We Live In A Political World: #333 / Hostile To Human Development

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HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Our Thanksgiving holiday notwithstanding, today's blog posting is not about turkeys, or the delights of family get togethers. It is about "families," though, and some of their most obvious failures.

The Atlantic has an online article, dated March 13, 2024, which has been published with the following headline: "The Terrible Costs Of A Phone-Based Childhood." The article, by Jonathan Haidt, with photos by Maggie Shannon, is a rather long one, and my personal experience with the paywall maintained by The Atlantic suggests that any non-subscribers reading this blog posting may have trouble accessing it.

Read it if you can! That would be my advice. I will provide a bullet list, below, of some of those "terrible costs" analyzed in the article, but the article is well summed up in a subheading immediately following the online title: "For a little over a decade, we have been raising children in an environment that is hostile to human development. We need to change that now." The bold-type emphasis has been added by me!

As promised, here is a list of some of the key findings, presented in Haidt's article:

Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with.

Members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious.

Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics.

Self-Harm Rates of U.S. Children Ages 10-14 have skyrocketed. Particularly for girls.

Play and Independence have declined.

Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health have significantly increased.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media.

Exercise declined, too.

The most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

Self-Reported Disabilities of U.S. College Freshmen Have Increased.

Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning Have Increased.

Addiction and Social Withdrawal Have Increased.

A Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning Is Clear.

Young People Are Struggling to Find Meaning in Life.

Haidt, who is a social psychologist, has four recommendations to counteract what is happening to young people - four "norms" that Haidt believes would help roll back the phone-based childhood in which children are now trapped: (1) No smartphones before high school; (2) No social media before 16; (3) Phone-free schools; (4) More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.

Legislation, Haidt believes, would be a perfectly acceptable way to accomplish items (1) through (3). It's hard to see how it would be possible, though, to legislate the kind of good parenting that could help accomplish objective (4), and yet that fourth "norm," I think, is the most important one. Unlike items (1) through (3), that fourth prescription advocates something "positive," something that would displace phone use because it would be more appealing and interesting than what a young person might find on a phone.

I do think that "positive" approaches are going to work best. In other words, what will work best is to restructure our lives in a wholesale way. The "collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face," identified by Haidt as one of the problems faced by younger people, is an affliction that affects us all.

When we are "on our phones," we are not, actually, where we physically are. I have pointed this out before. Going "on our phones" is to abandon the "real" world in which we physically live. The very first item in the finding from Haidt's article more or less makes this clear. Is "going on our phones" going to be more fun, more interesting, and more captivating than sex?

Well, according to Haidt that might actually be true - and I do have some questions about that. I am not suggesting that more sex could be the be-all and end-all solution to the problem that Haidt has identified - though let's be honest, Haidt's article does suggest there is a possibility there, and we really can't deny that sex offers lots of attractions!

Besides noting that sex could be one way to jolt us all into the "real world," I do want to suggest that all of us, and not just young people, need to take seriously the idea that we need to put our phones aside, and to find out that the real world is a lot more rewarding, and more involving, than the phantoms we find in that cellphone in our hand!