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The use of smartphones in the most formative years of people’s lives — as in childhood and adolescence — has severely depleted modern generations' development into adulthood and made them sick.

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The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning (So Many Harms Pt.2)

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The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning (So Many Harms Pt.2)

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Education and literacy rates are declining because of the excessive use of screens, which leads to decreased attention spans, lack of interest in reading, and decreased sleeping habits

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Mental health has been declining in younger generations, which also bleeds into physical health. This has led to increased mental disorders, suicide and self-harm rates, and heightened anxiety and depression

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Children are becoming more reclusive and nervous because they are being barred from being independent

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Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

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Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

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Childhood has become so intertwined with the digital world, that any effects from excessive technology use is intertwined with the newer generation, as they grew up with it

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The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

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The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

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People are isolated because of their dependent connection to their digital phone and their lack of socialization skills, which are more limited due to decreasing IRL conversation

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Mental health is declining while mental disorders are increasing

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Kids have an extreme amount of screen time at such a young age, that the use of technology is so intertwined with childhood, and any effects that technology has on people is heighted because of development, making it impossible to avoid.

"...it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave"

"In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens that number had said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives"

"It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development"

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Parents are keeping their children inside more, leading to kids not learning how to become independent

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Parents are keeping their children inside more, leading to kids not learning how to become independent

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"One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. is is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later."

"Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults"

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Children are becoming more reclusive, insecure, and feel more social pressures

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Children are becoming more reclusive, insecure, and feel more social pressures

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"Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness"

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"Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people and their attention chopped up into little bits by notifcations offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences"

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Literacy and test rates have been declining

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Literacy and test rates have been declining

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"It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer. This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit"

"Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out"

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"Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent"

Other countries also have record high statistics for anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders

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Young people before 2010 would spend around 2 hours with their friends every day outside of school together, and that time would decline naturally as they got older. However, this statistic specifically for young people declined in the 2000s while the same stayed for older adults.

"By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck"

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"Nonetheless, [behaviorial addictions] all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms"

"These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices"

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Real World Interactions vs Virtual Interactions

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Real World Interactions vs Virtual Interactions

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Real world interactions are embodied, synchronous, and one to one.

Virtual interactions are the opposite, making this conversation more disconnected from each other

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"But as soon as [high-school seniors] adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five"

"The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping 2010s, and many studies declined in the early tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through Exercise social media. declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health"

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1. No smartphones before high school

Connects to dependence and isolation

2. No social media before 16

Connects to dependence, isolation, and health and wellness

3. Phone-free schools

Connects to attention span

4. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Connects to dependence and isolation

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Haidt, Jonathan. “End the Phone-Based Childhood Now.” The Atlantic, The Atlantic Monthly Group, 13 Mar. 2024, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartphone-use-mental-health-effects/677722/.