The great rewiring of childhood: Navigating the digital dilemma for the anxious generation

Around the world others are grappling with the same challenges – and one is Canadian psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who in his book The Anxious Generation, outlines two basic propositions. One proposition regards a radical change in the approach to raising children and one relating to the first generation, Generation Z, to having grown up with smartphones potentially with them twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Firstly between 2010 and 2015 the social lives of American teenagers moved on to smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games and other internet-based activities.  Secondly from the mid-1980s parents became increasingly risk averse in relation to their children, with what Haidt has branded “safetyism”.

He argues that when these two phenomena combined it led to an unprecedented increase in a wide range of mental health issues, increased levels of self-harm and tragically suicide.  He says that this trend has resulted in adolescents spending less time with “real” people, experiencing poor sleep patterns, declining concentration and in many cases developing addictive behaviour.  He also states that there is evidence to show that while these traits are experienced by boys and girls, they disproportionately affect girls more.

These events are not just confined to the USA but are replicated in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand as well as the Nordic nations and Japan.

Haidt has branded this “The Great Rewiring of Childhood” where parents are terrified that their child may hurt themselves in a playpark or being unsupervised but a few years later find themselves exposed to the cyber equivalent of the Wild West.

Haidt believes that parents have become overprotective in the offline world, delaying the age at which children are deemed safe to play unsupervised but do too little to protect children from online dangers. The young have been given too much freedom on the internet, where they are at risk of encountering harmful content, from extreme violence, pornography to sites that glorify in suicide and self-harm.

Sceptics of Haidt’s claims that adolescents have simply more to worry about from climate change to the conflicts in the Middle East and the Ukraine.  He counteracts that previous political and economic convulsions like the fighting of two world wars didn’t lead to comparable behaviour.

Haidt’s critics might be right about teenagers feeling anxious and depressed in regarding the coverage of international events. Could the internet’s 24-hour news media be a contributory factor to many adolescents having a distorted perception of personal and global risk and danger?

He discusses at some length the variety of actions that can be taken by governments, tech providers, schools and parents to tackle this on-going cyber health crisis.  From improved age verification tests to operating phone free schools, he totally rejects the idea that the game’s up for this and future generations.

Many HMC members have written about these issues and developed their own initiatives to tackle the problems of smartphone addiction and the problems of online safety many of which have been shared on this site.

Vincent Hume of Cheadle Hulme Junior School last summer for example highlighted a wide variety of relatively simple measures that can be undertaken by schools to provide alternatives to an unhealthy over reliance on smartphones.  Andrew McGarva of Morrisons Academy wrote here a few months ago about the progress made at his school in tackling the same issues in a measured and proportionate way.

One major campaign and resource that HMC has developed is the Tech Control campaign run with Digital Awareness UK (DAUK).  It is designed to help young people take control of their own use of technology. To see a wealth of resources relating to the campaign including lesson plans and video content visit here.

Teachers, parents, pupils – along with governments and tech giants – all have a role to play in what happens next and HMC members have already shown their awareness of this problem and the practical steps that can be taken to help alleviate the problems of the Anxious Generation.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt, published by Allen Lane.