Delaney Ruston, MD - The Screenagers Podcast
Do you have your phone close by? Can you open it to where you get your podcasts? Hopefully, you will see The Screenagers Podcast there. If not, please search for it and consider pressing the “follow” button if you are on Apple Podcasts or "subscribe" if you get your podcasts elsewhere.
And voila, you should see the episode we dropped yesterday, “Jonathan Haidt Explains the Youth Mental Health Crisis”
Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt's latest book, “The Anxious Generation,” is on the New York Times best-seller list right now and has featured extensively across the media, as focus on this important topic increases.
Jonathan is a New York University professor, co-author of The Coddling Mind and other books, and co-founder of Let Grow, an organization dedicated to promoting childhood independence — an initiative I wholeheartedly support. Furthermore, he is a big advocate for Away For The Day school phone policies.
I recommend tuning into the podcast episode (just over 20 minutes long) with your tweens and teens. Jonathan and I get to the core of why social media, smartphones, and screen time, in general, have been significant drivers of the worsening mental health of today’s young people.
Listen Here: Apple Podcasts // Spotify // YouTube // Website.
For today’s blog, I have chosen a section of the podcast to share with you. So check this out, but remember, there is a lot more gold in the podcast!
Haidt discusses the difference in mental health between Gen Z and millennials. In 2012, Gen Z were in their preteen and early teen years when the mental illness indicators began rising, while millennials were in their later teens and 20s. (I’ve done some slight editing from the podcast transcript for clarity.)
Jonathan Haidt:
“What I've found, and here this is following up on the work of Jean Twenge and her book iGen, is that if you got smartphones and social media in puberty, especially early puberty, Gen Z is defined by the fact that they went through this crucial period of brain rewiring. As you go through puberty, the brain remodels itself from the back to the front to move into the adult configuration.”
“If you went through that on social media, you came out different. There are exceptions but on average, you came out more anxious, more depressed, more likely to self-harm than if you didn't get it till college.”
“A really significant aspect of the data is that when you look at millennials, that is, those who were born from 1981 to 1995, they are fine. They didn't get social media and smartphones until they were in college — for the most part, late high school. In other words, they were basically through puberty when they plunged into this virtual world.”
"That's why in the book, I focus so much on puberty and also late elementary school, that whole period when kids are not just changing their brains, they're also developing their sense of identity and they're developing their understanding of what kind of cultural creature they are. How do I become a good person in my culture?”
"We got it as adults. It doesn't go backward and rewire our brains. But the fact that we're letting kids go through brain rewiring on these technologies, I think, was a huge mistake, and we've got to stop it now.”
Questions to get the conversation started with your family or group:
- What do we think about the data showing that social media can be particularly negative for tweens and teens vs older people?
- Listen to the 20-minute podcast together and discuss things such as what do we think about the differences that Haidt discusses around girls vs. boys? What are examples of healthy things being displaced by the sheer amount of time some young people spend online?
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