0
0
The scientific evidence regarding the impact of intensive technology use on young people has slowly but surely been accumulating over the past decade or so. The results are now in and the message is unequivocal: excessive use of screens is screwing kids up.
This is not just a book. It has become a global phenomenon – a movement working towards helping make childhood great again.
Over the course of the Noughties a handful of companies in and around Silicon Valley started developing various technologies that changed childhood forever, all over the world.
Technologies like the internet started out slow and clunky, but soon sped up and delivered more sophisticated experiences. The early ones were novel, but didn’t compete with most real life (i.e. those that take place in the physical rather than digital world) leisure activities. The later ones became so compelling that normal activities offered by the non-digital world started to pale into insignificance.
As these technologies matured they became more portable, so you couldn’t escape the internet by leaving your computer behind. The smartphone in your pocket follows you everywhere you go, while travelling, while sitting in a cafe, in the bathroom, waiting for a bus, there is no escape. But why would you want to? After all, having the world’s knowledge and the ability to communicate with anyone at all times of day at your fingertips is surely a great advantage?
Prof Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who has been keeping a close eye on the impact of technology on the brains of young people. Decades of anecdotal observations during various lecturing roles at the University of Virginia and, more recently, New York University’s Stern Business School led him to suspect that each year the new intake of students seemed different. This suspicion was slowly but surely bolstered by hard evidence, gathered by his own lab and those generated in the academic literature by an army of researchers who had turned their attention to the impact of consuming more and more screen time throughout childhoods.
One of the key insights in this book that really took me by surprise was the trend towards parents being reluctant to let their kids play outside from the mid-90s onwards. The parents’ perception of how dangerous it was outside the home for their children had become twisted. The streets and parks were actually safer, according to the stats, but their perception was that it was more dangerous than ever. In their efforts to protect their kids they allowed them to use the latest smartphone technology, which meant taking their games, their instant messaging chats, their videos, their social networking sites with them wherever they went: in their schools, in their bedrooms. And in their ignorance those parents harmed their children, that much is now all too clear on the basis of the evidence presented in The Anxious Generation.
These parents unknowingly or at least unthinkingly provided unfettered access to the whole internet to their children 24/7. Those children ended up going to places on the internet most parents didn’t even know existed – accessing hardcore pornography of every imaginable permutation at the touch of a (“I am 18”) button, viewing videos of beheadings on social media – from a very young age. And even those who didn’t stumble into such unsavoury avenues of the world wide web would still find themselves compulsively consuming screen-based content that was specifically designed to drive addictive behaviours.
The Anxious Generation are those children who, whether they realise it or not, were guinea pigs and lab rats in a vast experiment in which more and more of their spare time was spent away from the types of activities that helped push their neurodevelopment in the right direction. The freedom for children to play in an unstructured fashion, where they are free to make up their own rules, make their own mistakes and figure out solutions to their own disputes is part of this. The evidence indicates that young people coming out of schools in the 2020’s are poorly equipped to work things out for themselves independently, demanding more support from their universities and workplaces than previous generations.
The other part of it is how they spend thousands of hours of their childhoods communicating. Being physically present in the same room allows them to train the body language processing parts of the brain. This was supplanted by mostly remote communication via screens that is disembodied (words only) and so robbed them of practice using the incredibly wide-bandwidth model of in-person human interaction. The communication tended to be asynchronous text-based interactions, with responses only available after time lag, as opposed to the synchronous communication that brains need to hone their communication skills based on live feedback to their utterances. And rather than the primary mode of interaction being one-to-one they were often communicating to large groups of peers, which over the course of adolescence is a somewhat terrifying thing to have to do. Yet there was no opting out. If your social life is via one form of social media or another, then opting out meant not being involved in your social group.
The end result of this was rocketing rates of anxiety for young girls who tended to gravitate towards social media. For adolescent boys the rates of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder have gone through the roof, which has been attributed to over-indulging in fast-paced and often violent video games. And the list of drawbacks from too much screen time go far beyond those two phenomena. Overuse of technology has negative impacts on concentration, empathy and working memory, in adults and in children. The difference is with children that their brains have yet to fully develop brain areas involved in resisting the temptation to act on an impulse to re-engage with technology over and over again. So they are even more powerless to resist the pull of the infinite scroll, the loot boxes and other devices designed to glue us to our screens for as long as possible (and hang the consequences).
Haidt does an immaculate job of a) outlining the problem, b) presenting the evidence in a fair and balanced manner, c) articulating solutions to these heinous problems and d) bringing together likeminded people to fight against this scourge on our children’s childhood.
Bravo Jonathan Haidt and thank you!
This book is nothing less than a vital tinder that might be used to ignite outrage that the output of Silicon Valley (and other tech nexuses) has caused such pain and suffering among millions of young people. The scorn we might feel at the realisation that a whole generation has been harmed by the irresponsible use of tech might help to fuel efforts to displace more and more childhood screen time back into activities that help teens to flourish. Group activities that have aided childhood neurodevelopment for millennia.
Haidt suggests that we at least 1) ban all phones for under 14’s, 2) ban social media for under 16’s, 3) ban phones in schools and 4) more unsupervised play. I wholeheartedly agree.
I’ve bought several copies of this book to give to the people in my life who look after my 2-year-old in the hope that it will stop them showing him photos and videos on their smartphones. People simply don’t realise how dangerous it is to saturate young children with technology. As I see it, it’s like a gateway drug: conditioning them to crave the screen, touch the screen, engage with it whenever possible. I think it’s really important to resist these lures as much as possible, on their behalf, to titrate the doses carefully.
In addition to these monthly brain blogs, I’m also active on the social media platform formally known as Twitter (www.x.com/drjacklewis), Instagram (www.instagram.com/drjacklewis_neuro) and LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/drjacklewis).
