Eric Ireland's status

Eric Ireland reviewed The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

The Anxious Generation

5 stars

Haidt argues the introduction of smart phones around 2012, with the resulting constant access to social media, has caused the decline in teen girls' mental health around the world, along with the loss of freedom as parents became more worried about "stranger danger". Research seems pretty robust to me, even though it cannot prove causation. I'm old so I grew up without mobile phones or internet, riding my bike around the suburbs. Even if the thesis of the book is wrong, I think a free range, smart-phone free childhood is not going to kill anyone, so why not try it? The only problem is that if your kid is the only one who doesn't have a smart phone or social media, they'll feel left out. So it's good to try and get your kids' friends' parents to ban the smart phones too. As regards letting kids roam the neighbourhood, I …

Haidt argues the introduction of smart phones around 2012, with the resulting constant access to social media, has caused the decline in teen girls' mental health around the world, along with the loss of freedom as parents became more worried about "stranger danger". Research seems pretty robust to me, even though it cannot prove causation. I'm old so I grew up without mobile phones or internet, riding my bike around the suburbs. Even if the thesis of the book is wrong, I think a free range, smart-phone free childhood is not going to kill anyone, so why not try it? The only problem is that if your kid is the only one who doesn't have a smart phone or social media, they'll feel left out. So it's good to try and get your kids' friends' parents to ban the smart phones too. As regards letting kids roam the neighbourhood, I suppose it depends where you live. Haidt let his daughter walk to school in NYC from the age of 9.

Daniel Reeders replied to Eric Ireland's status

@EricIreland Hello from your friendly neighbourhood epi-trained media researcher. The problem with Haidt is that his sample is WEIRD* and he cherry picks his studies like crazy. Yes, adolescent mental health took a dive in the Anglosphere around 2012, but it was unaffected in many comparable contexts e.g. Scandinavia which have even higher market uptake of smart phones. By convention we can't rule things into the causal picture using observational data but we can use patterns in it to rule things out. (Then again, nobody ever did an experimental study of smoking — we are quite happy to infer causation of lung cancer based on the strength of the association.)

* https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/05/weird

@EricIreland Hello from your friendly neighbourhood epi-trained media researcher. The problem with Haidt is that his sample is WEIRD* and he cherry picks his studies like crazy. Yes, adolescent mental health took a dive in the Anglosphere around 2012, but it was unaffected in many comparable contexts e.g. Scandinavia which have even higher market uptake of smart phones. By convention we can't rule things into the causal picture using observational data but we can use patterns in it to rule things out. (Then again, nobody ever did an experimental study of smoking — we are quite happy to infer causation of lung cancer based on the strength of the association.)

* https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/05/weird

Daniel Reeders replied to Eric Ireland's status

@EricIreland Oh I know he does. But he's not that kind of researcher, firstly, he built his career on experimental studies of moral attitudes and reasoning. (I'm a big fan of his earlier book The Righteous Mind.) Secondly, he's turned into a raging political conservative, and there's pretty good reason to suspect that is colouring his analysis, i.e. he keeps talking about this research in connection with his campaign against wokeness and snowflakes.