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With the rise of a new environment for children that is largely focused around cell-phones and devices, young adolescents are minimizing growth and progress by spending less time on real-world experiences, harming their overall health.

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Mental Health Crisis - Phone-based childhood has led to a rise in mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and self-harm among adolescents.

Childhood Restruction - Childhood is being restructured around devices, leading to a decline in activities that foster independence and risk-taking.

Collective Action Problem - The problem around phone-based childhood requires collective actions. Efforts by parents and schools are needed to initiate change.

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Over-protection of parents from 1970s and 80s in combination with a more engaging internet has led to less play/real world engagement which leads to lack of independence later in life.

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Experience-Expectant - when the brain grows and makes neural connections by interacting with our everyday lives. Especially in adolescents, the brain adapts to expected environmental experiences and grows as a result.

Social Capital - the degree to which people trust those around them, including their neighbors and institutions

Collective-action problem - A situation when all people in a group would be better off cooperating but do not because of conflicting individual interests.

Discover mode - When people are more open to their surroundings and view the world as full of opportunities.

Defend mode - When people view the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

Internet gaming disorder - Severe impairment or distress in several aspects of life due to addiction to internet and gaming. Inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so.

Opportunity cost - the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when you have already chosen a route.

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"Neurons that fire together, wire together"

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"Neurons that fire together, wire together"

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Synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear

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Earlier ages are periods of cultural sensitivity 

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Earlier ages are periods of cultural sensitivity 

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Japanese children who attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15 came to feel "American" in their identity and ways of interacting.

If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn't arrive until they were 15, it was too late.

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Generation Z is stuck in a new wave of devices, internet, and social media

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Generation Z is stuck in a new wave of devices, internet, and social media

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Rise of cell phones lead to an overall threat on health of adolescents

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Rise of cell phones lead to an overall threat on health of adolescents

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Adolescents actually don’t like their phone-based lives

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Adolescents actually don’t like their phone-based lives

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Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans have shown that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play

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Children and Adolescents must take risks and fail in environments in which failure is not very costly. Thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independence exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.

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"In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being
allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8."

Overprotection was only part of the story. Transition from a more independent childhood was facilitated by improvements in digital technology, which made it easier and more inviting for young people to spend time at home, indoors, and alone in their rooms. Tech companies developed exciting virtual activities, engineered for "engagement."

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The Internet came in two waves: the first one did little harm millennials, the second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

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The Internet came in two waves: the first one did little harm millennials, the second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

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By 2003, only 55% of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and poor mental health did not rise but actually fell during this period,

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone, the App Store, and high-speed internet (which reached 50% of American homes in 2007) that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online.

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Childhood in America was rewired in the period of 2011 to 2015.

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Childhood in America was rewired in the period of 2011 to 2015.

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In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.”

After its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives.

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The high opportunity cost of a phone-based childhood

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The high opportunity cost of a phone-based childhood

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The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and Youtube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average.

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Pew reports that in 2022, one-third of teens said they were on one of the major social-media sites “almost constantly,” and nearly half said the same of the internet in general. For these heavy users, nearly every waking hour is an hour absorbed, in full or in part, by their devices.

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Collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face.

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Collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face.

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Before 2010, young people aged 15-24 spent far more time (about two hours a day on average) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s.

By 2019, young people's time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day.

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Isn't much of this online time spent interacting with friends?

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Isn't much of this online time spent interacting with friends?

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Real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communication, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone.

Real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. We learn subtle cues about timing and controversial turn taking. Texts, posts, and other virtual interactions lack synchrony.

Real-world interactions primarily involve one-to-one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them.

Real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. In virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit - relationships within such networks are usually more disposable

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Typical adolescents now get 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour.

Sustained attention is essential yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications

It even happens in the classroom - when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, and their grades and learning suffer.

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The brain my experience withdrawal symptoms due to devices

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The brain my experience withdrawal symptoms due to devices

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Social media and video games involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine.

When children are not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn't get enough dopamine and they experience symptoms such as anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability.

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Internet Gaming Disorder is a condition that leads to significant impairment or distress, along with addiction and an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so.

Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men.

In 2019, 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement "I am addicted to pornography" - and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

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A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called "problematic social media use," which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media.

Many have found that rates of "problematic use" are higher for girls.

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When kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up to consume rivers of content often produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or seconds.

This has largely cut off the current generation from older generations. Additionally, adolescents are more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them as they are unable to filter good ideas from bad.

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From 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as "Life often feels meaningless."

As soon as they adopted a phone-based life and began to live in the whirlpool of social media, 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

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How can we point to the phone-based childhood for the epidemic of adolescent mental illness?

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How can we point to the phone-based childhood for the epidemic of adolescent mental illness?

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Hardly any members of Gen Z write out against regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools.

"I missed out on a lot of stuff in life - a lot of socialization i feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world is lacking. I didn't spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system."

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Each child thinks they need a smartphone because everyone else has one. Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade as a national or community norm would help protect adolescents during hte very vulnerable first few years of puberty

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Adolescents feel a strong need to open social media accounts because that's where most of thier peers are posting and gossiping. But if most adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, they could more easily resist the pressure to sign up.

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Schools should require all students to put their phones into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. This will make students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another

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Time should be replaced with more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

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Time should be replaced with more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

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If parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, parents would trust their children with more responsibility. The pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.