Jonathan Haidt: ‘People born after 1995 are in bad mental health’

The Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Jonathan Haidt’s research focuses on moral and political psychology. His latest book, The Anxious Generation, reveals that, between 2010 and 2015, as children and teens increasingly began using smartphones with social media apps, their mental health worsened. His book offers practical steps that parents, schools and teachers can take to protect the mental health of children.

What prompted your research on the rewiring of childhood that has led to an epidemic of mental illnesses in children and adolescents?

My research, for a long time now, has been on how technologies are changing societies and how it is interfering with liberal democracies. In my previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind, I began to cover this strange thing in the English-speaking world which is that students born after 1995 are much more fragile and anxious and different from the millennial generation before them. I have been working on that question for about five years and I had a lot of data on what was happening to teen mental health. When I began working on my previous book in 2022, I thought I would start with one chapter on what happens to teen mental health and then move on to what happens to democracies. Once I wrote that chapter, which became chapter one of The Anxious Generation, I saw that we are facing a global mental health crisis so large that there was no point in studying and writing about anything else. I thought this was the biggest story of our time.

You write that your focus is on why the rate of mental illness went up in so many countries between 2010 to 2015 for Gen Z while older generations were much less affected. Why have you focussed on this time period?

I started with the observation that these hockey stick graphs where there is no sign of a problem and all of a sudden, the lines shoot up like the end of a hockey stick. Once I saw that this has happened in many English-speaking countries, I began to try to figure out why this was happening. There is no other theory. No one can come up with a theory on what happened. So, globally, people born after 1995 are in bad mental health. The global financial crisis doesn’t work as that was in 2008. And the technological explanation fits well, at least in the western world. In 2010, almost all teens had a flip phone or a basic phone. It was hard to text on these phones and there was no internet on them yet. They used these phones to connect with each other. The first iPhone with a front-facing camera came out in 2010. So did Instagram, but teenagers are not yet on it in 2010. High speed internet comes soon after across the western world and so now your phone can do photos and videos not just text messaging. By 2015, teen life has been radically altered. They are not using their phones to talk directly with their friends but they are using it to interact with companies that have designed products to specifically hook them, and to keep them on all day long. By 2019, half of American teens say they are online almost all the time. They are always thinking about it as the phone is always in their hands. I don’t think you can grow up that way. That basically robs you of childhood. So, the great rewiring of childhood happened between 2010 and 2015. By 2015, it was done.

You write that social media harms adolescents, especially girls. What are the psychological and social developmental factors that make girls more vulnerable to the negative effects of smartphones and social media?

When we look at the links between activities and harm, the clearest most consistent link is that girls who spend a lot of time on social media are two or three times more likely to be depressed or anxious. For boys that ratio is much smaller. There is a very clear link in the data between girls and social media. This is the data from large studies such as the millennial cohort studies in the UK, which followed the same group of kids for many years through the 2010s. The link is very clear in the correlational data.

And the link is very clear in what the therapists say and in what clinical psychology finds. Girls are more sensitive to social comparisons especially based on their looks. So, for girls especially, when they get on social media, there is a lot of pressure for them to make everything about their physical appearance look a certain way. There is a homogenized sexuality that is pressed on the girls. And most of them cannot do it. They can’t look like that. Between the ages of 11 to 13 is already the hardest period for girls as their bodies are changing, and to suddenly put them on Instagram, the social comparison is very cruel and it is devastating for many girls.

For boys, the story is different. Bullying is much worse for girls online. The reason is that because boys’ aggression is ultimately physical. So, when boys move online, there is actually less violence in most schools. But aggression in girls is social. They destroy other girls’ reputations or their relationships. That’s the way it has always been. When they are on Instagram and Snapchat, now they can destroy other girls instantly and anonymously and even on the weekends. So, there is no escape from the bullying for girls. And then there is perfectionism and there is sexual harassment. So, there are just so many reasons why going through puberty on social media is worse for the girls.

During Covid, many toddlers were given smartphones and screen devices. Children started spending a lot of their time on touch screens. This seems to be interfering with their development. I think a screen-based childhood disrupts neural development from the very beginning all the way through to the teen years. We have to stop it. We have to give kids a childhood in the real world, not on touch screens.

You write that the rewiring of childhood is the major cause of the international epidemic of adolescent mental health. Does it also apply to countries outside the West where smartphone penetration is not as widespread, especially among the rural poor?

A researcher named David Blanchflower has gathered evidence from around the world. He has found that young people have become less happy everywhere except sub-saharan Africa. Sub-saharan Africa is part of the world that has least internet penetration. Data is very clear from the western world where teenagers have had smartphones for more than a decade. Here is what I would predict. When a village goes from having no internet to having internet, lots of good things happen and also some bad things. To be connected to the world opens up economic possibilities. So, when you move from no internet to internet, that is often very good. But when you move from lots of internet and a basic phone to lots of internet and a smartphone, that is when we see the transition to mental illness.

In terms of solutions, how can government policies help to reverse the trend of phone based childhood. We have seen countries like Australia banning the use of social media for children under 16 years to protect them from hazards online.

The thing to focus on is social norms. Every child has to have a smartphone and Instagram because every other child has a smartphone and Instagram. This is why this is so hard for parents to resist. There are two places where the government can be very helpful. The first is by removing smartphones from schools. I teach at New York University and I have found that young adults cannot learn when they have their computers in front of them. So why do we think that a 10-year-old can learn when there is a screen in front of them. We need government help in enforcing age limits on the internet. Right now, as long as the child is old enough to lie, he or she can go anywhere, including pornographic sites and getting in touch with strangers. This is insane. Australia is doing the world a favour by banning social media for children. Let’s hope it works there. Then many other countries are going to copy this. And in a few years, we are going to have a global norm of an age limit of 16 for social media usage.

The tech companies could easily enforce it. But they have shown over and over again that they will not. For several of them, their business model requires children. Especially Instagram, Tiktok, and Snapchat. These three companies require children for their business model. The only way that we can protect children from these three companies is with legislation and lawsuits. We need laws that companies must enforce age limits for children.

How do you minimize the surge in anxieties among children while at the same time not keeping them completely away from technology?

It is similar to candy and junk food. Kids would eat it if they could. But we have to put limits. In the same way, we are not going to remove all screens from childhood but I think we need a special focus on touch screens. When you give your child an Iphone or an Ipad, that is a touch screen which will reward the child by making him take some actions. A touch screen can train your child just like an animal is trained to perform tricks in the circus. Touch screens set up a pattern of stimulus, respond, reward. Do not give your children their own touch screens until they are 14. It’s also very important to create phone-free play groups.

Majid Maqbool is an independent journalist based in Kashmir.