The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was A Major Driver of The Loss of The Play-Based Childhood

Why kids growing up in close-knit communities are more protected from the harms of the phone-based childhood.

Intro from Jon Haidt:

When I was writing The Anxious Generation, I thought of it as a tragedy in two acts: In Act I, we took away the play-based childhood (1990-2010), and in Act II, we gave kids the phone-based childhood (2010-2015). Teen mental health plunged in the middle of Act II. 

But as Zach and I were finishing up the revisions of the book in the fall of 2023, and Zach was running additional analyses and making additional graphs, we began to realize that there was a third act, which predated Act I and caused it: the decline of local community, trust, and social capital. That’s the long process charted in Robert Putnam’s 2000 masterpiece Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and updated in his more recent book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.

Building on the country’s long-standing associational spirit, which Alexis de Tocqueville had praised in the 1830s, the extensive civic cooperation and institutional trust developed in the Progressive Era, and solidarity spurred by the attack on Pearl Harbor and the four-year national struggle against Germany and Japan, Americans had extraordinarily high levels of social capital in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. Civic groups, voluntary associations, and interfamily networks thrived in this era, giving Americans a strong sense of belonging as well as an abundance of place-based community networks.

But by most measures, these local relationships began to decline starting in the mid-1960s, and accelerating afterwards. Putnam points to changes in generation as the largest cause of the decline: as the World War II cohort began to die off, the Baby Boom generation that replaced it had not shared their unifying experiences. Putnam suggests that the second largest cause of the decline was the change in communication technology that occurred in these decades as television rose to dominance and changed patterns of association on a vast scale. Jean Twenge argues that technological change is the largest single driver of generational differences, in her book, Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future. Putnam and Twenge both point to the “individualizing” or “atomizing” effect of new technologies of convenience, including everything from the car to the rise of malls to television. People stopped hanging out with their neighbors and were no longer available to watch kids on their streets. They stopped shopping locally, and had less and less time to give to local institutions and associations. Family life moved decisively indoors as the television became the new family hearth. (The arrival of home air conditioning also amplified that move indoors.) Of course, these new technologies brought many benefits to consumers, but their main effect on social capital appears to have been negative.

In 1995, in the initial academic essay that became the book, Putnam described the social-capital-destroying effects of the rise of television in terms that extend our story in The Anxious Generation back another generation:

Television has made our communities (or, rather, what we experience as our communities) wider and shallower. In the language of economics, electronic technology enables individual tastes to be satisfied more fully, but at the cost of the positive social externalities associated with more primitive forms of entertainment. The same logic applies to the replacement of vaudeville by the movies and now of movies by the VCR. The new "virtual reality" helmets that we will soon don to be entertained in total isolation are merely the latest extension of this trend. Is technology thus driving a wedge between our individual interests and our collective interests? It is a question that seems worth exploring more systematically.

In other words: Act I of the tragedy was the loss of local community (1960s to 1990s), driven in part by the atomizing and individualizing effects of a variety of technologies and other changes to society. That loss of local community and trust in act I is one of the major reasons why Americans began to lock up their kids in the 1990s, which is Act II. Since we now had less knowledge of or trust in the other adults in our neighborhoods, we became much less likely to let children out for unsupervised free play or just plain “hanging out” until a much later age. But just as we were doing this, in came personal computers (in the 1980s) and the wondrous internet (in the 1990s), which called out to children and teens as an attractive alternative to outdoor unsupervised physical play and exploration.

By 2010, with the arrival of smartphones, high-speed internet, and highly addictive social media, we were ready for Act III: The arrival of the phone-based childhood. It was during this era that Putnam’s prediction came true. We did indeed get virtual reality goggles (not “helmets”), but far more insidiously, smartphones, social media, and ever-better headphones and AirPods did indeed allow adolescents to be “entertained in total isolation.”

Zach and I have been working this new three-act story into our talks and writings over the past few months, helped along by some fortuitous discoveries and contacts. 

In April, Zach came across a LinkedIn post by Seth Kaplan, an author and expert on fragile states. Kaplan challenged us to think beyond play- and phone-based childhoods, urging us to examine how neighborhoods and local communities have changed over the last century. He suggested that many of the issues we are concerned about today can be traced back to the great deterioration of the local community.

Zach connected with Kaplan and spoke with him regularly to better understand his perspective on the youth mental health crisis and his journey to his conclusions. After reading Kaplan's book Fragile Neighborhoods, which examines why neighborhood-based communities are essential to addressing many of the country’s social problems, Zach realized that many of Kaplan's insights aligned with our own. Moreover, Kaplan’s personal decision to become religious and live in an Orthodox Jewish community helped to explain some of Zach’s recent findings: specifically, the teens that appear least impacted by the mental health crisis tend to be religious, conservative, and live in less individualistic cultures. Seth helped us see that those who are more rooted in real-world communities seem to be more immune to the harms of a phone-based childhood.

Below is an important essay that Zach wrote for the Boston Globe, which was published as its cover story over the weekend. The post tells what we now call Act I of The Anxious Generation.

– Jon 

NOTE: This version of the essay has been lightly editing, with a few additional figures that are not included in the Boston Globe essay.

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Seth Kaplan, an author and lecturer, spent more than two decades traveling the world. He lived or worked in 75 countries before settling down in a small Orthodox Jewish community about an hour north of Washington, D.C. Although he was raised Jewish, Kaplan told me the faith wasn’t a central part of his identity while growing up. In fact, it isn’t even the reason he now lives in an Orthodox community. “I moved here for the lifestyle,” he says.

I laughed. I’ve always been resistant to the idea of living a religious life. It feels constraining, with too many rigid and seemingly arbitrary rules. The idea that someone would move to an Orthodox community for the lifestyle sounded, well, crazy. But as Kaplan explained his story in more detail, it began to make more sense — and it resonated with my research.

I’ve spent much of the last few years as the lead researcher for Jonathan Haidt’s recently published book “The Anxious Generation,” which explains how we’ve inadvertently deprived Gen Z (those born after 1995) of real-world community, independence, and free play, and replaced those things with smartphones and social media, contributing to a precipitous decline in their mental health. Kaplan isn’t part of the generation we’re most concerned about, but as sociologist Robert Putnam observed in his 2001 book “Bowling Alone,” the disintegration of communal life in the United States began in the 1960s as fewer adults attended religious services and civic engagement fell. The introduction of the smartphone and digital life has only exacerbated these existing problems: loneliness, lack of civic engagement, and the erosion of local communities.

But this disintegration of community did not happen as significantly for one subset of Americans: Religious conservatives continued attending faith services, and those adults and teens continued to engage in civic activities like volunteering and youth groups at higher rates than others. It seems that kids from conservative religious communities may have been less likely to lose their community- and free-play-based childhoods. This is the kind of childhood Kaplan wanted for his kids.

Kemp Mill, Md., where Kaplan lives, is not exclusively religious or Jewish, but its 1,200 Orthodox Jewish families (which are politically diverse) are especially focused on community building. The community is small enough for everyone to know one another but big enough to make sure all the amenities are there: schools, restaurants, supermarkets, synagogues, and community centers. “People are constantly doing things for each other: delivering groceries to the elderly, mentoring youth, joining park cleanups,” he says. “I wouldn’t call it volunteering. . . . It’s just what’s expected.”

His three kids live near their classmates, and there’s no shortage of neighborhood-based camps and after-school activities. He says because the neighbors trust one another, the kids go freely between houses, to the parks, or to the pizza parlor without adult supervision. The children are also expected to be contributing members of the community from an early age, from babysitting to tutoring and becoming camp counselors. “Everyone has a role.”

Kaplan’s description of his kids’ lives in their religious community strongly reflected what Haidt and I found likely to help solve the nation’s youth mental health crisis: real-world community.

Kaplan believes, more than anyone I have ever met, in the power of strong, tight-knit communities to solve our personal and social ills. In fact, Kaplan has become one of the world’s leading experts on what makes some societies and communities thrive and others not. He has come to believe that many of the crises we face today — the youth mental health crisis, the loneliness epidemic, the drug overdose crisis, and political polarization — can be traced back to the deterioration of local communities.

The more I have talked with him and members of other religious communities, and the more I have dug into the research, the more I think he might be onto something.

Religion protects young people’s mental health

That today’s youths are experiencing a mental health crisis is now common knowledge. Young people are struggling with higher rates of mental illness than any previous generation on record. Concerned parents, educators, politicians, and others are desperately seeking explanations and solutions.

Teens without a religious affiliation across the political spectrum started reporting that they felt lonely, worthless, anxious, and depressed at much higher rates starting in the early 2010s. However, religious teens, especially those who report being more conservative, did not.

How did this one group of young people manage to mostly buck the trend?

At first, I thought the differences could be a result of self-reporting. Perhaps religious conservatives were as distressed as others but less likely to admit it. However, the data consistently show that this is unlikely to be the explanation. Social scientists have shown — for as long as we have been collecting data — that conservatives have better mental health than liberals, and religious people have better mental health than their secular peers. People who are religious have lower rates of depression, anxiety, drug addiction, and suicide (for both men and women). We see this around the world: Nations where a larger percentage of people identify as religious tend to have lower suicide rates. This protective effect appears to be even stronger for those who are both conservative and religious.

Haidt and I took a look at how these trends apply to Gen Z. We used data from Monitoring the Future, a yearly survey conducted among thousands of American high school students since 1977. The survey asks students how much they agree with these statements: “I feel I do not have much to be proud of”; “Sometimes I think I am no good at all”; “I feel that I can’t do anything right”; and “I feel that my life is not very useful.”

Before 2010, teens agreed with those statements at similar rates across political and religious divides, with religious conservatives slightly less likely to agree. But after 2010, the gap between religious conservatives and everyone else grew rapidly. By 2019, it became clear that secular liberals were the most likely to agree with these self-disparaging statements.

Religious teens reported fewer issues with their emotional well-being

Figure 1. Rising “self-derogation” among American high school students by religiosity and conservatism. Source: Monitoring the Future, 1977-2019. The scale ranges from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), with higher scores equating to more agreement. The graph does not include data after 2019 to allow us to focus on pre-COVID effects. Rates of agreement rise for all groups in 2020, then decline for religious conservatives in 2021 (spreadsheet).

In “The Anxious Generation” and our related posts on our Substack newsletter, After Babel, Haidt and I argue that much of the decline in mental health among adolescents since 2010 can be tied to the rapid transformation of childhood between 2010 and 2015. Adolescents traded their flip phones for smartphones loaded with social media apps, and their play-based childhoods became disembodied and placeless phone-based childhoods. The new phone-based childhood pushes out most of teens’ real-world play and social interaction and brings young people a variety of harms, from loneliness and anxiety to attention fragmentation and sleep deprivation. The transformation of childhood has made many kids more anxious, more depressed, and more likely to self-harm, especially adolescent girls.

So, what are religious conservative teens doing differently?

What religious communities are getting right

The secret is likely not any particular belief system itself but the way organized religion and shared beliefs bind communities together.

As Haidt describes in his 2012 book “The Righteous Mind,” conservatives typically value loyalty, authority, and sanctity, which tend to foster openness to religion and its traditions and structure. In contrast, liberals generally prioritize individual rights and freedoms, which can lead to a rejection of organized religion.

We see this in the data: The percentage of liberal teens who report that religion is important in their lives and who regularly attend religious services has dropped from 40 percent in 1979 to 14 percent in 2019. In comparison, those numbers have changed much less for conservative teens, from 50 percent in 1979 to 42 percent in 2019.

Religiosity is declining among American high school seniors

Figure 2. Declining religiosity among American high school seniors by conservatism. Source: Monitoring the Future, 1977-2019. The percentage of teens who report that religion is important in their lives and if they go to services at least once a month. The graph does not include data after 2019 to allow us to focus on pre-COVID effects. (spreadsheet).

These value differences often play out in the home. I’m making some broad generalizations here, but research shows that conservative (and religious) families tend to emphasize structure and duty, providing children with clear boundaries and roles to play in the home and community. Liberal (and secular) families, however, tend to emphasize personal expression and exploration, encouraging children to discover diverse aspects of their identities. Each approach has strengths — secular liberals foster more self-expression, while religious conservatives offer more structure. Of course, either approach can go too far, leading to challenges like rigid and authoritarian parenting in conservative families or boundary-less parenting in liberal families.

These dynamics can play out with technology, too. Liberal and secular parents tend to be less restrictive about technology use than conservative and religious parents, and liberal and secular teens report spending more time on social media. 

Teenage girls who spend more than 20 hours a week on social media

Figure 3. Percent of high school senior girls who use social media more than 20 hours a week by religiosity and political party affiliation. I was unable to look at conservatism and social media use itself but used the proxy of political party status, which is similar but not the same. Source: Monitoring the Future, 2013-2017. This item was only asked between 2013 and 2017. (spreadsheet).¹

At the same time, conservative teens report spending more time engaging in their local community — attending religious services, working, spending more time with trusted adults, and spending more time with their friends in person.²

The difference in how teens spend their time matters. Experts have extensively documented the mental health and social benefits of strong and stable real-world communities, and the unique contribution of religion in binding such communities together (partly due to the collective rituals that are key components of religious life). As Kaplan explained to me, based on his own research, real-world communities help foster social trust, social capital, and social support. Any developmental psychology textbook will tell you that healthy child development requires these features.

Religious conservative teens have more social support

Figure 4. Percent of American high school seniors who agree with the statement: “I usually have someone to talk to when I need.” Source: Monitoring the Future, 1977-2019. The graph does not include data after 2019 to allow us to focus on pre-COVID effects. (spreadsheet).

Although most of us understand that community is beneficial, many have not experienced the kinds of tight-knit local communities that Kaplan describes. We often mistake social networks for communities. As he noted in an email to me, “An understanding of what community is has been lost to . . . people who have never experienced it. . . . Until very recently, human communities were always rooted in specific places — places imbued with meaning, places with history and a shared identity. Such communities may have constrained their members in various ways — limiting, as [author Alan] Ehrenhalt writes in ‘The Lost City,’ ‘privacy, individuality, and choice’ — but they provided ‘some anchors of stability to help us through times of . . . unsettling change.’”

Tight-knit communities provide a stable network of peers and adults (not just parents!) whom children can trust, collaborate with, and learn skills from. They also offer connections with supportive, trusted adults who act as guardians and mentors and can help a child through hard times during adolescence. The community features that help children thrive are much more difficult to build into the virtual world.

This can help us understand — beyond differences in parenting — why most secular teens across the political spectrum raced into the virtual world more quickly and stayed online longer than their religious conservative peers: They were searching for a community many felt was missing from their lives. Religious conservative teens, on the other hand, were more likely to be rooted in their real-world communities and less likely to move their lives so deeply into the virtual world, and thus less likely to have been harmed by a phone-based childhood.

Knowing all this, the solution becomes obvious. No, I’m not calling for everyone to fully abandon the digital world or decide to become religious and conservative. But I am saying that secular families and liberal parents may need to work harder and be more intentional about providing their children with tight-knit, real-world communities that can combat the ill effects of the immersive and addictive virtual world. 

This is the key point: Virtual networks are not sufficient replacements for real-world communities.

What about kids who don’t have a real-world community?

One common objection to the claim that real-world communities are better than virtual networks is that social media platforms offer marginalized youth many social benefits — they can find the like-minded peers they don’t have in their real-world communities.

Of course, that’s a good thing. This is a major advantage of the internet and, sometimes, of social media, too. However, kids from marginalized groups are also far more likely to experience the risks of the phone-based childhood — from cyberbullying and predation from peers and strangers to being fed self-harm content by the platforms’ algorithms. Until some guardrails are put in place, I worry that this solution may, at times, be worse than the problem it is trying to solve. These online networks are often unstable, transient, and full of unknown people — and they are embedded within platforms designed to fuel outrage and keep their users online much longer than they intend. Giving our most vulnerable teens unfettered access to an unregulated world with no guardrails or support does not outweigh the meager social benefits. We can do better than this.

When Kaplan told me he moved into an Orthodox Jewish community “for the lifestyle,” he helped me see that there is more to religious life than faith itself. He showed me that even if we’re lucky enough not to suffer from economic poverty, we often suffer from social poverty, with frail and shallow social ties to friends, family, and the local community.

Now, I personally don’t want to live in a highly religious community, and I don’t expect to move into one “for the lifestyle.” At the same time, I want to give my kids — when I have them — the kind of community that Kaplan is able to provide his children.³

This is the challenge of our time: How do we balance the desire to give kids individual freedom and new digital technologies with our desire to give them a stable, tight-knit community? These are difficult question to answer, though many organizations, like Outward Bound, Block Party USA, Let Grow, The Reconnect Movement, the Girl Scouts, and more, are creatively trying to do just this (Kaplan also has many ideas in his book “Fragile Neighborhoods”). My hope is that we can learn from the communities that have done this best and work together to end phone-based childhood, restore play-based childhood, and give all kids more deeply rooted, tight-knit, and loving communities in the real world.

1. Note that religious democrats actually spend more time on social media than secular democrats. It appears to be the unique combination of religiosity and conservatism that drives this trend.

2. In addition, religious conservative families tend to have more kids (thus, more siblings to play with and learn from) and are more likely—at least in the U.S.—than all other groups to live with both of their parents at home (Note that I understand this is a complex topic, impacted by factors like socioeconomic status, culture, and that the trends vary by religious tradition). 

Religious conservative teens are more likely to live with both parents

Figure 5. Percent of American high school seniors who report living with both parents at home. Source: Monitoring the Future, 1977-2019. The graph does not include data after 2019 to allow us to focus on pre-COVID effects. (spreadsheet).

3. This research has led me to questions that I regularly grapple with and do not know the answer to: What are the ingredients needed to create long-lasting and stable real-world communities? To what extent is religion necessary? And what might we—adults—need to sacrifice to provide community for our children?