Look you don’t talk about the big big thing. Kids these days don’t know shit. Profs at major universities say they can barely read, much less write a good paragraph, and don’t know basic math. Plus they’re staggeringly closed minded. I was a prof for 30 years myself and it’s true. The average student has gotten worse and worse. And it is DEFINITELY the screens. But otoh, the best students are far far better, and far more interesting and morally developed people too—because of the screens. The screens are like the little girl with the curl: very very good or very very bad. But the bad is obviously swamping the good and every teacher knows it.
Yeah yeah. Socrates said the same thing about young people 2,500 years ago -- books and art corrupted their pure minds. EVERY elder generation has said EXACTLY the same thing about how "kids today" "don't know shit." Please, those of you oldsters who recite this tired mantra about Gen Z, tell me your own high school graduation year, and I'll be happy to post what YOUR elders (YOUR professors) said about YOU and your stupidity and closed-mindedness. Enough! A majority of older people today vote for Trump. So, don't talk about how intellectually and morally superior the elders are.
Disagree big time. Horvath's testimony is incompetent bordering on fraudulent. He shows no awareness of the difference between a criterion-referenced and norm-referenced index, nor do those who spread his smug panic. Here's my summary:
Every generation hears they're the dumbest. See Bauerlein's "The Dumbest Generation" (2008) about Millennials; Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" (1987) and "A Nation at Risk" (1983) about how dumb (and worse) Gen X was; and I won't even start a list of how stupid TV-driven Boomers were portrayed.
Typically, these self-flattering tirades don't tell us anything about the new generations they lambaste; all they show is that the authors never learned critical thinking.
It is not about kids being different, it is about conditions being different. The "prof" thought it was the screens, if his comment was strongly worded, it was also nuanced in that he noted that not every kid was affected equally. I think he might just have expressed some personal frustration based on his "lived experience".
My point was also about conditions, in this case that there might just be a problem in education. If you disagree with that or find it over generalized, fine, if people in their fields notice a difference during their teaching careers, I personally think they, and other data, might just be on to something, and it is not about blaming kids.
Jonathan Haidt made it his personal mission to address phones, and however much that factor weighed against others, it was because of observations that something had changed for the worse. OK, my self flattery session is now over.
If the conditions each generation faces change radically, yet elders (especially educators) repeat the same dire criticisms of every new generation decade after decade in exactly the same words (and I mean identical; compare Horvath, 2026, to "A Nation at Risk", 1983 -- talk about a declaration that something that changed for the worse!), then that suggests it's the elders who can't face newness without panicking.
Two things can be true, namely that "elders" become repetitive and grumpy, and that new technologies and cultural changes impact children in a way the haven't done before in all of human evolution. There could be plusses and minuses, of course, as in all things.
As a fellow prof, it's easy to point the finger at screens as to why they struggle with literacy and numeracy, but the question I always come back to is who's teaching them? My friends who teach K-12 are routinely pressured by admin and parents to pass students who are objectively failing. School boards implement curricula where kids are not even given entire books to read, only chapters or passages. There is so much content that teachers are required to cover that there is no room for depth or critical thinking. Schools banning phones and getting rid of chromebooks in classes may be a good start, but if policies and procedures don't change, I have a hard time seeing how the needle will move.
While I was reading this, I was also constently wondering: why are we trying so hard to connect screen use with suicide rates, when the damage caused by screens is obviously on attention, aka learning skill. Is this a diversion piece paid by Facebook to blur the causal relation between education and screen, or what? Suicide rates, in a world were young people are rightfully concerned by so many other things (climate, economy, wars...) are obviously not a good proxy for how time spent online might affect children development.
Is it possible that this is because a lot of kids that go to college have no business or reason for being there other than the fulfillment of peer, social, and parental expectations? 30 years ago a kid that didn’t know shit (academically speaking) would go get a job or go to trade school. Now they’re sitting in freshman English lit with blank stares on their faces, and the professors naturally begin to bemoan the state of the world like every other person over 40.
In my job I see a lot of high caliber kids as interns and first year hires, and they’re certainly all smarter and better prepared than I was as a recent college grad.
The difference between TV watching in the 90s and TikTok & YouTube now isn't the amount of time devoted to them. It is that TV in the 90s was fairly limited and shows could serve as a Schelling Point for community. Kids could talk about their favorite shows or episodes, and form fandoms. When there's a million specialized offerings, everyone is in their own curated silo and it is much, much harder to bond over shared culture IRL. So you get more isolation and anomie with modern screens than 90s screens, even if the watching time is the same.
Also, having lived through the 80s and 90s as a kid, I think people in that time were right to complain about how much time kids then were spending on tv! The parallel is apt, and it was bad both times!
The reason the 'kids' spent too much time on the tv is because the adults spent too much time on tv. What exactly is bad about it? Do you have some evidence to present or just feel like sharing banalities?
I wonder if enough attention is being given to not just the smartphone / social media use of children & adolescents themselves, but the dramatic increase in smartphone / social media use (preoccupation) of the adults in their lives and what sort of direct and indirect impacts that is having on children & adolescents.
Is it maybe postmodernism and its woke ideology of pessimism? Young people have been indoctrinated into believing they are either victims or oppressors, their world is going to disappear due to global warming, and the selfish rule of the uncaring ultra rich minority. That is quite a depressing view of the world for someone thinking about growing up, and if you don’t adhere to that view you are a pariah unworthy to be called human by your peers…
You realize as soon as you use childish trendy buzzwords like 'woke' you lose all credibility, right?
It sounds like you've been indoctrinated into the MAGA ideology of anti-facts, anti-science, and anti-humanism. If your immediate knee-jerk reaction to an essay about the mental health of kids (i.e. under 18) is to spew out 'woke' and 'postmodernism' (to which kids have little exposure to) then maybe it's time to take a deep breath and go outside and touch grass.
If you take away the words woke and postmodernism, do you disagree that catastrophic narratives might be depressing for young people to encounter? By catastrophic I mean presenting the worst case interpretation as if it is the norm. This is true in the climate change debate (Rcp 8.5 represented as a baseline prediction, for example, when in fact it was never the path we were on). This caused people to be concerned about end of the world scenarios in their lifetime, and by appearances induced some into a panic. I see that mindset in other issues as well, and in general, as FIRE has amply demonstrated, intolerance of opposing views in universities has increased, often expressed in extreme behavior, and often ideology based, and that, based on FIRE's documentation, is a new phenomenon starting in the 2010's. Something's cooking. More black vs white thinking, more good vs. evil thinking, more emotional thinking. Not my words, FIREs observations. These are easily accessible, and the documentation thereof started, as it so happens, with the joint publications of Jonathan Haidt, mentioned above, and Greg Lukianoff, of FIRE.
Climate change is actually worse than climate scientists predicted. That's a fact. Drought, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and severe weather have been getting worse far faster than anyone predicted.
Intolerance of opposing views has been a hallmark of conservatives for several decades. Jeffrey Sacks (Acadia University) has carefully demonstrated this with his studies on cancelled speeches on campus across North America. Even Jonathan Haidt has admitted on numerous occasions that cancellations of speakers is only happening in a tiny minority of campuses concentrated at Ivy league schools. The reason you and so many others believe it's a widespread problem is the result of conservative media. The propaganda spreads like wildfire because 99% of all media is conservative owned.
Look around you. The entire society is living in a catastrophe. Most people can't afford a $500 emergency, and poverty, health, loneliness, mental health, well being, sense of community, loss of privacy and freedom, have all gotten a lot worse over the past 30-40 years. This is indisputable to all except the most die hard of ideologues.
You seem to exemplify exactly the catastrophism that you object to when it comes to kids. Everything is catastrophe! Maybe this has something to do with the media you consume?
In fact temperatures are not rising as fast as the projections have claimed. In fact the IPCC itself, not a conservative outlet, has distinguished between what can be attributed to climate change and where you can have little confidence. Roger Pielke Junior on his site The Honest Broker, has represented this most clearly. You will find charts of every item you mention there. As a climate realist he and others warns against the impulse, particularly by media and particularly by leftish media of associating every new event with climate change to push political narratives. One error is to confuse impact, due to increased exposure, to changes in the climate itself.
I don't think you know me as well as I know myself, and I do not rely on conservative or leftist media for important issues. Jonathan Haidt named his own Substack after the tower of Babel to signify that the tribal polarization of narratives makes everyone more stupid (so not just the kids). It is therefore hard to find trusted sources.
I have followed cancel culture for a long time, and the best source is those who actually have had to confront it legally, FIRE. See for example the Substack "The Eternally Radical Idea" . By the way, I got the term catastrophism from Haidt and Lukianoff (of FIRE), which encapsulates a new mindset they observed. Ring a bell? FIRE's documentation and research over the years have demonstrated with examples and data the unprecedented decrease in tolerance of opposing views and the punitive ways in which those were pursued, resulting in more professors being targeted than during the McCarthy era, and in a complete change in the climate of free speech and inquiry. This has resulted in the ideological politicization of even fields that should center scientific inquiry only. They have recently documented that people still do not realize how radical the liberal-conservative imbalance is, and if everyone agree, who need continued dramatic cancellations, you just need to ensure conformity, and the most radical views will win out over more moderate ones. FIRE has made it their mission to change this by rating universities, and their campaign and guidelines have had some success, just as they are now pursuing the free speech violations of the administration with some success - because they are non-partisan. Imagine that. Your notion that the media at large is conservative is baffling to me. We obviously live in different realities.
I am merely summarizing the conclusions from the scientific community, economics, sociology, and medicine. These are facts that you didn't address from my previous comment.
Roger A. Pielke Jr. is an American political scientist and a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. In other words, not a climate scientist, not a climate realist, but a climate denier. And of course, a conservative. What a surprise! Thank you for confirming my point.
Already told you Jonathan Haidt admits that cancel culture only affects a tiny number of universities. And I mentioned Jeffrey Sacks, who has documented that most of the cancelling is done by conservative groups. But I agree that freedom of speech is under attack from both sides. I previously mentioned that loss of freedom (this includes freedom of speech) is happening. This is part of the catastrophic changes happening. Kids pick up on this. It's not the media telling them this, it's the kids actually experiencing it.
You're baffled by the notion that the media at large is conservative because you've been baffled and bamboozled and lied to by the conservative media. Where did you get the idea from that most media is not conservative? Could it be from the media telling you this? Most media are owned by transnational corporations -- not unions, not communists, not radical college kids with green hair. Thanks to deregulation, media companies have been allowed to merge and concentrate ownership to form monopolies. 90% of all US media is owned by 6 companies (Sony, Comcast, Warner Bros, Paramount, Disney, and Fox). None of these could be described as liberal or left in any way. CBS was just bought by conservative tech billionaires Larry and David Ellison. Elon Musk (you know, that notorious commie pinko) bought twitter. Facebook is run by Zuckerberg, a well known Trump supporter. Google owns youtube which are owned and run by conservative tech billionaires. And then there are all the social media channels funded by billionaires. In September 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice charged two Russian state media employees with secretly funneling nearly $10 million to fund a U.S. media startup that paid prominent conservative influencers. Then there is the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative network of local television stations. There is also Newsmax and News Nation, both conservative outlets. Not to mention the entire conservative talk radio network on AM radio. So you are right, we do seem to live in different realities. I live in the real world, and you live in a conservative echo chamber filter bubble.
So Pielke is a climate denier, and I, of course a conservative. It is actually possible to view the same informational landscape and come to different conclusions, and if you want to counteract the tribalization of the public discourse it is best not to be an example of it. Your willingness to make absolutist statements about people you know nothing about reflects poorly on your judgement and disincentivizes people to engage with you. I'm certainly done.
I'd love to hear your take on this issue, specifically in relationship to the concept of evolutionary mismatch. As the world continues to stray ever further from our ancestral environments, doesn't that virtually guarantee problems will continue to arise for us as a species (in spite of the benefits/"good" it also brings)? I worry that we're all increasingly becoming like orcas at Sea World with our dorsal fins warped over.
This is a great piece that captures much of the nuance/uncertainty around claims on both sides. FWIW, my take, based on effect sizes from many studies (RCT’s and correlational) is that the situation is one of two things. Either social media’s effects are small (accounting for less than 5% of the variance in wellbeing) or that the effects are large for a small subset of the population (likely adolescent girls at higher risk) and tiny for the rest. I favor the second for many reasons. It accounts for the seeming variability across studies (it would result from sampling differences in the at risk population) as well as anecdotal evidence. It also seems to match the findings in studies that segment the sample (e.g., Cox’s new work finds social media only really negatively impacts adolescent girls). IMHO, I think rising perfectionism (an argument made by Jennifer Wallace in her book Never Enough) is a bigger cause of angst in young adults, with the effects of social media being: it can make most of feel slightly negative at times, but only results in large negative effects on wellbeing/mental health if we’re in a vulnerable segment of the population. I think there are many reasons to regulate it, but I don’t think the data supports that it re-wired the brains of a whole generation. I take Paul’s point about the possibility that research studies aren’t fully capturing its effects. But if people are going to use data to make their case, then they have to live by what the data says, and not pick and choose to make their points.
Yes, Haidt, Rausch et al. have long argued that the biggest effects are with younger teenage girls. But Chris Ferguson and others argue that even when you focus on that group, the effects are very small or non-existent.
Yes, but there are other studies showing effects for that subgroup. Cox is one example. To me, that makes the most sense in explaining the overall small effect sizes. The problem with Jon is that he argues from the data when it supports his claims, but then argues it away or ignores when it doesn’t (e.g., small effect sizes). It’s why I say if you’re going to use the data to support an argument (and as you say, there are reasons you might not want to in this case), then you can’t pick and choose (I mean, you can pick and choose single studies that are great or problematic, but not meta-analytic findings).
Another form of bias is when critics of smartphones/social media talk about the terrible harms that have come to some kids. They’re not wrong. But you know what else so often makes teenagers miserable? Dating! Social relationships! School! (Definitely school—Peter Gray’s new book is all about this.) But we don’t ban all of these because we recognize there are benefits as well. I think we need to think more in terms of trade-offs here …
Great piece. I’d be interested to read more about the European and wider comparative angle on this - that chart is really striking and doesn’t seem like it’s getting the airtime it deserves I the debate.
"We might not have to deal with this interpretative issue, though, because many investigators believe that there is either no relationship or a negligible one."
My problem with these sorts of studies is that they only explore the effect of social media on the individual. They don't typically examine how social media reshapes relationships, even for people who aren't actively using social media. If all of your friends are on TikTok, staying off TikTok might save you from the stress of being on TikTok but it will also isolate you from your friends. And if fewer people today are choosing to connect offline, then choosing to stay offline yourself makes it harder to connect generally than it would have been previously.
I appreciate the nuanced take and agree this is ultimately a value decision. We have allowed smartphones to dominate kids lives and many people now demand overwhelming evidence before we remove them from schools or kids lives. But there is very little evidence they are positive in any way (whereas there is lots of evidence that reading is great for kids). This is status quo bias.
I’d suggest we do a thought experiment where we close our eyes and reimagine what school or childhood should look like and start from there. At that point, would we want kids on social media for 35 hours a week? And this is not just a matter of suicide or depression, but we should consider the broader suite of social and cognitive consequences of this technology.
Thanks, Jay. I suspect our views aren’t so different. It seems to me perfectly consistent to believe that there is no good evidence (not no overwhelming evidence, but no good evidence) for the negative effects of smartphones and social media with regard to depression and anxiety and suicide, but also to believe they should be taken away from kids because so much time looking at screens is just a bad way to spend adolescence. (One could make similar arguments in favor of bans on porn, edibles, and, at least for the 1980s and 1990s, television.)
But I’m not as convinced as you that they have no positives. One argument in their favor is that studies that ask the kids themselves, including those focusing on teenage girls, find that many say that these make their lives better for all sorts of reasons. (For instance, see the 2023 Study “How Girls Really Feel about Social Media.”—hardly a pro-phone report). Now, this could be due to network effects, or maybe it’s like smokers saying they can’t be without their cigs, but it needs to be taken into account.
The network effects research you cited (ie the paper on collective traps, which I’ve found extremely compelling as someone who studies groups and social dilemmas) makes me extremely skeptical of relying on self reports unless you are going to add a question about how they’d feel if everyone else got rid of the social media apps. If you remember the collective traps paper, they contrast preferences for social media with other apps like Google Maps and find that everyone likes Google Maps. And even if everyone else got rid of Google Maps, you’d still want to keep that app for yourself. This is very different from preferences for social media. I also ran this experiment by my teenage daughter and she had the exact same response. Also, if teens are off those apps they can usually find the same social functionality (like texting or video calls) from other apps. Anyways, I look forward to your chapter—I’m writing one in the same volume on the modern information ecosystem and how it impacts society.
So who is an authority on the best way to spend Adolescence? Mostly its just silly old fools saying you should spend it the same way they did with no evidence. I know plenty of people who spent what some simpletons would consider way too much time listening to heavy metal, watching horror movies, or playing video games. Rather being harmed they tend to me the most interesting and successful people I know
I’m a long time student of Bowen Family Systems theory. (I’m a retired Episcopal priest and clinical social worker, director of a post graduate training program in Bowen theory). One concept Murray Bowen’s theory considers is called Emotional Process in Society and observes how anxiety impacts families and whole societies. Societal regression is one aspect, societal progression is another, each with symptoms or behaviors. You raise many of the points a practitioner of Bowen theory observes in the USA today, a time of both progression in some ways and regression in others. Thank you, this was very interesting to read and I’ll save it for my presentation to the class on emotional process in society.
This was a good nuanced approach. Parenting approaches are never going to be one size fits all, and the safest course is usually going to be some sort of moderation.
I think the category of "screen time" has grown to include so many things that it is no longer possible to lump them all together. A Twix bar and a filet of salmon are both “food.” Personalized AI learning and video games are both “screen time.” Same category, completely different function. It's silly to pretend they impact the brain the same way.
I enjoyed many things about this essay, but one of my favorite lines:
"The point of this example isn’t that books are the same as first-person shooters. I personally think books are better. But if your big complaint about smartphones is the loss of socialization and time outside, why do books get a free pass?"
For starters, I really appreciated this article. But to add to the above comments re aspects not covered (that I hope you address in the book chapter) are: the addictiveness of various digital environments (e.g. social media and online gaming), the intense negativity bias of the algorithms, the polarisation that occurs as a result, and finally the fact that smartphones are personal entertainment devices we carry with us all day, meaning they keep us placated, swatting away the evolutionary cues that loneliness might have presented, to go and seek out other humans, etc. These are all very different with smart phones as compared to books and TV. Also unmentioned is how much the focus-on-self vs. focus-on-others plays into poor mental health and how much "self-focus" is built into the digital world. On social media, you have to curate and maintain a digital brand, you have to optimise yourself or at least consume content that makes you compare yourself to what you see. This is quite a world away from books and TV, which transport you to other worlds for the most part.
I think depression is often a result of people feeling trapped within themselves. So whether or not it’s books, video games, tv, social media, etc., as long as people can actually form a meaningful connection to the world around them they’ll probably be fine. Also, quality matters here; not all books, video games, tv, and social media are equally stimulating.
Look you don’t talk about the big big thing. Kids these days don’t know shit. Profs at major universities say they can barely read, much less write a good paragraph, and don’t know basic math. Plus they’re staggeringly closed minded. I was a prof for 30 years myself and it’s true. The average student has gotten worse and worse. And it is DEFINITELY the screens. But otoh, the best students are far far better, and far more interesting and morally developed people too—because of the screens. The screens are like the little girl with the curl: very very good or very very bad. But the bad is obviously swamping the good and every teacher knows it.
Yeah yeah. Socrates said the same thing about young people 2,500 years ago -- books and art corrupted their pure minds. EVERY elder generation has said EXACTLY the same thing about how "kids today" "don't know shit." Please, those of you oldsters who recite this tired mantra about Gen Z, tell me your own high school graduation year, and I'll be happy to post what YOUR elders (YOUR professors) said about YOU and your stupidity and closed-mindedness. Enough! A majority of older people today vote for Trump. So, don't talk about how intellectually and morally superior the elders are.
Do you disagree with data concerning literacy and math skills?
Disagree big time. Horvath's testimony is incompetent bordering on fraudulent. He shows no awareness of the difference between a criterion-referenced and norm-referenced index, nor do those who spread his smug panic. Here's my summary:
https://mikemales.substack.com/p/no-screens-are-not-making-gen-z-dumber
Every generation hears they're the dumbest. See Bauerlein's "The Dumbest Generation" (2008) about Millennials; Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" (1987) and "A Nation at Risk" (1983) about how dumb (and worse) Gen X was; and I won't even start a list of how stupid TV-driven Boomers were portrayed.
Typically, these self-flattering tirades don't tell us anything about the new generations they lambaste; all they show is that the authors never learned critical thinking.
It is not about kids being different, it is about conditions being different. The "prof" thought it was the screens, if his comment was strongly worded, it was also nuanced in that he noted that not every kid was affected equally. I think he might just have expressed some personal frustration based on his "lived experience".
My point was also about conditions, in this case that there might just be a problem in education. If you disagree with that or find it over generalized, fine, if people in their fields notice a difference during their teaching careers, I personally think they, and other data, might just be on to something, and it is not about blaming kids.
Jonathan Haidt made it his personal mission to address phones, and however much that factor weighed against others, it was because of observations that something had changed for the worse. OK, my self flattery session is now over.
If the conditions each generation faces change radically, yet elders (especially educators) repeat the same dire criticisms of every new generation decade after decade in exactly the same words (and I mean identical; compare Horvath, 2026, to "A Nation at Risk", 1983 -- talk about a declaration that something that changed for the worse!), then that suggests it's the elders who can't face newness without panicking.
Two things can be true, namely that "elders" become repetitive and grumpy, and that new technologies and cultural changes impact children in a way the haven't done before in all of human evolution. There could be plusses and minuses, of course, as in all things.
As a fellow prof, it's easy to point the finger at screens as to why they struggle with literacy and numeracy, but the question I always come back to is who's teaching them? My friends who teach K-12 are routinely pressured by admin and parents to pass students who are objectively failing. School boards implement curricula where kids are not even given entire books to read, only chapters or passages. There is so much content that teachers are required to cover that there is no room for depth or critical thinking. Schools banning phones and getting rid of chromebooks in classes may be a good start, but if policies and procedures don't change, I have a hard time seeing how the needle will move.
Exactly.
While I was reading this, I was also constently wondering: why are we trying so hard to connect screen use with suicide rates, when the damage caused by screens is obviously on attention, aka learning skill. Is this a diversion piece paid by Facebook to blur the causal relation between education and screen, or what? Suicide rates, in a world were young people are rightfully concerned by so many other things (climate, economy, wars...) are obviously not a good proxy for how time spent online might affect children development.
Is it possible that this is because a lot of kids that go to college have no business or reason for being there other than the fulfillment of peer, social, and parental expectations? 30 years ago a kid that didn’t know shit (academically speaking) would go get a job or go to trade school. Now they’re sitting in freshman English lit with blank stares on their faces, and the professors naturally begin to bemoan the state of the world like every other person over 40.
In my job I see a lot of high caliber kids as interns and first year hires, and they’re certainly all smarter and better prepared than I was as a recent college grad.
The difference between TV watching in the 90s and TikTok & YouTube now isn't the amount of time devoted to them. It is that TV in the 90s was fairly limited and shows could serve as a Schelling Point for community. Kids could talk about their favorite shows or episodes, and form fandoms. When there's a million specialized offerings, everyone is in their own curated silo and it is much, much harder to bond over shared culture IRL. So you get more isolation and anomie with modern screens than 90s screens, even if the watching time is the same.
Also, having lived through the 80s and 90s as a kid, I think people in that time were right to complain about how much time kids then were spending on tv! The parallel is apt, and it was bad both times!
Entirely compatible with it being worse now, because of siloing and a loss of common ground.
The reason the 'kids' spent too much time on the tv is because the adults spent too much time on tv. What exactly is bad about it? Do you have some evidence to present or just feel like sharing banalities?
I wonder if enough attention is being given to not just the smartphone / social media use of children & adolescents themselves, but the dramatic increase in smartphone / social media use (preoccupation) of the adults in their lives and what sort of direct and indirect impacts that is having on children & adolescents.
Is it maybe postmodernism and its woke ideology of pessimism? Young people have been indoctrinated into believing they are either victims or oppressors, their world is going to disappear due to global warming, and the selfish rule of the uncaring ultra rich minority. That is quite a depressing view of the world for someone thinking about growing up, and if you don’t adhere to that view you are a pariah unworthy to be called human by your peers…
You realize as soon as you use childish trendy buzzwords like 'woke' you lose all credibility, right?
It sounds like you've been indoctrinated into the MAGA ideology of anti-facts, anti-science, and anti-humanism. If your immediate knee-jerk reaction to an essay about the mental health of kids (i.e. under 18) is to spew out 'woke' and 'postmodernism' (to which kids have little exposure to) then maybe it's time to take a deep breath and go outside and touch grass.
If you take away the words woke and postmodernism, do you disagree that catastrophic narratives might be depressing for young people to encounter? By catastrophic I mean presenting the worst case interpretation as if it is the norm. This is true in the climate change debate (Rcp 8.5 represented as a baseline prediction, for example, when in fact it was never the path we were on). This caused people to be concerned about end of the world scenarios in their lifetime, and by appearances induced some into a panic. I see that mindset in other issues as well, and in general, as FIRE has amply demonstrated, intolerance of opposing views in universities has increased, often expressed in extreme behavior, and often ideology based, and that, based on FIRE's documentation, is a new phenomenon starting in the 2010's. Something's cooking. More black vs white thinking, more good vs. evil thinking, more emotional thinking. Not my words, FIREs observations. These are easily accessible, and the documentation thereof started, as it so happens, with the joint publications of Jonathan Haidt, mentioned above, and Greg Lukianoff, of FIRE.
Climate change is actually worse than climate scientists predicted. That's a fact. Drought, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and severe weather have been getting worse far faster than anyone predicted.
Intolerance of opposing views has been a hallmark of conservatives for several decades. Jeffrey Sacks (Acadia University) has carefully demonstrated this with his studies on cancelled speeches on campus across North America. Even Jonathan Haidt has admitted on numerous occasions that cancellations of speakers is only happening in a tiny minority of campuses concentrated at Ivy league schools. The reason you and so many others believe it's a widespread problem is the result of conservative media. The propaganda spreads like wildfire because 99% of all media is conservative owned.
Look around you. The entire society is living in a catastrophe. Most people can't afford a $500 emergency, and poverty, health, loneliness, mental health, well being, sense of community, loss of privacy and freedom, have all gotten a lot worse over the past 30-40 years. This is indisputable to all except the most die hard of ideologues.
You seem to exemplify exactly the catastrophism that you object to when it comes to kids. Everything is catastrophe! Maybe this has something to do with the media you consume?
In fact temperatures are not rising as fast as the projections have claimed. In fact the IPCC itself, not a conservative outlet, has distinguished between what can be attributed to climate change and where you can have little confidence. Roger Pielke Junior on his site The Honest Broker, has represented this most clearly. You will find charts of every item you mention there. As a climate realist he and others warns against the impulse, particularly by media and particularly by leftish media of associating every new event with climate change to push political narratives. One error is to confuse impact, due to increased exposure, to changes in the climate itself.
I don't think you know me as well as I know myself, and I do not rely on conservative or leftist media for important issues. Jonathan Haidt named his own Substack after the tower of Babel to signify that the tribal polarization of narratives makes everyone more stupid (so not just the kids). It is therefore hard to find trusted sources.
I have followed cancel culture for a long time, and the best source is those who actually have had to confront it legally, FIRE. See for example the Substack "The Eternally Radical Idea" . By the way, I got the term catastrophism from Haidt and Lukianoff (of FIRE), which encapsulates a new mindset they observed. Ring a bell? FIRE's documentation and research over the years have demonstrated with examples and data the unprecedented decrease in tolerance of opposing views and the punitive ways in which those were pursued, resulting in more professors being targeted than during the McCarthy era, and in a complete change in the climate of free speech and inquiry. This has resulted in the ideological politicization of even fields that should center scientific inquiry only. They have recently documented that people still do not realize how radical the liberal-conservative imbalance is, and if everyone agree, who need continued dramatic cancellations, you just need to ensure conformity, and the most radical views will win out over more moderate ones. FIRE has made it their mission to change this by rating universities, and their campaign and guidelines have had some success, just as they are now pursuing the free speech violations of the administration with some success - because they are non-partisan. Imagine that. Your notion that the media at large is conservative is baffling to me. We obviously live in different realities.
I am merely summarizing the conclusions from the scientific community, economics, sociology, and medicine. These are facts that you didn't address from my previous comment.
In fact temperatures ARE rising faster than expected. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2025GL118804
"Some changes (such as droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall) are happening faster than scientists previously assessed." https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/effects/
I've got at least a dozen or more citations.
And your source is?
Roger A. Pielke Jr. is an American political scientist and a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. In other words, not a climate scientist, not a climate realist, but a climate denier. And of course, a conservative. What a surprise! Thank you for confirming my point.
Already told you Jonathan Haidt admits that cancel culture only affects a tiny number of universities. And I mentioned Jeffrey Sacks, who has documented that most of the cancelling is done by conservative groups. But I agree that freedom of speech is under attack from both sides. I previously mentioned that loss of freedom (this includes freedom of speech) is happening. This is part of the catastrophic changes happening. Kids pick up on this. It's not the media telling them this, it's the kids actually experiencing it.
You're baffled by the notion that the media at large is conservative because you've been baffled and bamboozled and lied to by the conservative media. Where did you get the idea from that most media is not conservative? Could it be from the media telling you this? Most media are owned by transnational corporations -- not unions, not communists, not radical college kids with green hair. Thanks to deregulation, media companies have been allowed to merge and concentrate ownership to form monopolies. 90% of all US media is owned by 6 companies (Sony, Comcast, Warner Bros, Paramount, Disney, and Fox). None of these could be described as liberal or left in any way. CBS was just bought by conservative tech billionaires Larry and David Ellison. Elon Musk (you know, that notorious commie pinko) bought twitter. Facebook is run by Zuckerberg, a well known Trump supporter. Google owns youtube which are owned and run by conservative tech billionaires. And then there are all the social media channels funded by billionaires. In September 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice charged two Russian state media employees with secretly funneling nearly $10 million to fund a U.S. media startup that paid prominent conservative influencers. Then there is the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative network of local television stations. There is also Newsmax and News Nation, both conservative outlets. Not to mention the entire conservative talk radio network on AM radio. So you are right, we do seem to live in different realities. I live in the real world, and you live in a conservative echo chamber filter bubble.
So Pielke is a climate denier, and I, of course a conservative. It is actually possible to view the same informational landscape and come to different conclusions, and if you want to counteract the tribalization of the public discourse it is best not to be an example of it. Your willingness to make absolutist statements about people you know nothing about reflects poorly on your judgement and disincentivizes people to engage with you. I'm certainly done.
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I'd love to hear your take on this issue, specifically in relationship to the concept of evolutionary mismatch. As the world continues to stray ever further from our ancestral environments, doesn't that virtually guarantee problems will continue to arise for us as a species (in spite of the benefits/"good" it also brings)? I worry that we're all increasingly becoming like orcas at Sea World with our dorsal fins warped over.
That's a great, provocative analogy!
This is a great piece that captures much of the nuance/uncertainty around claims on both sides. FWIW, my take, based on effect sizes from many studies (RCT’s and correlational) is that the situation is one of two things. Either social media’s effects are small (accounting for less than 5% of the variance in wellbeing) or that the effects are large for a small subset of the population (likely adolescent girls at higher risk) and tiny for the rest. I favor the second for many reasons. It accounts for the seeming variability across studies (it would result from sampling differences in the at risk population) as well as anecdotal evidence. It also seems to match the findings in studies that segment the sample (e.g., Cox’s new work finds social media only really negatively impacts adolescent girls). IMHO, I think rising perfectionism (an argument made by Jennifer Wallace in her book Never Enough) is a bigger cause of angst in young adults, with the effects of social media being: it can make most of feel slightly negative at times, but only results in large negative effects on wellbeing/mental health if we’re in a vulnerable segment of the population. I think there are many reasons to regulate it, but I don’t think the data supports that it re-wired the brains of a whole generation. I take Paul’s point about the possibility that research studies aren’t fully capturing its effects. But if people are going to use data to make their case, then they have to live by what the data says, and not pick and choose to make their points.
Thanks! Very interesting. I hadn’t heard of Cox’s work—can you send me a link/citation?
Sure. He’s at AEI: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-new-gap-in-american-adolescence-gender-class-and-the-teenage-digital-experience/
There are also other studies (can’t remember them now) that show increased effect sizes for the adolescent/young adults segment of girls/women.
Yes, Haidt, Rausch et al. have long argued that the biggest effects are with younger teenage girls. But Chris Ferguson and others argue that even when you focus on that group, the effects are very small or non-existent.
Yes, but there are other studies showing effects for that subgroup. Cox is one example. To me, that makes the most sense in explaining the overall small effect sizes. The problem with Jon is that he argues from the data when it supports his claims, but then argues it away or ignores when it doesn’t (e.g., small effect sizes). It’s why I say if you’re going to use the data to support an argument (and as you say, there are reasons you might not want to in this case), then you can’t pick and choose (I mean, you can pick and choose single studies that are great or problematic, but not meta-analytic findings).
Totally agree.
Another form of bias is when critics of smartphones/social media talk about the terrible harms that have come to some kids. They’re not wrong. But you know what else so often makes teenagers miserable? Dating! Social relationships! School! (Definitely school—Peter Gray’s new book is all about this.) But we don’t ban all of these because we recognize there are benefits as well. I think we need to think more in terms of trade-offs here …
Great piece. I’d be interested to read more about the European and wider comparative angle on this - that chart is really striking and doesn’t seem like it’s getting the airtime it deserves I the debate.
"We might not have to deal with this interpretative issue, though, because many investigators believe that there is either no relationship or a negligible one."
My problem with these sorts of studies is that they only explore the effect of social media on the individual. They don't typically examine how social media reshapes relationships, even for people who aren't actively using social media. If all of your friends are on TikTok, staying off TikTok might save you from the stress of being on TikTok but it will also isolate you from your friends. And if fewer people today are choosing to connect offline, then choosing to stay offline yourself makes it harder to connect generally than it would have been previously.
I appreciate the nuanced take and agree this is ultimately a value decision. We have allowed smartphones to dominate kids lives and many people now demand overwhelming evidence before we remove them from schools or kids lives. But there is very little evidence they are positive in any way (whereas there is lots of evidence that reading is great for kids). This is status quo bias.
I’d suggest we do a thought experiment where we close our eyes and reimagine what school or childhood should look like and start from there. At that point, would we want kids on social media for 35 hours a week? And this is not just a matter of suicide or depression, but we should consider the broader suite of social and cognitive consequences of this technology.
Thanks, Jay. I suspect our views aren’t so different. It seems to me perfectly consistent to believe that there is no good evidence (not no overwhelming evidence, but no good evidence) for the negative effects of smartphones and social media with regard to depression and anxiety and suicide, but also to believe they should be taken away from kids because so much time looking at screens is just a bad way to spend adolescence. (One could make similar arguments in favor of bans on porn, edibles, and, at least for the 1980s and 1990s, television.)
But I’m not as convinced as you that they have no positives. One argument in their favor is that studies that ask the kids themselves, including those focusing on teenage girls, find that many say that these make their lives better for all sorts of reasons. (For instance, see the 2023 Study “How Girls Really Feel about Social Media.”—hardly a pro-phone report). Now, this could be due to network effects, or maybe it’s like smokers saying they can’t be without their cigs, but it needs to be taken into account.
The network effects research you cited (ie the paper on collective traps, which I’ve found extremely compelling as someone who studies groups and social dilemmas) makes me extremely skeptical of relying on self reports unless you are going to add a question about how they’d feel if everyone else got rid of the social media apps. If you remember the collective traps paper, they contrast preferences for social media with other apps like Google Maps and find that everyone likes Google Maps. And even if everyone else got rid of Google Maps, you’d still want to keep that app for yourself. This is very different from preferences for social media. I also ran this experiment by my teenage daughter and she had the exact same response. Also, if teens are off those apps they can usually find the same social functionality (like texting or video calls) from other apps. Anyways, I look forward to your chapter—I’m writing one in the same volume on the modern information ecosystem and how it impacts society.
So who is an authority on the best way to spend Adolescence? Mostly its just silly old fools saying you should spend it the same way they did with no evidence. I know plenty of people who spent what some simpletons would consider way too much time listening to heavy metal, watching horror movies, or playing video games. Rather being harmed they tend to me the most interesting and successful people I know
I’m a long time student of Bowen Family Systems theory. (I’m a retired Episcopal priest and clinical social worker, director of a post graduate training program in Bowen theory). One concept Murray Bowen’s theory considers is called Emotional Process in Society and observes how anxiety impacts families and whole societies. Societal regression is one aspect, societal progression is another, each with symptoms or behaviors. You raise many of the points a practitioner of Bowen theory observes in the USA today, a time of both progression in some ways and regression in others. Thank you, this was very interesting to read and I’ll save it for my presentation to the class on emotional process in society.
This is, IMO, a fair and good faith effort to understand a serious issue.
What happened at the time things went bad, and primarily affects English-speaking countries? Rupert Murdoch / Fox News.
This was a good nuanced approach. Parenting approaches are never going to be one size fits all, and the safest course is usually going to be some sort of moderation.
I think the category of "screen time" has grown to include so many things that it is no longer possible to lump them all together. A Twix bar and a filet of salmon are both “food.” Personalized AI learning and video games are both “screen time.” Same category, completely different function. It's silly to pretend they impact the brain the same way.
I enjoyed many things about this essay, but one of my favorite lines:
"The point of this example isn’t that books are the same as first-person shooters. I personally think books are better. But if your big complaint about smartphones is the loss of socialization and time outside, why do books get a free pass?"
“Still, by all accounts, the effects in question are not large.”
I thought small effect sizes were all the rage these days!
For starters, I really appreciated this article. But to add to the above comments re aspects not covered (that I hope you address in the book chapter) are: the addictiveness of various digital environments (e.g. social media and online gaming), the intense negativity bias of the algorithms, the polarisation that occurs as a result, and finally the fact that smartphones are personal entertainment devices we carry with us all day, meaning they keep us placated, swatting away the evolutionary cues that loneliness might have presented, to go and seek out other humans, etc. These are all very different with smart phones as compared to books and TV. Also unmentioned is how much the focus-on-self vs. focus-on-others plays into poor mental health and how much "self-focus" is built into the digital world. On social media, you have to curate and maintain a digital brand, you have to optimise yourself or at least consume content that makes you compare yourself to what you see. This is quite a world away from books and TV, which transport you to other worlds for the most part.
I think depression is often a result of people feeling trapped within themselves. So whether or not it’s books, video games, tv, social media, etc., as long as people can actually form a meaningful connection to the world around them they’ll probably be fine. Also, quality matters here; not all books, video games, tv, and social media are equally stimulating.