If your child has a smartphone, you might well panic at the now prevalent idea that their adolescent, still developing brain is being “rewired” – that the undoubtedly revolutionary device to which pre-teens and teens (and not a few adults) seem to be habitually glued could be a catalyst for mental illness, anxiety or social isolation.
Indeed, Jonathan Haidt – the high-profile psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business – is adamant about what we, as a society, should be doing: put simply, children should not have access to a smartphone until they turn 14, and no access to social media until they are 16; schools, meanwhile, should simply ban the devices. We have to act now to save a generation, he claims. No wonder, making claims like that, that smartphones have become such a hot topic, if not an altogether conclusive one.
In part this antipathy towards smartphones – not, stress, computers or the internet or all screens – is because smartphones are by far the dominant means of accessing social media and, as a new report by the American Psychological Association has stressed, social media platforms are “inherently unsafe for children. [Children don’t have] the experience, judgement and self-control” to manage themselves on them. And, it hinted, social media’s opaque developers are doing all they can benefit from this fact – manipulating through algorithms – while blocking all attempts to moderate usage.
It’s not simply parents’ fault, says Haidt. But he does argue that parents have, over recent decades, fallen for all sorts of bogey-men: unfounded perceived threats to their kids in the real world, from ‘stranger danger’ to the desire to pad playground equipment, and that this, perversely, has latterly led them to gravitate towards the reassurance that their children are safely at home behind a screen. For decades we’ve over-protected our kids in the real world, and now under-protected them in the digital one, Haidt reckons in his book ‘The Anxious Generation’ (Penguin).
‘Safetyism’ – a term Haidt coined – has, among other factors, quashed traditional play, as older generations might understand it – being out there, socialising face to face, learning independence, taking the knocks necessary to grow into a balanced adult – with devastating consequences. He cites one shocking statistic to prove this point: before 2010 – that year marking the wide uptake of the smartphone, together with developments the likes of push notifications, front-facing cameras and social media platforms – teenage boys were much more likely than any other group to be admitted to hospital with a broken bone. After the early 2010s those boys are now slightly less likely to break a bone than their fathers or grandfathers.
Furthermore, Haidt argues that the 2010s – the start of the smartphone era – also saw a leap in rates of anxiety and self-harm among boys and especially girls. “Mental health [in many developed nations] falls off a cliff. It’s incredibly sudden,” he has said. Studies he cites show not just the “attention fragmentation” that smartphones bring, but the sleep deprivation and the social deprivation – a rise in isolated and lonely teens. Even when in each other’s company teens are often on their phones (a habit seen in adults too, giving rise to the term ‘phubbing’, or ‘phone snubbing’). As the sociologist Sherry Turkle has put it, “because of our phones, we are forever elsewhere”.
There are also longer-term implications for society, Haidt proposes: children are largely sex-segregated online – boys favouring YouTube and gaming, girls the more social, more performative and arguably more problematic “brand management” platforms the likes of Instagram or TikTok. That segregation isn’t conducive to dating, to the development of relationships. And if smartphones and social media are encouraging a generation that’s fragile, that’s scared to take risks – those encountered not just out in the real world but, one study suggests, those found even just in talking to someone live on a phone – that perhaps bodes ill for, among other things, the future entrepreneurial economy.
These are all the harmful externalities – as economists call the negative costs imposed by a private business’s actions on people – produced by social media; ones that, were they an oil company polluting the seas, would quickly drive government action to stop it, Haidt suggests.
It all adds up to a pretty demoralising picture, especially for parents of course, and especially for parents whose children have already opened Pandora’s Box (the one with the Apple or Samsung logo on it). Around the world a fledgling movement against the smartphone seems to slowly be gaining traction: in the UK, for example, there is in the pipeline a tightening of regulations to keep kids away from their smartphones in school; in Florida a bill has been signed making it illegal for people under 14 to have social media accounts in the state; grassroots organisations the likes of Smartphone Free Childhood are springing up. And so on.
But hang on: is Haidt actually right? For all that a lot of this undoubtedly speaks both to common sense – why, for example, would any school allow smartphones in class? – and to many parents’ impression of their children’s use of smartphones and social media – more time spent alone, less physical inactivity, greater mood swings and irritability, apparently shorter attention spans, the persistent distractions and so on – seeing it all through a stricter scientific lens might paint a different picture.
Certainly Haidt – who concedes he is merely postulating about where this might all go – is not without his detractors. They broadly argue not to dismiss the idea that smartphones are having these negative effects on adolescents – that could be true, while also acknowledging the seemingly contradictory benefits of smartphones bring, such as the ability to make connections – but that the evidence presented by Haidt is not yet substantial enough to reach his conclusions.
While the numbers are nonetheless concerning – the percentage of 17-18-year-olds who say they hung out with friends “almost every day” saw a dramatic decline from 2009, for instance – the reasons for them can’t be placed at the smartphone door with certainty. Indeed, psychologist Peter Gray, author of ‘Free to Learn’ and one of the world’s leading scholars of play, likes to flip things on their head: extend some of the graph data Haidt uses back to the 1950s, he says, and from that point you see a continuous increase in adolescent anxiety until around 1980, when it was similar to today’s figures. But then starts to decline, before rising again in the 2010s. Why that decline?
“I have a theory that it was because adolescents had the first home computers,” he says. “It gave them a new culture of childhood, and remember children were the experts on computers in a way that gave them pride and prestige”.
While the increase in anxiety among adolescents has increased since the 2000s, maybe that’s down to the many rolling global crises – growing economic instability, existential angst about the climate, the threat of nuclear war – that arguably paint a picture unlike that experienced by previous generations. Or maybe the increased rates of mental illness are the product of the growing awareness of mental illness, or changes in diagnostic definitions that broaden what mental illness is. Or maybe the seeming decline in teenagers meeting up in the real world is down to the lack of places to go to, or – for twentysomethings too – the lack of money with which to do it.
There may well be a link between smartphones and declining mental health. It’s just not clear that smartphones are the cause: it’s estimated that around half of Gen Zers with anxiety disorders would have had them irrespective of smartphones, for instance. Gray posits the cause as being radical changes in school curricula in many countries over the last 15 years, with increased pupil testing and the ranking of schools leading to a reduction in the time given to recess and fun, ‘non-essential’ activities. It’s why studies, he says, have repeatedly seen teenagers cite school pressure as the number one cause of their anxiety, followed by job prospects.
Bottom line: some experts say the evidence against smartphones is overwhelming, others that it’s not so strong, though their evidence delivers no knock-out blow to Haidt either. The experts don’t agree because the experts don’t know.
“Everyone needs to take a breather with this issue,” implores Pete Etchells, professor of psychology at Bath Spa University, UK, and author of ‘Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time’ (Piatkus). “The effects of smartphones do seem to be real, but [the reasons] are hugely complex, and the smartphone perhaps sits in an eco-system of many factors that affect mental health.
“Do we have bad habits with smartphones? Absolutely,” he adds. “But my concern is that there’s no clear consensus in the scientific research on the impact of screen time and yet a clear consensus seems to be suggested by the public conversation at the moment. The parents I’ve spoken to have a real sense of despair about how this debate has gone”.
Etchells concedes that this sounds like he’s suggesting everyone just waits several years for better studies to reveal what we need to know, time we maybe don’t have. But, he stresses, this is not to suggest that we can’t do anything positive now. We can pressure the tech companies to do better – governments might necessitate that social media companies actually enforce age verification for their users, for example – though he worries about this back-firing, with these companies disengaging from the discussion because they can never be seen to be doing enough.
Haidt adds that parents might choose to give their children a more basic phone – without social media capabilities – and phone makers might do a better job of making these devices more appealing. He also concedes that this isn’t something any isolated parent can tackle: because to be the only kid without a smartphone is to face ostracism, they need to coordinate their smartphone clampdown with other parents in their social group too. Parents can look to their own behaviour as well, says Etchells.
“I struggle with all this as a parent to of course,” he says. “I struggle with moderating my own tech behaviour in front on my kids, for example, or in the way I talk to them about it. When I’m asked why I’m on my phone in front of them I sometimes kind of quickly hide it away rather than explain why I’m on it [which may be a very valid reason].
“It would be ridiculous to say to parents ‘don’t worry’, especially when it’s hard to look at kids on their phones and not believe they’ve been completely sucked in. But it’s not the phone. It’s not how long they’re on their phones, since time in itself isn’t an indication of anything bad. It’s what they’re doing on their phones that’s the issue. That’s why we don’t want teens to feel that they have to hide their tech use, or that they can’t talk to their parents about their use. And it’s never too late to start working on this”.
To start with parents can learn to let go, Gray argues. “Ironically it’s often parents who want their children to have a smartphone because they want to be in minute to minute contact with them, even to constantly track their whereabouts,” he says. “It’s this umbilical cord that’s the smartphone’s most damaging aspect – the kids are never left to be independent of interfering adults, which they need to be to develop. Ask some teenagers why they spend so much time on their phones and they say it’s because it’s the only way their can communicate with their friends – they’re not allowed out, or if they are their friend isn’t”.
And so the confusion mounts. That we come to some better understanding of what is going on, and of how we use smartphones, is important, Etchells suggests, in no small part because he doesn’t see Haidt’s proposals for moderating usage as being enforceable anyway. He cites an attempt in South Korea to impose an internet curfew on teenagers from midnight to 6am; screen time just increased during the allowed hours.
“What we really need is joined-up national digital literacy initiatives [that teach children how to safely run their digital lives],” he argues. “We don’t ban children from driving until they’re 17 and then just give them a car – they have to undergo training in how to drive first”. Another analogy, he says, is to consider the safe enjoyment of the sea; yes, children can drown, so you could simply restrict them from ever entering the water. But that would be to keep from them the many pleasures that being in the sea also affords.
Somehow, we have to find the same balance with smartphones. Some have argued that this debate amounts to just another anti-tech moral panic of the kind that saw concerns about the impact of TV, or of the Walkman, or video games, and that the evidence for the smartphones’ harms is scant. Yet right now it nonetheless feels instinctively correct to default to the assumption that for any developing brain to stare at a screen for five hours a day – one that invites negative comparisons, rewards exaggeration and extremes, and is designed to be addictive – probably isn’t a good thing.
