We had one phone in the house, and while I was allowed to answer it, I would never have made a call without first having sought parental permission. It was certainly not their most extreme sin, but our apartheid rulers banned TV, so it was the radio and books when I needed entertainment.
These days, kids in the affluent world — which sadly does not extend throughout SA — have tablets, TVs, and games and, of course, smartphones. The phones may be smart, but is it smart to distribute them willy-nilly to young kids and adolescents?
The Anxious Generation suggests not.
“Gen Z is the first generation to have gone through puberty hunched over smartphones and tablets, having fewer face-to-face conversations and shoulder-to-shoulder adventures with their friends,” writes Prof Jonathan Haidt, a US social psychologist.
“As childhood was rewired — especially between 2010 and 2015 — adolescents became more anxious, depressed, and fragile. In this new phone-based childhood, free play, attunement and local models for social learning are replaced by screen time... Children are, in a sense, deprived of childhood.”
His message is that the traditional development of a young person is stunted and distorted if their smartphone has become their best friend — the one with whom they spend the most time.
In the pre-smartphone world, harassed or just lazy parents would plonk their kids in front of the TV, and that was bad enough. More recently, it is the smartphone that has all too often become the electronic babysitter.
“Many parents were relieved to find that a smartphone or tablet could keep a child happily engaged and quiet for hours. Was this safe? Nobody knew, but because everyone else was doing it, everyone just assumed that it must be OK,” Haidt writes.
What disturbs him is the length of time kids spend on their smartphones and other devices, day after day. He cites a 2015 Common Sense Research Programme report, which found that teens with a social media account reported nearly seven hours a day of leisure time (not counting school and homework) on screen media, “which includes playing video games and watching videos on Netflix, YouTube, or pornography sites”.
Were you aware of this, mum and dad? Should you have been?
The author believes that this portal in the pocket has lured young people away from traditional forms of social interaction that are vital for balanced development, into an addictive and unstable virtual world.
He writes: “Gen Z teens ... spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviours that are essential for successful human development.”
He suggests that parents in the West — and some of this must also be true of those in the more affluent SA households — have made some wrong and dangerous choices. Rightly concerned about the safety of their children, they have clamped down on their freedom to venture out without adult supervision. Instead, they have allowed kids virtually unrestricted access to the “Wild West of the virtual world” — as it has seemed too bothersome to design and apply age-appropriate guardrails for kids online.
“To take one example of our shortsightedness, a powerful fear for many parents is that their child will fall into the hands of a sexual predator. But sex criminals nowadays spend most of their time in the virtual world because the internet makes it so much easier to communicate with children and to find and circulate sexual and violent videos involving children,” he warns.
So, when did this change occur? The late 1980s saw the beginning of the transition from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood, “a transition that was not complete until the mid-2010s when most adolescents had their own smartphone”.
Smartphones do not (yet) carry health warnings, so what are the risks?
Perhaps the most obvious has applied to childhood pursuits for decades. Sleep deprivation.
I remember being such an avid reader as a child that I would read books into the early hours under the bedcovers, aided by a torch. A smartphone, of course, has a lit-up screen, which makes it easier to carry on until the early hours, and headphones can be used to ensure that the rest of the household is unaware of this sleep-depriving behaviour.
Haidt rightly suggests that children and adolescents need a lot of sleep to promote healthy brain development and good attention and mood the next day.
“When screens are allowed in bedrooms, however, many children will use them late into the night — especially if they have a small screen that can be used under the blanket. The screen-related decline of sleep is likely a contributor to the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that swept across many countries in the early 2010s.”
Mental illness? That’s not good.
The author has read, studied and researched all this, and he knows his stuff. If this book can be criticised, it is too thorough. He goes into painstaking detail to make and prove his case.
He provides a wealth of statistics that suggest that the decline in mental health can be seen through a sharp rise in rates of anxiety and depression. Most alarmingly, suicide rates among young people have also risen.
He also notes that this has hit girls hardest, and suggests this is because girls are more sensitive to visual comparisons, especially when other people praise or criticise their face and body.
“Visually oriented social media platforms that focus on images of oneself are ideally suited to pushing down a girl’s ‘sociometer’ (the internal gauge of where one stands in relation to others),” Haidt explains.
So, what is to be done? He suggests four reforms “in which I have such a high degree of confidence, that I’m going to call them foundational. They would provide a foundation for healthier childhood in the digital age.”
The reforms are:
- No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children’s entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (about 14 years).
- No social media before 16. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a fire hose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers.
- Phone-free schools. In all schools from elementary through high school, students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked pouches during the school day. That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers.
- Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.
“If most of the parents and schools in a community were to enact all four, I believe they would see substantial improvements in adolescent mental health within two years,” he writes.
“The most important lesson here is to speak up. If you think the phone-based childhood is bad for children and you want to see a return to play-based childhood, say so.”
This is an important book that parents, schools and our wider society cannot afford to ignore.
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