressively. With regard to what kids are hearing on social media re the trauma of sexual, physical or virtual assault you appear to minimize the plight of young women who are relentlessly subjected to unattainable norms, objectification & bullying. Did you write your dissertation on this subject or are you getting your talking points from right wing media?
Does Matthew Yglesias count as right wing media? Or Jill Filipovic? Or Haidt himself?
Because all three have pointed out that there is a political dimension to this discussion. Liberal teens are far more likely to report feelings of depression or anxiety than their conservative peers.
Yes, I have plenty of evidence or I wouldn’t have said it. That includes anecdotal evidence gathered in my workplace.
Your assertion is secondary source propaganda that I am weary of explaining to people who get their news from corrupt sources. Again, I urge you to find out what specifically DeSantis is “banning” and why. “Don’t say gay” is blatant shameless propaganda bullshit.
Other than anecdotal evidence, your argument depends on a vague law instituted by an aspiring authoritarian. Critical thinking is a mainstay of graduate & postgraduate education. There, we learn that “anecdotal evidence” is not evidence and is not generalizable to the population to which you refer. Perhaps a Medline search for peer reviewed articles in reputable journals?
One misconception of critical thinking that I have observed is its conflation with critical lenses such as feminism, Intersectionality, and critical race theory. I’ve heard grad students tell undergrads to write a thesis based on these tenets then “just find sources to support it.”
Anyone who believes that DeSantis is banning discussion of being gay in public schools did just that — without ever investigating the primary source.
Given the responses that minimize DeSantis’ authoritarian actions in Florida’s primary & secondary education system, respondents are either ignorant or gaslighting. It makes me wonder if the rise of gaslighting doesn’t also contribute to teen mental health disorders. They might not know how to deal with it yet. Serges Bauer would be proud of you.
So much of what you describe (and so much of modern politics and education) resembles the psychological disorder known as Munchausen by Proxy.
In order for there to be a Savior there first needs to be a Victim, so the Social Justice church ladies work to convince their targets how deeply victimized they are, by History, by Whitey, by capitalism, by that bad date, or even by their bodies if they just might have been "born in the wrong one".
First you create the Victim class, then you pump them full of anxiety and resentment, then you swoop down and tell them that while those other evil people want to hurt them, you understand and are there to spread care and compassion on all their psychic wounds.
So we have basically sacrified a generation of children to meet the emotional, psychological and career needs of their teachers (most esp the need to be seen as a righteous SJW).
Nice article. The last few--maybe as many as 10, years before I retired from full-time college teaching I resorted to penalizing students for using their phones in class. I had a teaching assistant in the back of the room. And even though my students on average had higher SAT or ACT scores in 2015 than in 1986, and my classes were more demanding in the 1980s, the latter students did not do as well because they clearly were not used to taking demanding classes. They were used to be called outstanding.
Curious if it might be worth looking into whether there are particular aspects of the internet and social media, beyond the addictive engagement, that could help explain some of the effects on various groups. For example, the psychology of status. At face value social media seems to have taken the aspects of status that people feel in general, and teens feel acutely (reference John Hughes movies) and super-sized them. No longer do teens have to measure themselves against only their local peers at school - they have an entire world of online peers, and the heights and distribution of status seem dramatically greater as a result. Thinking about examples of "flexing" online, YouTubers making millions, stories of instagram models taking hundreds of pictures to get the "perfect" shot that gets posted. The curated lives and personas of teens' "peers" don't have the humbling checks of observable day-to-day life that may have been present in real life local circumstances pre-internet.
The effects on low status, low achieving groups from observing the curated hyper-status of online "peers" that far exceeds the normal distribution, and that is largely fabricated, may be worth investigating.
I suspect the disembodiment of online life plays a significant role. It allows for unlimited malleability of identity, such that you can be a cat girl in the games you play online (and others will affirm you as such), but who will recognize you as such in three-dimensional life? If your friends are predominantly people you know on Tumblr and not IRL, who’s gonna be there to give you a hug when you’re sad? I think there’s much more to be explored along these lines.
Could not be just that due to being on the phone no matter what sites they are on, subtracts time they could be in person with their friends? So it’s the smartphone, tablet itself rather than the sites they visit? Just a thought ...
That could probably be tested by looking at rates of depression across groups that play video games. Video games in the 80s and 90s consumed a lot of (some) kids' time, and it is probably even a greater amount of time today. There seems to be something more going on relating to the nature of the time spent in the digital world. The hypothesis test might be to look at rates of depression among males in relation to their time spent on gaming and examine that across the other categories that have been broken out. If males who spend more time on video games were relatively more depressed it would support your hypothesis. Might have to control for the type of game, e.g. a MMORG with player interaction might have different results than a solo game. If there was no distinguishable difference in depression level, that might support that there is something in the nature of the online activity. That may be consistent with the differences across male/female in the results Jonathan and others are finding. At risk of generalizing, the data seem to support that girls and boys spend their digital time in different ways, i.e. girls skew greater on social media and boys greater on video games. Something that might be even more interesting is how the status element plays out in a video game context. In theory anyone who puts in the effort and time can achieve a degree of status in a virtual world - it is more "meritocratic". That is different than looking at a level of wealth or perceived beauty or popularity on social media that is effectively beyond reach. And to take this a step further, it would be interesting to see how the achievement of video game status impacts the vitality of real world achieving. If one can achieve greater status heights in a game than in real life, that might create some bad incentives. Maybe not depression, because instead of feeling hopelessly low status, you can just log on and level up.
I’m curious if rates between the sexes have always skewed heavier towards females being more depressed regardless of the cause. Because we are generally more emotional and sensitive.
Thank you for this excellent article and detailed analysis. I will feature it on my radio spot (discussion news in education/family/homeschooling) next week as it emphasizes that we need to focus on the impact of social media on mental health rather than academic stress. Parents need support in helping their children step away from this candy-coated crack, see my article TikTok Brain Cure with Three Ingredients. https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/tiktok-brain-cure-with-three-ingredients
On a related note:
We homeschooled our children and my daughter is now in her first year of university studies. She observed that students spend an incessant amount of time complaining about the work they need to do but seem to spend comparatively little time actually studying.
Much of students' lives is spent on a screen for entertainment; yet most learning now also requires them to read, complete exercises, write, and study using screens. The constant pull to check messages, tweets, or some other pleasure kernel, must certainly scatter attention and leave students wallowing in a feeling of distraction rather than a sense of academic mastery.
But in recent years, exponentially more young people are claiming trans identity, teen girls in particular. In surveys by the American College Health Association, the number of females embracing “non-binary” gender status soared from one in 2,000 in 2008 to 1 in 20 today. That’s an increase of 2,000 percent.
Why the sudden spike in gender confusion? Is “gender fluency” a latent adolescent psychological disorder undetected in previous generations? Has the human species evolved in a decade from dimorphic to multi-morphic?
Is there any work being done around the use of, frequency of, widespread availability of and thus the impact of catastrophic language describing climate phenomena that has the potential to promulgate fear and hopelessness? I am on board with the screen time hypothesis; there may be content of the screen time that harbors the seeds of teen depression.
Maybe not, but the schools certainly promote it. Kids may not pay much attention to algebra or history, but constantly beating the "Earth is dying, and you will too!" drum gets their attention. Throw in the beat of " You're oppressed, or you're an oppressor" and you have created the percussion track for mass depression among kids.
Maybe we could try an experiment and stop bombarding kids with doom in the classroom? A lot easier to accomplish than “get rid of social media”. It just might work, so why not try it?
According to the climate experts, the world will be doomed before these kids are old enough to do anything about it anyway. How about we leave them out of it and let them be kids?
Don't know. Outside of substitute teaching once a week, I've been away from the classroom for four years. I taught British Lit, so climate change was never part of the curriculum.
But I saw the phone addiction take hold over the last 6-7 years of teaching. The kids simply cannot control themselves. The notification "dings" and they're on it.
Or they're texting. Do you think the topic of their texts is "did you see the latest emissions data?" Shoot, half the time they were texting back and forth with their parents.
They don't read about it, but they get offhand comments from influencers and media figures, and characters in popular media about how "the planet is burning" etc. - it's picked up via osmosis, not actively seeking it out.
Haidt just wrote an article here about how the mental health of liberal teens is apparently far worse than their conservative peers. In it he cites the writers Matthew Yglesias and Jill Filipovic who single out the phenomenon of "catastrophizing" as problematic.
So maybe not climate change so much as the general trend of magnifying problems to the point where they become too big to handle and engender feelings of helplessness and passivity?
You don't need to hear 'catastrophic language" when you can't breathe outside in the summer because the forests are burning up, or you can't sled or ice skate in the winter like your parents did because the ponds don't freeze. We all want to protect children, but the dramatically changing forces of nature are impossible to ignore or wish away.
You may be right Brigid. But then all the more reason to stop the classroom climate hysteria, as they will see it anyway. And if you’re right, the world will be doomed before they are old enough to do anything about climate change. Pink Floyd said it best- “leave them kids alone”.
I hear you, but we shouldn't leave kids alone. They need us. Our ancestors survived by learning from their elders and so will they, with any luck. Starting with how to use a chain saw.
Is it possible that young girls are more sensitive to the world around them that's the cause of the bump in depression. Between SM and the internet you can't help being exposed to:
Climate change
Forever wars
Constant dissonance at so many levels
Maybe this barrage of chaos is playing a part in this bump.
Thank you. There is a mental health crisis among teens & there seems to be no will to address this. Florida has chosen to exacerbate this epidemic by mandating the avoidance of gender identity & sexual orientation in the classroom, hiring unqualified teachers & banning books. DeSantis & other red state Governors have all but declared war on LGBTQ+ people & are criminalizing abortion. Some are even loosening up the rules for employment of minors. I can’t imagine that these draconian measures will help the situation.
And, in Congress, there are no mental health professionals to raise this issue on a daily basis. I’m hoping that your upcoming book will include some possible interventions to reduce this trend.
The point of this work by Twenge and Haidt is that the “unattainable norms, objectification & bullying” that young women are increasingly subject to is caused by the artificial and distorted social milieu of social media. In pre-internet natural childhood those problems exist, but are balanced by competing ingroup dynamics such as altruistic friendship, social cost of gossip, etc.
I feel like the politics of social conservatives is often self-defeating and too authoritarian. I’m with you on that much. But the idea that conservative social norms “exacerbate this epidemic” is exactly contrary to the gist of Jonathan Haidt’s work. Start with “ Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest” and then read Haidt’s books, starting with The Righteous Mind.
Are you saying that book banning is a conservative social norm? Are the avoidance of & virulence against LGBTQ+ people & government action against “woke” businesses conservative social norms? None of these are. They are part of fascism.
No, I’m saying that those things you mention aren’t the cause of the recent Mental Illness Epidemic in teenage girls. Which is what Twenge and Haidt’s data are showing.
There are no book bans, that is a media narrative designed to portray DeSantis as an evil bigot and designed to make Democrats fear and loathe him as the next Hitler du jour.
What evidence (you know, peer reviewed Medline linked journals) do you have that forcing gender & sexual orientation discussions and activists into academics would have a positive effect on teens’ mental health? The current obsession with these topics is almost perfectly correlated with the alarming spike in teen mental illness.
Correlation & causation being different things, of course, but inverse correlation is even harder to use to find causation....
I can 100% tell you for a FACT it is not academic pressure. It is the social media responsible.
I was an international student in Canada, I went there in 2007 (feels like another universe now). In 2012 a year before my graduation 🎓, I started seeing the university change. They offered safe spaces, started giving students "more time" to complete assignments, they even started lowering grading standards. Focus on asking the students how they felt took priority and students were told that if they were depressed to seek mental help from a counsellor etc
None of these behaviours existed the first three years I was at that university and it has only exploded in the real world. 2012 was really the year it all changed. Jon Haidt's Atlantic article and Jon Ronson's "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" saved me and helped me realised I wasn't crazy.
In 2016, teens mental health really went off a cliff and social media played a huge part in this ESPECIALLY TIK TOK!!!
I have lived in so many places and I am currently living in Europe right now. North America kids are attached to their phones like it's an appendage. They are permanently online and the kind psychopathology that creates in not normal. Even the social media know this but they are motivated by profit. .
Jean, great article! I am curious, have you looked at the changes that have occurred in the curriculum since the late 90's? I wonder how the expectations placed on kids at younger ages that may not be developmentally appropriate have played a part on the decline of mental health. What's expected of kids in kindergarten now was once what we expected in first grade and so on. This places stress on kids not ready to learn what is being pushed on them. Add to the mix what is being revealed regarding the way that reading has been taught. The podcast Sold a Story presents an excellent investigation into how the way children have been taught to read has not been based on science and has created a generation of bad readers. I think the issue of academic pressures is way deeper than just home work and the demands for good grades.
https://jimgeschke.substack.com/p/we-need-a-12-step-program-for-cellphone
I'm a retired teacher (ret. Dec. 2018). I saw the same trend in my final years of teaching. I was competing for their most precious classroom asset -- their attention.
My competition? The high IQ's and salaries of brilliant app developers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. And I was losing. Badly. I wrote about it in one of my first pieces on Substack about 18 months ago (see link above). I concluded we need a 12-Step program for phone addiction. The first people who should do the 12-Step ... the parents.
Jim, I fully agree. Children can smell hypocrisy keener than freshly baked cookies. I posted an article on this exact point: Reclaiming Your Stolen Focus - A Lenten fast with a tech twist https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/reclaiming-your-stolen-focus
First, the academic pressure assertion is more dangerous thinking that contributes to unpreparedness for adulthood. What an insidiously infantilizing assertion! Of course being overwhelmed and overworked can make one depressed, but there’s a goal in this case, and pressure can be very useful towards getting there. Making too much of pressure is only going to discourage teens from rising to the occasion.
This insidious line of thought correlates to what on social media is destroying young minds. Catastrophic ideation. All men are rapists. White people are evil oppressors. The planet is dying. Being female is a lifetime of trauma. If grabbed by a guy you should be traumatized for life....on and on and on. These ideas are CRUEL and peddled by useful idiot teachers....not just social media, often feminist unmarried childless teachers ironically living their best life while destroying the minds of our youth.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claims about what “useful idiot teachers” or the “feminist unmarried childless teachers” are saying in their classrooms? You should have some receipts if you are going to denigrate teachers & women so aggressively. With regard to what kids are hearing on social media re the trauma of sexual, physical or virtual assault you appear to minimize the plight of young women who are relentlessly subjected to unattainable norms, objectification & bullying. Did you write your dissertation on this subject or are you getting your talking points from right wing media?
Does Matthew Yglesias count as right wing media? Or Jill Filipovic? Or Haidt himself?
Because all three have pointed out that there is a political dimension to this discussion. Liberal teens are far more likely to report feelings of depression or anxiety than their conservative peers.
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-girls
https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-are-young-liberals-so-depressed
https://jill.substack.com/p/fear-of-a-female-body
Yes, I have plenty of evidence or I wouldn’t have said it. That includes anecdotal evidence gathered in my workplace.
Your assertion is secondary source propaganda that I am weary of explaining to people who get their news from corrupt sources. Again, I urge you to find out what specifically DeSantis is “banning” and why. “Don’t say gay” is blatant shameless propaganda bullshit.
Have a nice day.
Other than anecdotal evidence, your argument depends on a vague law instituted by an aspiring authoritarian. Critical thinking is a mainstay of graduate & postgraduate education. There, we learn that “anecdotal evidence” is not evidence and is not generalizable to the population to which you refer. Perhaps a Medline search for peer reviewed articles in reputable journals?
“Critical thinking is a mainstay of graduate & postgraduate education.”
Unfortunately, that’s become almost axiomatically incorrect.
One misconception of critical thinking that I have observed is its conflation with critical lenses such as feminism, Intersectionality, and critical race theory. I’ve heard grad students tell undergrads to write a thesis based on these tenets then “just find sources to support it.”
Anyone who believes that DeSantis is banning discussion of being gay in public schools did just that — without ever investigating the primary source.
“Fact-checking” has become almost a sport in certain circles, and call it critical thinking.
Given the responses that minimize DeSantis’ authoritarian actions in Florida’s primary & secondary education system, respondents are either ignorant or gaslighting. It makes me wonder if the rise of gaslighting doesn’t also contribute to teen mental health disorders. They might not know how to deal with it yet. Serges Bauer would be proud of you.
So much of what you describe (and so much of modern politics and education) resembles the psychological disorder known as Munchausen by Proxy.
In order for there to be a Savior there first needs to be a Victim, so the Social Justice church ladies work to convince their targets how deeply victimized they are, by History, by Whitey, by capitalism, by that bad date, or even by their bodies if they just might have been "born in the wrong one".
First you create the Victim class, then you pump them full of anxiety and resentment, then you swoop down and tell them that while those other evil people want to hurt them, you understand and are there to spread care and compassion on all their psychic wounds.
So we have basically sacrified a generation of children to meet the emotional, psychological and career needs of their teachers (most esp the need to be seen as a righteous SJW).
Nice article. The last few--maybe as many as 10, years before I retired from full-time college teaching I resorted to penalizing students for using their phones in class. I had a teaching assistant in the back of the room. And even though my students on average had higher SAT or ACT scores in 2015 than in 1986, and my classes were more demanding in the 1980s, the latter students did not do as well because they clearly were not used to taking demanding classes. They were used to be called outstanding.
Curious if it might be worth looking into whether there are particular aspects of the internet and social media, beyond the addictive engagement, that could help explain some of the effects on various groups. For example, the psychology of status. At face value social media seems to have taken the aspects of status that people feel in general, and teens feel acutely (reference John Hughes movies) and super-sized them. No longer do teens have to measure themselves against only their local peers at school - they have an entire world of online peers, and the heights and distribution of status seem dramatically greater as a result. Thinking about examples of "flexing" online, YouTubers making millions, stories of instagram models taking hundreds of pictures to get the "perfect" shot that gets posted. The curated lives and personas of teens' "peers" don't have the humbling checks of observable day-to-day life that may have been present in real life local circumstances pre-internet.
The effects on low status, low achieving groups from observing the curated hyper-status of online "peers" that far exceeds the normal distribution, and that is largely fabricated, may be worth investigating.
I suspect the disembodiment of online life plays a significant role. It allows for unlimited malleability of identity, such that you can be a cat girl in the games you play online (and others will affirm you as such), but who will recognize you as such in three-dimensional life? If your friends are predominantly people you know on Tumblr and not IRL, who’s gonna be there to give you a hug when you’re sad? I think there’s much more to be explored along these lines.
Could not be just that due to being on the phone no matter what sites they are on, subtracts time they could be in person with their friends? So it’s the smartphone, tablet itself rather than the sites they visit? Just a thought ...
That could probably be tested by looking at rates of depression across groups that play video games. Video games in the 80s and 90s consumed a lot of (some) kids' time, and it is probably even a greater amount of time today. There seems to be something more going on relating to the nature of the time spent in the digital world. The hypothesis test might be to look at rates of depression among males in relation to their time spent on gaming and examine that across the other categories that have been broken out. If males who spend more time on video games were relatively more depressed it would support your hypothesis. Might have to control for the type of game, e.g. a MMORG with player interaction might have different results than a solo game. If there was no distinguishable difference in depression level, that might support that there is something in the nature of the online activity. That may be consistent with the differences across male/female in the results Jonathan and others are finding. At risk of generalizing, the data seem to support that girls and boys spend their digital time in different ways, i.e. girls skew greater on social media and boys greater on video games. Something that might be even more interesting is how the status element plays out in a video game context. In theory anyone who puts in the effort and time can achieve a degree of status in a virtual world - it is more "meritocratic". That is different than looking at a level of wealth or perceived beauty or popularity on social media that is effectively beyond reach. And to take this a step further, it would be interesting to see how the achievement of video game status impacts the vitality of real world achieving. If one can achieve greater status heights in a game than in real life, that might create some bad incentives. Maybe not depression, because instead of feeling hopelessly low status, you can just log on and level up.
I’m curious if rates between the sexes have always skewed heavier towards females being more depressed regardless of the cause. Because we are generally more emotional and sensitive.
And males tend to complete suicide while females make more attempts probably out of attention seeking.
Prof Twenge, you’re one of my heroes. Thank you for all you do!!
hi Adrian 🙏🏼 i'd like to put my latest post (re: digital heroin) on your radar.
https://opentochange.substack.com/p/growing-up-before-digital-heroin
Great post, beautiful artwork, thank you! I remember, too…
thanks for remembering AG. i'd be honored to have you as a subscriber 🙏🏼
Also, more time on the "smartphones" -> ever worsening focus & memory -> lesser ability to do the homework -> increased depression.
Thank you for this excellent article and detailed analysis. I will feature it on my radio spot (discussion news in education/family/homeschooling) next week as it emphasizes that we need to focus on the impact of social media on mental health rather than academic stress. Parents need support in helping their children step away from this candy-coated crack, see my article TikTok Brain Cure with Three Ingredients. https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/tiktok-brain-cure-with-three-ingredients
On a related note:
We homeschooled our children and my daughter is now in her first year of university studies. She observed that students spend an incessant amount of time complaining about the work they need to do but seem to spend comparatively little time actually studying.
Much of students' lives is spent on a screen for entertainment; yet most learning now also requires them to read, complete exercises, write, and study using screens. The constant pull to check messages, tweets, or some other pleasure kernel, must certainly scatter attention and leave students wallowing in a feeling of distraction rather than a sense of academic mastery.
hi Ruth 🙏🏼 i'd like to put my latest post (re: digital heroin) on your radar.
https://opentochange.substack.com/p/growing-up-before-digital-heroin
Throw the phones away.
But in recent years, exponentially more young people are claiming trans identity, teen girls in particular. In surveys by the American College Health Association, the number of females embracing “non-binary” gender status soared from one in 2,000 in 2008 to 1 in 20 today. That’s an increase of 2,000 percent.
Why the sudden spike in gender confusion? Is “gender fluency” a latent adolescent psychological disorder undetected in previous generations? Has the human species evolved in a decade from dimorphic to multi-morphic?
https://jimgeschke.substack.com/p/whatever-happened-to-common-sense
Your meaning being that maybe it's just social contagion at work?
Yep
This is so helpful. I just shared this with one of my students, in fact. Thanks so much!
hi Steve 🙏🏼 i'd like to put my latest post (re: digital heroin) on your radar.
https://opentochange.substack.com/p/growing-up-before-digital-heroin
Is there any work being done around the use of, frequency of, widespread availability of and thus the impact of catastrophic language describing climate phenomena that has the potential to promulgate fear and hopelessness? I am on board with the screen time hypothesis; there may be content of the screen time that harbors the seeds of teen depression.
Kids don't read climate change analyses on Instagram and TikTok.
They're researching the latest dance steps. Girls are busy editing their selfies with the facial filters, then listening for "like" notifications.
Maybe not, but the schools certainly promote it. Kids may not pay much attention to algebra or history, but constantly beating the "Earth is dying, and you will too!" drum gets their attention. Throw in the beat of " You're oppressed, or you're an oppressor" and you have created the percussion track for mass depression among kids.
Maybe true, but that's not what's causing depression. The number of "likes," or lack thereof, is.
Maybe we could try an experiment and stop bombarding kids with doom in the classroom? A lot easier to accomplish than “get rid of social media”. It just might work, so why not try it?
According to the climate experts, the world will be doomed before these kids are old enough to do anything about it anyway. How about we leave them out of it and let them be kids?
Don't know. Outside of substitute teaching once a week, I've been away from the classroom for four years. I taught British Lit, so climate change was never part of the curriculum.
But I saw the phone addiction take hold over the last 6-7 years of teaching. The kids simply cannot control themselves. The notification "dings" and they're on it.
Or they're texting. Do you think the topic of their texts is "did you see the latest emissions data?" Shoot, half the time they were texting back and forth with their parents.
hi Jim 🙏🏼 i'd like to put my latest post (re: digital heroin) on your radar.
https://opentochange.substack.com/p/growing-up-before-digital-heroin
They don't read about it, but they get offhand comments from influencers and media figures, and characters in popular media about how "the planet is burning" etc. - it's picked up via osmosis, not actively seeking it out.
Haidt just wrote an article here about how the mental health of liberal teens is apparently far worse than their conservative peers. In it he cites the writers Matthew Yglesias and Jill Filipovic who single out the phenomenon of "catastrophizing" as problematic.
So maybe not climate change so much as the general trend of magnifying problems to the point where they become too big to handle and engender feelings of helplessness and passivity?
This makes more sense than latching onto climate change anxiety.
Hyer-coversge of environmental topics is not recent, it's been around since at least the middle of last century.
Children and teenagers suffer from an awful lot of adult projection. Maybe someone should ask them what's up, instead of telling them.
There's still a definite correlation between the digital native generations and the increase in self reported mental health concerns.
Of the thousands of topics on TikTok, dance steps would not be a top search for teenagers.
It ain't climate change.
You don't need to hear 'catastrophic language" when you can't breathe outside in the summer because the forests are burning up, or you can't sled or ice skate in the winter like your parents did because the ponds don't freeze. We all want to protect children, but the dramatically changing forces of nature are impossible to ignore or wish away.
You may be right Brigid. But then all the more reason to stop the classroom climate hysteria, as they will see it anyway. And if you’re right, the world will be doomed before they are old enough to do anything about climate change. Pink Floyd said it best- “leave them kids alone”.
I hear you, but we shouldn't leave kids alone. They need us. Our ancestors survived by learning from their elders and so will they, with any luck. Starting with how to use a chain saw.
Most of the country was not downwind of the forest fires in Northern California last year.
Is it possible that young girls are more sensitive to the world around them that's the cause of the bump in depression. Between SM and the internet you can't help being exposed to:
Climate change
Forever wars
Constant dissonance at so many levels
Maybe this barrage of chaos is playing a part in this bump.
Thank you. There is a mental health crisis among teens & there seems to be no will to address this. Florida has chosen to exacerbate this epidemic by mandating the avoidance of gender identity & sexual orientation in the classroom, hiring unqualified teachers & banning books. DeSantis & other red state Governors have all but declared war on LGBTQ+ people & are criminalizing abortion. Some are even loosening up the rules for employment of minors. I can’t imagine that these draconian measures will help the situation.
And, in Congress, there are no mental health professionals to raise this issue on a daily basis. I’m hoping that your upcoming book will include some possible interventions to reduce this trend.
The point of this work by Twenge and Haidt is that the “unattainable norms, objectification & bullying” that young women are increasingly subject to is caused by the artificial and distorted social milieu of social media. In pre-internet natural childhood those problems exist, but are balanced by competing ingroup dynamics such as altruistic friendship, social cost of gossip, etc.
I feel like the politics of social conservatives is often self-defeating and too authoritarian. I’m with you on that much. But the idea that conservative social norms “exacerbate this epidemic” is exactly contrary to the gist of Jonathan Haidt’s work. Start with “ Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest” and then read Haidt’s books, starting with The Righteous Mind.
Are you saying that book banning is a conservative social norm? Are the avoidance of & virulence against LGBTQ+ people & government action against “woke” businesses conservative social norms? None of these are. They are part of fascism.
No, I’m saying that those things you mention aren’t the cause of the recent Mental Illness Epidemic in teenage girls. Which is what Twenge and Haidt’s data are showing.
Apparently it’s not just teenagers who need to step away from social media.
Sorry to say but you’re incredibly misinformed.
Please be more specific on how “incredibly misinformed” you think I am.
https://www.city-journal.org/book-bans-baloney
There are no book bans, that is a media narrative designed to portray DeSantis as an evil bigot and designed to make Democrats fear and loathe him as the next Hitler du jour.
There was also never any "Don't Say Gay."
You can go to the primary source (DeSantis) …no?
Neither DeSantis nor the Republicans in the State Legislature did their homework on this one. You made the assertion. You show the receipts.
What evidence (you know, peer reviewed Medline linked journals) do you have that forcing gender & sexual orientation discussions and activists into academics would have a positive effect on teens’ mental health? The current obsession with these topics is almost perfectly correlated with the alarming spike in teen mental illness.
Correlation & causation being different things, of course, but inverse correlation is even harder to use to find causation....
hi Marlene 🙏🏼 i'd like to put my latest post (re: digital heroin) on your radar.
https://opentochange.substack.com/p/growing-up-before-digital-heroin
This interpretation would seem to be at odds with the studies and analysis presented on this Substack.
I can 100% tell you for a FACT it is not academic pressure. It is the social media responsible.
I was an international student in Canada, I went there in 2007 (feels like another universe now). In 2012 a year before my graduation 🎓, I started seeing the university change. They offered safe spaces, started giving students "more time" to complete assignments, they even started lowering grading standards. Focus on asking the students how they felt took priority and students were told that if they were depressed to seek mental help from a counsellor etc
None of these behaviours existed the first three years I was at that university and it has only exploded in the real world. 2012 was really the year it all changed. Jon Haidt's Atlantic article and Jon Ronson's "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" saved me and helped me realised I wasn't crazy.
In 2016, teens mental health really went off a cliff and social media played a huge part in this ESPECIALLY TIK TOK!!!
I have lived in so many places and I am currently living in Europe right now. North America kids are attached to their phones like it's an appendage. They are permanently online and the kind psychopathology that creates in not normal. Even the social media know this but they are motivated by profit. .
You're a low-key savage, Mr Haidt, and I appreciate both the low-keyness and the savageness.
Jean, great article! I am curious, have you looked at the changes that have occurred in the curriculum since the late 90's? I wonder how the expectations placed on kids at younger ages that may not be developmentally appropriate have played a part on the decline of mental health. What's expected of kids in kindergarten now was once what we expected in first grade and so on. This places stress on kids not ready to learn what is being pushed on them. Add to the mix what is being revealed regarding the way that reading has been taught. The podcast Sold a Story presents an excellent investigation into how the way children have been taught to read has not been based on science and has created a generation of bad readers. I think the issue of academic pressures is way deeper than just home work and the demands for good grades.