Before the advent of smartphones, female adolescence was nightmarish enough, but apps like Instagram and TikTok have put popularity contests and unrealistic beauty standards into hyperdrive. (Boys, by contrast, have problems related to overuse of video games and pornography.) The studies Haidt cites, and the studies he debunks, show that concerns about children and cell phones are a modern phenomenon. We need to eradicate the idea that this is nothing more than a moral panic. It’s similar to how previous generations zeroed in on radio, comic books, and television.
However, I suspect that many readers will not need any persuasion. The question in our politics is not so much whether these ubiquitous new technologies are causing widespread psychological damage, but rather what can be done about it.
So far, the answer is not much. The federal Kids Online Safety Act, recently revised to allay at least some concerns about censorship, has a vote to pass the Senate, but has not yet been introduced in the House. In the absence of federal action, both red and blue states are trying to enact their own laws to protect children online, many of which have been challenged in court for violating the First Amendment. It has been withheld from. Lawmakers in New York are working on legislation that would curb predatory social media apps while respecting free speech. It targets the algorithms social media companies use to feed kids ever more extreme content and keep them glued to their phones. But while this law seems likely to pass, no one knows whether the courts will uphold it.
But there are small but potentially important steps local governments can take right now to reduce the amount of time children spend online, and they don’t raise any constitutional questions at all. Phone-free schools are a natural start, but in a perverse twist in the United States, some parents oppose them because they want to be able to contact their children in the event of a mass shooting. Beyond that, we need more places where children can interact in person, such as parks, food courts, movie theaters, and arcades.
In “An Anxious Generation,” Haidt argues that children are underprotected on the internet but overprotected in the real world, and that these two trends go hand in hand. . For a variety of reasons, including parental fear, child welfare departments’ overzealousness, and car-centric city planning, children generally have far less freedom and independence than their parents. Sitting at home in front of a screen may protect you from physical harm, but it leaves you more vulnerable to psychological harm.
