Are Smartphones Dumbing Down the Younger Generation?

If your child has a smartphone, you might well be panicking at the now prevalent idea that their adolescent, still developing brain is being ‘rewired’ – that the undoubtedly revolutionary device to which tweens and teens (and not to mention 7.2 billion adults) seem to be habitually glued to could be a catalyst for anxiety, social isolation or even mental illness. 

Indeed, Jonathan Haidt, the high-profile psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is adamant about what we, as a society, should be doing: quite simply, he says, children should not have access to a smartphone until they turn 14 while social media should be off limits until they are 16. Schools should simply ban the devices. We have to act now to save a generation, he insists. No wonder, with such imminent experts making claims like this, that smartphones have become such a hot topic, if not an altogether conclusive one.

In part this antipathy towards smartphones – not, we stress, computers, the internet or all screens – is because smartphones are by far the dominant means of accessing social media and, as a new report by the American Psychological Association has highlighted, social media platforms are ‘inherently unsafe for children’ because they don’t have ‘the experience, judgement and self-control’ to manage themselves on them. And, it hinted, social media’s opaque developers are doing all they can to benefit from this fact – manipulating through algorithms – while blocking all attempts to moderate usage.

It’s not simply parents’ fault, says Haidt. But he does argue that parents have, over recent decades, fallen for all sorts of bogey-men: unfounded perceived threats to their kid, from ‘stranger danger’ to the desire to pad playground equipment, and that this, perversely, has latterly led them to gravitate towards the reassurance that their children are safely at home behind a screen. For decades we’ve over-protected our children outside in the real world, and now under-protected them in the digital one, Haidt reckons in his book The Anxious Generation (Penguin). 

‘Safetyism – a term Haidt coined – has, among other factors, quashed traditional play, as older generations might understand it: being out there, socialising face to face, learning independence, and taking the knocks necessary to grow into a balanced adult, with devastating consequences.

Before 2010 – the year marking the wide uptake of the smartphone, together with developments such as the likes of push notifications, front-facing cameras and social media platforms  – teenage boys were much more likely than any other group to be admitted to hospital with a broken bone. After the early 2010s those boys are now slightly less likely to break a bone than their fathers or grandfathers because, presumably, they’re too busy online to go out and play or take part in sports.

The Mental Health Plummet

Haidt argues that the 2010s, the start of the smartphone era, also saw a leap in rates of anxiety and self-harm among boys but especially girls. ‘Mental health [in many developed nations] falls off a cliff. It’s incredibly sudden,’ he said. Studies he cites show not just the ‘attention fragmentation’ that smartphones bring, but the sleep and  social deprivation which leads to a rise in isolated and lonely teens. Even when in each other’s company teens are on their phones (a habit seen in adults, too, giving rise to the term ‘phubbing’, or ‘phone snubbing’).

As the sociologist Sherry Turkle has put it: ‘because of our phones, we are forever elsewhere’. 

There are also longer-term implications for society, Haidt proposes. Children are largely sex-segregated online with boys favouring YouTube and gaming, while girls prefer the more social, more performative and arguably more problematic brand management platforms such as Instagram or TikTok. That segregation isn’t conducive to dating or the development of relationships.

And if smartphones and social media are encouraging a generation that’s fragile, and scared to take risks – including even talking to someone on a phone rather than hiding behind snaps, messages or texts – then that doesn’t bode well for, among other things, the future entrepreneurial economy. 

It all adds up to a pretty demoralising picture, especially for parents, of course, whose children have already opened Pandora’s Box (the one with the Apple or Samsung logo on it). Around the world a fledgling movement against the smartphone seems to slowly be gaining traction. In the UK, for example, there is a tightening of regulations in the pipeline to keep kids away from their smartphones in school; in Florida a bill has been signed making it illegal for people under 14 to have social media accounts in the state and grassroots organisations such as Smartphone Free Childhood are springing up.

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But hang on: is Haidt actually right? Even though a lot of this undoubtedly speaks both to common sense and to many parents’ impression of their children’s use of smartphones and social media – more time spent alone, less physical inactivity, greater mood swings and irritability, apparently shorter attention spans, the persistent distractions and so on – seeing it all through a stricter scientific lens might paint a different picture. 

Certainly Haidt, who concedes he is merely postulating about where this might all go, is not without his detractors. They broadly argue that smartphones could be having  negative effects on adolescents while also acknowledging the seemingly contradictory benefits that smartphones bring, such as the ability to make connections, but that the evidence presented by Haidt is not yet substantial enough to reach his conclusions.

What’s Really Driving Teen Anxiety?

While the numbers are nonetheless concerning – the percentage of 17-18-year-olds who say they hung out with friends ‘almost every day’ saw a dramatic decline from 2009, for instance – the reasons for them can’t be placed at the smartphone door with certainty. Psychologist Peter Gray, of Boston College, author of Free to Learn (Basic Books) and one of the world’s leading scholars of play, likes to flip things on their head.

Extend some of the graph data Haidt uses back to the 1950s, he says, and from that point you see a continuous increase in adolescent anxiety until around 1980, when it was similar to today’s figures. But then it starts to fall, before rising again in the 2010s. Why that decline? 

‘I have a theory that it was because adolescents had the first home computers,’ he says. ‘It gave them a new culture of childhood, and remember children were the experts on computers in a way that gave them pride and prestige.’

The increase in anxiety among adolescents since has the 2000s may be down to factors other than the smartphone – including growing economic instability, existential angst about the climate, and the threat of nuclear war that, arguably, paint a picture unlike any experienced by previous generations. Or maybe the increased rates of mental illness are the product of the growing awareness of mental illness, or changes in diagnostic definitions that broaden what mental illness is. Or perhaps the seeming decline in teenagers meeting up in the real world is down to the lack of places to go to, or the lack of money with which to do it.

There may well be a link between smartphones and declining mental health. It’s just not clear that smartphones are the cause. It’s estimated that around half of Gen Zers with anxiety disorders would have had them irrespective of smartphones, for instance.

Gray posits the cause as being radical changes in school curricula in many countries over the last 15 years, with increased pupil testing and the ranking of schools leading to a reduction in the time given to recess and fun and ‘non-essential’ activities. It’s why studies, he says, have repeatedly seen teenagers cite school pressure as the number one cause of their anxiety, followed by job prospects. 

The bottom line is that some experts say the evidence against smartphones is overwhelming while others argue that it’s not, even though their evidence delivers no knock-out blow to Haidt either. The experts don’t agree because, quite simply, the experts don’t know.

‘Everyone needs to take a breather with this issue,’ implores Pete Etchells, professor of psychology at Bath Spa University, in the UK, and author of Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (Piatkus). ‘The effects of smartphones do seem to be real, but [the reasons] are hugely complex, and the smartphone perhaps sits in an eco-system of many factors that affect mental health,’ he says. 

Jumping the Gun

‘Do we have bad habits with smartphones? Absolutely,’ he adds. ‘But my concern is that there’s no clear consensus in the scientific research on the impact of screen time and yet a clear consensus seems to be suggested by the public conversation at the moment. The parents I’ve spoken to have a real sense of despair about how this debate has gone.’

Etchells concedes that this sounds like he’s suggesting everyone just waits several years for better studies to reveal what we need to know, time we maybe don’t have. But, he stresses, this is not to suggest that we can’t do anything positive now. We can pressure the tech companies to do better – governments might necessitate that social media companies actually enforce age verification for their users, for example – though he worries about this back-firing, with these companies disengaging from the discussion because they can never be seen to be doing enough. 

Haidt adds that parents might choose to give their children a more basic phone, without social media capabilities, and phone makers might do a better job of making these devices more appealing. He also concedes that this isn’t something any isolated parent can tackle: because to be the only kid without a smartphone is to face ostracism; they need to coordinate their smartphone clampdown with other parents in their social group too.

‘It would be ridiculous to say to parents “don’t worry”, especially when it’s hard to look at kids on their phones and not believe they’ve been completely sucked in,’ says Etchells. ‘But it’s not the phone or how long they’re on their phones, since time in itself isn’t an indication of anything bad. It’s what they’re doing on their phones that’s the issue. That’s why we don’t want teens to feel that they have to hide their tech use, or that they can’t talk to their parents about their use. And it’s never too late to start working on this.’

To start with parents can learn to let go, Gray argues. ‘Ironically it’s often parents who want their children to have a smartphone because they want to be in minute to minute contact with them, even to constantly track their whereabouts,’ he says. ‘It’s this umbilical cord that’s the smartphone’s most damaging aspect – the kids are never left to be independent of interfering adults. Ask some teenagers why they spend so much time on their phones and they say it’s because it’s the only way their can communicate with their friends – they’re not allowed out, or if they are their friend isn’t.’ 

And so the confusion mounts. That we come to some better understanding of what is going on, and of how we use smartphones, is important, Etchells suggests, in no small part because he doesn’t see Haidt’s proposals for moderating usage as being enforceable anyway. He cites an attempt in South Korea to impose an internet curfew on teenagers from midnight to 6am: screen time just increased during the allowed hours. 

‘What we really need is joined-up national digital literacy initiatives [that teach children how to safely run their digital lives],’ he argues. ‘We don’t ban children from driving until they’re 17 and then just give them a car – they have to undergo training in how to drive first.’

Somehow, we have to find the same balance with smartphones. Some have argued that this debate amounts to just another anti-tech moral panic of the kind that saw concerns about the impact of TV, Walkman, or video games, and that the evidence for the smartphones’ harms is scant. Yet right now it, nonetheless, feels instinctively correct to default to the assumption that for any developing brain to stare at a screen for five hours a day – one that invites negative comparisons, rewards exaggeration and extremes, and is designed to be addictive – probably isn’t a good thing.