This worries me. Peggy Noonan’s weekly column featured a new book by Jonathan Haidt, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” Picture kids on phones. Adults too.
Background: 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. “By 2016 one survey showed 79% of teens owned a smartphone, as did 28% of children 8 to 12. Soon teens were reporting they spent an average of almost seven hours a day on screens. ‘One out of every four teens said that they were online ‘almost constantly,’ Mr. Haidt writes.”
Here's the burden on my heart, and I hope yours too. “The tidal wave came to these children during puberty, when the human brain is experiencing its greatest reconfiguring since early childhood. In puberty, as brain researchers say, ‘neurons that fire together, wire together.’ What you do at that time ‘will cause lasting structural changes in the brain,’ Mr. Haidt writes. 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.”
“Signs of a mental-health crisis quickly emerged. Rates of mental illness among the young went up dramatically in many Western countries between 2010 and 2015. Between 2010 and 2024 major depression among teens went up 145% among girls, 161% among boys. There was a rise in disorders related to anxiety as well.”
Mr. Haidt quotes a 14-year-old girl. “I was ten years old when I watched porn for the first time. I found myself on Pornhub, which I stumbled across by accident and returned to out of curiosity. The website has no age verification, no ID requirement, not even a prompt asking me if I was over 18. The site is easy to find, impossible to avoid, and has become a frequent rite of passage for kids my age. Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily.” (Wall Street Journal, April 6-7; A13)
Much more to say but for now, what’s the church doing?
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