The Scam to Force Your Kids to Play More

Jonathan Haidt released his new book, The Anxious Generation, and it has been receiving a lot of attention. With this attention comes status, and as the Gossip Trap theory suggests, when a crab tries to status-climb his way out of the bucket, society responds by pulling him down with us.

The book attempts to show how smartphones are causing the decline in youth mental health.

I am partial to Haidt so I have trouble decoupling criticism of him from my admiration. So take what I write with a grain of salt.

Without digging too deep into the Nature critique of his work, my impression is that it’s trying to say that the evidence Haidt presents isn’t particularly strong. Others have suggested alternative causes and when Haidt or Jean Twenge respond they seem to do a good job of showing that the alternatives are always weaker than the smartphone theory.

So now we have the funnel problem. How do I know what is true when the process for truth-finding produces conflicting results?

This is where I have learned to throw everything aside and ask: What does common sense tell me?

Let’s go back to our priors, our base rates before we knew anything about smartphones.

The year is 2006. Everyone still owns flip phones and logs into Facebook from their laptop. A portal opens and someone from the year 2024 steps out. You ask him: What is the future like?

“Donald Trump becomes president. Then he loses reelection and tries to overthrow the government. Then he becomes indicted on 91 criminal charges. Then he gets reelected.”

“No, seriously,” you say.

“Well, Apple invents a phone that has the internet on it. Every teenager in America gets one and joins Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.”

“What’s a TikTok?” you ask.

“Forget I said that. Just understand that kids flock to whatever new, cool social media platform that developers come up with.”

“Oh, just like they do with video games?”

“Sort of. Only the market share is much higher than video game users, like 95%. And they are on it all the time: when they are in bed, during class, while eating meals … always. Plus, the algorithms are designed to keep you on as long as possible and they heighten the most outrageous users with the most polarizing opinions. Teens spend less and less time meeting with one another face to face and more time using their phones.”

Now, knowing nothing more than this information—nothing about the coming recession, climate change worries, global conflicts, or any other coming disaster— would you predict that teen mental health would increase, decrease, or stay the same over the next 15 years?

Better yet: forget about smartphones for a minute. Imagine the time traveler shows you this chart. 

The number of hours a 12th grader spends with friends per week is 2.67, almost exactly what it was 25 years earlier in 1981. Then he tells you that in 2020 it will drop to 1.89, a 29% decrease. Do you expect there to be any second order effects from teens spending so much time alone in their bedrooms?

I get that some people require a high threshold for updating their priors but is it really that absurd to assume the second order effects of kids spending time reading comments on their Instagram feed instead of building a treehouse would have some negative consequences? And Haidt’s suggestions aren’t exactly draconian—no phones during school, age verification for social media to screen teens, more time for recess at school, etc.

Are we really worried that Haidt is in the pocket of Big Recess and wants to trick us into letting kids play more? It’s beginning to sound like this: