The only missing piece is what to do when you take the phone away and suddenly your child is all alone because all their friends communicate only through snapchat and instagram. This is a collective action problem.
We can start by getting to the root of the Big Tech problem, their surveillance advertising model that incentivizes the very worst of Big Tech. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) shows us the way:
I agree. My mom tried extremely hard to shelter me from all this, and even though in some ways it worked, it also made it even more difficult for me to make friends when I was in middle school (and I was born in 1998).
Maybe if you let them have social media, ask your kids to scroll through their feed with you every so often -- not so that you can judge them, take things away from them, or freak out about content you find alarming, but just to talk with them about what they’re seeing. These apps can start really meaningful conversations, you just have to make sure your 14-year-old isn’t left to interpret all of it on their own.
Exactly. I was the last of my high school classmates to get a phone in 2014. The isolation was real- it's hard to hang out when you only have the family landline.
I manage this with my own 3 kids on a daily basis (and have written a book on it). It's not as hard as it seems. There are workarounds, like using a home computer to message friends to arrange meet-ups, which enables independent planning without tempting them every minute from their pocket. Another option is to use simpler devices, non-smartphones that allow texting and calling.
And what are they really missing out on by not being on those platforms? Very little. In fact, they're being spared much of the psychological turmoil that those platforms induce. I'm OK with delaying my kids' entrance into that world until at least 16 because I know how harmful it is.
Despite not being on these platforms, my kids are busy, social, athletic, and academically strong. They're not suffering; if anything, other parents comment on how our phone-free policy is clearly paying off. My point is that it IS possible. More parents should feel empowered to refuse to let their kids get sucked into social media.
This reply is a breath of fresh air. Wandered to your site and subscribed. I'm thankful there are other voices, such as yours, in the milieu reminding others THERE IS ANOTHER WAY. Yes, it's challenging... but it's not impossible and the rewards are significant.
I've recently said to a few friends that WHAT my kids miss out on is of far less value to us as human beings than what they have to gain BY missing out. What they gain is... immeasurable.
I’m in my late twenties and a majority of my friends don’t use social media all that much and I knew plenty of folks in college who didn’t use it much or at all. I’m barely on social media as it is. My guess is there are plenty of college students today who don’t use it at all.
Indeed, it's almost like revoking their online freedom without first giving then back all of the offline freedom that they would have had a generation or two ago, is putting the cart before the horse. But, hey, what do I know? I'm just the 800 pound guerrilla in the room.
The solution is a gradual ban of smartphones for children. Start at age 10 and increase year on year until minimum reached (I think 16/17 years ideal). When peers don't have them, the need is gone. BanSmartphonesForChildren chng.it/ZjHchVYYCW
Nov 10, 2023·edited Nov 10, 2023Liked by Jon Haidt, Freya India
Taking away screens is only half the job. Girls need to be equipped and expected to take an interest in the world, to not equate their value with their physical appeal. Thank you, Freya and Jon, for understanding this.
Absolutely, and this ties in with so many of the other points here about what we fill time with when we put down our screens. Children need to have full, exciting, independent lives that revolve and nature, play and socialisation.
Feminists and their supporters have been trying this for the last seventy years with little success. For whatever reason, a sizable majority of women feel compelled to mess with their faces and figures, obsessing over their appearances for reasons seemingly unrelated to attracting a mate (something very difficult for men to understand). No one has a good reason for why.
I couldn’t agree more with Freya when she says that Gen Alpha parents should not let their children open social media accounts when they are still in early puberty, and that they should prioritize in-person interactions and real-world experiences.
The problem is that it is extremely difficult to find a place where they can actually do this - especially in the US. The natural world of unsupervised outdoor play that would enable children to grow up normally (as I discuss at length in my book Life Before the Internet) has all but disappeared due to the combined effects of social media and over-protective parenting.
Jonathan Haidt hit the nail on the head in an earlier post entitled “Why some researchers think I’m wrong”, when he said that we have lost the “IRL (In Real Life) model”. He likens social media to “a bulldozer that came in and leveled all the environments teens needed to foster healthy social development, leaving them to mature alone in their bedrooms.”
So even if we can get them out of their bedrooms, where will they go? Once they get off their screens, they will have to create a new face-to-face social circle, because they will most probably lose their online friends. I don’t have an easy answer, but it’s good to remember that we no longer have the IRL model for them to fall back on.
I don’t think that it’s really true that there’s no unsupervised outdoor play happening in North America anymore. What I notice is that it really depends on the community. Whiter, more affluent (or even just middle class) neighbourhoods with families tend to have less kids out and about. Except in respectable, gentrified, inner city neighbourhoods, where the point is to go against the grain of suburban conformity. In more working class areas, it’s still fairly common to see kids playing and discovering the world, at least in my experience.
We live in Los Angeles in a middle class community and kids are always outside playing or gathering at local parks to play. It definitely varies from community to community but I think in our case most people don’t have large yards or large homes so go to the parks to get outside and get energy out.
Good point. Less unsupervised outdoor play is closely related to over-protective parenting, which in turn is more prevalent in middle- and upper-middle-class families, who have the necessary time and resources. Working class kids will usually have more opportunity for outdoor play, if only because they are less likely to be ferried to extra-curricular activities after school.
There are IRL opportunities out there. I’m raising 6 kids, ages 2 to 15, and we manage without social media. Scouts, sports teams, church, co-ops. I will grant you that it is harder than it used to be. We are fortunate to have some girls down the street that are my younger kids’ ages so they can experience just going outside to play with friends. It’s harder for the older kids, but I just want to encourage parents to seek like minded families in your area - maybe even through an Elks Lodge or YMCA or another club of some kind. It’s hard work, but the real experiences for our kids - and ourselves! - are so worth it!
Freya, this is a striking and disturbing essay, exposing the urgency of the situation that young girls face. I have written along similar lines over the last few months on School of the Unconformed, and will continue to focus my efforts on helping people to recognize harms, remove them, and return to an embodied reality that does not leave us as empty shells hollowed out by digital misery. Here a fitting quote from my post From Feeding Moloch to Digital Minimalism https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/from-feeding-moloch-to-digital-minimalism:
"We are all unwilling, or oblivious, participants in the tech industry’s single-minded goal to capture our full attention. In the ‘race to the bottom of the brain stem’ children are the most vulnerable contestants. Their minds are part of a relentless digital colonization, and unless we intervene, we risk the overall well-being of future generations."
‘The cost of a thing is the amount what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.’
I’m the mother of two Gen Z boys. Every generation has had to contend with targeted ads and screen addictions. The difference is the parents. We did not allow our children to have smart phones until college. We only allowed them half an hour of any type of screen time a day on weekends. No screen time during the week. Sure, there was a lot of pushback from them and nagging from me, but that’s just part of being a parent. This is not rocket science, it’s basic parenting.
I have seen Gen Z mothers walking with their two year old who’s trying to point out a butterfly as his mother is obliviously engaged with her phone. Parents at restaurants with their children have them zoned out on screens rather than talking together. Gen Z parents can’t be bothered to parent their children; they’re self-absorbed, self-obsessed perpetual adolescents.
If parents were parenting, kids would not have smart phones or social media access until adulthood. They wouldn’t miss out on what their friends are doing because their friends wouldn’t be on social media either.
It's not that simple. They find ways to access things behind parents' backs because social media provides ways to do that. Schools expect the kids to look stuff up on their phones and also they give them laptops (this is where the righteous usually declare parents would homeschool if they cared enough, as if it is an option for everyone). We need societal change, not just people talking about how they are better parents than the rest. Yes, some use screens as babysitters, but when an entire society is structured around screens and social media, we have to teach kids HOW to use it, not just make it taboo.
“Accessing things behind parents’ backs” and “looking stuff up on their phones” is a far cry from providing kids with 24/7 availability through their own phones.
What does “societal change” even mean? HOW do you “teach kids HOW to use it” (as though a kid is going to listen to a parent instructing him on how to use social media)?
You make a very good point, Kiki. The parents, especially the mothers, are all over social media too and lose credibiltiy and authority to tell their children to go off. I don't agree that every generation had to contend with targeted adds and screen addictions to the same extend. It got so much more sophisticated. Just using the Grammerly app can show how AI can read every mood in your writing. The AI algorythmn meassure how long you stare at an image, what you search after, and so on. They know you better than you know yourself because that's all deeply unconscious stuff. That wasn't around before 2010.
But this also re-enforces your point: The only way to protect them is getting them off the damn thing. Which was very difficult in our case.
We moved to a new country with a single child in 2019 when she was 12. She made immediate friends and was very welcomed in her new school - that wasn't the problem. The problem was outside school and how to stay in touch with her friends. We didn't know the parents, there was no history, no contact details. Restricting her phone access, which we tried, felt cruel to a single child in a new town. We still did but it eroded away over the next years. If I would have know about how smart and damaging those algorithmn are, we would have made more effort.
While restricting access as long as possible helps, it doesn's solve the problem. Ultimately, only awareness and eduction and reflection and learning how this monster works and what it does to us will beat it. Because, in my opinion, greed is just the first layer of this. There is a darker force behind it that is driven by control and power, and that's scares me even more. Here is a first, albeit estreme example: https://markusmutscheller.substack.com/p/digital-holocaust-nudged-to-commit
Gen Z mothers are not the only ones on their phones 24/7. I see a lot of millennial and older parents on their phones th e whole time their kids are at the park. It’s a problem across all generations
I’m also the parent of two zoomers. They were allowed phones at 12. I have completely failed to monitor their activity but I have always encouraged them to be skeptical - maybe I passed on my Gen X cynicism. They don’t lean much into social media and they’re quite distrustful of it. I think I got lucky with my kids, but, as they might say, to them most social media is just mid.
THIS. My son was born in 2010 and so many times I saw moms glued to their phones instead of actually parenting. I’d be at a playground and I’d be the only one actually playing with my child. We have to model what we want to see in our children or our messaging about safety and boundaries will make no sense to them.
As a psychiatrist, your diagnosis of what is plaguing young people (and all of us to some extent) rings true. Our panicked response to COVID only magnified the trend. We all need to get off our screens and back into living in the real world, interacting with real people.
Fantastic piece, Freya, and deadly accurate. I'm an elementary school educator who has watched this phenomenon take off like a rocket. In September 2021, 11 out of 22 students in my Grade 6 homeroom class showed up using different pronouns or identities. We were not allowed to inform the parents of the changes.
In my experience, parents are acutely aware of the situation with their kids but need the schools to step up and support them by implementing policies that reduce the tendency to rely on social media.
I've recently moved to a new school where the administration instituted the following:
1. No cell phones during the school day
2. An 80-minute block of outdoor education per week
3. Block all social media from the school Wifi
4. Offer several after-school programs such as sports, woodworking, cooking, robotics and board games
5. A friend bench at recess and lunch where students can signal to their peers that they don't have anyone to play/eat with. The teachers challenge the other students to ensure the bench is never occupied for more than 30 seconds (and it works!)
great piece but doesn't mention online porn which hovers (not far) in the background of all of this. it's effect on both boys and girls is far reaching and is the true horror of our age.
I could not agree more. This is a major piece of the puzzle, as it teaches boys how to treat girls awfully, and teaches girls that they should look a certain way and expect to be treated awfully. Sex should be able love, affection, care and safety...and *contemporary* porn is filled with the opposite, for all the same reasons that Instagram and YouTube are filled with extreme content.
I’m convinced that some of the social contagion of gender dysmorphia in girls is related to online porn. Imagine, for a minute, being a 11 year old girl at home during the lockdowns, exposed to online porn like the rest of her peer group. You come back to school at 12, 13, deep in puberty, surrounded by classmates who have been exposed to hardcore crap, fearful or grossed out by what all that mean.
Hi Elle, I would be surprised if there was not some truth in what you are describing. Certainly a combination of online porn and Instagram Face seem to be driving boys and girls to look and act in unhealthy ways, and it seems to start so young.
Heart break says it all. I know that the culture I grew up within was unhealthy in many ways...but it is nothing compared to what children are being fed today.
Nov 10, 2023·edited Nov 10, 2023Liked by Jon Haidt
It is nice to know, theoretically, that there is no algorithms hijacking my feed on Substack. I feel like that, at least on this digital screen, new forms of organic friendships are being forged on this platform. I hope that Gen Alpha can pursue this type of course of action.
My very online Zoomer is mostly on Discord, connecting with IRL friends but also online-only “friends” met through shared fandoms. While not without some risk, it still seems better than Instagram and TikTok. No ads, no algorithms. Agree that our GenX cynicism/skepticism may have helped. (Our Zoomer also prefers the music of the ‘70s and ‘80s to today’s. So apparently we do have some influence as parents.)
Best comment: “…But I also believe that a 12-year-old’s mind is no match for a giant corporation using the most advanced AI to manipulate her behavior. Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment…”. Reminds me of Frank Zappa song “I am the slime”…
Freya, thank you so much for writing about this! I have a 15 year old daughter who has displayed many of the things you wrote about. She ended up hospitalized for depression last spring and we couldn’t quite figure out what all led to it. She doesn’t have a social media account so I thought we could avoid depression and anxiety. But she did have access to YouTube and Pinterest and she started off by watching makeup tutorials but it led to seeing these mental health influencers that led her to start self diagnosing and taking on other diagnoses.
As always, Freya hits the mark exactly. It's so refreshing to see someone write about how my generation ticks accurately. That same conveyor belt exists for men, and very often it leads to depression, inceldom, misogyny. Pickup artists, fitness and financial influencers tell them how they're not enough, that all women care about is status and there's always someone better.
Isn’t it interesting how the algorithms Ms. India describes seem to reinforce the same inadequacy narratives that have been present in American culture for decades? Namely, unrealistic beauty standards for women, defining what makes someone a “real man” for men. Playing on these narratives has always been an approach to effective marketing, but social media puts it on hyperdrive.
I am a member of Gen Z (24) and I'll offer some thoughts.
The best question is to ask - when did reality get so boring that we must turn to social media for so many hours a day?
A lot of young people don't know who they are, and thus don't know what they want. They haven't found a life-direction they want to take that makes their reality exciting. It's easy not to try and find this when you have the seemingly costless pleasure of social media at your fingertips.
But in the long run, it's not costless. We young people are still empty-minded, not sure what to do, and thus very impressionable.
When you stare into the digital abyss long enough, the abyss stares back into you and shapes you, giving you a purpose you did not choose. Social media now controls you, what you want and who you are.
Because content is always structured to generate viewer interest and emotion, this leads it to artificially manipulate young people into thinking and acting in ways they never would have otherwise. Sometimes this is good and has a positive impact, but many times it hijacks their desires and causes them to want things which they would never have wanted in the first place if they weren't exposed to such poison.
Another question: Did social media create more purposeless and mentally unhealthy people or were those people already that way so they went online?
As the dad of two girls aged 12 and 9, this may be the most frightening thing I’ve ever read. On a related note, I greatly appreciate you sharing this and bringing me to Freya’s work.
The only missing piece is what to do when you take the phone away and suddenly your child is all alone because all their friends communicate only through snapchat and instagram. This is a collective action problem.
exactly! that;s what The Anxious Generation is about: how to solve 4 collective action problems.
We can start by getting to the root of the Big Tech problem, their surveillance advertising model that incentivizes the very worst of Big Tech. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) shows us the way:
https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms
Big Tech can go EFF off!
Section 230 .. surveillance .. addictive-manipulative algorithms .. concentration
I agree. My mom tried extremely hard to shelter me from all this, and even though in some ways it worked, it also made it even more difficult for me to make friends when I was in middle school (and I was born in 1998).
Maybe if you let them have social media, ask your kids to scroll through their feed with you every so often -- not so that you can judge them, take things away from them, or freak out about content you find alarming, but just to talk with them about what they’re seeing. These apps can start really meaningful conversations, you just have to make sure your 14-year-old isn’t left to interpret all of it on their own.
an interactive supportive approach, dig it.
This is it exactly. How do you step out of the milieu of a digital reality and into "the outside" when _there's no one outside anymore_.
https://justinowings.com/digitally-isolated/
Exactly. I was the last of my high school classmates to get a phone in 2014. The isolation was real- it's hard to hang out when you only have the family landline.
The genie is out of the bottle now.
I manage this with my own 3 kids on a daily basis (and have written a book on it). It's not as hard as it seems. There are workarounds, like using a home computer to message friends to arrange meet-ups, which enables independent planning without tempting them every minute from their pocket. Another option is to use simpler devices, non-smartphones that allow texting and calling.
And what are they really missing out on by not being on those platforms? Very little. In fact, they're being spared much of the psychological turmoil that those platforms induce. I'm OK with delaying my kids' entrance into that world until at least 16 because I know how harmful it is.
Despite not being on these platforms, my kids are busy, social, athletic, and academically strong. They're not suffering; if anything, other parents comment on how our phone-free policy is clearly paying off. My point is that it IS possible. More parents should feel empowered to refuse to let their kids get sucked into social media.
This reply is a breath of fresh air. Wandered to your site and subscribed. I'm thankful there are other voices, such as yours, in the milieu reminding others THERE IS ANOTHER WAY. Yes, it's challenging... but it's not impossible and the rewards are significant.
I've recently said to a few friends that WHAT my kids miss out on is of far less value to us as human beings than what they have to gain BY missing out. What they gain is... immeasurable.
Thank you! I am so happy to hear that.
I’m in my late twenties and a majority of my friends don’t use social media all that much and I knew plenty of folks in college who didn’t use it much or at all. I’m barely on social media as it is. My guess is there are plenty of college students today who don’t use it at all.
Very good point Ed, which I try to address in my comment above.
Have you heard about Wait Until 8th? They provide some good ideas. https://www.waituntil8th.org/
Indeed, it's almost like revoking their online freedom without first giving then back all of the offline freedom that they would have had a generation or two ago, is putting the cart before the horse. But, hey, what do I know? I'm just the 800 pound guerrilla in the room.
And when it’s all provided by school….school even thoughtfully provides the chatgpt to let them cheat.
I am blog post in article on post i will to work and you Will result
The solution is a gradual ban of smartphones for children. Start at age 10 and increase year on year until minimum reached (I think 16/17 years ideal). When peers don't have them, the need is gone. BanSmartphonesForChildren chng.it/ZjHchVYYCW
Raising the minimum internet age and removing the devices from the schools
Taking away screens is only half the job. Girls need to be equipped and expected to take an interest in the world, to not equate their value with their physical appeal. Thank you, Freya and Jon, for understanding this.
Absolutely, and this ties in with so many of the other points here about what we fill time with when we put down our screens. Children need to have full, exciting, independent lives that revolve and nature, play and socialisation.
Feminists and their supporters have been trying this for the last seventy years with little success. For whatever reason, a sizable majority of women feel compelled to mess with their faces and figures, obsessing over their appearances for reasons seemingly unrelated to attracting a mate (something very difficult for men to understand). No one has a good reason for why.
I couldn’t agree more with Freya when she says that Gen Alpha parents should not let their children open social media accounts when they are still in early puberty, and that they should prioritize in-person interactions and real-world experiences.
The problem is that it is extremely difficult to find a place where they can actually do this - especially in the US. The natural world of unsupervised outdoor play that would enable children to grow up normally (as I discuss at length in my book Life Before the Internet) has all but disappeared due to the combined effects of social media and over-protective parenting.
Jonathan Haidt hit the nail on the head in an earlier post entitled “Why some researchers think I’m wrong”, when he said that we have lost the “IRL (In Real Life) model”. He likens social media to “a bulldozer that came in and leveled all the environments teens needed to foster healthy social development, leaving them to mature alone in their bedrooms.”
So even if we can get them out of their bedrooms, where will they go? Once they get off their screens, they will have to create a new face-to-face social circle, because they will most probably lose their online friends. I don’t have an easy answer, but it’s good to remember that we no longer have the IRL model for them to fall back on.
I don’t think that it’s really true that there’s no unsupervised outdoor play happening in North America anymore. What I notice is that it really depends on the community. Whiter, more affluent (or even just middle class) neighbourhoods with families tend to have less kids out and about. Except in respectable, gentrified, inner city neighbourhoods, where the point is to go against the grain of suburban conformity. In more working class areas, it’s still fairly common to see kids playing and discovering the world, at least in my experience.
We live in Los Angeles in a middle class community and kids are always outside playing or gathering at local parks to play. It definitely varies from community to community but I think in our case most people don’t have large yards or large homes so go to the parks to get outside and get energy out.
Good point. Less unsupervised outdoor play is closely related to over-protective parenting, which in turn is more prevalent in middle- and upper-middle-class families, who have the necessary time and resources. Working class kids will usually have more opportunity for outdoor play, if only because they are less likely to be ferried to extra-curricular activities after school.
Never suggested it was an urban vs rural thing.
There are IRL opportunities out there. I’m raising 6 kids, ages 2 to 15, and we manage without social media. Scouts, sports teams, church, co-ops. I will grant you that it is harder than it used to be. We are fortunate to have some girls down the street that are my younger kids’ ages so they can experience just going outside to play with friends. It’s harder for the older kids, but I just want to encourage parents to seek like minded families in your area - maybe even through an Elks Lodge or YMCA or another club of some kind. It’s hard work, but the real experiences for our kids - and ourselves! - are so worth it!
Freya, this is a striking and disturbing essay, exposing the urgency of the situation that young girls face. I have written along similar lines over the last few months on School of the Unconformed, and will continue to focus my efforts on helping people to recognize harms, remove them, and return to an embodied reality that does not leave us as empty shells hollowed out by digital misery. Here a fitting quote from my post From Feeding Moloch to Digital Minimalism https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/from-feeding-moloch-to-digital-minimalism:
"We are all unwilling, or oblivious, participants in the tech industry’s single-minded goal to capture our full attention. In the ‘race to the bottom of the brain stem’ children are the most vulnerable contestants. Their minds are part of a relentless digital colonization, and unless we intervene, we risk the overall well-being of future generations."
‘The cost of a thing is the amount what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.’
Henry David Thoreau
I’m the mother of two Gen Z boys. Every generation has had to contend with targeted ads and screen addictions. The difference is the parents. We did not allow our children to have smart phones until college. We only allowed them half an hour of any type of screen time a day on weekends. No screen time during the week. Sure, there was a lot of pushback from them and nagging from me, but that’s just part of being a parent. This is not rocket science, it’s basic parenting.
I have seen Gen Z mothers walking with their two year old who’s trying to point out a butterfly as his mother is obliviously engaged with her phone. Parents at restaurants with their children have them zoned out on screens rather than talking together. Gen Z parents can’t be bothered to parent their children; they’re self-absorbed, self-obsessed perpetual adolescents.
If parents were parenting, kids would not have smart phones or social media access until adulthood. They wouldn’t miss out on what their friends are doing because their friends wouldn’t be on social media either.
It's not that simple. They find ways to access things behind parents' backs because social media provides ways to do that. Schools expect the kids to look stuff up on their phones and also they give them laptops (this is where the righteous usually declare parents would homeschool if they cared enough, as if it is an option for everyone). We need societal change, not just people talking about how they are better parents than the rest. Yes, some use screens as babysitters, but when an entire society is structured around screens and social media, we have to teach kids HOW to use it, not just make it taboo.
“Accessing things behind parents’ backs” and “looking stuff up on their phones” is a far cry from providing kids with 24/7 availability through their own phones.
What does “societal change” even mean? HOW do you “teach kids HOW to use it” (as though a kid is going to listen to a parent instructing him on how to use social media)?
You make a very good point, Kiki. The parents, especially the mothers, are all over social media too and lose credibiltiy and authority to tell their children to go off. I don't agree that every generation had to contend with targeted adds and screen addictions to the same extend. It got so much more sophisticated. Just using the Grammerly app can show how AI can read every mood in your writing. The AI algorythmn meassure how long you stare at an image, what you search after, and so on. They know you better than you know yourself because that's all deeply unconscious stuff. That wasn't around before 2010.
But this also re-enforces your point: The only way to protect them is getting them off the damn thing. Which was very difficult in our case.
We moved to a new country with a single child in 2019 when she was 12. She made immediate friends and was very welcomed in her new school - that wasn't the problem. The problem was outside school and how to stay in touch with her friends. We didn't know the parents, there was no history, no contact details. Restricting her phone access, which we tried, felt cruel to a single child in a new town. We still did but it eroded away over the next years. If I would have know about how smart and damaging those algorithmn are, we would have made more effort.
While restricting access as long as possible helps, it doesn's solve the problem. Ultimately, only awareness and eduction and reflection and learning how this monster works and what it does to us will beat it. Because, in my opinion, greed is just the first layer of this. There is a darker force behind it that is driven by control and power, and that's scares me even more. Here is a first, albeit estreme example: https://markusmutscheller.substack.com/p/digital-holocaust-nudged-to-commit
Gen Z mothers are not the only ones on their phones 24/7. I see a lot of millennial and older parents on their phones th e whole time their kids are at the park. It’s a problem across all generations
I’m also the parent of two zoomers. They were allowed phones at 12. I have completely failed to monitor their activity but I have always encouraged them to be skeptical - maybe I passed on my Gen X cynicism. They don’t lean much into social media and they’re quite distrustful of it. I think I got lucky with my kids, but, as they might say, to them most social media is just mid.
THIS. My son was born in 2010 and so many times I saw moms glued to their phones instead of actually parenting. I’d be at a playground and I’d be the only one actually playing with my child. We have to model what we want to see in our children or our messaging about safety and boundaries will make no sense to them.
It's almost like there really is no magic age at which all of this suddenly becomes safe.
As a psychiatrist, your diagnosis of what is plaguing young people (and all of us to some extent) rings true. Our panicked response to COVID only magnified the trend. We all need to get off our screens and back into living in the real world, interacting with real people.
Fantastic piece, Freya, and deadly accurate. I'm an elementary school educator who has watched this phenomenon take off like a rocket. In September 2021, 11 out of 22 students in my Grade 6 homeroom class showed up using different pronouns or identities. We were not allowed to inform the parents of the changes.
In my experience, parents are acutely aware of the situation with their kids but need the schools to step up and support them by implementing policies that reduce the tendency to rely on social media.
I've recently moved to a new school where the administration instituted the following:
1. No cell phones during the school day
2. An 80-minute block of outdoor education per week
3. Block all social media from the school Wifi
4. Offer several after-school programs such as sports, woodworking, cooking, robotics and board games
5. A friend bench at recess and lunch where students can signal to their peers that they don't have anyone to play/eat with. The teachers challenge the other students to ensure the bench is never occupied for more than 30 seconds (and it works!)
It's not a perfect solution, but it's a start.
Wow Freya, another good one as someone who struggles with depression I think it helps to tell the people around you, not the whole world.
great piece but doesn't mention online porn which hovers (not far) in the background of all of this. it's effect on both boys and girls is far reaching and is the true horror of our age.
I could not agree more. This is a major piece of the puzzle, as it teaches boys how to treat girls awfully, and teaches girls that they should look a certain way and expect to be treated awfully. Sex should be able love, affection, care and safety...and *contemporary* porn is filled with the opposite, for all the same reasons that Instagram and YouTube are filled with extreme content.
I’m convinced that some of the social contagion of gender dysmorphia in girls is related to online porn. Imagine, for a minute, being a 11 year old girl at home during the lockdowns, exposed to online porn like the rest of her peer group. You come back to school at 12, 13, deep in puberty, surrounded by classmates who have been exposed to hardcore crap, fearful or grossed out by what all that mean.
My heart breaks for these girls.
Hi Elle, I would be surprised if there was not some truth in what you are describing. Certainly a combination of online porn and Instagram Face seem to be driving boys and girls to look and act in unhealthy ways, and it seems to start so young.
Heart break says it all. I know that the culture I grew up within was unhealthy in many ways...but it is nothing compared to what children are being fed today.
It is nice to know, theoretically, that there is no algorithms hijacking my feed on Substack. I feel like that, at least on this digital screen, new forms of organic friendships are being forged on this platform. I hope that Gen Alpha can pursue this type of course of action.
My very online Zoomer is mostly on Discord, connecting with IRL friends but also online-only “friends” met through shared fandoms. While not without some risk, it still seems better than Instagram and TikTok. No ads, no algorithms. Agree that our GenX cynicism/skepticism may have helped. (Our Zoomer also prefers the music of the ‘70s and ‘80s to today’s. So apparently we do have some influence as parents.)
Best comment: “…But I also believe that a 12-year-old’s mind is no match for a giant corporation using the most advanced AI to manipulate her behavior. Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment…”. Reminds me of Frank Zappa song “I am the slime”…
Freya, thank you so much for writing about this! I have a 15 year old daughter who has displayed many of the things you wrote about. She ended up hospitalized for depression last spring and we couldn’t quite figure out what all led to it. She doesn’t have a social media account so I thought we could avoid depression and anxiety. But she did have access to YouTube and Pinterest and she started off by watching makeup tutorials but it led to seeing these mental health influencers that led her to start self diagnosing and taking on other diagnoses.
Freya is one of the best young writers around. Excited to see her make an appearance in After Babel
As always, Freya hits the mark exactly. It's so refreshing to see someone write about how my generation ticks accurately. That same conveyor belt exists for men, and very often it leads to depression, inceldom, misogyny. Pickup artists, fitness and financial influencers tell them how they're not enough, that all women care about is status and there's always someone better.
Isn’t it interesting how the algorithms Ms. India describes seem to reinforce the same inadequacy narratives that have been present in American culture for decades? Namely, unrealistic beauty standards for women, defining what makes someone a “real man” for men. Playing on these narratives has always been an approach to effective marketing, but social media puts it on hyperdrive.
I am a member of Gen Z (24) and I'll offer some thoughts.
The best question is to ask - when did reality get so boring that we must turn to social media for so many hours a day?
A lot of young people don't know who they are, and thus don't know what they want. They haven't found a life-direction they want to take that makes their reality exciting. It's easy not to try and find this when you have the seemingly costless pleasure of social media at your fingertips.
But in the long run, it's not costless. We young people are still empty-minded, not sure what to do, and thus very impressionable.
When you stare into the digital abyss long enough, the abyss stares back into you and shapes you, giving you a purpose you did not choose. Social media now controls you, what you want and who you are.
Because content is always structured to generate viewer interest and emotion, this leads it to artificially manipulate young people into thinking and acting in ways they never would have otherwise. Sometimes this is good and has a positive impact, but many times it hijacks their desires and causes them to want things which they would never have wanted in the first place if they weren't exposed to such poison.
Another question: Did social media create more purposeless and mentally unhealthy people or were those people already that way so they went online?
As the dad of two girls aged 12 and 9, this may be the most frightening thing I’ve ever read. On a related note, I greatly appreciate you sharing this and bringing me to Freya’s work.