What if social media isn’t hurting kids?

Подробности

A new book says modern schooling, not phones, are behind youth mental health declines. Will anyone listen?

Two years ago, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt released his New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation. The book posits that the rise of social media and smartphone use is largely to blame for the prominent decline in teen mental health since 2010. It quickly became a central rallying cry of the social media backlash. Haidt has been credited with helping inspire Australia’s nationwide teen social media ban. He has joined forces with bereaved parents who are fighting tech companies in court . His name comes up unprompted in conversations with people in power who say his book opened their eyes to an online crisis.

Haidt’s theory has received regular critiques from recognized academics. Candice Odgers, a leading adolescent mental health researcher , wrote a scathing review of Haidt’s analysis in Nature that opened by conceding, “this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe.” Now, in the wake of that highly accurate prediction, a former colleague of Haidt’s seeks to not only take down his theory, but also offer an alternative. The biggest question may not be whether he’s correct — but whether it’s too late to change course if he is.

In his new book Restoring Childhood , psychology researcher Peter Gray argues that teens’ mental health declined thanks to decades of steadily reduced autonomy, and after a brief period of reprieve, fell again in the 2010s not — as Haidt argues — because of phones and social media, but because of rigid schooling methods linked to the Common Core curriculum and government pressure to improve children’s performance . And far from being damaging, Gray also argues the adoption of home internet in the 1990s and 2000s actually drove a rebound in teens’ mental health by restoring freedom and connection lost in earlier decades. He fears social media bans aren’t just — as Odgers has argued — a distraction from real solutions, but a new harm in themselves.

“You take a smartphone away from your kids and that study suggests you’ll make them less happy”