Crisis generation or generation crisis – NRC

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What is going on with the youth? The question is being asked more and more often, especially since the corona period, when it became apparent that young people are increasingly suffering from anxiety and depression. But the problems predate this: since the early 2010s, there has been a notable decline in the well-being of young people worldwide.

Jonathan Haidt: The Anxious Generation. How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Allen Lane, 386 pages.
€ 28,97

Abigail Shrier: Bad Therapy. Why Kids Aren’t Growing Up. Swift, 298 pages.
€ 36,99

Two recently published books attempt to explain the phenomenon. The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt points to smartphones and social media as the culprit, Bad Therapy by journalist Abigail Shrier looks for it in the therapeuticization of society.

Social psychologist Haidt is known for previous books such as The Coddling Of The American Mind (2018), in which he described how students on American campuses were becoming increasingly sensitive and intolerant. His new book is even more alarming in tone. In the years 2010-2015, Haidt argues, a change took place, the consequences of which we can barely foresee. Almost everyone got a smartphone, and social media such as Instagram became an integral part of daily life, especially for young people. This led to a ‘public health crisis’ of which Generation Z, born after 1995, is the biggest victim.

According to Haidt, this crisis is harming young people in four ways: They have less real life contact, they sleep worse, they have attention problems and they are addicted. This all also applies to adults, but it has a greater impact on young people: they are still developing. They need to learn to relate to their peers, and new technology can disrupt this in many ways. While boys often retreat to gaming or watching porn, girls spend an excessive amount of time with each other on apps like TikTok and Instagram. The result: boys become lonelier, and girls more anxious and insecure.

There is a second line running through the book. Not only has the smartphone made young people less resilient, but also the new, protective parenting style that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, according to Haidt. Since then, parents have tried to shield their children from pain and danger in the outside world, so that they no longer learn to deal with it themselves. As an example, Haidt mentions playgrounds, where in the past you could at least have a big fall, but which are now paved with rubber tiles. The smartphone and social media added to this: the new vulnerable generation was released into the jungle of the internet without guidance.

This part of the book, while interesting, is less well developed than the rest. Unlike the chapters on technology, it is explicitly only about the Anglo-Saxon world. It also seems to revolve mainly around middle-class parenting philosophy, which gives it a more limited scope.

Haidt’s book immediately sparked controversy. He exaggerates the problems of smartphones, some colleagues write. Often cited is a review in Nature by psychology professor Candice Odgers, who believes that Haidt has confused correlation with causation. The fact that teenagers who spend a lot of time on social media are more likely to be depressed may also be because depressed teenagers use social media more often. Haidt himself refuted Odgers’ criticism in a response to his blog After Babel, in which he lists all studies that do point to a causal relationship. There are not many yet, he acknowledges, but the phenomenon has only just begun.

Social-mediastress

Regardless of whether the causal link has been conclusively established, you may wonder whether a lack of conclusive evidence means that you should ignore the subject. There was also no conclusive evidence for the link between smoking and cancer. Sometimes it is best to take some reasonable measures, such as a smartphone ban at school, while science conducts further research.

In addition, Odgers’ alternative explanations are not really convincing. She cites “access to firearms, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid crisis, economic hardship and social isolation” as possible causes of increased mental health problems among young people. But this does not explain why young people outside America and also in affluent circles suffer from it.

Whether you find Haidt’s book convincing probably depends in part on your own experiences and your thoughts about them. I myself (born in 1986) experienced the rise of the Internet in my teenage years, which meant that as a fifteen-year-old I sat behind my father’s computer after school to converse with classmates using the chat program MSN. This led to significant stress: sometimes someone wouldn’t talk back, or there were even indications that I had been blocked. MSN brought schoolyard logic to my home. But the difference with now was enormous: when my father needed his computer, I had to go back to watching MTV or having one-on-one telephone conversations with friends. The logic of the schoolyard had limited control over my private life.

I can hardly imagine what it is like to be in contact with peers every hour of the day: to have to constantly live with their judgments or even their presence. That is why I can intuitively agree with Haidt’s thesis. This does not alter the fact that his book does not tell the whole story. He also admitted this himself in an interview The New York Times. Haidt referred to Abigail Shrier, who, according to him, Bad Therapy describes “an important part of the puzzle.”

Therapeutenjargon

Shrier’s book is about the therapeuticization of society, especially the youngest generation. We have exchanged resilience as a value for vulnerability, says Shrier. This is a self-reinforcing mechanism: the more we zoom in on vulnerability, the more vulnerabilities we discover, until we end up licking ourselves like a wounded cat all day long.

Shrier discusses therapeutics in various areas. More and more children are receiving diagnoses such as ADHD and autism, they are entering therapy more quickly and they are also being talked to in therapist jargon outside of therapy, such as in the classroom. Everything is called a trauma and is unsafe, says Shier, and that makes it feel more traumatic and unsafe. What you pay attention to grows.

What all these phenomena have in common is that adversity and discomfort are placed outside the normal. As a result, children and young people are not only more likely to experience them as a problem, but they also lack the skills to deal with them. In this, Shrier agrees with Haidt’s criticism of the modern parenting style.

Shrier goes in with a straight leg. Her tone is polemical and often mocking: she sounds like a typical Generation Xer who thinks everyone after her has gone crazy. She provides a lot of evidence for this, both scientific and anecdotal. Sometimes you wonder whether she has done her best to find researchers who disagree with her, but some examples in themselves are telling enough. Shocking is the passage in which she describes how her son, who was suffering from severe abdominal pain, was subjected by the doctor to a list of questions such as: “How often in the past few weeks have you wished you were dead?” and: “Have you ever tried to commit suicide?” Shrier strongly criticizes these types of questionnaires, which assume a vulnerability for which there is no indication whatsoever.

But that polemical, mocking tone makes this book not only important and often convincing, but also boring and even a bit annoying. You know what the point is from the start, and then you just have to watch as the evidence is put up on the tree. Take, for example, Chapter 6, on trauma. In the first two sentences, Shrier describes how her strong, optimistic grandmother had lost her mother during childbirth. Then you immediately know what time it is: grandma has experienced something terrible, but she never complains – unlike Gen Zers, who would all have to undergo trauma therapy after such a birth. And sure enough, that’s exactly how the chapter goes.

Shrier also overlooks a number of things a little too easily. First of all: today’s young generation is indeed growing up in a difficult context. There is a lot of emphasis on individual performance, while the prospects in various areas (geopolitics, housing market, etc.) are less sunny than those for the millennials in their youth. Moreover, as mentioned, Gen Zers have had to constantly deal with the gaze of others since the rise of smartphones and social media. Shrier acknowledges in a few pages that this plays a role, but does not elaborate further.

Second, not everyone needs therapy, but that doesn’t make all therapy bad. The same goes for self-help books. Too much navel gazing is not good, but a little more self-reflection wouldn’t hurt many people. For many of my generation, who are practiced in talking about themselves, it is incomprehensible how little insight their parents or older colleagues have into their own strengths and weaknesses.

Tough fifties

The question is, as always: where is the right middle ground? It would have been interesting if Shrier had investigated this. But she doesn’t, and that makes the book a bit too much of a self-congratulations from a tough fifty-something. The sometimes overly cheerful tone does not help. Sentences like: “The short answer is no. The long answer is nooooo.” Yet the book has added value, especially in the United States itself, as I can imagine. A culture that deals so spastically with irregularities in children’s lives could use some sobriety.

Shrier and Haidt reach similar conclusions despite their different focuses. In short, they are: it is not the angry outside world that makes young people anxious and depressed, but their immediate environment: their upbringing and their use of media. They both think the role of concerns about climate change, for example, is overestimated. Major disasters have always existed, Haidt writes, and they usually lead to a sense of solidarity rather than to collective depression. How is it possible that young people themselves mention climate change? According to Beth, a student psychologist who interviewed Shrier, young people like to give answers that adults take seriously: “the demise of the earth” sounds like a better excuse for gloom than “someone was mean to me on Instagram.”

Shrier’s and Haidt’s solutions are also partly similar. Children need to be offline more, play more, and be monitored less. They need to be told ‘no’ more often: more (figurative) tapping on the fingers, less patting on the head. More freedom and more restrictions at the same time. Unlike Shrier, Haidt also has concrete proposals: he advocates, among other things, smartphone-free schools and a social media ban for under-16s. The latter should be imposed by the government and facilitated by social media companies with age verifications. With these kinds of rules, Haidt hopes to solve a “collective action problem”: even though many young people say they find social media problematic, they would never stop using it if their friends stayed on it.

Before this kind of drastic government intervention becomes acceptable, a lot of data still has to flow through the cables. First, more evidence of a causal link between social media use and psychological distress is needed. But as a starting point for a social debate, and as a source of information for concerned parents, these books are certainly worthwhile.

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