What happened around the late 2000s and early 2010s to cause our children’s well-being to take such a nosedive?
This is a question that has haunted me for a long time.
I just read an article in The Atlantic1 which provides great food for thought. The theme: children and teenagers who are not doing well, precisely. The title: “End the phone-based childhood now”, which could be translated as: “It is urgent to keep phones away from childhood”.
I summarize the thesis of the author, Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist: everything that comes with smartphones is unhealthy for the development of young brains.
Haidt notes that the digital age that took off in the late 2000s (with high-speed internet and the pivot to mobility represented by smartphones) has completely screwed up the way the brains of children and adults adolescents had been developing for thousands of years: “It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in the United States (and in several other countries) was reconfigured towards a more sedentary, solitary and virtual which is incompatible with healthy human development. »
This is a fantastically well-researched article on what screen time does to human development. But it is also – perhaps above all – an article about what childhood should be, about what adolescence should be.
“Human childhood is a cultural learning process punctuated by different tasks at different ages, until puberty […] For children of all ages, one of the most powerful vectors of learning is the deep motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: building the connections in their brains by playing vigorously and often, rehearsing the gestures and skills they will need as adults. »
However, notes the author, children play less in the real world, since they have the entire Internet in this thing that they never let go of.
Haidt’s article is nuanced. He does not see the digital age as the alone factor having ruined childhood, from the end of the 2000s. This is why I wrote above that according to the author, the digital age completed to damage the brain and development of children and adolescents.
Because the work of undermining had started before, notes Haidt, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when parents became reluctant to let their children play outside without supervision, for fear that they would get hurt or be kidnapped.
Reading Haidt on the emergence of parental overprotection, I thought back to this curious new release a few weeks ago: the Canadian Pediatric Society made a plea2 for “risky play”. Playing near the fire, tugging at each other, making a cabin in the woods, exploring the neighborhood without adult supervision, playing inside: it’s healthy for the physical, mental and socio-emotional development of children.
I come back to the article “End the phone-based childhood now” : “But overprotection is only part of the equation. The trend toward less independent childhoods has been facilitated by continued advances in digital technology that have made it easier and more inviting for young people to spend more time at home, indoors, and alone in their rooms. . Eventually, digital companies came to have access to children 24/7, developing exciting virtual activities designed for “interaction” that have nothing to do with the real-world experiences that young minds need. »
Today, notes Jonathan Haidt, the American teenager spends an average of seven to nine hours on screens. This explains the decline in the number of hours of sleep among teenagers which began in the early 2010s.
But the most devastating cost of the proliferation of smartphones among young people would be the collapse of time spent with other people, in “real life.” Here again, the beginning of the 2010s marks an acceleration of a trend among young people, that of spending time with their friends, in real life: between 2010 and 2019, this time fell by half.
However, spending time with other humans, in 3D, has been nourishing for hundreds of thousands of years, notes Haidt, in four respects.
One, these relationships are embodied: non-verbal is part of human communication, while virtual communication is mainly based on the written or oral. Virtual creates humans less able to interact in person.
Two, interactions in the real world take place in a synchronous mode. That is to say here, now: we interact in real time, which reinforces proximity. In the virtual world, “there is less real laughter, more space for misunderstandings and more stress when a comment does not generate an immediate response. »
Three, virtual communications often take place in front of an audience: “Your reputation is then always at risk, a mistake or poor performance can damage your social status with a large group of people. These interactions then tend to become more theatrical (performative, in English) and cause more stress than face-to-face conversation. »
Four, real-world relationships require real investment. To gain access to a group of friends, for example, you need motivation to invest in relationships and to repair ties when things go wrong. In the virtual world, you can block anyone: “These relationships are disposable. »
Take all that, mix it into the great mixer that is adolescence, and you have young people who, since 2010, have been living virtual existences for which the human brain has no evolutionary affinity. .
Young people who experience puberty online (as is the case for those born after 1996, i.e. from Generation Z) “are more subject to social comparison, self-consciousness, public shame and chronic anxiety than adolescents of the previous generation, which has the potential to put developing brains into a defensive posture by default. »
However, when your brain is in a defensive posture by default, notes Jonathan Haidt, your mental health is affected: “They tend to see the world as being full of threats and are more vulnerable to anxiety and depressive disorders. »
If there is a better explanation for the rise in mental health problems among young people in this country in the early 2010s, I am willing to explore it. But Jonathan Haidt’s thesis is terribly convincing. I will come back to it.
I’ll leave you with the most disturbing sentence in this article, which touches on the idea we have of the danger for our children: “At the beginning of the 2010s, a generation already deprived of independence was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents, but which is in fact, in many respects, more dangerous than the real world. »
1. Read Jonathan Haidt’s article in The Atlantic (in English)
2. Check out the “risky gambling” advocacy
Write to me I am curious to read you on the subject of young people and the digital world.