If you ask, I'd tell you I grew up glued to a screen but it's a massive exaggeration compared with the first generations to grow up with personal screens. What I meant is that I'd quietly get up around 5 or 6am at the age of 5, turn the living room TV on, and sit right in front of it.
When I finally read the best-selling The Anxious Generation, I figured it was about the negative consequences of near constant screen and social media usage for children and teens. I didn't realize the other half of the book is about the importance of play, a topic near and dear to my heart.
Social psychologist, professor and best-selling author Jonathan Haidt opens the book with a space analogy: no parent would sign up to send their children to be first on a dangerous trip to Mars, yet he says that's exactly what has been done with personal screens and social media, in that a whole generation were handed devices with little to no idea of the consequences their usage would have. The result is a huge increase in feelings of anxiety and depression among children and teens correlated with their usage of personal smartphones and social media (and pornography, and online multiplayer video games that liberally borrow design principles from gambling).
He makes a distinction between phone-based and play-based childhoods throughout the book. He also tracks back some of the effects to children and teens having less in-person play time with mixed-age peers, less autonomy and agency; more time with parents, studying, or having structured activities:
"evolution didn't just lengthen childhood to make learning possible. It also installed three strong motivations to do things that make learning easy and likely: motivations for free play, attunement, and social learning. In the days of play-based childhood, the norm was that when school let out, children were out playing with each other, unsupervised, in ways that let them satisfy these motives."
While it is natural to be protective of our children, he says: "We are misallocating our protective efforts. We should be giving children more of the practice they need in the real world and delaying their entry into the online world, where the benefits are fewer and the guardrails nearly non-existent."
I just wrote a review of Cory Doctorow's Enshittification book, and ironically wrote that maybe the largest tech companies in the world might not have the best interest of their users in mind. This books is more of that, from a different angle. Thankfully the book also includes what we can do now to change things for the better, while being honest about the inherent challenges to collective action.
I loved the whole book, and particularly enjoyed an unexpected chapter about awe and natural beauty. "I told my students to listen to the podcast and then take a walk, slowly, anywhere outside, during which they must not take out their phones. The written reflections they turned in for that week's homework were among the most beautiful I've seen in my 30 years as a professor."
