There is no question that our youth are struggling in multiple ways, especially mental health.  This is particulary true of the Gen Z population, which consists of the children born after 1995.  Does the ubiquitous reign of technology have anything to do with it?  

Gen Z and Electronic Media

Smartphones were introduced in 2007, but did not reach current capabilities until around 2012.  These provide 24 hour internet access, on-line video games, selfie-based social media, news (real and fake) and all kinds of applications designed to beguile adolescents.  Today, 98 percent of Gen Z cohort own smartphones. 

Teens are now spending 6 to 8 hours per day looking at screens.  This includes television, which in the 1990s was two to three hours per day, but watching TV is now decreasing steadily.  The screen time statistic does not include school work.  

Due to their portability, phones constitute the bulk of the viewing time.  There are messaging apps (for example, WhatsApp), social media apps (Twitter, Instagram), and news sites, to mention a few.  These come with “alerts,” and the average teen receives 192 of them per day.  This means the phone buzzes on average every five minutes.  

Gen Z’ers spend less time in in-person contact with friends.  In 2010, they spent about 130 minutes per day with friends; in 2020, this dropped to 45 minutes.  

The percentage of students getting less than seven hours of sleep per day in 2020 rose dramatically from 2010: almost 50 percent for girls and 40 percent for boys.  

If deprived of their phones, many adolescents display classic symptoms of addiction–irritability, anxiety, and insomnia.  

Mental Health Trends

In 2008, the prevalence of an anxiety disorder among college students was 10 percent.  In 2020, it was 14 percent.  The age group from 18 to 25 (Gen Z’ers) suffered the most: the increase was 139 percent.  

The prevalence of depression among teens, fairly steady at about 13 percent for girls and 5 percent for boys before 2010, increased to about 29 percent and 11 percent, respectively, in 2021.

And the big one, suicide rates, saw an increase of 91 percent for boys in 2019 compared to 2010.  For girls, the rates increased by 167 percent over the same time period.

The inflection point on all the cited data was 2010, the year the negative statistics for those Gern Z kids started to go the wrong way.  So what happened in 2010?

Smartphones and Social Dislocation

In “The Anxious Generation” published in 2024, Jonathan Haidt lays out a grand hypothesis.  All of the negative trends cited above took off in and around 2010.  He implicates communication technology in general, but concentrates on smartphones. By 2010, the Gen Z kids  were coming of age and were becoming products of what Haidt calls the phone-based childhood. They appear to be victims of the adverse health trends cited above.

To sum it up: today’s teens are not socializing as previous generations did.  In-person social interactions are much different from chat groups.  For instance, they teach conflict resolution without having the stroke of a key handy.  Studies show that teens who spend more time on social media suffer more depression and anxiety.  It is clear that more time spent on screens deprives the young from face-to-face group activities such as sports, clubs, and religious groups.

Much of the popular media is violent, mendacious, and just plain mindless.  Haidt calls the obsession with screens the “rewiring of childhood.”  While the content is highly questionable, the sheer amount of time spent comes with opportunity costs like less time spent interacting face-to-face with other people.  Social interaction, especially during the impressionable formative years, is critical to becoming a well adjusted, productive adult.

Naysayers

Critics of Haidt’s work point out that the data show association, not causation.  Of course this is true, but no one has come up with an alternate explanation for why our youth’s mental health went south around 2010.  The Covid epidemic, with its lockdowns and school closings, did not help, but the fact is that the adverse trends started long before Covid came on the scene.

What to Do

The importance of providing healthy social activities and counselling services is critical in addressing our youth’s mental health problems.  But control of the phones could be an effective, and cheap, intervention too.  Haidt suggests that smartphones be banned from schools, that no one should have a smartphone before high school age, and that persons should be blocked from social media before the age of 16.  These are strong prescriptions, but the mental health of our young people is at stake.