If you missed all the headlines about the link between smartphones and the epidemic of mental illness in children and young people, then you have not been paying sufficient attention to your social media feed.
The demand for young people’s mental health services currently stands at record levels. It began around 2012, which saw a sharp uptick in rates of childhood anxiety, depression and self-harm. And since then, the graphs have continued their upward march. Even sceptical mental health epidemiologists like me, who prefer to look at data from several different sources before making up their minds, now believe that something serious is happening to our children.
Broader indicators of mental wellbeing, including loneliness, social isolation, and unhappiness, have been going downhill too. Strikingly, these changes have been reported across a range of widely dispersed Western nations, including the UK, the US, Nordic countries, Australia and New Zealand.
So, what are we to make of it all? To many, including the eminent social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the culprit behind this epidemic is staring us in the face: in a ‘great rewiring’ of children’s brains, social media apps such as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram have hijacked the minds of a generation.
According to one survey, by the end of 2023, 96% of children aged 12–15 owned a smartphone and nearly 20% of three- to seven-year-olds. Haidt’s case is that 2012 (remember, the year that rates of mental illness began to rise) was the tipping point for mobile phone ownership among young people. It was the also the year in which smartphones with forward-facing cameras were introduced for the first time. The correlation between smartphone penetration and the deterioration in children’s mental health is indeed striking and, on the face of it, compelling.
But there’s the problem. As we all know (but frequently forget), correlation doesn’t mean causation. But because we are developmentally disposed to spot patterns and see ‘hidden hands’ at work in the world around us (it helps keep us safe), we often mistake one for the other. Jonathan Haidt knows all about the correlation fallacy of course, but nevertheless, after painstakingly sifting through hundreds of studies, he believes the evidence now points conclusively to this being causation rather than correlation.
Is he right? Is it now time to limit access to social media for under-16 year-olds and prevent children under 14 from owning a smartphone altogether?
I’m afraid that, along with many scientists and statisticians who have looked at his work, I’m not convinced by the quality of the studies being cited. They don’t completely unravel cause and effect (does increased time on social media make kids depressed, or do depressed kids spend more time on social media?) and in experimental conditions the negative impacts being reported are incredibly small. Many of the studies also have problems with bias in the way subjects are chosen, or have insufficient safeguards against false results.
It’s important to emphasise that none of this criticism implies that smartphones have no negative effects on wellbeing and cognition; it simply means that before we can confidently conclude that phones are the main cause of a widespread epidemic of mental illness, we need more and better research.
So, must we sit on our hands and wait? On the contrary, I believe we must act now, and I support all Haidt’s recommendations. But I do so based on the precautionary principle rather than claims about the evidence that I find hard to sustain. This ethical principle states: ‘when activities appear to lead to morally unacceptable harm that is scientifically plausible but uncertain, actions should be taken to avoid or diminish harm’. And in this case there are plenty of plausible mechanisms by which phones may be causing harm.
For example, we know that social comparison is part and parcel of the coming-of-age experience. Yet, by letting social media loose on our children we submit them to cascades of visual comparison feeds. Finding themselves immersed in a world where everybody appears to be having a good time – using the most on-trend cosmetics, and hanging out with the coolest people – no wonder young people are left feeling empty, anxious and depressed.
We also know how, with the rapid-fire efficiency of a machine gun, smartphone algorithms feed our insatiable appetite for novelty and entertainment. Many of us are finding it difficult to sit through an entire film without checking our phones, or to respond to a news item without searching for instant analysis and comment. And if this is happening to adults, what effect does it exert on the developing brains of our children? The price they pay is limited attention span, increased distractibility, difficulty with deferred gratification, and insomnia.
Also, because they want to hold our attention so that they can sell it to advertisers, social media companies design algorithms to push us relentlessly towards the extremes of the topic that interests us. A girl who is anxious about her appearance, and interested in cosmetics, will find herself conveyer-belted to sites exploring cosmetic surgery.
Finally, there are the suction effects of virtual reality. Back in 2009, if a 13-year-old didn’t like what she sees in the virtual world, she could simply switch her phone off and spend more time with her friends in the real world. Today, however, when she returns to the real world there are no friends available because they are also buried in their phones. This mass exodus from the real world traps parents as well: nobody wants their child to be left out when ‘everybody else has one!’, and we are all being sucked into a virtual-world vortex from which there is no escape.
Here is my central point: whether or not there is a direct causal link between social media use and the wider epidemic of mental illness, we already have enough evidence about how smartphones in general, and social media in particular, can put our children’s wellbeing at risk, and we need to take action now.
We could start by supporting schools in no-phone policies and joining (or starting!) parental support groups that help us to say ‘no’ to our kids’ demands. And social media providers must be forced to get to grips with age verification now.
But this isn’t just about limiting harms such as pornography, self-harm sites, etc. You could remove every extreme site – and the dopamine hits, the upward comparison escalators, the quick-fire visual feeds that sap our ability to defer gratification, would continue. All the other impacts on children’s cognition – concentration problems, insomnia, anxiety, insomnia, memory impairments and social isolation – would continue as well.
And let’s avoid making this all about ‘cracking down’ on our kids and their phones. As I’ve argued elsewhere, we need smart kids to handle smart phones, kids who are willing collaborators rather than resentful conscripts. Let’s recognise the multiple goods that smartphones have brought as well: you are likely reading this on one; they reunite families across continents and connect the lonely and isolated; and they may have banished marital map-reading disputes for good (well, nearly…). Smartphones are here to stay. We need a holistic approach that prepares our kids for coming of age as wise and astute users of smartphones and social media.
By ‘we’ I mean ‘you’.
If you are a pastor, there are things your church needs to be doing now. I know of one 12-year-old whose parents, conscious of these potential harms, limit her to just half an hour a day total screen time and no social media access. But on a church fellowship weekend away she found herself isolated, lonely and bored. Why? Because all the other children were buried in their phones and their parents didn’t seem to care. How did we let this happen?
If you are a parent, think about it this way. You open your front door to find a 20-something man with a winning smile. He asks to spend 30 minutes every day for the next year with your 13-year-old son (you’d be around so nothing to worry about), so he can share his ideas and adventures and news of interesting gadgets he has discovered in his trips around the world. How would you respond to this total stranger knocking at your door?
Now, look at your son’s YouTube feed. The stranger with the winning smile is already in your home. Sure, you switched on restricted mode so there’s no graphic content or risk of bullying and porn here. But what about the values that underpin everything he will watch? What about the envy, the greed and the status anxiety this material evokes? How is this shaping his heart? And do you care?
Oh, it’s OK because he attends church every week! Is it? That’s a 20-minute talk interrupted by a stream of notification vibrations from the phone sitting in his pocket. Do we seriously think this will slow the shaping of our kids’ hearts by YouTube and social media over the remainder of the week? What planet are we on?
It’s not just about the content either. Think about the way social media affects our cognitive processes. One of the central tenets of Christian formation is non-conformity: ‘do not be conformed to the pattern of this world…’ (Rom.12:2), and yet inciting conformity is the central mission of much social media. The apostle Paul counsels: ‘I have the right to do anything – but I will not be mastered by anything’ (1 Cor. 6:12), but those dopamine hits, the passive scrolling, the compulsive reaching for your phone even before you know what you will stare at, are all features of your smartphone’s mastery over you. ‘Live self-controlled lives in this present age’ (Titus 2:12) – and yet we surrender to our phones the power to control our thoughts, even our movements.
I suspect that many readers agree that smartphones harm their mental and spiritual health, but in the same way that many smokers agree that smoking is bad for their health: we know we have a problem, but we are not yet ready to make the change. This is what addiction experts call a state of ‘contemplation’. Contemplation can be dangerous because it offers all the virtue of self-awareness with none of the pain of actually doing anything about it. Does this sound familiar?
So, this isn’t just about the kids, it’s about all of us. If the possibility that social media has caused an epidemic of mental illness is what it takes to shake us out of our complacency, then so be it. But for Christians, whatever were we thinking? How did we let this happen to us in the first place? And what are we going to do about it now?
