"...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"

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

"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"

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

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"

"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"

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

"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"