What is it about?
“What happened that made Gen Z’s mental health get dramatically worse around the world, starting around 2012?”
Jonathan Haidt, a renowned professor of social psychology in New York, explores this question in his bestseller “The Anxious Generation.” (The page numbers in this article refer to the German edition, Generation Angst.)
“It’s not just about smartphones and social media; it’s about a historic and unprecedented transformation of human childhood.” (p. 27)
In the book, Haidt evaluates attempts to explain the decline in the mental health of children and teenagers, and he grounds his research in various meta-studies and in developmental psychology and biology.
In one sentence
According to Jonathan Haidt, the shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood prevents healthy development in young people, produces an anxious generation and drives the rise in mental illness among Gen Z.
The most striking numbers
40 hours a week: that’s how long a teenager currently spends on their smartphone, practically a full-time job. And roughly every five minutes, a notification comes in from a messaging app. If you include all apps, there’s an attention-breaking notification every minute. (p. 163)
The Great Rewiring of Childhood
Haidt sees the triumph of portable broadband internet, above all in the form of smartphones, as a “Great Rewiring of Childhood” (p. 63): childhood shifting out of the physical world and into the digital one.
This dynamic was reinforced by a societal “safetyism” (an exaggerated drive for safety): children were overprotected in the physical world to shield them from every possible risk. The result was harm instead of protection. They lost their freedom and their chances to develop through risky play in the real world, because they need free play with the danger of getting hurt in order to learn not to get hurt (p. 70f.). Their lives moved further and further into the digital world, where, paradoxically, they remained underprotected and were exposed to content that isn’t appropriate for their age (p. 90).
The problem with the digital world is that it works very differently from the physical world: interactions happen asynchronously rather than synchronously (with the exception of video calls) and are disembodied rather than embodied. Unlike in the physical world, you can join a group quickly and with little personal investment, and communication increasingly happens with many people at once rather than one-on-one (p. 21). But a child’s brain doesn’t just need real, physical social interaction to develop; it expects it. So the shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood produced a generation that grew up fundamentally differently from all the generations before it.
Defend mode instead of discover mode
Instead of going through the world in “discover mode” by default, which sees interacting with the world as a chance to learn and allows “antifragility” to develop (resilience built by being knocked down again and again) (p. 98ff.), more and more children spend their lives in “defend mode.” In this mode, the real world is perceived as a threat, and existing fears, some of them childhood fears, are amplified. Instead of learning protective and coping strategies through a healthy alternation between discover mode and defend mode, many escape into the digital world.
“It’s as if we gave our toddlers tablets with videos about walking, but the videos were so captivating that the kids never took the time or made the effort to actually learn to walk.” (p. 73, paraphrased)
The digital world as an experience blocker
Because there are no physical risks, the digital space creates the illusion that you can’t get hurt. So smartphones don’t just act as experience blockers for the real world. They also open the door to subtle, often lasting harm, which excessive consumption of highly emotional content can cause in combination with impulse control that isn’t fully developed yet. The result shows up in numerous studies on dramatically increased mental illness and suicidal thoughts and behavior.
Boys and girls are at risk in different ways
Interestingly, boys and girls react to it very differently. Girls usually suffer more from a phone-based childhood, because on average they spend more time on social media, where they are confronted with visual social comparison and perfectionism, more often take on the emotions and disorders of other girls, and experience relational aggression as well as sexual predation (pp. 194-212). Boys, on the other hand, spend more time on video games and pornography. They increasingly turn to the digital world to meet their needs and so become more and more alienated from the physical world. But they, too, are increasingly suffering from mental illness.
Phone-based life leads to spiritual dulling
Strikingly, Haidt, an avowed atheist, calls not only for stronger limits on the digital world but also for more lived spirituality, as an antidote, so to speak, to the problems he observes. He describes how spirituality suffers under a phone-based childhood. But where people experience an embodied community that gives meaning, makes it possible to think beyond the individual and lets them experience sacredness and awe (he uses strongly Christian vocabulary in this chapter), the negative aspects of a phone-based childhood can be offset (pp. 249-272).
“The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.” (p. 249)
From knowing to doing
In the last part of his book, Jonathan Haidt addresses the responsibility of society as a whole (ch. 9), of governments and tech companies (ch. 10), of schools (ch. 11) and of parents (ch. 12).
What these observations mean in practice
Preventive
- Smartphone-free group sessions: Within their own programs, children’s and youth ministries can start with young children and make groups (as far as possible) smartphone-free, so that this becomes normal for the kids. On the one hand, they experience play-based moments in a phone-based culture; on the other, ideally it becomes a dynamic that carries over into the teenage years. This can only work, though, if the leaders follow the same rules and serve as role models.
- Church as a “playborhood”: Haidt describes how, in the past, children played with other kids in the neighborhood instead of surfing the internet. But since American neighborhoods are mostly no longer designed to be child-friendly, he calls for creating “playborhoods” (a blend of “play” and “neighborhood”): places such as private yards where children can play freely without adults stepping in, but where individual adults keep an eye on things to reassure other children’s parents and to step in if there’s an emergency. Churches can be ideal for this. They often already have the space and the materials for kids to run around and play together. This makes a kind of open children’s and youth ministry possible, which can then lead into planned group activities, for example.
- Parents make joint agreements: Haidt describes how dealing with smartphones is a collective action problem: a problem that can only be solved if people act together. If only a few families do it, their children suffer and become social outsiders. Here, children’s and youth ministry has the opportunity to inform parents about the dynamics of a phone-based childhood and to reach a collective agreement about the age at which they will let their children have smartphones (with internet access). That way it isn’t just individual children but whole groups and circles of friends, so that (ideally) no one feels like a social outsider. At the same time, this gives the church a chance to be countercultural in a healthy way and to win people over through it.
Proactive
Proactive steps apply above all to teenagers (but also to children) who have already gone through and lived a phone-based childhood, which makes it much harder to put them into practice successfully.
- Synchronous, embodied activity: While communication in the online world is mostly asynchronous and disembodied, groups can counter this by deliberately planning synchronous, embodied interactions that create community and meaning. For example, games that involve teenagers physically, sometimes with synchronized movements, or, especially with younger children, songs with motions.
- Opportunities to talk and reflect: At the same time, you can create opportunities for conversation that reflect on Haidt’s observations and draw on teenagers’ own experiences, in order to find healthy habits together with them. Beyond that, this makes it possible to reflect on the mass of content that teenagers take in through “doomscrolling,” instead of letting it be pumped into them unprocessed and unquestioned, where it can do them harm.
- A shared commitment: Finally, with children and teenagers who have already experienced a phone-based childhood, you can make a kind of “community covenant” that everyone (including the leaders!) signs, agreeing not to use their phones at least during youth group, unless phones are deliberately built into the program.
