Psychologist Jonathan Haidt provides evidence to suggest something is going wrong with Gen Z, which Wikipedia more or less defines as … the mid-to-late 1990s as starting birth years and the early 2010s as ending birth years., or something like ages 10-20. Haidt has some headwinds, as he should when suggesting something out of the ordinary, but he deals:
I began this essay by taking the burden of proof upon myself. Given the long history of tech panics, you should come to this question and this blog with skepticism. Your default assumption should be the null hypothesis so often asserted by my critics: this is just one more unjustified freakout by older people about “kids these days.”
But as I have shown in this post, the evidence that this time is different is very strong. In 2010 there was little sign of any problem, in any of the long-running nationally representative datasets (with the possible exception of suicide for young teen boys). By 2015––when Greg Lukianoff and I wrote our essay The Coddling of the American Mind––teen mental health was a 5 alarm fire, according to all the datasets that Jean Twenge and I can find. The kids are not alright.
But this gave me pause:
In sum, it’s reasonable to start with skepticism of my claim (with Jean Twenge) that there is an epidemic of mental illness that began around 2012, and that is related in large part to the transition to phone-based childhoods, with a special emphasis on social media. It makes sense to embrace as a null hypothesis the skeptics’ view that there is nothing to see here, just another moral panic, and the kids are fine. I am in full agreement that the burden of proof falls on me.
Sure, phone-based childhoods is a possibility. I’m not operating on data here, but rather a long history of blundering while analyzing bugs in software, coming often from the classic After this, then that logic error – yes, yes, there’s a Latin phrase I should use, and I forget it. The point is, a cause must be postulated and analyzed, and it’s important to keep an open mind.
So other causes to consider: overpopulation, the climate change crisis, American societal polarization between agnostics, or “Nones,” and fundamentalists, and the consequent appearance of a breakdown of society. Kids are quite vulnerable to all sorts of things. Sure, it could be phones. Maybe social media is a terrible thing. I’ve been a little troubled by it myself, given the innate urge of humanity to compete in any arena that comes along.
But whatever the cause, it needs analysis. The real question is whether it can be discerned from statistics, or if interviews with Gen Z members on a large scale will be necessary.
