When faced with growing evidence that their products were harming young people, they mostly engaged in denial, obfuscation, and public relations campaigns.[3] Companies that strive to maximize “engagement” by using psychological tricks to keep young people clicking were the worst offenders. They hooked children during vulnerable developmental stages, while their brains were rapidly rewiring in response to incoming stimulation. This included social media companies, which inflicted their greatest damage on girls, and video game companies and pornography sites, which sank their hooks deepest into boys.[4] By designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale. (Location 119)
What legal limits have we imposed on these tech companies so far? In the United States, which ended up setting the norms for most other countries, the main prohibition is the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), enacted in 1998. It requires children under 13 to get parental consent before they can sign a contract with a company (the terms of service) to give away their data and some of their rights when they open an account. That set the effective age of “internet adulthood” at 13, for reasons that had little to do with children’s safety or mental health.[5] But the wording of the law doesn’t require companies to verify ages; as long as a child checks a box to assert that she’s old enough (or puts in the right fake birthday), she can go almost anywhere on the internet without her parents’ knowledge or consent. (Location 128)
While the reward-seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, the frontal cortex—essential for self-control, delay of gratification, and resistance to temptation—is not up to full capacity until the mid-20s, and preteens are at a particularly vulnerable point in development. (Location 149)
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Thanks to the social psychologist Jean Twenge’s groundbreaking work, we know that what causes generations to differ goes beyond the events children experience (such as wars and depressions) and includes changes in the technologies they used as children (Location 160)
Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and—as I will show—unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness—perpetually—to managing what became their online brand. (Location 172)
They watched increasing quantities of user-generated videos and streamed entertainment, offered to them by autoplay and algorithms that were designed to keep them online as long as possible. They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviors that are essential for successful human development. (Location 177)
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Unsupervised outdoor play declined at the same time that the personal computer became more common and more inviting as a place for spending free time.[*] (Location 189)
Communication Technology Adoption Figure 1.6. The share of U.S. households using specific technologies. The smartphone was adopted faster than any other communication technology in history. (Source: Our World in Data.) (Location 557)
According to a survey of U.S. parents conducted by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, by 2016, 79% of teens owned a smartphone, as did 28% of children between the ages of 8 and 12. (Location 581)
A 2015 Common Sense report found that teens with a social media account reported spending about two hours a day on social media, and teens overall reported spending an average of nearly seven hours a day of leisure time (not counting school and homework) on screen media, which includes playing video games and watching videos on Netflix, YouTube, or pornography sites.[30] A 2015 report by Pew Research[31] confirms these high numbers: One out of every four teens said that they were online “almost constantly.” By 2022, that number had nearly doubled, to 46%. (Location 584)
These “almost constantly” numbers are startling and may be the key to explaining the sudden collapse of adolescent mental health. These extraordinarily high rates suggest that even when members of Gen Z are not on their devices and appear to be doing something in the real world, such as sitting in class, eating a meal, or talking with you, a substantial portion of their attention is monitoring or worrying (being anxious) about events in the social metaverse. As the MIT professor Sherry Turkle wrote in 2015 about life with smartphones, “We are forever elsewhere.”[33] This is a profound transformation of human consciousness and relationships, and it occurred, for American teens, between 2010 and 2015. This is the birth of the phone-based childhood. It marks the definitive end of the play-based childhood. (Location 590)
We might therefore say that the smartphone and selfie-based social media ecosystem that we know today emerged in 2012, with Facebook’s purchase of Instagram following the introduction of the front-facing camera. By 2012, many teen girls would have felt that “everyone” was getting a smartphone and an Instagram account, and everyone was comparing themselves with everyone else. (Location 605)
With so many new and exciting virtual activities, many adolescents (and adults) lost the ability to be fully present with the people around them, which changed social life for everyone, even for the small minority that did not use these platforms. That is why I refer to the period from 2010 to 2015 as the Great Rewiring of Childhood. Social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity, and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast, for adolescents, over the course of just five years. (Location 613)
When countries are attacked, either by military force or by terrorism, citizens usually rally around the flag and each other. They are infused with a strong sense of purpose, suicide rates drop,[41] and researchers find that decades later, people who were teens during the start of the war show higher levels of trust and cooperation in lab experiments.[42] When young people rally together around a political cause, from opposing the Vietnam War in the 1960s through peak periods of earlier climate activism in the 1970s and 1990s, they become energized, not dispirited or depressed. Every generation grows up during a disaster or under the threat of an impending disaster, from the Great Depression and World War II through threats of nuclear annihilation, environmental degradation, overpopulation, and ruinous national debt. People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless. (Location 645)
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Everything may seem broken, but that was just as true when I was growing up in the 1970s and when my parents were growing up in the 1930s. It is the story of humanity. If world events played a role in the current mental health crisis, it’s not because world events suddenly got worse around 2012; it’s because world events were suddenly being pumped into adolescents’ brains through their phones, not as news stories, but as social media posts in which other young people expressed their emotions about a collapsing world, emotions that are contagious on social media. (Location 667)
Self-Harm Episodes, U.K. Teens Figure 1.9. U.K. teens’ (ages 13–16) self-harm episodes. (Source: Cybulski et al., 2021, drawing from two databases of anonymized British medical records.) (Location 703)
High Psychological Distress, Nordic Nations Figure 1.11. Percent of Nordic teens with high psychological distress (ages 11–15). (Source: Data from the Health Behavior in School Age Children Survey.) (Location 732)
The 2008 global financial crisis did not cause this multinational increase in the 2010s, nor did American school shootings or American politics. The only plausible theory I have found that can explain the international decline in teen mental health is the sudden and massive change in the technology that teens were using to connect with each other. (Location 747)
What Children Need to Do in Childhood
The primary reason is that we evolved into cultural creatures between 1 million and 3 million years ago, roughly when our genus—Homo—emerged from earlier hominid species. Culture, which includes tool making, profoundly reshaped our evolutionary path. To give just one example: As we began using fire to cook our food, our jaws and guts reduced in size because cooked foods are so much easier to chew and digest. Our brains grew larger because the race for survival was won no longer by the fastest or strongest but by those most adept at learning. Our planet-changing trait was the ability to learn from each other and tap into the common pool of knowledge our ancestors and community had stored. Chimpanzees do very little of this.[4] Human childhood extended to give children time to learn. (Location 810)
The evolutionary race to learn the most made it maladaptive to reach puberty as fast as possible. Rather, there was a benefit to slowing things down. The brain doesn’t grow much in size during late childhood, but it is busy making new connections and losing old ones. As children seek out experiences and practice a range of skills, the neurons and synapses that are used infrequently fade away, while frequent connections solidify and quicken. In other words, evolution has provided humans an extended childhood that allows for a long period of learning the accumulated knowledge of one’s society—a kind of cultural apprenticeship, during adolescence, before one is seen and treated as an adult. (Location 817)
Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and come out socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play. (Location 829)
Gray defines “free play” as “activity that is freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake, not consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.” (Location 843)
Children can only learn how to not get hurt in situations where it is possible to get hurt, such as wrestling with a friend, having a pretend sword fight, or negotiating with another child to enjoy a seesaw when a failed negotiation can lead to pain in one’s posterior, as well as embarrassment. When parents, teachers, and coaches get involved, it becomes less free, less playful, and less beneficial. Adults usually can’t stop themselves from directing and protecting. (Location 848)
A key feature of free play is that mistakes are generally not very costly. (Location 852)
Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development. It is in unsupervised, child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair. Children are intrinsically motivated to acquire these skills because they want to be included in the playgroup and keep the fun going. (Location 855)
the addictive design of these platforms reduces the time available for face-to-face play in the real world. The reduction is so severe that we might refer to smartphones and tablets in the hands of children as experience blockers. (Location 872)
Meet Up with Friends Daily Figure 2.1. Percentage of U.S. students (8th, 10th, and 12th grade) who say that they meet up with their friends “almost every day” outside school. (Location 890)
Attunement forms the foundations for later emotional self-regulation. Children who are deprived of this joyful, mutually trusting social experience often face emotional difficulties and exhibit erratic behavior in their later years. They can have difficulty forming healthy attachments as adolescents and as adults they may be less able to cope with unexpected challenges, regulate emotions, make sound decisions when risk is involved, or learn to deal effectively as they enter into more and more complex social interactions.[17] (Location 915)
We decided that the real world was so full of dangers that children should not be allowed to explore it without adult supervision, even though the risks to children from crime, violence, drunk drivers, and most other sources have dropped steeply since the 1990s. (Location 1089)
If we really want to keep our children safe, we should delay their entry into the virtual world and send them out to play in the real world instead. (Location 1109)
The designers had not realized that young trees need wind to grow properly. When the wind blows, it bends the tree, which tugs at the roots on the windward side and compresses the wood on the other side. In response, the root system expands to provide a firmer anchor where it is needed, and the compressed wood cells change their structure to become stronger and firmer. This altered cell structure is called reaction wood, or sometimes stress wood. Trees that are exposed to strong winds early in life become trees that can withstand even stronger winds when full grown. Conversely, trees that are raised in a protected greenhouse sometimes fall over from their own weight before they reach maturity. Stress wood is a perfect metaphor for children, who also need to experience frequent stressors in order to become strong adults. (Location 1183)
The Biosphere trees illustrate the concept of “antifragility,” a term coined by my NYU colleague Nassim Taleb in his 2012 book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Taleb noted that some things, like wineglasses, are fragile. We protect fragile things from shocks and threats because we know they cannot withstand even a gentle challenge, such as being knocked over on a dinner table. Other things are resilient, such as a plastic cup, which can withstand being knocked off the table. But resilient objects don’t get better from getting dropped; they merely don’t get worse. Taleb coined the word “antifragile” to describe things that actually need to get knocked over now and then in order to become strong. I used the word “things,” but there are very few inanimate objects that are antifragile. Rather, antifragility is a common property of complex systems that were designed (by evolution, and sometimes by people) to function in a world that is unpredictable.[11] The ultimate antifragile system is the immune system, which requires early exposure to dirt, parasites, and bacteria in order to set itself up in childhood. Parents who try to raise their children in a bubble of perfect hygiene are harming their children by blocking the development of their antifragile immune systems. It’s the same dynamic for what has been called the psychological immune system[12]—the ability of a child to handle, process, and get past frustrations, minor accidents, teasing, exclusion, perceived injustices, and normal conflicts without falling prey to hours or days of inner turmoil. (Location 1189)
Kids and puppies are thrill seekers. They are hungry for thrills, and they must get them if they are to overcome their childhood fears and wire up their brains so that discover mode becomes the default. Children need to swing and then jump off the swing. They need to explore forests and junkyards in search of novelty and adventure. They need to shriek with their friends while watching a horror movie or riding a roller coaster. In the process they develop a broad set of competences, including the ability to judge risk for themselves, take appropriate action when faced with risks, and learn that when things go wrong, even if they get hurt, they can usually handle it without calling in an adult. (Location 1249)
Sandseter and Kennair define risky play as “thrilling and exciting forms of play that involve a risk of physical injury.” (In a 2023 paper, expanding on their original work, they add that risky play also requires elements of uncertainty.[17]) They note that such play usually takes place outdoors, during free-play time rather than during activities organized by adults. Children choose to do activities that often lead to relatively harmless injuries, particularly bruises and cuts. (Location 1254)
Sandseter and Kennair analyzed the kinds of risks that children seek out when adults give them some freedom, and they found six: heights (such as climbing trees or playground structures), high speed (such as swinging, or going down fast slides), dangerous tools (such as hammers and drills), dangerous elements (such as experimenting with fire), rough-and-tumble play (such as wrestling), and disappearing (hiding, wandering away, potentially getting lost or separated). These are the major types of thrills that children need. They’ll get them for themselves unless adults stop them—which we did in the 1990s. (Location 1261)
Researchers who study children at play have concluded that the risk of minor injuries should be a feature, not a bug, in playground design. In the U.K., they are acting on this insight, adding construction materials, hammers, and other tools (which are used with adult supervision).[22] As one enlightened summer camp administrator told me, “We want to see bruises, not scars.” (Location 1282)
While writing this chapter, I met with Mariana Brussoni, a play researcher at the University of British Columbia. Brussoni guided me to research showing that the risk of injury per hour of physical play is lower than the risk per hour of playing adult-guided sports, while conferring many more developmental benefits (because the children must make all choices, set and enforce rules, and resolve all disputes).[25] Brussoni is on a campaign to encourage risky outdoor play because in the long run it produces the healthiest children.[26] Our goal in designing the places children play, she says, should be to “keep them as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.”[27] (Location 1301)
the human brain reaches 90% of its adult size by age 5, and it has far more neurons and synapses at that moment than it will have in its adult form. Subsequent brain development, therefore, is not about overall growth but about the selective pruning of neurons and synapses, leaving only the ones that have been frequently used. (Location 1548)
These slow processes of pruning and myelination are related to the great trade-off of human brain development: The young child’s brain has enormous potential (it can develop in many ways) but lower ability (it doesn’t do most things as well as an adult brain). However, as pruning and myelination proceed, the child’s brain becomes more efficient as it locks down into its adult configuration. This lockdown process happens in different parts of the brain at different times, and each lockdown is potentially the end of a sensitive period. It’s like cement hardening: If you try to draw your name in very wet cement, it will disappear quickly. If you wait until the cement is dry, you’ll leave no mark. But if you can catch it while it’s in the transition between wet and dry, your name will last forever.[2] (Location 1558)
humans are socially and culturally adaptable creatures who need a wide variety of social experiences to develop into flexible and socially skilled adults. Because children are antifragile, it is essential that those experiences involve some fear, conflict, and exclusion (though not too much). Safetyism is an experience blocker. It prevents children from getting the quantity and variety of real-world experiences and challenges that they need. (Location 1583)
Are screen-based experiences less valuable than real-life flesh-and-blood experiences? When we’re talking about children whose brains evolved to expect certain kinds of experiences at certain ages, yes. A resounding yes. Communicating by text supplemented by emojis is not going to develop the parts of the brain that are “expecting” to get tuned up during conversations supplemented by facial expressions, changing vocal tones, direct eye contact, and body language. We can’t expect children and adolescents to develop adult-level real-world social skills when their social interactions are largely happening in the virtual world.[7] (Location 1612)
A human child doesn’t morph into a culturally functional adult solely through biological maturation. (Location 1664)
Historically, there were plenty of adults, norms, and rituals to help the child along. But since the early 20th century, scholars have noted the disappearance of adolescent rites of passage across modern industrial societies. (Location 1687)
Teens Engaging in Adult Activities Figure 4.1. The percentage of U.S. high school seniors who have engaged in four adult activities has been declining since the 1990s or early 2000s, prior to the Great Rewiring of 2010 to 2015. (Location 1712)
By 2015, more than 70% of American teens carried a touch screen around with them,[6] and these screens became much better at holding their attention, even when they were with their friends. (Location 1860)
in 2009, Facebook introduced the “like” button and Twitter introduced the “retweet” button. Both of these innovations were then widely copied by other platforms, making viral content dissemination possible. These innovations quantified the success of every post and incentivized users to craft each post for maximum spread, which sometimes meant making more extreme statements or expressing more anger and disgust.[8] At the same time, Facebook began using algorithmically curated news feeds, which motivated other platforms to join the race and curate content that would most successfully hook users. Push notifications were released in 2009, pinging users with notifications throughout the day. The app store brought new advertising-driven platforms to smartphones. Front-facing cameras (2010) made it easier to take photos and videos of oneself, and the rapid spread of high-speed internet (reaching 61% of American homes by January 2010[9]) made it easier for everyone to consume everything quickly. By the early 2010s, social “networking” systems that had been structured (for the most part) to connect people turned into social media “platforms” redesigned (for the most part) in such a way that they encouraged one-to-many public performances in search of validation, not just from friends but from strangers. Even users who don’t actively post are affected by the incentive structures these apps have designed.[10] These changes explain why the Great Rewiring began around 2010 and why it was largely complete by 2015. (Location 1883)
This kind of continuous use, often involving two or three screens at the same time, was simply not possible before kids carried touch screens in their pockets. It has enormous implications for cognition, addiction, and the wearing smooth of paths in the brain, especially during the sensitive period of puberty. (Location 1929)
Children need face-to-face, synchronous, embodied, physical play. The healthiest play is outdoors and includes occasional physical risk-taking and thrilling adventure. Talking on FaceTime with close friends is good, like an old-fashioned phone call to which a visual channel has been added. In contrast, sitting alone in your bedroom consuming a bottomless feed of other people’s content, or playing endless hours of video games with a shifting cast of friends and strangers, or posting your own content and waiting for other kids (or strangers) to like or comment is so far from what children need that these activities should not be considered healthy new forms of adolescent interaction; they are alternatives that consume so much time that they reduce the amount of time teens spend together. (Location 1958)
The sharp drop of time with friends actually underestimates the social deprivation caused by the Great Rewiring because even when teens are within a few feet of their friends, their phone-based childhoods damage the quality of their time together. Smartphones grab our attention so powerfully that if they merely vibrate in our pockets for a tenth of a second, many of us will interrupt a face-to-face conversation, just in case the phone is bringing us an important update. We usually don’t tell the other person to stop talking; we just pull out our phone and spend some time pecking at it, leaving the other person to conclude, reasonably, that she is less important than the latest notification. When a conversation partner pulls out a phone,[21] or when a phone is merely visible[22] (not even your own phone), the quality and intimacy of a social interaction is reduced. (Location 1963)
The Great Rewiring devastated the social lives of Gen Z by connecting them to everyone in the world and disconnecting them from the people around them. (Location 1981)
When you add it all up, the average number of notifications on young people’s phones from the top social and communication apps amounts to 192 alerts per day, according to one study.[42] The average teen, who now gets only seven hours of sleep per night, therefore gets about 11 notifications per waking hour, or one every five minutes. And that’s just for the apps that are about communication. When we add in the dozens of other apps for which they have not turned off push notifications, the number of interruptions grows far higher. And we’re still only talking about the average teen. (Location 2054)
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Staying on one road got much harder when the internet arrived and moved much of our reading online. Every hyperlink is an off-ramp, calling us to abandon the choice we made moments earlier. Nicholas Carr, in his aptly titled 2010 book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, lamented his lost ability to stay on one path. Life on the internet changed how his brain sought out information, even when he was off-line trying to read a book. It reduced his ability to focus and reflect because he now craved a constant stream of stimulation: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” (Location 2068)
Many studies find that students with access to their phones use them in class and pay far less attention to their teachers.[46] People can’t really multitask; all we can do is shift attention back and forth between tasks while wasting a lot of it on each shift.[47] (Location 2086)
But even when students don’t check their phones, the mere presence of a phone damages their ability to think. In one study, researchers brought college students into the lab and randomly assigned them to (1) leave their bag and phone out in the entry room of the lab, (2) keep their phone with them in their pocket or bag, or (3) put their phone on their desk next to them. They then had the students complete tasks that tested their fluid intelligence and working memory capacity, such as by solving math problems while also remembering a string of letters. They found that performance was best when phones were left in the other room, and worst when phones were visible, with pocketed phones in between. The effect was bigger for heavy users. The article was titled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” (Location 2089)
The brain develops throughout childhood, with an acceleration of change during puberty. One of the main skills that adolescents are expected to develop as they advance through middle school and high school is “executive function,” which refers to the child’s growing ability to make plans and then do the things necessary to execute those plans. Executive function skills are slow to develop because they are based in large part in the frontal cortex, which is the last part of the brain to rewire during puberty. Skills essential for executive function include self-control, focus, and the ability to resist off-ramps. A phone-based childhood is likely to interfere with the development of executive function.[52] (Location 2107)
The neural basis of behavioral addictions to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addictions to cocaine or opiates.[53] Nonetheless, they all involve dopamine, craving, compulsion, and the feeling my daughter expressed—that she was powerless to act on her conscious wishes. That happens by design. The creators of these apps use every trick in the psychologists’ tool kit to hook users as deeply as slot machines hook gamblers.[54] (Location 2124)
This is a key discovery of behaviorist psychology: It’s best not to reward a behavior every time the animal does what you want. If you reward an animal on a variable-ratio schedule (such as one time out of every 10 times, on average, but sometimes fewer, sometimes more), you create the strongest and most persistent behavior. (Location 2148)
We know that Facebook intentionally hooked teens using behaviorist techniques thanks to the Facebook Files—the trove of internal documents and screenshots of presentations brought out by the whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. In one chilling section, a trio of Facebook employees give a presentation titled “The Power of Identities: Why Teens and Young Adults Choose Instagram.” The stated objective is “to support Facebook Inc.–wide product strategy for engaging younger users.” A section titled “Teen Fundamentals” delves into neuroscience, showing the gradual maturation of the brain during puberty, with the frontal cortex not mature until after age 20. A later photo shows an MRI image of a brain with this caption: The teenage brain is usually about 80% mature. The remaining 20% rests in the frontal cortex… . At this time teens are highly dependent on their temporal lobe where emotions, memory and learning, and the reward system reign supreme. A subsequent slide shows the loop that Facebook’s designers strive to create in users and notes the points of vulnerability (see Figure 5.4). Many other slides in the presentation indicate that the presenters were not trying to protect the young woman in the center from overuse and addiction; their goal was to advise other Facebook employees on how to keep her “engaged” for longer with rewards, novelty, and emotions. Suggestions include making it easier for teens to open multiple accounts and implementing “stronger paths to related interest content.” Figure 5.4. Screenshot of an internal Facebook presentation, brought out by Frances Haugen. The caption says, “Teens’ decisions and behavior are mainly driven by emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward. While these all seem positive, they make teens very vulnerable at the elevated levels they operate on. Especially in the absence of a mature frontal cortex to help impose limits on the indulgence in these.” (Source: The Facebook Files, section 42/15, p. 53.)[56] (Location 2171)
Lembke writes, “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.”[60] Her metaphor helps to explain why the transition from play-based childhood to phone-based childhood has been so devastating, and why the crisis showed up so suddenly in the early 2010s. Millennial adolescents in the 1990s and early 2000s had access to all kinds of addictive activities on their home computers, and some of them did get addicted. But they couldn’t take their computers with them everywhere they went. After the Great Rewiring, the next generation of adolescents could, and did. (Location 2211)
Now imagine a sleep-deprived, anxious, irritable, and socially isolated student trying to focus on her homework as off-ramps beckon from the phone lying faceup on her desk. Her impaired executive abilities will strain to keep her on task for more than a minute or two at a time. Her attention is fragmented. Her consciousness becomes “the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state” that William James said is the opposite of attention. (Location 2220)
When we gave children and adolescents smartphones in the early 2010s, we gave companies the ability to apply variable-ratio reinforcement schedules all day long, training them like rats during their most sensitive years of brain rewiring. Those companies developed addictive apps that sculpted some very deep pathways in our children’s brains.[61] (Location 2224)
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Why Social Media Harms Girls More Than Boys
To establish that one thing caused another to happen, the main tool scientists use is an experiment in which some people are randomly assigned to receive a treatment and other people are randomly assigned to be in the control group, which receives a placebo (in medical studies) or carries on with business as usual (in many social science experiments). Experiments like this are sometimes referred to as RCTs (randomized controlled trials). (Location 2385)
Psychologists have long studied social comparison and its pervasive effects. The social psychologist Susan Fiske says that humans are “comparison machines.”[35] Mark Leary, another social psychologist, describes the machinery in more detail: It’s as if we all have a “sociometer” in our brains—a gauge that runs from 0 to 100, telling us where we stand in the local prestige rankings, moment by moment. When the needle drops, it triggers an alarm—anxiety—that motivates us to change our behavior and get the needle back up. (Location 2498)
It was bad enough when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, when girls were exposed to airbrushed and later photoshopped models. But those were adult strangers; they were not a girl’s competition. So what happened when most girls in a school got Instagram and Snapchat accounts and started posting carefully edited highlight reels of their lives and using filters and editing apps to improve their virtual beauty and online brand? Many girls’ sociometers plunged, because most were now below what appeared to them to be the average. All around the developed world, an anxiety alarm went off in girls’ minds, at approximately the same time. (Location 2510)
Researchers in France exposed young women either to media photographs of very thin women or to media photographs of average-sized women.[41] They found that the young women exposed to images of very thin women became more anxious about their own body and appearance. But here’s the surprising thing: The images were flashed on a screen for just 20 milliseconds, too fast for the women to become consciously aware of what they had seen. The authors conclude that “social comparison takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluations.” This means that the frequent reminders girls give each other that social media is not reality are likely to have only a limited effect, because the part of the brain that is doing the comparisons is not governed by the part of the brain that knows, consciously, that they are seeing only edited highlight reels. (Location 2545)
Facebook itself commissioned a study on how Instagram was affecting teens in the United States and the U.K. The findings were never released, but whistleblower Frances Haugen smuggled out screenshots of internal documents and shared them with reporters at The Wall Street Journal. The researchers found that Instagram is particularly bad for girls: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression… . This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” [44] The researchers also noted that “social comparison is worse” on Instagram than on rival apps. Snapchat’s filters “keep the focus on the face,” whereas Instagram “focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle.” (Location 2566)
Studies confirm that as adolescents moved their social lives online, the nature of bullying began to change. One systematic review of studies from 1998 to 2017 found a decrease in face-to-face bullying among boys but an increase among girls, especially among younger adolescent girls.[47] A separate study of roughly 16,000 Massachusetts high school students from 2006 through 2012 observed no increase in face-to-face bullying for girls and a decrease for boys. However, cyberbullying among girls surged.[48] According to one major U.S. survey, these high rates of cyberbullying have persisted (though have not increased) between 2011 and 2019. Throughout the period, approximately one in 10 high school boys and one in five high school girls experienced cyberbullying each year.[49] In other words, the move online made bullying and harassment a larger part of daily life for girls. (Location 2583)
Puberty was already a fraught time of transition, with heightened need for a few close friends. Then social media came along to make the transition harder by making relational aggression so much easier and status competition so much more pervasive and public. (Location 2612)
The sociologist Nicholas Christakis and the political scientist James Fowler analyzed data from a long-running survey of the residents in Framingham, Massachusetts, called the Framingham Heart Study.[53] The study focused on physical health, but Christakis and Fowler were able to use items in the survey to study the way emotions moved through the community over time. They found that happiness tends to occur in clusters. This was not just because happy people seek each other out. Rather, when one person became happier, it increased the odds that their existing friends would become happier too. Amazingly, it also had an influence on their friends’ friends, and sometimes even on their friends’ friends’ friends. Happiness is contagious; it spreads through social networks. (Location 2619)
When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%. When a man became depressed, it had no measurable effect on his friends. The authors surmise that the difference is due to the fact that women are more emotionally expressive and more effective at communicating mood states within friendship pairs. When men get together, in contrast, they are more likely to do things together rather than talk about what they are feeling. (Location 2630)
But TikTok did not just encourage girls to dance. Its advanced algorithm picked up any sign of interest in anything and sent users more of that, often in a more extreme form. Anyone who revealed an interest in mental health was soon inundated with videos of other teens displaying mental illness and receiving social support for doing so.[60] In August 2023, videos with the hashtag mentalhealth had more than 100 billion views. Trauma had more than 25 billion. A group of German psychiatrists led by Kirsten Müller-Vahl[61] noted a sudden increase in young people showing up at clinics claiming to have Tourette’s syndrome—a motor disorder in which patients emit pronounced tics, such as heavy blinking or head and neck rotations, and in which they often emit words or sounds involuntarily. The disease is thought to be related to irregularities in a part of the brain called the basal ganglia, which is heavily involved in physical movement. It usually emerges between the ages of 5 and 10, and 80% of those who have it are boys. But the German psychiatrists could see that almost none of these patients really had Tourette’s. The tics were different, there had been no sign of the disease in them when they were young, and, most revealingly, their tics were astonishingly similar. In fact, these patients—mostly young men in this first wave—were mimicking a single German influencer who actually had Tourette’s and who demonstrated his tics in his very popular YouTube videos. These included shouting out, “Flying sharks!” and “Heil Hitler!”[62] The German researchers wrote, “We report the first outbreak of a new type of mass sociogenic illness that in contrast to all previously reported episodes is spread solely via social media. Accordingly, we suggest the more specific term ‘mass social media–induced illness.’ ” Even though Tourette’s is mostly a male disease, once it became a popular disorder on social media, it spread faster among girls. For example, some girls in Anglo countries suddenly developed tic disorders with head shakes and the common tendency to randomly shout the word “beans.” This was triggered by one British influencer, Evie, who modeled those behaviors and shouted out the word “beans.”[63] One of the main treatments doctors prescribe for the disorder is getting off social media. (Location 2669)
There is evidence that several other disorders are spreading sociogenically, especially via sites that feature video posts such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a condition that used to be known as multiple personality disorder. It was dramatized in the 1957 movie The Three Faces of Eve. The person reports that they have within themselves different identities, known as alters, which may have very different personalities, moral profiles, genders, sexualities, and ages. There is often a “bad” alter who encourages the person to do bad things to others or to themselves. DID used to be rare,[64] but since the arrival of TikTok, there has been an increase, primarily among adolescent girls.[65] Influencers portraying multiple personalities have attracted millions of followers, contributing to an escalating trend of self-identifying with the disorder. Asher, a TikTok influencer who describes themself as one of a “system” of 29 identities, has amassed more than 1.1 million followers. The growing interest in DID is further evidenced by the billions of views garnered by hashtags such as did (2.8 billion), dissociativeidentitydisorder (1.6 billion), and didsystem (1.1 billion).[66] Naomi Torres-Mackie, the head of research at the Mental Health Coalition, encapsulated the trend this way: “All of a sudden, all of my adolescent patients think that they have [DID]… . And they don’t.”[67] The recent growth in diagnoses of gender dysphoria may also be related in part to social media trends. Gender dysphoria refers to the psychological distress a person experiences when their gender identity doesn’t align with their biological sex. People with such mismatches have long existed in societies around the world. According to the most recent diagnostic manual of psychiatry,[68] estimates of the prevalence of gender dysphoria in American society used to indicate rates below one in a thousand, with rates for natal males (meaning those who were biological males at birth) being several times higher than for natal females. But those estimates were based on the numbers of people who sought gender reassignment surgery as adults, which was surely a vast underestimate of the underlying population. Within the past decade, the number of individuals who are being referred to clinics for gender dysphoria has been growing rapidly, especially among natal females in Gen Z.[69] In fact, among Gen Z teens, the sex ratio has reversed, with natal females now showing higher rates than natal males.[70] Some portion of this increase surely reflects the “coming-out” of young people who were trans but either didn’t recognize it or were afraid of the social stigma that would attend the expression of their gender identity. Increasing freedom of gender expression and growing awareness of human variation are both forms of social progress. But the fact that gender dysphoria now often appears in social clusters (such as a group of close friends),[71]… (Location 2690)
Girls in virtual networks are subjected to hundreds of times more social comparison than girls had experienced for all of human evolution. (Location 2795)
Chapter 7 What Is Happening to Boys?
Since the early 2010s, adolescent boys’ rates of depression and anxiety have been rising, across many nations, though they remain at lower absolute levels than girls’. In the United States, the U.K., and Australia, suicide rates have been rising too, hitting both sexes, with rates always much higher for boys. (Location 2860)
In other words, the girls’ story is more compact. For girls, most of the transformation in mental health takes place between 2010 and 2015, across multiple nations, and the evidence points repeatedly to the combination of smartphones and social media as major contributors to their increased anxiety and depression. For boys, in contrast, the story is more diffuse. Their decline in real-world engagement starts earlier, their mental health outcomes are more varied, and I can’t point to one single technology as the primary cause of their distress. (Location 2869)
for the next 20 years, women’s enrollment rose rapidly while men’s did not, so that by 2019 the gap had reversed: Women earned 59% of bachelor’s degrees, while men earned just 41%. (Location 2902)
“a world of floundering men is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women.” (Location 2910)
As the economic decline made it harder for them to engage productively with the outside world, the new internet made it possible, for the first time in history, for young men to meet their agency and communion needs, to some degree, alone in their bedrooms. (Location 2946)