Have smartphones created an ‘anxious generation’? Jonathan Haidt sounds the alarm

By Hugh Breakey, Griffith University

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation delivers an urgent call for action.

Haidt argues that the evidence is in. Teenagers’ widespread use of smartphones is causing a mental health crisis. Individual, collective and legislative action is required to limit their smartphone access.

Haidt begins his book with an allegory. Imagine someone offered you the opportunity to have your ten-year-old child grow up on Mars, even though there is every reason to believe that radiation and low gravity could greatly disrupt healthy adolescent development, leading to long-term afflictions. Surely, given the risks, you would refuse the offer.

A decade ago, parents could not have known the threats lying within the shiny new smartphones they presented to their excited teenagers. But the evidence is mounting that the children who grew up with smartphones are struggling.

Haidt calls the period from 2010 to 2015 the “great rewiring”. This was a period when adolescents had their neural systems primed for anxiety and depression by extensive daily smartphone use.

The kids aren’t alright

Haidt’s two central claims are that Gen Z is suffering from a major mental illness epidemic and that smartphones are largely to blame.

Readers should be wary about both these claims – not in the sense that we should resist believing them, but rather we should not be too eager to embrace them. After all, it is perilously easy to believe that the kids aren’t alright. Elders routinely despair of the younger generation.

Haidt explicitly acknowledges that other experts have argued against claims of widespread teenage anxiety. In response, he cites recent evidence from a host of different sources: not just self-reports of problems, but hard data on self-harming, suicide rates, diagnosed mental disorders and mental health hospitalisations.

While Haidt focuses on the US, he observes concurrent shifts in youth mental health in many Western countries, including Australia.

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