I heard an interview recently with Jonathan Haidt about kids. Two main thoughts struck me. The first: beginning in the 1990s, American parents became diligent about hovering over their kids to make sure they were not taken away by a predator or meeting some other horrible fate (helicopter parents). Unfortunately, this diligence created a snowball effect. Young people grew up without the benefit of trying and succeeding independently. Part of adult life is negotiating success and failure. Traditionally, children best learned this early when the relative victory or defeat was small and manageable. Adults who did not learn these skills held a lower amount of self-confidence. Instead of being the equivalent of stepping over a small stream, normal risks appeared considerably more daunting–like trying to jump over roaring rivers. Anxiety has surged in these adults.
The second strong statement from Haidt was that beginning in 2009, parents began buying smartphones for their kids. However, they monitored those kids very little. When children needed structure and management, they headed off instead into their online silos engaging in unsupervised and often self-destructive activity. As they grew older, these kids also grew more anxious.
To summarize, we have had a lot of parental failure for the past thirty years. Initially, children were not allowed to self-reliantly interact enough with other kids, learn to take small risks, and learn how to fail or succeed. On the other hand, when parental supervision and boundaries were critical, too many kids over the past fifteen years were given free rein to focus on the electronic stimulation of the smartphone. This, in turn, caused too many young people to retreat into a pixeled lifestyle. This lifestyle was not natural, did not offer human contact, and has undoubtedly contributed to the disastrous mental health of today’s youth.
Today, I received a copy of Haidt’s latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. I look forward to reading this book and occasionally sharing illuminating findings in the weeks ahead.