Only God may have the answer to the smartphone mental health epidemic
The Shabbat dinner table is more important to Judaism, I was once told, than the church is to Christianity. The ceremonial handwashing, the welcoming of angels, the paean to the women, the singing: it’s no less of a ritual than commemorating the Last Supper and something I’ve long wanted to see. When I was finally invited to one last month, I thought I was fully prepared but I’d forgotten one thing. No mobile phones on the Sabbath. “We were a few centuries ahead with this digital-detox thing,” my host said.
The outside world is steadily catching up with this rabbinical wisdom. Smartphones have been banned from British classrooms and Florida has this week outlawed all social media for under-14s. A body of evidence about the harm caused to children seems to be growing all the time. An explosive new book by Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation, argues that children are being damaged after being left to play with digital tools which are too sharp for young minds. The result? An epidemic of misery, anxiety and self-harm.
An astonishing 20 per cent of children aged eight to 16 now have a probable mental health condition, according to NHS data, up from 13 per cent seven years ago. Another study found that self-harm in teenage boys has more than doubled over the past decade, up 78 per cent for girls. The number of teenagers being treated for mental health is up by a third in three years. Add to this the surge in antidepressants and a doubling of under-25s saying they are too sick to work and it suggests a rather urgent problem.
Haidt traces it to the spread of smartphones. When parents found that tablets could keep children engaged and quiet for hours, they happily deployed the digital nanny. Potties with iPad holders started appearing on Amazon. The typical child’s screen time rolled into several hours per day, bringing what Haidt regards as a transition from “play-based childhood” to “phone-based childhood”. So children are sucked away from parents and each other and plunged into an alternative universe that is “exciting, addictive, unstable – and unsuitable for children and adolescents”.
Today, nine in 10 British children own a smartphone by the age of 11. Almost half do by the age of nine. The devices supplant television, telephones and, often, company. UK figures suggest that most 10 to 15 year olds spend at least three hours on these devices on a school day. American figures suggest the time children spend hanging out with each other has fallen by two-thirds since the turn of the century. As the father of three children aged 16, 14 and 10, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to study this phenomenon close-up.
My eldest, Alex, once wrote a two-page letter making the case for him to be given a mobile phone after primary school. It would help him grow in independence, he said. Manage his time better. We caved in. I then tried my best to understand a world where, when kids get back from school, they go on chat groups and continue parallel conversations. There are several groups, and each different mix of people has a different tone. So the child has a conundrum: how much (or little) to contribute to each chat? What to say, and in what tone?
To some, this is the future of communication and teenagers should learn it as they learn anything else. To Haidt, this is a rotten consensus that forces teenagers to devote “a large part of their consciousness – perpetually – to managing what becomes their online brand” to gain acceptance from their peers “which is the oxygen of adolescence”. And also to avoid online shaming: to stop people being mean about you because you’re not in the conversation. It all adds up to what he calls the largest-ever uncontrolled experiment that humanity has ever conducted on children.
Florida is just the latest state to act. The law has been changed in Texas, Louisiana and Utah to say that under-18s need parental consent before creating a social media account. It’s not hard to see calls for similar laws over here. But are the studies really so clear that new laws are needed? Is it really time to give up on the original idea: that parents teach children how to navigate the digital world as well as the real one?
Even Haidt’s figures show that not all phone use is bad. There is little evidence of harm done, even a sign of some benefit, with less than two hours screen time a day. Tools exist to let parents set limits: deeply unpopular, perhaps, but doable. The wonders of smartphone technology also permit parents from any class to convene and collude via WhatsApp. If all agree to equip their children with an old-school Nokia brick until a certain age, it could work. My hunch is that my generation, to whom this is still bewildering, have been thrown – but the generation behind mine, themselves digital natives, will be more savvy.
When I spoke to Haidt a few months ago, he mentioned a surprising finding: that religion does seem to offer some protection. A University of Michigan study found secular girls are worst affected, but religious boys the least. So when assessing the mystery of the mental health collapse, Haidt admits that there is another factor: “The rapid decline in religious life that has happened to various degrees across Europe”. Girls are not so protected by faith, he says, because the smartphone effect – Instagram especially – is so acute.
Why should faith matter at all? The studies don’t really say. Churchgoers (like me) would like to think that Christian teaching has always emphasised the danger of judging oneself by the verdicts of others. All religions emphasise that the right thing is seldom the popular thing: it’s a perennial theme. The Easter story is, after all, about someone who did not end up with very many “likes”. So often these ancient stories, and the morals therein, take on new relevance in a new age.
The studies do not point to any tension between God and smartphones. But as evidence grows on the benefits of rationing screen time, it seems the Shabbat angels might have been watching after all.
