How Smartphones and Social Media are Harming Our Children: A Q&A with "The Anxious Generation" Chief Researcher
The kids are not all right.
A drumbeat of headlines, studies, and personal relationships is sounding the alarm: Something in our culture is devastating the next generation. They’re struggling to cope with an epidemic of serious mental illness, loneliness, suicidality, and alienation.
But there’s hope. Scholars based at New York University believe they’ve identified the toxin that’s poisoning the future. In his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Creating an Epidemic of Mental Illness, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues the culprit is a massive, sudden switch from raising kids on play to raising kids on phones—specifically, smartphones loaded with life-sucking social media apps.
I talked with the book’s chief researcher, Zach Rausch, about what he and Haidt found. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Margaret Brady: In 2007, the iPhone was released, and it functioned like a digital Swiss army knife: a calculator, flashlight, and map, all in one. Dr. Haidt’s book says the real game changer was social media apps designed for the smartphone. Can you talk about how that combo was so impactful?
Zach Rausch: I think it’s such an important point that’s often missed in the conversation. I often hear people talking about “just” social media, or “just” smartphones. I think the conversation needs to be about how they interact with each other.
We’re trying to understand why adolescent mental health really deteriorated within a very short period of time, between 2010 and 2015. The iPhone came out in 2007, and social media came out before then—we had MySpace and Facebook. Both had issues, but they weren’t causing much of a crisis. In 2010, most adolescents didn’t have a smartphone. They didn’t have a high-speed data plan, a front-facing camera on their phone, or an Instagram account.
By 2015, they had all of those.
What we argue in the book is that social media transformed from being about networking . . . We now call them social media “platforms” where we are, in essence, standing on a stage, performing for an audience, by posting videos or pictures of ourselves, of our lives, to be judged by the world.
And that is only possible with the combination of smartphones with front-facing cameras, new platforms like Instagram, and the ability to carry this thing around in our pocket all throughout the day.
This is particularly harmful for adolescents going through puberty, when we are so sensitive to our social environment, to feeling included. You’re developing your sense of identity, your sense of group identity.
When we put that on a stage to be judged, it’s a disaster.
MB: How do you answer skeptics who say it’s a matter of correlation, not causation? They’d argue, maybe more kids report anxiety and depression just because it’s no longer so taboo to have a mental illness. Or maybe young people are just very stressed out by the American economy. The fact that smartphones and social media took hold at the same time is a coincidence.
ZR: It’s a really important question to address, because I have two things to say about this.
One, these things are not mutually exclusive. You can have reduced stigma, and you can make it easier for people to talk about mental health problems. That doesn’t mean we can’t, at the same time, be having a mental health crisis among young people. I don’t want to dismiss the idea that it is absolutely true that today; many more kids are talking about mental health.
[But] what can also be true is that we have not only changes in self-reporting, we also have the same pattern in many countries around the world. So, a U.S.-specific phenomenon is hard to explain in Iceland and New Zealand.
Secondly, we also have behavior metrics, where adolescent girls are now going to the [psychiatric] Emergency Room three times the amount they did just 10 years ago. These are 10- to 14-year-old girls, and they’re being hospitalized as well. And it’s awful . . . For me, when I look at those charts [of] self-harm episodes, it is shocking and disturbing, and it’s the same thing in many places across the world. And I don’t think that can be explained by the end of stigma.
There are dozens of experiments, and lots of studies showing harm, but I do recommend your readers check out our substack, After Babel, where we lay out many different articles trying to show that causality.
MB: Do tech companies know how their product is affecting people?
ZR: The user is not the customer—the user is the product. The customers are advertisers, who are being sold the user’s attention. This is the business model behind social media platforms, where you try to maximize the amount of time that kids and other users spend there . . . They design features like the infinite scroll, like autoplay, and other features that are intended to keep you on longer than you may have wanted to.
What we know from their own internal research, which came out of the Facebook Files [exposé] a couple years ago, is that their own reports found [their platform] makes body image worse—Instagram in particular, for preteen girls.
One of the most disturbing facts I recently came across, from a Facebook whistle-blower named Arturo Bejar, reflected in the recent Senate hearings on social media platforms, where he said that almost one out of five—13 percent—of children ages 13 to 15 have had some kind of unwanted sexual contact on social media in the last 7 days.
He says it’s one of the biggest cases of sexual harassment, ever. And very little, or nothing, is being done about it.
MB: Both boys and girls are affected by this, but girls seem to have it worse.
ZR: So, the data is very clear about girls and social media. Again and again, we find the same pattern: The effects and time spent on these platforms are much worse for girls. For boys, it’s more complicated; the research is more mixed. Often, we find no effects. Of course, this is not to say that boys are not impacted.
The first thing is that boys and girls are using different online platforms. Girls have moved to social media, especially TikTok and Instagram, while boys have moved to more text-based platforms, like Reddit and Twitter. But mostly, multiplayer online video games. That’s where the boys are.
What we make the case for is that, on average, boys and girls have different fundamental motivations. Especially for young girls, it’s about communion, relationships, group dynamics, feeling tight within your friend group. Social media really sells that. It’s about connection.
With boys, it’s a little bit more about the motivation for agency, to stand out, to compete, and video games really sell that, and really sell that well. Both [types of business] know their audience, and so their products have, over time, become more catered toward these different groups. And so the harms will be different.
What we see with social media is that visual social comparison is something that girls particularly struggle with. Instagram and TikTok are all about visual social comparison. We are constantly seeing filtered, air-brushed, curated images of ourselves and other people throughout the day. It’s all about beauty. And this is really harmful to developing self-image.
Girls’ aggression also tends to be a little bit more relational than physical. Boys tend to punch it out. Girls tend to use more gossip. There’s nothing better to gossip and destroy the reputation of someone with than social media.
MB: The book talks about how kids have few guardrails online, but at the same time, in real life, they’re locked down with a trend called “safetyism.” That’s the other half of the equation.
ZR: The key idea is, we believe the phone-based childhood is so harmful because kids need a play-based childhood.
All mammals need to play to wire up their brains, to grow up and thrive. I love watching kittens play; it’s like the most remarkable thing that they can play for 24 hours straight and never get bored. They’re fighting with each other. What’s amazing is that in that process, they learn to navigate interaction. How hard can I bite? How hard can I hit? When kittens aren’t able to have those experiences, they end up really struggling when they get older. They’re more violent; they end up not knowing how to use their claws the right way.
Humans are no different. We need to have thousands of experiences every single year, every single day, to practice interacting with others in the real world, navigating conflict and struggle, but all of that should be very low [risk]. When kittens are playing with each other, it’s not like there’s a real threat that somehow they’re going to actually be [hurt].
Online life is much more high cost. When you are online and posting things, you don’t know: You could get berated; you could have something sent out about you to thousands of people. The pressures are very high, which makes it very hard to take risks. That’s part of the reason online life is not good enough. We need to have a small friend group, and [be] engaging with each other, playing.
And hopefully, some unsupervised time where you’re trying to learn with each other to manage things. Not just having adults around managing all conflict, preventing anything bad from ever happening.
So the core idea is that kids need to have these experiences in order to grow up and to thrive. And both over-protection in the real world and smartphones act as “experience blockers,” preventing kids from having the experiences that they need to really be prepared to set off to be free and out in the world.
What we’re hoping is that by giving kids more opportunity for freedom and independence in the real world, and more protection online, we’ll be setting them up for success.
MB Is there any hope? So often, parents I talk to express that they don’t want to give their kids devices and social media, but the pressure is so intense, they give in earlier than they planned. It feels like fighting a losing battle.
ZR: These things are a trap. They lure you in, and then they get you stuck there. Both boys and girls are stuck in a social trap, where all of their friends, and all of their social lives, exist on these platforms. And so any attempt to get out of it individually is painful and isolating. The fact of the matter is, because everyone’s stuck in the system, even though generally we aren’t actually happy in it, we just stay in, because that’s where everybody else is.
The only way to solve this problem is to coordinate together to get out of it. And that’s where I really believe we’ll see the benefits come, where we’ll feel more connected, less lonely, find more meaning in one’s life.
Things are not lost; we don’t need to despair because there is a lot that we can do. I believe the most important thing is to find a group of your children’s friends, maybe three or four or five of them, and their parents, and you agree together that you’re going to delay smart phones until age 14. And those kids are going to play together.
We create little networks of phone-free childhood, where the kids play together in person, finding ways to do that, but also working together to delay phones so that they do not feel as much pressure. If enough people start to do this, which we believe is possible and is going to happen, then we’re going to create a new norm, where it’s going to be taboo—it’s going to seem crazy to think, “I’m going to give my child a smartphone at age 9 or 10.”
We’re hoping that is the shift that this book is going to help bring about.
Editor's note: Here at Verily, we recently announced a new project: Verily Teen, an all-new magazine tailored specifically to the needs and interests of teen girls, with new original content created just for them.
This dream of ours isn’t a reality just yet, but with your help, we can make it one. To start, we’re conducting a survey to find out what kind of content teen girls want to read—will you please share this survey with the teen girls in your life? We’ve also got a survey for parents and other adults with teens in their lives—please take it yourself and share it with others.
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