The Anxious Generation Goes Out — to Hear Bestselling Author Jonathan Haidt

What Does it Take to Get Parents Out on A School Night? Solutions for Online Addiction for Starters

As anyone with a phone can admit, the stupid things are undeniably addictive. | Photo: Vitolda Klein, Unsplash

An odd and crackling frisson charged the air late last week as I headed downtown to meet some girlfriends for what promised to be an electric night out; the bars and restaurants were packed with — Schools? Murders? — of moms, friends of a certain age, and parents knocking out date night with a gleam in their eye. This was not Valentine’s Day. The Film Festival had wrapped the prior week, and nary a rock star was in town.

No, the source of this palpable buzz was the appearance of Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, at the Arlington, as part of UCSB’s Arts & Lectures series.

While it may seem odd that an academic could inspire such a vibe, Haidt’s ideas have lent him a kind of rock star cache, at least among those of us who would rather sleep than hit a show. His ideas about what overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the digital one has done to our children are not particularly cheery, but then again, there is perhaps a certain joy to be found when presented with the empirical evidence that shows that your worst fears, your sinking suspicions, are in fact completely correct. (Perhaps there is a German word for this very sensation?)

Haidt, who also holds a professorship at NYU’s Stern School of Business, does more than propose a theory. Through reams of data plotted on chart after chart, he makes the case that the advent of the smartphone — the ones with attention-demanding push notifications and selfie-enabling cameras — is tied not correlationally, but causally, with a precipitous decline in the mental health of our children.

(Alarmingly, he began his talk with slides documenting an increasingly common pinkie deformity caused by the contortion required to palm an iPhone, and medical research suggesting the shape of our eyeballs has begun to shift to reflect atrophy in distance vision and overuse of near sight, and the even scarier hypothesis that brains, which as opposed to fingers and eyeballs are designed to be plastic and all the more so the younger we are, are even more susceptible to phone-habit-inspired changes.)

The damage caused by the ubiquitous, addictive technology of the day, he argues, piled onto kids that are overprotected in the real world, allowed little autonomy, unplanned hours or boredom, or even drops of interstitial time not immediately hijacked by their phones, no trust of themselves or “strangers” (Danger!), has left them floundering in a toxic stew, saying they believe their lives to be “meaningless” at a historically unheard-of rate. Of course they are suffering.

Protecting our kids from digital harms when their brains are still forming is the name of the game says Haidt. | Photo: Hessam Nabavi, Unsplash

The effects on girls are crushing: spiking increases in depression, anxiety, self-harm — the internalizing disorders. The effects on boys are equally so: already alienated from a culture that devalues their need for physical expression from the time they can say “recess,” they seek their dopamine online, becoming more withdrawn and inept every time they turn away from the real world and instead toward the empty “connection” of online porn and video games.

And, as anyone with a phone can admit, the stupid things are undeniably addictive. Who hasn’t lost an hour to a mindless scroll? Who hasn’t accidentally clicked on some weird reel on Instagram and immediately been served up even weirder garbage as a result?

Can you imagine where a kid might wind up with just a couple errant clicks?

It’s horrifying, depressing, and can feel as though parenting with the hopes of raising a well-adjusted human in the age of the iPhone is nothing short of delusional.

But, as I mentioned, the vibe in the Arlington was absolutely electric, and surely that means something? Something other than that parents need to get out more, I mean.

I’d like to think it’s because Haidt has solutions, and they are very, very doable.

Protecting our kids from digital harms when their brains are still forming is the name of the game, and the norms Haidt proposes to do this are simple: No smartphones before age 14. No social media before 16. Phone-free schools, more childhood independence and free play.

Schools need to do their part, he argues, as does the American Pediatric Association (he got charmingly livid on this point). And parents need to band together; too many of us give in, he says, when we believe our child is the only one who doesn’t have a phone.

The cheers in the theater were encouraging, if likely fueled by the happy hour drinks that preceded them. But the next morning, I woke up to a flurry of texts that didn’t let up.

We were fired up but clear-eyed. Just because the solutions are simple doesn’t mean they’ll be easy.

It’s hard to say no when your kid is whining, crying, yelling, insisting that everyone else has something you’re saying no to. It’s hard to surrender the tranquility the digital pacifier promises. It’s hard to make a choice, rather than abdicating and just letting things happen.

But I have faith. So much about parenting is so hard, and yet we do it anyway. Every day, little miracles. And, as Haidt said, just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

He should know: He got 2,000 parents out on a school night.