I'm hesitant to post this chart, because it comes from a source I'm unfamiliar with and don't know if I can trust. But it seems both interesting and plausible. Zach Goldberg of the Manhattan Institute combined the answers to a whole slew of mental hygiene questions into a single index of teen mental health, and this is what he got:
We've seen similar results before. For some reason, around 2012 teen mental health suddenly plummets (a higher score means worse mental health). And it plummets more for lefty teens than for conservative teens.
Based on the evidence I've seen, I don't believe this is due to social media. Maybe a little bit, but the best research simply doesn't demonstrate that social media plays a big role in teen angst, or that its role is more than strictly limited.
So either this is a statistical artifact, which seems less likely the more we see it, or something else is going on. But what?
I'm pretty convinced that it's smartphone addiction. Politics, climate, etc. could play a role, but mostly I think it's because smartphones are sucking kids into an endless vortex of addiction that keeps them from having a healthy social life.
I think the best solution is to prohibit students from bringing smartphones to school. Flip phones are ok because they are not addictive. But only by banishing smartphones completely from school can we restore healthy social lives to our kids.
Don't disagree about the negative impact of most social media, but school is about 6 to 7 hours a day. What happens when they retrieve their phones after school and spend hours a day on social media?
Requiring parent/guardian consent for using social media under the age of 18 would have a greater impact. The folks who run social media have $ millions/billions available to lobby against such legislation.
I don't think it is social media per se, kid-kid interaction in most cases. I think it is targeted content, mostly youtube. If your child diddles around on it for five minutes, the algorithm will figure out that they are a kid and start feeding them stuff that makes (1) fearful of the future, (2) depressed because they are not cool unless they have x, y, and z, or (3) stuff that makes them feel angry about x group or past event that affected their group (which the algorithm also knows what group (black, male, bi, etc.) they are a part of). I didn't realize how bad it was until my constitutionally happy teenager did some youtube research on climate change and he was DELUGED by endless doom shit about climate change. He was genuinely afraid until we talked it through. He now clicks nothing he is fed on youtube because as I told him, most people do not know WTF they are talking about and are just trying to get you to LOOK.
These algorithms are designed to get you to look. And what gets attention--All the massive societal car wrecks that are now and have always been a part of human society. This is what most 'news' organizations peddle, but now the 'news' is tailored made for kids and is constant. Some lawyers are going to make a ton of money on lawsuits against Google and Meta someday and Godspeed to them.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/2/23746904/maryland-school-meta-google-tiktok-snap-lawsuit
I tend to agree, I don't think it's the social interactions per se, it's the doom scrolling. I think the "cool" factor has been drastically reduced with a much larger (global, in fact) pool of kids to compare against.
The doom piece, though. Fox News perfected it and everyone else has figured out that fear keeps eyeballs glued. If you are a young person, it looks like the climate is going to hell, crackpots are banning books and refusing to acknowledge your gender crisis, and you'll never be able to afford an apartment, let alone buy a house.
Also, I don't know that it's helpful to bucket kids into liberal/conservative. Kids are still heavily influenced by their parents and haven't yet landed on what they themselves believe. Seems like an attempt to sow more divisiveness.
I'm convinced it can happy to any kid, but oddly enough, it is probably worse for kids who are naturally inquisitive about the world they live in.
People need to teach their kids that the internet bigs are simply capitalistic mind predators. They do not give a crap about the truth or your well-being. They simply want to cash in and will do anything the law allows them to do. In 20 years, we will be shocked that we left them get away with profiling children in the same way we are now shocked that kids spent 12 hour days underground to open mine shaft air flow vents.
Even when sober, I can't type when I'm on this subject. I get seriously pissed off.
I don't think it is just one thing, but doom scrolling + reduced in person social interaction because of time spent on phones + toxicity of social media sounds like a good match. And it's hard to fight, because whatever you're worried about, that's what these algorithms will feed you, in order to maximize engagement, i.e. ad revenue.
The depression rates really start moving up in 2010, which is when the iPhone 4 came out. IIRC, that's about when using a phone on the Internet actually started to work well. FB hit 200M users in 2009, about a year after it hit 100M users, so was in a period of explosive growth in the US.
With social media, as with nuclear war, the only winning move is not to play.
Smartphones are hellishly addictive and distracting even if you are not using them for social media. Social media can make smartphone use more damaging, but I'm convinced that the primary problem is smartphones as such.
Ban smartphones in schools and you give kids a good 35-40 hours of smartphone-free time, in the company of other kids, every week. That by itself will be very good for them even if their parents are setting no limits whatsoever on screen time at home.
A couple years ago I copyedited a book about GenZ. It was really a marketing book, how to market to GenZ. The book argued that GenZ is suffering from "history fatigue" because of how many earthshaking historical events have happened in the last 10-12 years or so.
I'm going from memory but the list was something like this:
2008
Obama elected
market crash
Tea Party movement
Arab Spring
Occupy movement
Ferguson
Brexit
Trump election
Covid
George Floyd protests
2022
I may have left a couple out. In any case I am extremely resistant to the thesis that 2010-2020 had more earthshatteringly important events than the 80s or the 60s, I just don't buy it. What I do believe is that we're all plugged into the news cycle in a way that is new and that GenZ PERCEIVES itself to be existing in an unusually historic period. What do you guys think?
The modern generation that you describe is not dealing with anything like the genuinely traumatic and world changing disasters of WWI or WWII.
By many easily identifiable and objective measures, in fact, it could easily be argued that we’re currently fortunate enough to live in the most peaceful and prosperous era in the history of humanity; so,
No: the kids today are not undergoing uniquely difficult challenges. Even when it comes to climate change, previous eras have been through any number of climate disasters (acid rain and ozone holes being two fairly recent examples).
But the kids today may very well believe that they are living in uniquely iniquitous times, and that belief makes all the difference.
Isn't this a common view among young people, who know little history and have little time for experience?
The period from 1960 to 1975 seems pretty wild, both domestically and internationally (from JFK to Vietnam and Pol Pot and everything from race riots to the Berlin Wall to the ERA), but I cant imagine a Baby Boomer trying to claim it was uniquely earthshaking back then. Their Great Depression/WWII parents would have laughed in their faces.
I think social media makes a lot of things feel more immediate and personal, even though they aren't. The Arab Spring, for example, was totally irrelevant to the majority of American Gen Z'ers. Just like the Soviet crackdowns in Prague and Budapest were personally irrelevant to their grandparents and Tienamen Square was personally irrelevant to their parents. But it seems more relevant when it's on Twitter instead of the evening news.
Not that many people read papers back in the day. But being fed customized news feeds designed to hit your biggest concerns over and over again might be a different story.
And as you point out, the 1960s weren't a great time. *Nixon* elected, Vietnam War, which really affected kids lives in a concrete way, vicious anti-Black violence in the South to prevent Blacks from voting.
I tend to think that social media makes phones more interesting than interacting IRL, and that's the biggest hit on mental health. But I also don't think it is just one thing.
Other than covid, those things would have basically zero impact on the day to day lives of most teenagers.
LOL. When I was a Millennial kid in the 90s I told my mom I wanted to see some history. The 90s were so boring! Really, these kids are not wrong that they are living in Interesting Times.
Finally, my paycheck is $ 8,500 A working 10 hours per week online. My brother’s friend had an average of 12K for several months, he work about 22 hours a week. I can not believe how easy it is, once I try to do so. This is what I do
🙂 AND GOOD LUCK.:)
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HERE====)> https://iplogger.com/1rkjJ9
Here's a pretty good sketch of the Manhattan Institute:
https://sourcewatch.org/index.php/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research
So a right wing outfit finds that liberal teens have significantly worse mental health than right wing teens? This is very surprising.
The Manhattan Institute is a pretty reactionary joint. Other output of theirs indludes the likes of Heather Mac Donald, who never lets the facts get in the way of defending the worst American cop shops have to offer.
I don't know anything about Zach Goldberg, and good folks sometimes publish in trashy places. But the brand association is a red flag for me.
"Zach Goldberg is a Paulson Policy Analyst who recently completed his PhD in political science from Georgia State University. His dissertation focused on the “Great Awokening” – closely examining the role that the media and collective moral emotions played in recent shifts in racial liberalism among white Americans."
Recent articles: "Yes, Critical Race Theory Is Being Taught in Schools"
"White progressives on course to dominate the Democratic Party"
"Democrats Are Turning Immigration Into a Moral Ultimatum"
"... in our own time it’s the moral mythologies of liberal Democrats that have become increasingly detached from practical realties. "
Your red flag is warranted.
Liberals seem pretty invested in doomsday right now. On just about any topic, from the environment to student loans to housing affordability to elections to policing to covid to lgbtq+ acceptance to women's rights, it goes beyond legitimate concern and into fatalistic negativity.
Everything is late stage capitalism. No one will ever afford a house. Don't have kids because we are just decades from extinction. Every time a cop sees a Black person, they murder them. You will be shot at school.
It used to be that conservatives were the big pessimists, but they largely limit that to politics. And they are busy joining astroturf movements that let them bully others, which brings them great joy. Meanwhile liberal groups often rip each other apart over microagressions. The kids see all the negativity and fear, and it is hard to live with.
Liberal kids have long been more unhappy, but the really big split in that graph is covid related. Starting in 2012 social media and smart phones made all teens more miserable. But covid really hit liberal teens hard. Conservative kids got to do what they wanted, and cared little about the "government tyranny" rhetoric their parents spewed. Liberal kids had to stay home or fear death or being blamed for killing others, at the same time they were told that half the country wanted them to die of disease. That messed them up.
There is no such thing as late stage capitalism.
I think this can't be stressed enough.
The system we have has almost infinite flexibility, except when conservatives work hard to screw it up.
Is there such a thing as a late stage game of Monopoly?
Death. Conservatives expect this at any moment so it hardly matters what they do.
The late-stage capitalism vibes and forty years of conservatives working hard to screw it up are directly related.
This is for 12th graders, do they say how the same thing racks up for other age groups over the same period?
This is pretty simple. Despite their forever grievances, conservatives (teens included) are not really under attack. Lib kids, especially LGBTQ teens, feel like they are growing up in 1920s germany. How would your mental health be?
I have to take extreme exception to this post:
“Despite their forever grievances, conservatives (teens included) are not really under attack. Lib kids, especially LGBTQ teens, feel like they are growing up in 1920s Germany.”
Compared to just 30-40 years ago, gay kids are living in a previously inconceivable Nirvana. In the space of barely more than a generation, our society has shifted from one where the existence of gay people was barely acknowledged to one where the Supreme Court has granted them rights to marriage (and other federal protections) and every corporation in the country (more or less) is falling over themselves in a race to see who can wave more pride flags. Gay rights is one of the fastest and most dramatic success stories our country has ever witnessed. The success of gay advocacy, in fact, is positively head-spinning, and it demonstrates the extent to which our society truly can change for the better.
Conservatives, on the other hand, truly do have reasons to feel shunned. Just about every major cultural institution (from universities to Hollywood to most major news outlets) is overwhelmingly Liberal. I personally consider myself a Liberal Democrat, and yet even I felt out of place on the modern Far Left campus that I recently attended. What on earth would a Conservative feel like in a climate like that? Plus, the decline in influence of religion on American life is quite real and well documented. Conservatives can of course be melodramatic about the assault on their values, but they’re not wholly imagining things.
So, your framework is almost completely backwards: gay kids in America have never had it so good (they probably could not even imagine the hatred and neglect their gay forebears endured), while Conservatives are the ones genuinely facing some legitimate cultural challenges.
I have to agree with this statement. I was in college from '74-'78, and personally knew of two gay kids on our hall (of 45) who ended up hospitalized due to extreme suicidality, primarily because they were gay and life as a gay person was much more constrained, including legally constrained. Hell, gay sex was illegal in many states until Lawrence v. Texas, and that's in *2003*. You can have biological children much more easily, and you can get *married*. This is a much better time to be gay than in the previous century.
Even trans rights are protected, by this very conservative Supreme Court, under the same laws as protect discrimination on the basis of sex. There's some pushback against the idea of medical transition for children, and teaching young children the factually incorrect statement that you can choose to be a boy or a girl, but generally you have far more protections against discrimination as a trans person today than you would have any other time in history as well.
Hah!
dear god,
RFK Jr. suggests COVID-19 could have been 'ethnically targeted' to spare Jews,
https://www.rawstory.com/rfk-jr-2662283859/
RFK
Really
Fuckin'
Krazy
I am stealing that, I hope you don't mind.
Christopher Rufo is a fellow at the MI. I can't imagine a serious researcher would want to be associated with the MI.
Is this how a serious person would describe themselves:
"Wokeness Studies scholar researching all things woke @ManhattanInst"
It's how Zack Goldberg describes himself. Without a deep dive into how this "study" was put together this needs to be filed under "'ideologue finds his ideology rocks." Up your game Kevin.
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That derivative has quite a spike at 2016, the place where everyone's mental health imploded like a carbon-fiber sub.
2016-23: Trump, 1-megadeath pandemic, social isolation, 2020 election, insurrection, increasingly obvious climate issues.
I spent my high-school years under the assumption that my life could end within an hour, probably without warning. In contrast to recent history, that had the advantage of stability, with one continual threat, hence one coping routine, spanning 2-3 decades.
Now it's a kaleidoscope of gloomy possibilities and certainties.
Did you really worry about a nuclear attack hitting without warning? I sure didn't. I never thought that the USSR was *irrational*, and by the 1980s, it was pretty clear that ideologically, they were a failure, as well.
My view of the nuclear balance of terror in the 1960s, when I was growing up (b. 1956) was that it was great. Now even the dimmest leaders, like St. Ronnie Reagan, had to recognize that all out war was a guaranteed loser for all involved. For the first time perhaps in human history, the most powerful nations in the world had no real interest in, and could get no benefit from, all out war.
And indeed, until that moron Putin decided to invade Ukraine, Europe had more or less been at peace for 77 years.
Liberals are in the main despair doomers and it's infecting the kids. It's slowly gotten worse for everyone because things have actually gotten worse, but liberals provide no hope to balance the doom.
I am not entirely clear about the emerging evidence about a teenage mental health crisis. However, I tend to disfavor the trend to ban cell phones at school.
I see there being unintended consequences of such a policy. Basically, life is a competition: You want something? Compete for it. You want friends? Then outcompete all alternatives.
What happens especially in school environments is that when they see a new innovation that shifts the balance away from social interaction (e.g. cell phones) they reflexively ban it.
Schools have a very strong prosocial bias. I remember well when a sibling wanted to read a book by themselves during recess and this was endlessly mocked (even by the teacher). It is highly disturbing that a place of learning could be so abysmally anti-intellectual. The socially approved activity during recess was to "play" with their primary school peers. I am sure the book would have been much more enlightening than playing with children. Schools ultimately do not want to ban only cell phones; they have and they will ban book reading as well. Being part of an immersive social environment 7 hours per day, 200 days per year for at least 15 years of your life is not a bug, but a feature of school life. Indeed, the aggressive prosocial socialization of schools is the most notable of all features of a school environment.
Interestingly, this sibling was actually relatively social. Yet, the day they left the school yard for their last time-- the 15 years of intensive socialization-- was the also last day that almost all of that socialization continued. They went to all of that effort to shape the social experience of the students and none of it lasted more than 5 seconds after leaving the school for the last time.
Why is that? They forced the socialization! They said that you can't read the book: you can't have your cell phone. What happens the second that you can make adult level choices? You do! You can only ever make people do what you want them to, when you have imprisoned them.
The only way around this is open up competition. Force people to have to outcompete whatever technology people might find most interesting. That is how you create a real community that has long term potential. Otherwise, you have what we have now-- completely hollow community based upon the prison model.
In 1980 I was in 11th grade and celebrated Ronald Reagan’s election. Once I turned 18, I never voted for a Republican even once. The data on political affiliation is meaningless. Being a teenager sucks.
“For decades, the share of U.S. children living with a single parent has been rising, accompanied by a decline in marriage rates and a rise in births outside of marriage. A new Pew Research Center study of 130 countries and territories shows that the U.S. has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households.
Almost a quarter of U.S. children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults.”
Maybe not such a good idea after all.
Just a few days ago, Kevin posted a chart showing the skyrocketing levels of cynical and negative headiness and news stories. Simply combine that trend with the chart in this post (detailing increasing levels of mental health problems for teens), and you get a pretty good idea of what’s going on.
At the same time that the media has turned overwhelmingly nihilistic, we developed portable, handheld devices to deliver that nihilism directly into teen brains 24/7. We also developed social media and it’s attendant algorithms to filter out anything that might be positive and instead present the most typical social media users (young people) with the most incendiary of all the negative stuff out there (supposedly to keep them enraged and engaged).
We have in essence put one building block after another in place to subject kids to a nonstop firehose of doom and despair, and then we throw up our hands and ask what the hell is wrong with the kids these days.
But why are Liberals affected more than Conservatives? That fits too: every puzzle piece I just outlined is busy promoting Leftist doctrine that our American society is the worst in the history of the world, that we’re all irredeemably racist, sexist, misogynistic, transphobic, evil capitalists living on a planet where every heat wave is reported with end of times apocalyptic hysteria. And I suspect that Liberals will be more likely to listen to their (astonishingly cynical) Liberal peers. Conservatives, on the other hand, are trained to ignore woke Leftist nonsense.
And the great irony of this whole situation is that, as Kevin and many other writers (Matt Yglesias comes to mind) point out, our society (and world) has been moving in the right direction in so many ways for so many years. But no one listens to objective or data based assessments of anything. Instead, our brains, and the not fully formed brains of our kids, are bombarded with more negativity more of the time than ever before.
We live in a devolving society and the devolution is accelerating. This is a kind of thing where the age cohort in question is going to serve as a canary in the mineshaft. The cognitive dissonance will be less in smaller children, who still trust, and in adults, who have acquired learned helplessness.
Does this manifest in *anything* other than responses to polls?
For example teen suicide rates remain below their peak in the 90s, and are (contra to the claims of who is suffering this epidemic of mental health) much higher for males than females.
Likewise pregnancy rates are down massively, which seems to suggest something positive (better impulse control or something).
Similarly for alcohol usage.
I could believe that this is pretty much ENTIRELY a social phenomenon, in the sense that "I am constantly told I am supposed to be upset about the world for xyz reasons, so I guess I ought to say that I am upset".
We have seen this repeatedly throughout history – https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us
But of course those inside the latest craze don't want to see it as just one more craze that's essentially social hysterical contagion... (cf all those in the 80s who more or less honestly believed in the whole repressed memory craziness and all that resulted from it).
I think you are on to something. IMO this is more about the fact that psychological diagnosis and the taking of prescription mental health drugs among teens has become utterly normalized. 30 years ago few teens were in therapy. Now it sems like nearly all of them are. And lord knows if you take someone to a therapist the therapist is going to find a mental health issue that requires the medication.
It started when the GOP went berserk. See: Tea Party, also Barack Obama.
I like what I’ve heard in terms of social media+phones =>
1. Less face to face time
2. Less sleep.
Those two factors lead to worse MH outcomes. Doesn’t entirely explain lib vs conservative disparity tho.
Gen Z thinking, right now, generally regardless of political leaning. Literally, the didn't start the fire, and they tried to fight it. But the world is literally burning and it won't stop burning.
Climate change.
It's as simple as that.
The young people I know are fully cognizant that the carbon in the ground is going to get burned, because to do otherwise would mean that some corporations and people make less money. Some might even *lose* money -- imagine!
They see some efforts to lift the accelerator off the floorboards, but they know that there's almost no chance the speed won't continue to increase, much less the brakes put on. And it is already too late to stop before the edge of the cliff.
Let me say that again: The cascading and self-reinforcing effects of the carbon already in the atmosphere are going to have catastrophic consequences, even if we were to stop burning carbon altogether today. 1.5 C turns out to be not a safe increment, merely one that might enable civilization to survive. Maybe. And we're already on track to shoot well past that. The heat waves, ecosystem degradation, and political instability are just the first harbingers.
Young people aren't dumb. They aren't nearly as buried in their phones and their games as we ancients like to rant about. They are perfectly cognizant that they are being handed a world where large populations will be fleeing uninhabitable parts of the planet, that food production and ecological health will be severely damaged in much of the remainder, and that desperate, furious people with nothing to lose are going to be coming after the ones they perceive were responsible.
It's already happening, as we see millions willingly follow despots promising to make their lives less hellish. Donald fecking Trump is not a symptom of a healthy society, yo.
And while it's not hopeless, the absurdity of our political systems makes good outcomes terribly hard to achieve, with a long fight against opponents who have all the high ground. It's not that the money power is invincible -- we've beaten it before. But after forty years it's very well entrenched and that puts a huge drag on any efforts to make things better.
If you're sniffing at the young people and their inability to see how wonderful the world is around them, take a breath and look around. Maybe they're the ones seeing more clearly than you.