The real innovators of the present time are the ones saying “No” to the digital wave.
“America’s kids are facing a mental health crisis.”
That’s the opening line of a statement Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders sent this month to governors of all the 50 states and to legislators in her own state of Arkansas.
She included in each delivery a copy of Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” which compiles persuasive evidence of the impact the smartphone has had on the emotional condition of teens. (For discussions of Mr. Haidt’s book, see Politico’s “‘It’s Causing Them to Drop Out of Life’: How Phones Warped Gen Z,” Time magazine’s “Jonathan Haidt: Putting down the screen,” and the American Enterprise Institute’s April 8 American Dream Lecture Series.)
Gov. Sanders endorses Mr. Haidt’s policy recommendations. They are:
- No smartphones before high school.
- No social media before age 16.
- Phone-free schools.
- More outdoor play and childhood independence.
These are blunt and sweeping descriptions, and each one should be implemented immediately. Mr. Haidt and Ms. Sanders are absolutely right. When social media came about 20 years ago, younger Americans were the first ones to pick them up. Commentators of the time dubbed those users “digital natives” and “early adopters,” and they meant those terms positively.
They cheered the advent, speaking as if handheld devices wielded by energetic, innovative youths, that is, by individuals whose minds hadn’t been grooved and hardened by the “linear” cognitive acts of print reading during childhood years (as was the case for Boomers and X-ers, we were told), would open up fresh pathways of knowledge and insight and creativity. The smartphone would bring the universe of known things to the eyes and ears of 14-year-olds, who would proceed to become the most informed and worldly generation in American history. A kid in 2011 well-equipped with the latest tools would deserve the epochal label Millennial.
Of course, it hasn’t turned out that way, and it was never going to turn out that way. The smartphone didn’t impress adolescents as a window onto history, art, politics, religion, science, and foreign affairs. It was naïve, in fact, ever to assume that it would, a specimen of pro-youth sentimentality that a certain strain of liberal has adopted since the Sixties.
