The Kids Are Not All Right
by Clare Morrell, Public Discourse:
A Review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation:
“Mental health is a complex issue and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.” This is the statement that Mark Zuckerberg recently gave under oath to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Zuckerberg’s statement is just the most recent example of how Big Tech CEOs have publicly denied for years that their products are harmful to children.
But the tide is finally turning.
In his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Jonathan Haidt has done the difficult work of proving what Big Tech has been denying: that their products, smartphones and social media, are killing our children. Haidt proves both that there is a problem––there is, in fact, a teen mental health crisis—and that the cause of the crisis is the phone-based childhood ushered in by smartphones and their social media apps. The question for us now, Haidt suggests, is, where we go from here. Haidt is no pessimist. Though the train has left the station, he argues, it is not too late to turn it around.
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