Smartphones Are Killing KidsPreventing this attachment to screens is the most effective response to the teen mental health crisis. No one wants to acknowledge this.
MAY 5, 2022
AUGUSTE MEYRAT
A mental health crisis has been raging among today’s teens, especially teenage girls. In a recent essay in the New York Times, writer Matt Richter explores this disturbing trend, focusing on the story of M, an otherwise bright girl with potential who eventually suffers from gender dysphoria, anxiety, depression, and self-harm.
M’s problems began at the end of elementary school and quickly worsened as she began middle school. One of her peers, Elaniv, experienced the same thing, and eventually committed suicide at 15 years old. Understandably worried by this, M’s parents tried all kinds of interventions, including medication and therapy, because as one psychologist puts it, “it’s life or death for these kids.”
It is a sad story and one that has become all too common. For all the apparent advantages enjoyed by young people today—they are safer, richer, and much more comfortable than previous generations—they seem to be the most miserable.
So what happened? Why are young people breaking down like this? For me as a teacher and anyone else who works with young people, it is quite simple: screens and social media. Kids are given a smartphone or tablet and they spend more and more time on it. They consume immoral and harmful content that warps their understanding of the world and encourages them to be self-destructive. Consequently, they retreat from everyone around them, suffer extreme loneliness, and increasingly become untethered from reality.
Somehow this explanation never seems to occur to anyone in Richter’s essay. The dots are fairly easy to connect: M gets a phone at 10, her school reports that she can’t focus in class, she starts using different pronouns, she names herself after an anime character who stabs men with scissors, she has frequent emotional meltdowns and starts cutting herself, and she continually complains about being lonely.
And yet, when Richter even bothers to address this argument, he seems to dismiss it altogether: “The [mental health] crisis is often attributed to the rise of social media, but solid data on the issue is limited, the findings are nuanced and often contradictory and some adolescents appear to be more vulnerable than others to the effects of screen time.” In other words, the data on screens and social media are mixed, so it’s not worth considering.
It is difficult to know whether such specious reasoning is intentional or not. Either way, it is still an argument used by many people who defend kids having unrestricted access to screens. As such, it demands a thorough rebuttal.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/smartphones-are-killing-kids/
