I wasn’t in a cranky mood last week when I wrote about Jonathon Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” To review, Cell phones became smart phones in 2007. The Internet became omnipresent. 2009 came “the new age of hyper-viralized social media.” And in 2010 phone cameras made it easy to take selfies.
“The tidal wave came to these children during puberty, when the human brain is experiencing its greatest reconfiguring since early childhood….” What you do at that time “will cause lasting structural changes in the brain,” Mr. Haidt wrote. Suddenly children “spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching or even making eye contact with their friends and families.” They withdrew from “embodied social behaviors’ essential for successful human development. It left them not noticing the world.”
Ross Douthat of the New York Times wrote about it. In his column, “Can Those on the Left Be Happy?” he cited a child development scholar, Candice Odgers, who is critical of Haidt’s book. Douthat: “The tone of the review suggested that kids really ought to be a bit depressed… And for an answer to this unhappiness, with neither Providence nor scientific socialism available, Odgers turned to the therapeutic process, lamenting the dearth of school psychologists to help kids process ‘their symptoms and mental-health struggles.’” Good psychologists can help, but is that the best our secular culture can offer? Seems so.
Peggy Noonan thinks Haight’s book might galvanize action on something we all know is a problem (Wall Street Journal, April 6-7, A13). Might it galvanize congregations to action? Parents to model faith at home? Douthat: “This seems like where a good portion of the American left finds itself today: comforted by neither God nor history, and hoping vaguely that therapy can take their place” (New York Times, April 7; Sunday Opinion, 2). “One generation shall commend your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts” (Psalm 145:4). Do we care enough to act?