CV NEWS FEED // A psychologist is warning that smartphones have “rewired” an entire generation’s childhood, by facilitating isolation from friends, developmental delays, and higher risks of addiction.
On March 26 The Free Press featured an excerpt from a new book titled, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by psychologist Jonathan Haidt.
Haidt argues that children who grew up with smartphones have experienced an unprecedented kind of childhood, which resulted in high rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. This is in part, he writes, because smartphones isolate adolescents and damage their social opportunities and time with their peers.
“Even when teens are within a few feet of their friends, their phone-based childhoods damage the quality of their time together,” Haidt wrote.
He added that even the shortest vibration of a smartphone’s notification can take one’s attention away from the person in front of them by checking the phone, “just in case the phone is bringing us an important update.”
“It’s painful to be ignored, at any age,” Haidt continued. “Just imagine being a teen trying to develop a sense of who you are and where you fit in, while everyone you meet tells you, indirectly: you’re not as important as the people on my phone.”
Another issue caused by smartphones and screen access is sleep deprivation.
Smartphones’ addictive design keeps adolescents up later, so combined with rising early for school, they are losing sleep over scrolling on social media, Haidt wrote.
“In short, children and adolescents need a lot of sleep to promote healthy brain development and good attention and mood the next day,” Haidt wrote. “When screens are allowed in bedrooms, however, many children will use them late into the night… The screen-related decline of sleep is likely a contributor to the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that swept across many countries in the early 2010s.”
Another issue caused by smartphones is “attention fragmentation.”
“When you add it all up, the average number of notifications on young people’s phones from the top social and communication apps amounts to 192 alerts per day, according to one study,” Haidt wrote.
For every waking hour that a teenager is awake, that evens out to about 1 message or alert every five minutes.
“Capturing the child’s attention is the goal of app designers, and they are very good at what they do,” Haidt wrote. “This never-ending stream of interruptions—this constant fragmentation of attention—takes a toll on adolescents’ ability to think and may leave permanent marks in their rapidly reconfiguring brains.”
Fragmented attention operates under a guise of “multitasking,” which isn’t actually possible, he argued, writing, “all we can do is shift attention back and forth between tasks while wasting a lot of it on each shift.”
The fragmented attention harms the child’s development of “executive function,” which Haidt explained “refers to the child’s growing ability to make plans and then do the things necessary to execute those plans.”
Properly-developed executive function requires skills of self-control and focus, which a child likely struggles to cultivate when he or she is addicted to a smartphone, Haidt argued.
Smartphones are designed to be addictive, or at the very least manipulative, Haidt wrote. Noting how this addiction risk is unlike the early 2000s teens who had at-home computers, he referenced the work of Stanford University addiction researcher Anna Lembke.
In Lembke’s book Dopamine Nation, she writes, “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.”
Haidt wrote that Lembke’s “metaphor helps to explain why the transition from play-based childhood to phone-based childhood has been so devastating, and why the crisis showed up so suddenly in the early 2010s.”
While Millennial teenagers and children in the 19990s and 2000s had at-home computers with addictive qualities, these computers couldn’t go with the adolescents everywhere they went.
“After the Great Rewiring, the next generation of adolescents could, and did,” Haidt wrote. “When we put these four foundational harms together, they explain why mental health got so much worse so suddenly as soon as childhood became phone-based.”
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