GENERATION ANXIOUS

I’ve been reading “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt. A must-read for any parent with a kid who has a smartphone addiction. Which essentially means a must-read for any parent whose kid has a smartphone. 

Now you’d think a parent would have a pretty strong say in whether a kid owns a smartphone, but in my experience, these things just  … One day they have a phone and a phone number and you can’t figure out how the hell it happened. 

As Haidt describes it, that period between 2010-2015 where we gave Gen Z smartphones without a second thought was “the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.” 

The result: It’s right there in the title of the opening chapter. “The Surge of Suffering.” A 145% increase soince 2010 in major depression amongst teenage girls – 30% of whom report at least one major depressive episode in the past year. A 161% increase for boys – tho’ they are at a lower overall rate. 

“A 2023 study of American college students found that 37% reported feeling anxious ‘always’ or ‘most of the time’ while an additional 31% felt this way ‘about half the time.’ Which means that only one-third of college students said they feel anxiety less than half the time or never.” 

And as Haidt is careful to point out, the research he culls really isolates the change – it’s not mass shootings. It’s not the Great Recession. It’s not China or Russia or 9/11. It’s the damn phone. And 2010 is the witching hour – when the iPhone 4 was introduced with its front-facing camera. 2010 also marked the year Instagram was launched. Once Facebook purchased Instagram in 2012, its user base exploded. 

Count back and … if you were older than 13 in 2010 (meaning you were born prior to 1997), you generally had enough of a foundation in pre-smartphone childhood so that you escaped the brunt of the phone’s initial impact – before there was evidence to suggest phones could be harmful and perhaps there should be a limitation on screen time, parental controls, etc. 

But if you reached your teen years in the early 2010s just as they were rolling these phones and the associated apps – good damn luck. 

“My central claim in this book,” writes Haidt, “is that the trends of overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.” 

Just a few odds and ends … former Mammoth Police Chief Al Davis’s arraignment, scheduled for this past Tuesday (April 9) was delayed. Again. Until May 15. 

You know he’ll skate. 

And the preliminary hearing for Brian Russell Stange, who allegedly murdered David Miller on Shepard Lane in Bishop in February, is scheduled for Friday, April 12 in Independence. So if the paper is delivered a little later than usual this Friday, it’s because I plan to attend the prelim.