Kids These Days, Part II

More about smartphones, bans, and the good life

A couple of weeks ago, I published a post called Kids These Days that discussed various claims about the lives of teenagers, with a special focus on debates about the effects of screens and smartphones. I got a lot of reactions on Substack and over email, including from key figures in these debates. I’m grateful. I’m excited about these issues, and I find this conversation helpful as I work through them.

Prompted by this discussion, here are some further thoughts. Some of this is really tentative—trying out ideas, not necessarily endorsing them.

1.

Many of you worry that teenagers these days are doing poorly—as one commentator nicely put it, “Kids these days don’t know shit”—and you’ve told me why. It’s the rise of wokeness, of course. Or, relatedly, postmodernism. Or cancel culture. No, it’s the brutality of capitalism, and specifically it’s the fault of tech companies that are crushing our kids’ spirits. It’s because teenagers think they have no future in this wretched economy. It’s because so many of them identify as gay and nonbinary. Kids are miserable because they worry about climate change. It’s the lousy schools. It’s the permissive parents.

H.L. Mencken once wrote that “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”¹ I don’t begrudge people their annoyance at some features of our modern world. I’m bothered by a few myself. But if you are looking at the actual data, certain facts should discipline your theorizing. Any serious attempt to explain what’s going on has to explain why certain bad things, such as a rise in the suicide rate, started around 2010, why girls were hit harder than boys, and why preteen girls were affected the most. Whatever you think of the smartphone theory, it does a good job of capturing these data. For extra points, you should explain—and I’m not confident anyone has—why suicide began to decline around 2018, particularly for boys, and why things aren’t as bad for adolescents in many European countries.

2.

But maybe trying to explain the data is a mug’s game. Some days I worry that Eric Turkheimer is right when he defends the “gloomy prospect.” The expression was coined in a 1987 paper by Robert Plomin and Denise Daniels in a discussion of why children in the same family (strong genetic overlap, many similar experiences) turn out so differently. Plomin and Daniels write:

One gloomy prospect is that the salient environment might be unsystematic, idiosyncratic, or serendipitous events …

They reject this as a “research dead end” and discuss promising alternatives such as birth order effects and the influence of peer groups. ²

Turkheimer defends gloominess—indeed, he calls his Substack the Gloomy Prospect Blog. Mostly, he argues for gloominess with regard to attempts at genetic explanation, writing that while there exist correlations between individual genes and complex behaviors such as a person’s educational attainment, making sense of how causation works—how the presence of a certain gene makes someone more likely to get a PhD, say—might be forever beyond us. This isn’t because it’s magic or anything like that. It’s because it’s a mess, with too much going on to make sense of.

He is similarly gloomy about making sense of non-genetic causation.

Individual human behaviors are caused by a vastly complex network of interacting causes … that can’t be decisively controlled. Moreover, that network of causes differs from individual to individual, based on genetic, environmental and embedded-luck differences, all of which interact and loop back on each other. … It sucks to be a social scientist.

Turkheimer’s skepticism is about explaining individual differences, but population trends also emerge from many interacting causes. When trying to understand an increase in depression among a certain population at a certain time, we should take seriously a similar skepticism about theories that say it’s caused by this—and even about more subtle theories that say it’s caused by this and that and this other thing. When it comes to the claim that smartphones are to blame, this skepticism should be reinforced by the failure to find robust evidence in its favor. (See my Kids These Days for discussion.)

3.

Some people have said to me: What’s the downside of banning smartphones for teenagers? Or blocking their access to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and similar sites? Since these activities don’t seem to do any good and might well do harm, better safe than sorry.

I disagree with the logic here. The burden of proof should be on the person proposing the ban. For one thing, there is something obviously good about these digital distractions: They’re a source of pleasure.³ If kids didn’t like them, after all, you wouldn’t need to ban them.

Then there’s the violation of autonomy. You don’t have to go Full Libertarian to appreciate that we should hesitate before restricting the freedom of other people to do what they choose. Now, 14-year-olds don’t (and shouldn’t) have the full autonomy of adults. But they aren’t 4-year-olds, either. And any ban on teenage activities also infringes on the rights of their very adult parents.

4.

You might think the two points above (we don’t know whether smartphones are to blame; one needs a good argument before restricting people’s freedom) mean I am against banning smartphones for kids.

Actually, I’m on the fence. I am sympathetic to critics such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge who argue that staring at a phone for hours a day is an awful way to spend one’s adolescence—so awful that it might make sense to intervene forcibly. My sympathy here isn’t based on suicide trends or ratings on depression scales. It follows from my views on which activities are valuable and which are not. I think that reading books, playing sports, spending time outside, making art, goofing with friends, seeing movies, dating, and occasionally hanging out with the parents are good activities for teenagers. Now, I’m sure your own list will differ, and the lack of consensus is one argument against government intervention. But maybe we can agree that watching TikTok videos doesn’t make the list and takes time away from the things that do.

If TikTok doesn’t bother you, consider more extreme cases. What would you think if your teenage daughter had no friends and no romantic relationships but instead interacted exclusively with an assembly of AI companions? What would you think if your teenage son spent all his free time masturbating inside a goon cave? Do you really need a set of carefully controlled studies to appreciate that these are not lives well lived? Would you have to wait for a meta-analysis?

I think these considerations of flourishing matter more than the psychological studies that everyone, including me, is so obsessed with.

1. When I asked Claude to fact-check this post, it pointed out that this is a common misquote. But it’s better than what Mencken actually said, so I’m sticking with it. I’m only human, after all.

2. As Turkheimer notes, many years later, in his book Blueprint, Plomin changes his mind: “it’s time to accept the gloomy prospect.”

3. Some would reject this claim for social media. Perhaps kids don’t actually like Instagram, say, but they feel they have to spend time on it because all their friends are on it. If so, it’s a good example of the sort of collective action problem where a higher-order intervention is most justified. I think this point is overstated, though (polls show a more complicated picture regarding what kids think of social media), and anyway, it doesn’t apply to other digital distractions like TikTok videos.