I'm a father, grandfather, former journalist, P.R. professional and teacher (14 years, now retired), and currently a reborn writer also on Substack. My longevity (68 years old) and personal and professional life put me in direct view of the issues Haidt, Twenge, Lukianoff, Gray, et. al. have researched and published. In other words, I've seen in real life and real time the destructive behaviors and consequences in young people that their data reflect.
As a teacher I saw what the phones did to my classroom and how it captured my students' most valuable asset: their attention. I saw how adolescent social and learning growth went from free play in the 20th century but moved indoors with the advent of smartphones and social media in the late 2000s and early 2010s. I saw first hand the damaging effects of young people's retreat into social isolation.
It concerns me greatly. I often write about the plight of boys and men in my Quoth the Maven newsletter on Substack (https://jimgeschke.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-boys-and-men). I've seen the problems and am looking at viable answers and, more importantly, how these answers may translate into public policy.
Dr. Haidt writes about banning phones from schools during school hours. A great start. But what else? How can policy influence parenting and curtailment of isolationism and resultant despair of young people? I'm open to anyone's input and hope to write more about this critical issue.
To start 2024 on a hopefully positive note: reading the posts on here about the loss of independence and constant supervision of children inspired me and my wife to let our 9yo go to the shop nearby unaccompanied for the first time.
And, honestly? I hated it, at first. It’s not just children that are anxious compared to earlier generations. But now it seems like second nature and our child is more confident and happy at getting a little independence. And I would credit this substack for getting our family over that initial anxiety.
You'll be delighted to know that the newly elected Coalition Government in New Zealand has announced that legislation will be introduced within the first 100 days banning cell phones from schools. In addition to upgrading my own subscription to After Babel to PAID, I have offered to pay for a subscription for the new Education Minister, Erica Stanford. Happy New Year and thank you for your important work.
Dec 31, 2023·edited Dec 31, 2023Liked by Zach Rausch
Jon and Zach, thank you for all your great work on this important topic. I have been following Dr. Gray’s substack as well. Zach recently led me to the work of https://www.everyschool.org/ which I am so thankful for. I am sure you have seen the recent JAMA of Pediatric article (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2798256) which has found alarmingly (but not surprisingly) that adolescent screen time has increased 52% globally since the pandemic. I work in a public school and am meeting with administrators next week to present them the information provided on the everyschool website to advocate for a healthier balance of technology in my school district. I believe that removing phones from school as well as significantly reducing the amount of technology used to “educate” would have a significant positive impact on mental health. Mental health and in person social connectedness go hand and hand. Devices and screen time are barriers to children developing social skills and social connections, schools must make the changes. It is predicted that the education technology market will be $404 billion by 2025. Education technology is a huge business but like you said, it will take collective action to advocate for what kids need, I hope to be a part of that group! Happy New Year!
You're doing excellent work and the following comment is not meant in any way to question that. There is another dimension to this crisis as I see it... the modern phenomenon of over-medicalisation of plain old human happiness/unhappiness....such that it all gets re-labelled as 'mental health'. Is this 'progress'? I don't think so: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
I think the collapse of a play-based childhood translates to adolescents as well. By "play", I mean unstructured time spend with friends in person without adults present. Everything seems to point to teens recently spending far less time "hanging out" in person. My own experience as a 24 year old has corroborated this. I think people really underestimate how much social isolation causes anxiety. Your brain was wired to crave (in person) contact with others. When you replace this with social media, it just doesn't have the same effect. The anxiety is an "alarm bell" going off in your brain that is alerting you that you need more social interaction (long periods of social isolation were often dangerous for early humans). I think that's part of the reason "self-care" and "mindfulness" have become such a big thing with young people recently. I'm not arguing against the psychological benefits of mindfulness meditation, but so much of this seems to be geared towards helping people "calm down" or become less anxious. That anxiousness, in my view, is caused by social isolation, so these tactics are unlikely to work long-term. I went back home recently and hung out with a friend from high school. We walked around a park by the beach (staring at those massive Southern California waves) and then got lunch and took a hike. We were probably hanging out for 4 or 5 hours. I can't stress how therapeutic this was. In person social interaction (either one-on-one or in a group) brings tremendous positive psychological benefits. Unfortunately, it seems like this has decreased sharply among adolescents from, say, two decades ago.
Conspicuous by its absence in Twenge's 13 alternative explanations is the use of neuroleptics, antidepressants etc. Given the historical connection, well documented in the Whittaker's landmark book "Anatomy of an Epidemic", it should at least be addressed. I am glad that new approaches focus on counselling, talk therapy etc. and maybe 'therapy' can be exonerated, but at least address it.
p.s. No one should drop their meds. Work with a clinician to taper.
Excellent, informative, frightening - leavened with a touch of hopefulness. I hadn't read Coddling (book or article) but read the latter today as I read this one. I have long been a fan of CBT, having used it to lift myself out of a suicidal depression 35 years ago - and stay out. I think "structural stupidity" has much in common with Martin Seligman's "learned helplessness." I think a carefully constructed curriculum based on a CBT world view could help turn around this dismal state of fairs in kids -- and we parents. Thanks!
Thanks for doing all this research on the teen mental health crisis.
I think that you have hit on a really important topic that needs addressing. Hopefully, we can protect the mental health of teens while making them stronger instead of making them more fragile.
The first step is admitting what we are doing now is not working.
Gen Z’s mental crisis is all our mental crisis, and though Haidt et. al. do yeoman’s work in pinning it to the wall, I’m afraid their data-ridden style of thought is part of the problem, which is why they can’t fix on any persuasive solution.
The technology the children are playing with is a poisoned apple, and the social science methodology Haidt uses to study it part of the witch’s brew that poisoned it. They have a common, deeper source in the fanatical faith in the quantification of reality as the source of Truth.
Such quantification is a tool, no more than that, but these “thinkers” have no other way of understanding anything but their dry and sterile scientism—which, I suggest, is the deeper source our malaise—which we share with the children.
We used to know this; we used to know that poetry, music, art, fairy tales, religion, myth, and all the rest of our mystic ways for negotiating with the untamed forest of our minds were absolutely indispensable to our souls. All these scholars can talk of is our “mental health.” What a desiccated sense of reality! No wonder the children are crying.
I have watched my kids grow up during the years you are studying and am convinced social media is a big part of how these kids view themselves. It has killed attention spans and created people who need instant gratification. You can see the groupthink effect by those disrupting and rallying for Palestine while also calling for the extinction of Israel. Leaving this up to schools is wrong answer number one. Many of these teachers are the ones indoctrinating our kids creating more confusion in their minds by having them question their biological births. It goes from there to bashing free markets and “colonialism”. These kids grow up knowing one thing and teachers have them questioning everything they were taught at home destroying their foundations. I’m all for teachers raising questions and challenging kids but telling them their parents have been wrong and then keeping what they do in the classroom as secrets and laws being put in place where anything done at school never reaches home is just insane. We shouldn’t be fighting our educators in courts. There was always a joint custody agreement when those kids went to school educators were to do their best teaching our kids what we couldn’t and as parents we tried to give them what we didn’t have. Everything is ass backwards and upside down now. First, Theres no reason a kid needs their phone in school. NONE! We more than survived without them and the “what if there’s an emergency?” Argument is moot as the 2 minutes it takes to call the school and get that child isn’t any extra time where the kid could do anything anyways. Phones should be locked up before they enter school and given back when they exit. NO EXCUSES! I also subscribe to the idea that the teachers union needs to die. I also believe the dept. of education has done nothing for our kids since the 60’s. States are more than capable of setting school agenda and it would create more competition for states to be top 10/5 or the best in the nation. TikTok is a Chinese spy app. The division it has created about every minor issue making them bigger than they should be shows it needs to go. Why are so many people going nuts over Palestine? On Oct 6. 7/8 of the idiots out there couldn’t point to Israel or Palestine on a map. We need a huge reset when it comes to our kids and it starts with changing schools. Get rid of Randi Weingarten and Michael Mulgrew. Kill that Union and allow charter schools and school choice to grow which will make public schools change or die. Inner city kids have almost no chance going to a public school so what are our taxes being wasted on but over inflated budgets that bow to the alter of DEI. This last generation was indoctrinated with the Marxist playbook and we are seeing the results right now. Have to get back to phonics and civics being taught early. I can go on and on but those two subjects especially phonics allows kids to read and points out Learning defects to get kids the help they need earlier.
Going phone-free in schools is not helpful if all the students are waiting for is to get on their phones for hours on end as soon as the final bell rings.
They aren’t in sports or church or anything other than their phones.
At some point we have to hold parents accountable. I don’t know how.
You wondered why things seem like they’ve been going haywire since the early 2010’s. That’s when I started to notice it, too. Then I did some research and came to the conclusion that Obama and installed to begin the more overt process of the destruction of Western Civilization. No, I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but everyday it looks more and more like I was right.
Off topic .. but has anyone noticed the proliferation of wi-fi towers on school properties... I’ve been reading the science & having those towers n school properties can’t be good for those kids
VR tech will put all these trends on steroids. Immersive wrap-around headsets can literally make the "real" world disappear from view. The movie "The Matrix" is a chilling image of a world of institutionalized psychosis serving the appetites of the overlords (political and corporate IRL).
I'm a father, grandfather, former journalist, P.R. professional and teacher (14 years, now retired), and currently a reborn writer also on Substack. My longevity (68 years old) and personal and professional life put me in direct view of the issues Haidt, Twenge, Lukianoff, Gray, et. al. have researched and published. In other words, I've seen in real life and real time the destructive behaviors and consequences in young people that their data reflect.
As a teacher I saw what the phones did to my classroom and how it captured my students' most valuable asset: their attention. I saw how adolescent social and learning growth went from free play in the 20th century but moved indoors with the advent of smartphones and social media in the late 2000s and early 2010s. I saw first hand the damaging effects of young people's retreat into social isolation.
It concerns me greatly. I often write about the plight of boys and men in my Quoth the Maven newsletter on Substack (https://jimgeschke.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-boys-and-men). I've seen the problems and am looking at viable answers and, more importantly, how these answers may translate into public policy.
Dr. Haidt writes about banning phones from schools during school hours. A great start. But what else? How can policy influence parenting and curtailment of isolationism and resultant despair of young people? I'm open to anyone's input and hope to write more about this critical issue.
To start 2024 on a hopefully positive note: reading the posts on here about the loss of independence and constant supervision of children inspired me and my wife to let our 9yo go to the shop nearby unaccompanied for the first time.
And, honestly? I hated it, at first. It’s not just children that are anxious compared to earlier generations. But now it seems like second nature and our child is more confident and happy at getting a little independence. And I would credit this substack for getting our family over that initial anxiety.
You'll be delighted to know that the newly elected Coalition Government in New Zealand has announced that legislation will be introduced within the first 100 days banning cell phones from schools. In addition to upgrading my own subscription to After Babel to PAID, I have offered to pay for a subscription for the new Education Minister, Erica Stanford. Happy New Year and thank you for your important work.
Jon and Zach, thank you for all your great work on this important topic. I have been following Dr. Gray’s substack as well. Zach recently led me to the work of https://www.everyschool.org/ which I am so thankful for. I am sure you have seen the recent JAMA of Pediatric article (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2798256) which has found alarmingly (but not surprisingly) that adolescent screen time has increased 52% globally since the pandemic. I work in a public school and am meeting with administrators next week to present them the information provided on the everyschool website to advocate for a healthier balance of technology in my school district. I believe that removing phones from school as well as significantly reducing the amount of technology used to “educate” would have a significant positive impact on mental health. Mental health and in person social connectedness go hand and hand. Devices and screen time are barriers to children developing social skills and social connections, schools must make the changes. It is predicted that the education technology market will be $404 billion by 2025. Education technology is a huge business but like you said, it will take collective action to advocate for what kids need, I hope to be a part of that group! Happy New Year!
You're doing excellent work and the following comment is not meant in any way to question that. There is another dimension to this crisis as I see it... the modern phenomenon of over-medicalisation of plain old human happiness/unhappiness....such that it all gets re-labelled as 'mental health'. Is this 'progress'? I don't think so: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
I think the collapse of a play-based childhood translates to adolescents as well. By "play", I mean unstructured time spend with friends in person without adults present. Everything seems to point to teens recently spending far less time "hanging out" in person. My own experience as a 24 year old has corroborated this. I think people really underestimate how much social isolation causes anxiety. Your brain was wired to crave (in person) contact with others. When you replace this with social media, it just doesn't have the same effect. The anxiety is an "alarm bell" going off in your brain that is alerting you that you need more social interaction (long periods of social isolation were often dangerous for early humans). I think that's part of the reason "self-care" and "mindfulness" have become such a big thing with young people recently. I'm not arguing against the psychological benefits of mindfulness meditation, but so much of this seems to be geared towards helping people "calm down" or become less anxious. That anxiousness, in my view, is caused by social isolation, so these tactics are unlikely to work long-term. I went back home recently and hung out with a friend from high school. We walked around a park by the beach (staring at those massive Southern California waves) and then got lunch and took a hike. We were probably hanging out for 4 or 5 hours. I can't stress how therapeutic this was. In person social interaction (either one-on-one or in a group) brings tremendous positive psychological benefits. Unfortunately, it seems like this has decreased sharply among adolescents from, say, two decades ago.
Most mental illness could be drastically curtailed by passing a minimum age requirement for smart phone use.
Conspicuous by its absence in Twenge's 13 alternative explanations is the use of neuroleptics, antidepressants etc. Given the historical connection, well documented in the Whittaker's landmark book "Anatomy of an Epidemic", it should at least be addressed. I am glad that new approaches focus on counselling, talk therapy etc. and maybe 'therapy' can be exonerated, but at least address it.
p.s. No one should drop their meds. Work with a clinician to taper.
Excellent, informative, frightening - leavened with a touch of hopefulness. I hadn't read Coddling (book or article) but read the latter today as I read this one. I have long been a fan of CBT, having used it to lift myself out of a suicidal depression 35 years ago - and stay out. I think "structural stupidity" has much in common with Martin Seligman's "learned helplessness." I think a carefully constructed curriculum based on a CBT world view could help turn around this dismal state of fairs in kids -- and we parents. Thanks!
Thanks for doing all this research on the teen mental health crisis.
I think that you have hit on a really important topic that needs addressing. Hopefully, we can protect the mental health of teens while making them stronger instead of making them more fragile.
The first step is admitting what we are doing now is not working.
Gen Z’s mental crisis is all our mental crisis, and though Haidt et. al. do yeoman’s work in pinning it to the wall, I’m afraid their data-ridden style of thought is part of the problem, which is why they can’t fix on any persuasive solution.
The technology the children are playing with is a poisoned apple, and the social science methodology Haidt uses to study it part of the witch’s brew that poisoned it. They have a common, deeper source in the fanatical faith in the quantification of reality as the source of Truth.
Such quantification is a tool, no more than that, but these “thinkers” have no other way of understanding anything but their dry and sterile scientism—which, I suggest, is the deeper source our malaise—which we share with the children.
We used to know this; we used to know that poetry, music, art, fairy tales, religion, myth, and all the rest of our mystic ways for negotiating with the untamed forest of our minds were absolutely indispensable to our souls. All these scholars can talk of is our “mental health.” What a desiccated sense of reality! No wonder the children are crying.
I have watched my kids grow up during the years you are studying and am convinced social media is a big part of how these kids view themselves. It has killed attention spans and created people who need instant gratification. You can see the groupthink effect by those disrupting and rallying for Palestine while also calling for the extinction of Israel. Leaving this up to schools is wrong answer number one. Many of these teachers are the ones indoctrinating our kids creating more confusion in their minds by having them question their biological births. It goes from there to bashing free markets and “colonialism”. These kids grow up knowing one thing and teachers have them questioning everything they were taught at home destroying their foundations. I’m all for teachers raising questions and challenging kids but telling them their parents have been wrong and then keeping what they do in the classroom as secrets and laws being put in place where anything done at school never reaches home is just insane. We shouldn’t be fighting our educators in courts. There was always a joint custody agreement when those kids went to school educators were to do their best teaching our kids what we couldn’t and as parents we tried to give them what we didn’t have. Everything is ass backwards and upside down now. First, Theres no reason a kid needs their phone in school. NONE! We more than survived without them and the “what if there’s an emergency?” Argument is moot as the 2 minutes it takes to call the school and get that child isn’t any extra time where the kid could do anything anyways. Phones should be locked up before they enter school and given back when they exit. NO EXCUSES! I also subscribe to the idea that the teachers union needs to die. I also believe the dept. of education has done nothing for our kids since the 60’s. States are more than capable of setting school agenda and it would create more competition for states to be top 10/5 or the best in the nation. TikTok is a Chinese spy app. The division it has created about every minor issue making them bigger than they should be shows it needs to go. Why are so many people going nuts over Palestine? On Oct 6. 7/8 of the idiots out there couldn’t point to Israel or Palestine on a map. We need a huge reset when it comes to our kids and it starts with changing schools. Get rid of Randi Weingarten and Michael Mulgrew. Kill that Union and allow charter schools and school choice to grow which will make public schools change or die. Inner city kids have almost no chance going to a public school so what are our taxes being wasted on but over inflated budgets that bow to the alter of DEI. This last generation was indoctrinated with the Marxist playbook and we are seeing the results right now. Have to get back to phonics and civics being taught early. I can go on and on but those two subjects especially phonics allows kids to read and points out Learning defects to get kids the help they need earlier.
Going phone-free in schools is not helpful if all the students are waiting for is to get on their phones for hours on end as soon as the final bell rings.
They aren’t in sports or church or anything other than their phones.
At some point we have to hold parents accountable. I don’t know how.
You wondered why things seem like they’ve been going haywire since the early 2010’s. That’s when I started to notice it, too. Then I did some research and came to the conclusion that Obama and installed to begin the more overt process of the destruction of Western Civilization. No, I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but everyday it looks more and more like I was right.
Off topic .. but has anyone noticed the proliferation of wi-fi towers on school properties... I’ve been reading the science & having those towers n school properties can’t be good for those kids
VR tech will put all these trends on steroids. Immersive wrap-around headsets can literally make the "real" world disappear from view. The movie "The Matrix" is a chilling image of a world of institutionalized psychosis serving the appetites of the overlords (political and corporate IRL).
Thanks to Jon et al for trying to "wake us up"! 👏