How cell phones are killing our kids, and what we can do about it

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt probably has become a pretty unpopular guy among teenagers over the last few weeks.

By Matt Villano

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt probably has become a pretty unpopular guy among teenagers over the last few weeks.

His new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” essentially calls for a revolution in how parents administer smartphones and social media to their teens.

Put simply, Haidt writes that kids should have little to no access to either until they turn 16.

While some have questioned the science behind Haidt’s thesis, Haidt argues the perspective is informed by years of research — investigations that depict climbing mental health struggles among American tweens and teens, and statistics that indicate many teenagers in the United States already are depressed or anxious in some way.

The American Psychological Association echoed his concern in a new report that calls out social media platforms for designs that are “inherently unsafe for children.” The APA’s report, released Tuesday, says that children do not have “the experience, judgment and self-control” to manage themselves on those platforms. The association says burden shouldn’t be entirely on parents, app stores or young people — it has to be on the platform developers.

But parents probably can’t count on developers, which leads to Haidt’s jarring conclusion: We’re at a tipping point as a society, and if grown-ups don’t take action, they could risk the mental health of all young people indefinitely.

Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, has spent countless hours publicizing the book’s message since its March 26 release. CNN recently talked with Haidt about his data, the book and what lies ahead for parents and teens alike.

CNN: How did we get ourselves into this predicament?

Jonathan Haidt: Kids always had play-based childhoods, but we gradually let that fade away because of our growing fears of kidnapping and other threats in the 1980s and 1990s. What arose to fill all that time was technology. In the 1990s, we thought the internet was going to be the savior of democracy. It was going to make our children smarter. Because most of us were techno-optimists, we didn’t really raise alarms when our kids started spending four, five, six and now seven to nine hours a day on their phones and other screens.

The basic argument of the book is that we’ve overprotected our children in the real world and we’ve under-protected them online. And for both halves of that, you can see how we did that thinking that it was going to be OK. We were wrong on both points.

CNN: What is some of the most startling data you found?

Haidt: The one that comes immediately to mind was the discovery that teenage boys used to have by far the highest rates of broken bones before the great rewiring of childhood. Before 2010, teenage boys were much more likely than any other group to go to a hospital because they broke a bone. Once we get to the early 2010s, their rates of hospitalization plunge, so that now teenage boys are slightly less likely to break a bone than are their fathers or grandfathers. They’re spending most of their time on their computers and their video games, and so they’re physically safe. But I would argue that this comes at the cost of healthy boyhood development.

CNN: Does this mental health crisis affect boys and girls differently?

Haidt: The basic facts about gender differences are that when everyone got a smartphone in the early 2010s, boys went for video games and YouTube and Reddit, while girls went more for the visual social media platforms, especially Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr.

A second difference is that girls share emotions more than boys do. They talk about their feelings more, and they’re more open to each other. Girls’ levels of anxiety go up a lot in this period (the tween and teen years), as soon as they get hyper-connected to each other via social media.

Self-harm is a way that some girls have historically coped with anxiety, and those rates also went way up in the early 2010s. It used to be that (self-harm) was not a thing that 12- and 13-year-olds were doing, it was more older girls. In the 2010s, hospital emergency room visits (for self-harm) for 10 to 14-year-old girls nearly tripled. That’s one of the biggest increases in markers of mental illness that we see in all the data that I’ve reviewed.

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