Teenage Wasteland
Teenage Wasteland
Social media, Cell Phones, Isolation Are Making Kids Depressed. What should we do to fix things?
About ten years ago, I speculated that teenagers devoured dystopian novels, like The Hunger Games, because they found post-apocalyptic hellscapes preferable to their over-scheduled, high pressured, isolated, sanitized worlds. Teenagers, I believed, would rather run through the woods with a sword than fill out another college application. While I never finished that essay, I continued being worried about teenagers and mental health.
In an article that I published for the Atlantic in 2016, I touched on the stress that my son felt around grades. Later, Edutopia asked me to do an article that focused on mental health and boys, and I got an earful from psychologists and academics about the unprecedented levels of alienation in America’s youth. While the problems definitely started before the pandemic, school shutdowns didn’t help things, for sure.
Spurred on by record high rates of depression among teenage girls, the punditry has been writing about their theories for the causes of teenage depression. While it makes for a catchier opinion article to focus on one pet cause to explain a big problem, there’s probably a multitude of causes behind teenage sadness— decreased family time, social media, video games, economic shifts, and online access to disturbing material. To meet those challenges, we need to make big changes within our families and in the wider world.
My son, who is 23, says that his cohort had unregulated access to too many new things — iPhones, Instagram, vape pens. Ground Zero for toxic modernity. He says that they overindulged in these innovations before adults had a chance to set up limits and understand the dangers.
Jonah got his first cellphone when he was in fifth grade, so I could make sure that he was safe on his walk home from middle school. With that iPhone, he had access to all sorts of content that should not have been seen by a kid who still read Pokemon books. He told me that he first witnessed a beheading on an online news site when he was twelve. Harsh, scary images that are graphically sexual or violent cause real trauma in young people.
Girls in particular are immersed in the toxic social media game. Who’s in the picture, who’s taking the picture, who’s in the comment section, the number of friends, the number of likes — there are a million variables that figure into the elaborate calculus of popularity. It’s hard not to feel jealous of classmates whose lives seem a tad more fabulous than yours. Even when done with the best of intensions, commenting and liking and writing fake-cheerful comments, like “oh you are sooooo beautiful,” becomes a job that takes hours every day.
In addition, both boys and girls are much more isolated than we were. Rather than walking to the bowling alley to play video games for hours and hours. like Steve used to do with his friends, now social activity often happen in an xBox chat. Teens are isolated from their families, because parents are too busy with work and their own online relationships. My family still eats dinner together, around a table, with vegetables and a main course and no cellphones, but we’re dinosaurs. Most teens are eating a box of Popeyes chicken or nuked Hot Pockets in their bedrooms.
Young people are either working too hard to get into an elite college, or they have completely given up on school all together. There’s no happy middle ground. If they’re working super hard, they are often doing it without a clear goal, because nobody really knows the right way to get to a nice middle class lifestyle anymore. Every job that I’ve ever done is in danger of being eliminated entirely, so I’m not exactly the right person to offer career advice. Stay away from academia and journalism is the only career wisdom that I have for my kids.
Steve and I have tried to push back against the mental health demons by maintaining dinner time rituals, by spending weekends outside on various adventures, and by encouraging a little rebellion. Maintaining mentally health during the pandemic was a priority, so quite a number of my newsletters discussed our methods, but solutions can’t rest solely on families.
Locally, we need to build community centers and provide more volunteer opportunities and clubs. We need denser housing in walkable communities. And we need the federal government to subsidize those efforts. But most importantly, adults have to recognize that kids are in crisis, prioritize their needs, and then be actually willing to make changes.
LINKS
We just came back from a family ski trip. Ian’s flat feet refused to fit in a ski boot. (Are flat feet an autism thing? Not sure.) But we still had lots of fun anyway. Some pictures, including our new state capitol building project.
From my disability newsletter:
The Atlantic — Have cities become too big to govern?
WaPo, McArdle — Why it’s wrong to rewrite Roald Dahl’s children’s books
Slate — Yellowstone’s Politics Are Left. And Right. And American.
The Free Press — Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?
Thread on school vouchers and special education below:
We visited UVM’s art museum, when we visited Vermont and were very disappointed that they removed artwork from the permanent collection and replaced the art with woke rants. Thread starts here.
Royal Family Gossip: King Charles tells Harry and Meghan that they need to give up their lease on Frogmore Cottage — they only use it for a couple of days a year, and he needs to put his bother somewhere. Given all of Harry’s complaining about his family, it should hardly be a surprise.
Watching: 1923, Mandalorian, Last of Us, Quantomania
Reading: Someone Else’s Shoes (light, mindless, fun)
Amen. Our 23-year-old daughter admitted last week that she wants to trade in her smart phone for a basic flip phone. Less dopamine, distraction, and related depression. Thx for shining a light on these issues.