Jonathan Haidt blames teenage depression, anxiety on smartphones, social media
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
My daughter has had access to a tablet since she was 12 months old. She's 5 currently, but she's not a tablet zombie as I so commonly see reported of toddlers with free access to phones. Just yesterday, my daughter freely, without my intervention, put away her tablet to play with a child who happened into the room we were in. She never touched it again until we were bad into the car and begged me to leave and play with her new friend outside instead of ask for another set of headphones for the friend.
This is the result of my international teaching of my daughter about how we interact with devices. As someone who grew up with the internet in elementary school, I feel extremely confident, I can keep this up even as my preschooler turns into a kid into a teen.
I just think it's a shame that I'm surrounded by parents with intention of teaching her kids about how to responsibly use their devices or they want to deny their kid access at all like somehow their child will magically manifest all the skills they need to deal with infinite stroll once they turn 18.
I think his takes are pretty accurate.
I see this a lot where "${thing} is bad" leads to people saying "we should stop letting people have ${thing}" and trying to raise kids as if ${thing} doesn't exist or as if they can choose to not be addicted / influenced by ${thing}, regardless of how realistic that is. Pick your vice, sex, drugs, guns, rock and roll, pop music, movies, TV, the internet at large, social media, communism, capitalism, socialism, fascism, power tools, knives, etc. And it seems to me, more often than not, heavily "abstinence only" treatment of ${thing} results in far more harm than in trying to model ways to healthily deal with the fact that ${thing} exists and may vary well be something you have to deal with.
I think of it like an immune system response. Your body needs to encounter pathogens in order to learn how to deal with them. Sure it would be ideal if you never ever got sick at all. But since that's basically impossible, and we know that trying to do that often results in unintended side effects, it's better instead to teach people (and their immune systems) how to deal with things. People get taught to wash their hands, cover their mouths, and immune systems get vaccines, and exposure to pathogens by not keeping our kids in hermetically sealed environments. Should you go out an intentionally get your kid sick? No, generally speaking you shouldn't. But that's exactly the goal of a vaccine. Get your body a little sick, so that it's better prepared to deal with the real thing when it gets there. Or see also chicken pox parties (though I don't know if that's still a thing or even recommended anymore)
So you assume social media is required for a successful life? I bet there were people that would have argued in the ‘50s and ‘60s that the social aspect of smoking was helpful to having a successful life back then too. Never mind the cancer and all being popular with your peers is what’s important.
No, nothing in my post assumed or even suggested that. Recall the discussion was whether smartphones and tablets have any more utility than nicotine. Let's forget social media for a moment, then, since it's a red herring here. I can, and do, capably use both devices without needing to use social media.
Yes, being able to use a smartphone or tablet is likely required for many successful careers, and likely more in the future. If someone looking for a job can only use a phone or tablet as well as my grandma can use a mouse, that unfortunately rules out some career options. The story is the same for me: Had I no access to computers or technology until I was an adult, I would have a totally different career path and life. Not sure I'd be as happy in that case as I am now.
I don't like how "devices" are replacing full-fledged computers (maybe it's the old man in me), but that only portends more hardship for people handicapped in "on-device computing".
I merely made the further connection that smoking had a social connection too and was yet another rotten thing we did to ourselves and kids once upon a time.
Frankly, I’d also suggest to your point that devices, computer, and coding skills are going to be less important in the future. I think coding and SW dev will become less and less a human endeavor and more a product of AI practically eliminating the vocation, but that’s not what this thread is about and I am sure not what folks on HN will want to hear. People will also manage to figure out how to utilize the tech of their time, they won’t need to be exposed to it as children. I know I wasn’t, and my nearly 90 year old mother manages to use a smartphone and tablet just fine and she didn’t even have indoor plumbing when she grew up.
I can, and do, capably use both tablets (and smartphones!) without needing to use social media, and we have no indication that the child in question used social media. So, let's forget social media for a moment, then, since it's a red herring here. Let's return to topic: whether the story of child tablet usage which spawned this thread is "akin to" child nicotine consumption.
I appreciate your point about deep computer knowledge being less useful as HCI approaches a conversation, and can see that being a possible future as well.
Even at the height of smoking, around half of the population were nonsmokers.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184418/percentage-of-cig...
How many high school kids don't have a smartphone, especially outside the poorest areas? One in thirty?
Socially, it is very different being part of half of the population, and a tiny minority of the population, doubly so if it restricts your communication capabilities and you are left out of all common activities of your peers.
The situation can be fixed, but a critical mass of people willing to change their current ways must gather and be willing to sacrifice some efficiency and comfort for the sake of personal contact.
I love my kids more than life, but I find a lot of dog training stuff crosses over very well. I taught them "come" command from an early age - and they know to come immediately, without question. The idea being if they are in a dangerous situation, like in the middle of a street or about to be hit by a bike or something, that this is how I will get them out of it. I don't use the command very often, but damn if those kids don't come running! It makes me feel so much safer.
Them: "How'd you get $oneYearOld to do $that?"
Me: [Explains]
Them: "That's clever"
Me (unguardedly): "Yeah, it's basically like dog-training - [more or less what you said]."
Them: [Dirty look]
A year on I don't think they've started another conversation with me. Lol. I have the "bad parent" rep, but everyone likes our kid, so I really, really don't care.
[Edit: It's all positive reinforcement, mind. I'm not yelling or beating the kid, or anything like that. The objection is to a mental association between the child and an animal. My wife initially had the same.
If it’s parents and teachers vs legions of well-funded PhDs at Meta and TikTok, I know who I would bet on winning…
Millions of dollars of research goes into making Doritos and Coca Cola hyper palatable yet it's been 5 years since I tasted either of them.
It's more holistic than just telling your kids to not eat Doritos. You have to inculcate skills and decision making. Such as the ability to cook delicious food. The ability to meal plan and shop accordingly. If you have no idea how to cook, no cultural norms about eating out only once in a while as a treat rather than a habit, then when you're hungry you'll jump for the packet of chips.
Unfortunately not only are we slowly forgetting these skills, we also come up with galaxy brained theories about why that's a good thing.
This is a key part. As a parent it’s hard to distinguish between parent guidance and the way the kid would be even without our intervention. In any case, Haidt’s argument is one of public health. The claim is that many/most parents don’t know how to provide that teaching even if they were of a mind to be intentional about parenting.
> like somehow their child will magically manifest all the skills they need to deal . . . once they turn 18
There are so many things like this. Fortunately one’s offspring need not get cut off at 18. The challenge is progressively cutting apron strings so any particular threshold isn’t a cliff.
> This is the result of my international teaching of my daughter about how we interact with devices.
Do you mean like exposure to how different cultures live with technology?
The problem is with a society where we deprive minors of their freedom and independence because we refuse to pay for basic public safety and basic public transportation. Instead, we make helicopter parenting into the norm and then blame the one domain (the internet) where they are capable of experiencing some freedom for the problems caused by a lack of freedom. If we actually want to fix the youth mental health problem, we need to ensure that kids can safely go outside and play or go places without parents having to follow them 24/7 like they could in past generations.
Where in the world is it unsafe for children to play outside? As far as I can see children don't play outside simply because they are not encouraged to.
https://www.nydailynews.com/2014/09/17/neighbor-calls-cops-c...
https://reason.com/2023/03/09/teaneck-new-jersey-arrest-kids...
No. It's the result of you having time to spend with her instead of working 2 or 3 back-breaking jobs like many parents have to, and her having a safe and stable material livelihood so she doesn't constantly desire escape.
What really makes me sad is when I'm at a restaurant or shop or similar and there is a parent with a small child getting restless and they pacify them by sticking a phone with Youtube in their face.
Of course anyone can be a bad parent, but being a good parent might require having a certain amount of material security and wealth. Not such a crazy idea if you think about it.
You need a support system to be able to model good behavior. If you barely have energy to make it to bed at night then you definitely won't have energy to entertain a hyperactive toddler. Things like having grandparents help raise kids and spend time with them instead of turning on YouTube can help.
Nutritional studies have more scientific rigor than what Haidt is hocking and we're happy to point out standards of evidence. All I'm asking is that we don't alter our standard of evidence simply because we agree with the conclusion. It's bad science and a bad way of making decisions.
RCT advocates should have easy pickings here.
1. Haid has evidence from randomized experiments with kids.
2. There are natural experiments caused by different regional adoption rates of high-speed internet.
3. When the effect size of harm correlates with the frequency of use in population, that's more than time series and spurious-correlations.
Social Media and Mental Health: A Collaborative Review https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-coddling-of-the-american-p...
One of the points he makes -- and that I don't see much discussed when it comes to Haidt's work -- is that Haidt's prescriptions for a solution are dangerous. If Haidt is wrong, one of the most unsettling consequences of relying on his solutions is that we stop looking for the real causes of any degradation in childhood mental health. Even if he's right, his solutions will have all sorts of unintended consequences, including loss of privacy on the internet, lack of access by children to resources that are in fact helpful to their mental health, and violations of various legal and constitutional human rights frameworks.
I'm not sure how to put this, but effect size and causation are different things. It's a category mistake to compare.
It's not necessary. Randomized experiment is good enough. So are natural experiments.
Also, it's not just about statistics, in this case we have a pretty intuitive grasp on the mechanics at play, they are not far fetched.
We can make up risks endlessly, see the AI-as-an-existential-threat debate. It simply is not grounded in reality. All I'm asking is transparency. People make non-scientific claims and conclusions all the time. Folks just need to be honest that this is what they're doing so they aren't fooling themselves and others.
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
I stopped there. We're talking specifically about teenage depression and the cited study is adults. If Haidt wants us to take results from one subgroup and apply it to another, he has to provide evidence. That's how this process works.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-...
Perhaps considering where he does so, further in the article which you stopped reading.
There's too much stuff and for me personally, the only solution has been to let most of it go, to try to care about as little of it as possible. I'm happier now than I've ever been. But students often have no choice but to care since this stuff affects their futures so much, and it results in insane amounts of depression and anxiety, the same sort I certainly experienced before I had a plan more figured out.
I’m not for more regulation or big government. But I find this difficult to argue with.
Their customers do not care about damage done, and the people being damaged mostly have no idea.
The problem is when every aspect of tech is corrupted to maximize ad impressions (and this goes beyond social media - the vast majority of consumer technology is chasing "engagement").
Regulating away this disgrace of a business model and tech will become much more sane & safe, including for children.
We fix this by mandating all subscription services at least show you the Present Value of a perpetuity at the cashflow of the subscription on checkout (discounted at the highest US bond yield); ideally they must also offer to the customer the option to instead pay that Present Value in lieu of the recurring subscription charge (but also, when the customer quits the company must return the difference of the perpetuity and the annuity representing the whole period in the subscription).
The market, the amount of money we’re talking about, the amount of influence that is a hand… It’s not going to go away because we passed a regulation or two.
I don’t think there is any solution. I certainly don’t think that one solution would come from government. However, a multi approach explaining what these companies are doing, and some regulation and some pressure put on their actual customers, the advertisers, might move the needle.
As a parent of two children, we will hold off on social networking media for a long time most likely. Content can be valuable, and our children largely use their devices for content interests (YouTube) and creation (various apps and games like Minecraft).
I would love to see studies that better explain the effects of these habits as they relate to the "networking" part of social networks and media. I'd argue right now that my LinkedIn consumption is probably more harmful than my TikTok consumption, in terms of depression.
No social media (or online gaming even?) until at least 16, if not 18 or 21, seems entirely reasonable given how much it messes with the heads of full-grown adults.
We’re planing on a shared Nokia at first, maybe separate ones as they get older.
We figure if they want a smartphone, they can have one when they can pay for both the phone and the data line themselves. If they can hold down a part-time job they might be responsible enough for it. If it matters that much to them, they’ll do what they need to get it. If not… guess it wasn’t that important.
Has phone, messages, weather, location sharing, ability to google basic stuff. But very, very hard to use compulsively. You can even add things such as instagram apps but they're just not that compelling in a small format.
You can also set it up so that incoming calls are whitelisted or something like that on just about every phone.
Nope. You get a blacklist as a basic feature, but a whitelist has to be installed (on Android). I use Silence (single Android profile) or Yet Another Call Blocker (multi Android profile) [both on F-Droid]. I add * to the blacklist then set the ignore/skip for numbers in contacts setting. You literally cannot make my phone ring without being added to my contacts.
This should have been the standardest of standard features for years, which is just another example of Out To Get You games companies play on retail customers (another example of a set of standard features which should be ubiquitous is the Privacy.com cards: every bank or credit card company should offer the same virtual cards and control features but practically none do: screw you Mr. Customer buy the upgrade/DLC/"Pro edition!").
In my wet dreams: gone will be the days of one assembly line, one physical object, many grades of product performance dependent on '''licensing''' codes and such. You don't want the customer to have heated seats? Don't ship the heated seats! Don't like that the customer is hacking your software/firmware to enable those features, and sharing the modifications (just the steps to mod, like a diff patch)? Tough cookies mate, actually here's a 20%-of-last-year-gross-revenue fine for anticompetitive and anticustomer sovereignty business practices. Pray we don't seize all assets and liquidate you, next time you try this trick again.
Imagine if companies had to treat customers like a defendant has to treat Your Honor in a courtroom, or they get boycotted and fined to bankruptcy... that would be niiice. :^)
I think banning phones in schools is an urgent need, at the very least.
I get that a lot of the "power" that teachers had was inappropriate, just as spanking, but now they often can't even call the parents and have the child sent home. If you can't do anything about a student disobeying the rules, what can you do?
It's not the teachers' fault, and expecting them to fix the situation is pointless.
I'm told that at least some of the campaigners were originally aiming for just liquor, not all alcohol.
I won't be surprised if history repeats, and some chunk of the world bans all social media (including forums like this one) despite the majority of the harm being concentrated into specific social networks and the strong drive that led to it being a thing in the first place.
When I was in school every single classroom was wired for landlines and Ethernet. You can also set up your wifi networks in ways that limit certain things and not others.
Alright, but they're not wired now. Neither are bathrooms, cafeterias, hallways, or other place where someone might have a stroke, a heart attack, a seizure. And unfortunately, gunmen in school are a thing, and if you're a teacher, scrambling for the wall-phone while you can hear gunshots in the next room over is significantly more difficult than reaching into your pocket for your phone.
If phones in schools really are bad for kids, it seems like we could probably sort out some of these objections?
But I would think that the telecom industry does not want that.
People adapt
> Jonathan Haidt Wants You to Take Away Your Kid’s Phone
The part where Haidt discusses “market failure” for tech companies is interesting and suggests society needs totally different laws to manage big tech (including social media).
I also thought this particular answer from Haidt’s interview was interesting, about what may happen to Gen Z:
> The brain is literally rewiring, literally in the sense that neurons are seeking each other out. Neurons are fading away if they’re not used, synapses are forming or fading away. That happens very rapidly in the first couple of years of life, then it slows down. But in puberty it speeds up. So puberty is a time of really important rewiring, and traditional societies would give young people some guidance into how you make the transition to adulthood. We don’t do that. We give them an iPhone and an iPad and we say, “Here, we’re going to let you be guided into adulthood by a bunch of random people on the Internet chosen by algorithm for their extremity—that’s how you’re going to rewire your brain.”
> So it is possible that there are lasting effects and that Gen Z, for the rest of their lives, will be more anxious and fragile. That is possible—we just don’t know. But the optimistic thing I can say is that there’s a lot they can do to make themselves better quickly.
> I teach a course at N.Y.U. Stern called Flourishing. It’s an undergraduate positive-psychology course. And one of the most important things I do with the class is to go through their notifications with them. Two hundred to five hundred a day is typically how many the students get. And I say, “Turn off notifications for everything except for five apps. If you could only keep on five apps, like Uber—you surely want to keep on Uber and Lyft because you need to know, Is the car coming or not? But do you need an update from the New York Times or from The New Yorker or anybody else?”
In this case the original title is linkbait, so we changed it.
However, this wasn't an obvious case of "linkbait" and it's from the New Yorker, a respectable publication known for its evenhandedness and scrupulous fact-checking. And the original title is accurate as stated. Jonathan Haidt really does want parents to take their kids smartphones away.
I can’t remember the last time I hadn’t already found my ride by the time the phone noticed it was there.
You can only be a spectator for so long, "monkey see, monkey do", except when you see something on social media that you deem interesting becomes impossible to do it within a short timeframe, so the lack of action makes us feel like something is missing.
Just like drugs tapering a good starting point would be to focus on social media content that is actionable.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3428496/figure/...
The data is clear that this mental health crisis started in the late 90s. Before social media even existed.
The problem with Haidt isn't with his diagnosis, but his recommended course of treatment. Haidt is a member of the camp that believes age-gating is the solution - the kind that involves users being compelled to perform facial scans or upload government-issued photo ID, which are both HUGE invasions of privacy.
47:30 is where they start diving into policy proposals
The way he feigns much difficulty to understand the baby & the steak argument is very revealing. Responsible kids deserve the chance to have fun and be taught by elders where the line of too risky play is. When he seems so indifferent to the slippery slope of the state picking up all the slack for the parents it can easily be taken for the main aim of his work.
We shouldn't prevent children from working in factories because that might be a privacy violation!
The problem isn't with the idea of keeping kids off social media, it's with the infringement of privacy that necessarily comes with one of the only ways society has figured out to effectively enforce that policy.
"We shouldn't prevent children from working in factories because that might be a privacy violation!" is an emotionally-charged straw-man of my argument. Please calm down and argue against the argument I'm actually making, not the much weaker argument that you wish I was making.
Are you sure about that?
Even so, there's no reason age verification online couldn't work similarly.
>Are you sure about that?
Yes. I am certain that the middle aged woman who half-glanced at my driver's license for 2 seconds 3 months ago did not memorize my driver's license number and enter it into the computerized list of all driver's license numbers displayed by customers who paid in cash and left on a bicycle without any kind of identifying plates, before proceeding to remember me as a customer and not ask for the ID anymore.
I'm not asserting there's no record of any kind of me being there - the cashier can attest to as much. What I'm so confident of is that I can do this and know with 100% certainty that my ID (ssn, drivers license number) did not get stored as a digital record, such as the database entry correlating to that purchase on that day at that time in that store.
The reason this cannot work similarly online is that the user has no way of knowing with certainty that their identifying information (IP address, facial scan data, photo of driver's license) is not being stored, whereas I do know with absolute certainty that my identifying information is not being stored for the purchases I do not want being tied to me in a database.
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jonathan-haidt-a...
He really did a lot of pushing back on this one, and it was really interesting to see their different approaches. Haidt really seemed focus on finding common ground with Tyler personally, while Tyler was far more interested in challenging hadiat's position.
Ultimately, I felt they were talking about different points. Tyler thought that it was on net positive on average, or at least will be in the global long run. Haidt was talking about worsening outcomes for a subset of the population, and perhaps the average today.
My priors lead me to agree with basically both of them in their own domains. I think social media today is increasing harm and dropping the mean outcome, but also increasing the performance for children who successfully navigate it. I think long-term, culture will evolve to develop better habits around social media.
I did however think that Tyler's hypothesis that AI will curate people's social media feed to free up time was simply dumb. I think it entirely ignores why most people use social media, which is both an escape and an addiction. It's like suggesting that people will spend less time drinking and drunk if we provide everyone with High proof alcohol for free. They aren't drinking it for the calories.
Online, I see lots of complaints about rent burden, but it barely increased from 25%->27% from 2001-2024 [a].
Median wages are growing faster than inflation, too. The easiest numbers to pull up are Wolfram Alpha's [1]:
CPI (2001-2022): +68% (+2.5%/yr)
Median wage (2001-2022): $27060 -> $46310 (2.6%/yr)
Mean wage (2001-2022): $34020 -> $61900 (2.9%/yr)
Bottom 10% wage (2001-2022): $14070 -> $27340 (3.2%/yr)
I think there was a temporary spike in rent burden [2] [3] which quickly reversed [4].
It generated lots of headlines, but nobody paid attention to the decline.
[a] https://cre.moodysanalytics.com//app/uploads/2024/02/image-1... , from [4]
[1] eg: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=median+US+wage+2022
[2] https://www.moodysanalytics.com/about-us/press-releases/2023...
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DP04ACS006037
[4] https://cre.moodysanalytics.com/insights/market-insights/q4-...
EDIT: A commenter below led me to the following stat: 32% of American adults can't afford a $500 expense with their savings (Table 12): https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2023-economic-we...
What's mysterious about the inflation to me is that there's very little discussion exploring an inflation rationale that links it to record corporate profits and a record raging bull market.
That lack of emphasis reads political to me. The people being most harmed by increased consumer prices are generally not the ones who are most benefiting from them.
I think both wages & prices around the time of covid, and it's easy to manufacture dissent over this (due to the above quote).
It's true that prices and wages increased through COVID, but I don't believe the full explanation is quite so neat. For instance, this article lays out some additional details.[0]
Essentially, commodity pricing and other production inputs have stabilized, however, companies are charging their customers higher prices and enhancing their margins.
This is yielding record corporate profits and helping to fuel the bull market while consumers end up eating the resulting inflation. Yet, there's relatively little discussion about it when the issue of inflation is raised.
The broader economy is strong, and their long term employment prospects are excellent, with many people leaving the workforce and productivity gains increasing overall wealth.
Edit: the parent also called out median comp being up. Again, the persistence of the negative vibes without any actual data reinforces how the media now negatively impacts everyone's attitudes and ultimately mental health
Some numbers (all the usual "mean-vs-median" caveats apply, though IME it rarely changes much):
France mean wages (2001-2022): 41706/26275 = 1.59 (2.2%/yr)
France CPI (2001-2022): 108.74/80.39 = 1.35 (1.4%/yr)
GB mean weekly wages (2001-2022): 599/321 = 1.87 (3.0%/yr!)
GB CPI: 114.6/73.5 (2001-2022): = 1.56 (2.14%/yr)
Canada mean wages (2001-2022): 14,176.4/10,405.1 = 1.36 (1.5%/yr)
Canada CPI (2001-2022): 146.3/96.8 = 1.51 (2.0%/yr)
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/time...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/416204/average-annual-wa...
I agree the numbers look great -- Added stats in a sibling comment above.
40% of people not saving $400 doesn't mean the economy is bad. It could mean they don't know how to save the money they're earning. Perhaps something else is wrong.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/03/in-the-u-...
> Nearly 4 in 10 Americans lack enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense
https://fortune.com/2023/05/23/inflation-economy-consumer-fi...
> What a $400 emergency expense tells us about the economy
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2021/what-a-400-dolla...
And the master of them all:
> Sixty-eight percent of adults said they could pay an expense of at least $500 using only their current savings (table 12). This is a somewhat larger share than the 63 percent of adults who said they would pay an unexpected $400 expense with cash or the equivalent, suggesting that some people do choose to pay with other methods, even if they have cash savings available to them.
We have it better than ever before in basically everything. But the media can't just report that, they have to find things that "need" improving and present them as dire straits.
Children, since they haven't learned to filter it out yet, feel that as soul-crushing dread. And since it's nothing they can do anything about, they feel helpless.
If that is so, then why even complain or feel bad about this stuff? Like all this discourse feels pretty futile if you don't even believe a different state of affairs is possible...
Crime will always exist, too, but we don't stop fighting that, either. It's part of life that we fight against bad things, even if we can't possibly eliminate that bad thing permanently.
On the brighter side of things, the internet has provided people to more information than ever before, and cell phones have put that information in their pocket. People can and do look up things all the time and inform themselves.
All you end up doing from this point of view is reinforce the very pessimism you are arguing against by posing this entire aspect of our society as forever broken
Also, is it not "the media" anymore when I inform myself on the internet? Where is the line there?
Most of western civilization is in severe danger of collapsing into fascist dictatorships or being taken over by same, egged on by truly deranged billionaires who somehow don’t think it will negatively affect them. Antivax hysteria is bringing back mid-20th century disease. Climate change appears to be accelerating on the worst-case side. Militarized police departments. Racial injustice has always been with us in the USA, but now it’s been made visible to everyone, and it’s very clear that some people — who were supposed to be the good guys — not only don’t care, but actively support it. Multiple state governments are now encouraging book banning and child labor. Do we need to mention women’s healthcare?
And you, old person, are saying “you have it better than I had it in 1970’s jfc” — that’s true for some values of “you” and “I”, but you’re completely missing the point.
Now, it's possible—probably likely—that I'm in an economic bubble, but these same kids do suffer from other anxieties and would likely fit the studies.
Teenagers should be more focused on discovering their hobbies and interests alongside their education, finding some positive goals for their lives. But social media is telling them that WW3/climate-pocalypse/Trumpageddon is coming within months/years. They'll either be thinking 'why bother?' or 'we need a revolution!'. Neither of which are good for them.
must be the phones.
Not too far a stretch to see how our device / social media time might contribute to a breakdown in deep social connections.