The chief research assistant for the influential new book The Anxious Generation said in an exclusive interview that the prevalence of smartphones and the rise of overbearing parenting have caused a youth mental health crisis.
Zach Rausch, an associate research scientist at New York University, Stern, who helped social psychologist Jonathan Haidt write The Anxious Generation, told the Washington Examiner that the book’s “thesis is that we’ve been overprotecting kids in the real world, but underprotecting them online.”
Rausch, born in 1994, on the transitional cusp between millennials and Generation Z, said his own adolescent struggles with mental health developed his interest in psychology, eventually leading him to work with Haidt.
Haidt and Rausch argue that the combination of hyperprotective parenting that began in the 1980s and the rise of smartphones in the 2010s has led to what they call the “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” These massive shifts in parenting and technology have altered the childhood and adolescent experience to the degree that they have caused a sizable rise in anxiety, depression, and suicidality in children born after 1995.
“Childhood was transformed in a way that kids are not having what you need to grow up and thrive,” Rausch said.
Diagnosing the crisis
In the book, Haidt described himself as having “felt overwhelmed, personally and perpetually, since around 2014,” saying that “something very deep changed in the 2010s.”
In research for his 2018 book on the problems of Gen Z, The Coddling of the American Mind with co-author Greg Lkianoff, Haidt uncovered that rates of self-reported mental health crises had dramatically increased between the time that Apple released the iPhone in 2007 and that social media came to the fore.
Around this period, people of all ages spent less time in one-to-one, embodied, and real-time interaction with one another and shifted toward one-to-many, disembodied, and asynchronous communication, such as likes from strangers on a social media post versus intimate conversations with friends and family.
Children and adolescents are the most vulnerable to the negative effects of technology because of their developing brains and limited mental maturity.
At the same time, the cultural shift in the late 20th century of shielding children from difficult situations, what is sometimes called helicopter parenting, or what Haidt and Rausch call “safetyism,” prevents children from growing through adversity and challenge.
So, as children increasingly retreat into the virtual world that does not prepare them for adulthood, their experience in the real world is also less fulfilling than in generations past, creating a twofold problem.
“What Jon and I are really arguing is that children need certain experiences to grow up and thrive as adults,” Rausch said. “It’s not just social media that is this problem. It’s that it’s displacing a lot of this really essential aspect of childhood.”
Youth mental health by the numbers
“The data speaks volumes here,” Rausch said. “As kids moved their social lives onto these platforms, they became lonelier and less connected.”
Citing survey data from the 2022 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, Haidt reported that self-reported depression among teenage girls between the ages of 12 and 17 has increased by 145% since 2010 to nearly 30% of all girls in this age group. For boys, it has increased by 161% since 2010, totaling over 10%.
Rates of anxiety for adults ages 18-25 have also increased by 139% since 2010, according to the same dataset. By contrast, rates of anxiety for those between the ages of 26 and 34 or 35 and 49 have only increased by 103% and 52%, respectively.
While these self-reporting studies demonstrated disturbing trends in mental health decline, more concrete data in hospital treatments for self-injury also increased dramatically during this period.
Emergency room visits for nonfatal self-injury increased by 188% for girls aged 10-14 since 2010, with the sharpest increase between 2010 and 2014. Nonfatal self-injury includes nonfatal suicide attempts and self-injury behavior, such as cutting, which is psychologically diagnosed as a coping mechanism for crippling anxiety and depression.
Suicide rates for preteenagers and early teenagers also rose significantly during this period, 91% for boys and 167% for girls. Although girls are more prone to nonsuicidal self-injury, boys have always had significantly higher rates of suicide than girls.
From this, Haidt spends the rest of the book building a framework for a solution: make life more meaningful for children in the real world and give them the tools they need to become functional adults.
Restoring responsibility for children
Rausch said that his life changed when he became a wilderness therapy counselor through the Connecticut Department of Children and Families’s teenage and youth program. Being responsible for the welfare and education of his campers on one-week to three-week camping trips was a pivotal moment in Rausch’s personal development.
“I think it impacted me more than probably all of the campers,” Rausch said. “For the first time in my life, I was trusted to take care of a ton of kids. People put faith in me.”
Rausch said this type of responsibility is an essential part of the transition to adulthood.
Haidt and Rausch contend in the book that children grow up by gradually being given greater responsibilities, emphasizing the importance of challenging them to sink or swim on their own.
While parental safetyism removed the risks, and corresponding rewards, of children being able to solve problems for themselves in the real world, smartphones act as “experience blockers” as well, sucking children’s attention and preventing them from developing the skills necessary to interact off-screen.
Haidt argues that reestablishing a system of rites of passage, which have largely been lost in a secular, post-modern society, would create a “ladder from childhood to adulthood” to ensure a pathway to growing up.
“Children do not turn into fully functioning adults on their own,” Haidt wrote. “Let’s lay out some steps they can take that will help them get there.”
‘Phone-free’ and ‘play-full’ in schools
Although there are certain high-level policy changes recommended in the book, such as raising the age at which a child is legally considered an adult online from 13 to 16 and enforcing greater cyber protections for minors from pornography sites and social media, the majority of Haidt’s nonfamily recommendations are for schools.
Although parents are the ultimate vehicle for change for each child, schools, where children spend seven hours of their day, also could make a significant impact by implementing what Haidt calls “phone-free” and “play-full” policies that create the conditions for more and better real-life experience.
Although most schools have policies of no smartphones during class time, Haidt argues that this encourages students to not only hide the use of phones in class but also to spend nonclass time interacting on their phones rather than in person with other students.
Implementing a phone-free policy could be done with special phone banks or zippered pouches for phones and other smart technology to limit distractions.
Haidt and Rausch also recommend that schools take every step possible to increase recess time, after-school programs, and other periods in the day for experiential learning through self-guided play or discovery, supervised by adults as more of a “lifeguard” rather than a “referee.”
“This is how kids, and all mammals, learn to become self-governing adults,” Rausch said. “You need lots and lots of experience and lots and lots of play.”
When asked about how schools can overcome the intense pressure to perform well on standardized testing for federal funding, limiting time for experiential learning within a state-set curriculum, Rausch admitted that financial incentives “end up pushing out play and recess, things that are super crucial.”
What can one person do?
In the book, Haidt outlines the concept of collective action problems in economics, or the situation in which each person does what is best for himself or herself even though everyone is worse off when everyone else makes the same decision.
Haidt described the collective action problem for preteenagers who are cast out from the social group if they do not join the crowd and get a smartphone.
Parents similarly face a collective action problem in giving children independence if they’re worried that other parents will judge them, perhaps even alleging that they are neglecting their children if they are left unsupervised.
“The biggest opponent that we’re facing right now is less that people disagree with us,” Rausch said. “The biggest problem is that people feel resigned. It’s too late to turn the ship around.”
But Rausch and Haidt argue that each parent’s action makes it more likely that others will also change their parenting style and relationship with technology.
“If you delay giving your child a smartphone, it makes it easier for other parents to do so. If you give your child more independence, it makes it easier for other parents to do so too,” Haidt wrote.
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When asked about the sheer complexity of the problems Gen Z faces, Rausch said he sees promise in the future.
“I think there is an element of hope, which is that we do know what children need, and there are many ways for that to happen,” Rausch said. “Doing this alone is really hard but doing it with other people, with other families, it becomes much easier.”
