Last Thursday ABPTL posted Part 1 of “What If It’s Not the Phones,” which included excerpts from an article published in The Atlantic focused on the mental-health crisis facing our young people.
Today’s Part 2 focuses on Peter Gray’s reaction to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and Gray’s theory about why our young learners are struggling so much these days:
“…[W]hen Gray first read [Haidt’s] manuscript…, he was appalled. ‘The book frankly makes me mad,’ he told me. ‘I have to say that. I think it’s unethical.’ …As [Gray] sees it, the analysis improbably suggests that taking away phones would prompt kids to run around exploring as their grandparents had done. The few freedoms that kids had left were private communications with their friends and some independent movement, permitted only so long as they could be tracked and called. More than that, Haidt’s book implies that kids cannot be trusted to delve into the online world on their own, or even taught to do it safely. The internet is too dangerous for children – too full of scary strangers and powerful temptations – much in the same way that parents and pundits had decried the perils of the physical world generations before. Haidt had wanted feedback on the manuscript. Gray told him he disagreed with its premise.”
“Months later…[Gray] posted a critique to his Substack. Gray wrote that he took ‘no pleasure’ in rebutting his colleague’s work. ‘I have tried to avoid it but no longer can,’ he wrote. ‘As a society we have almost a knee-jerk reaction to believe that the solution to any problem experienced by kids it to deprive them of yet one more freedom, and [The Anxious Generation] is helping to jerk some of those knees even further.’”
“…Gray referred to social-media age minimums as a violation of human rights…. Before The Anxious Generation was published, Gray had been working on another book about the broad topic of play. But he scrapped that one after posting his rebuttal, and instead began to write a full-length counterpoint to Haidt’s ideas…. That book, titled Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety, is due to publish in September.”
“The new book will argue that the mental-health crisis affecting children is real, but has nothing whatsoever to do with what Gray describes as the ‘moral panic’ over smartphones and social media. The real problem, he says, has to do with schools – and in particular with the 2010 rollout of the Common Core standards, which narrowed teachers’ options for creative curricula and increased the amount of time that the average American student spent taking tests.”
“To make that case, Gray points to the American Psychological Association’s annual Stress in America study, which surveyed kids in 2009, just before Common Core was introduced, and in 2013, just after. In 2009, 43 percent of U.S. teenagers said that performing well in school was a source of stress in their lives. In 2013, this number jumped to 83 percent. Gray found analogous survey data from before and after similar educational reforms in Sweden and England were put in place.”
“School policies were not the only things that changed from 2009 to 2013; smartphone use, for example, skyrocketed across the same few years. But lots of evidence affirms the notion that in America, at least, children are more stressed out by school than by any other aspect of their lives. Young people often say that they hate school, and youth suicides are far more common during the school year. In 2024, 68 percent of U.S. teenagers surveyed by Pew Research Center said that they felt a great deal or fair amount of pressure to get good grades – significantly more than those who said they felt pressure to look good or fit in. Studies of teens in North America and parts of Europe also suggest that school pressure has increased more for girls than it has for boys over the past two decades, which is consistent with the fact that, in some respects, the teen-mental-health crisis has been more intense for girls.”
Restoring Childhood goes on to make another, even more surprising argument: It says that computers and video games have actually been responsible for improving children’s mental health. Teen suicides rose in every decade from the 1950s through the 1980s, Gray writes, as restrictions were increased on children’s freedoms. Anxiety and depression seem to have been rising too. But that trend was temporarily reversed by the arrival of the digital world. Suddenly, kids had a new place where they could connect with one another, make their own rules, and solve their own problems. They were among the early adopters of the new technologies, and so became authorities in their households, giving them a chance to feel competent and helpful. Teen-suicide rates never went back down to the levels of the 1950s, but they did decline by about 40 percent from 1990 to 2010. ‘Everybody was ignoring that,’ Gray said. ‘Nobody was writing about that.’”
Teen and young adult suicide rates grew significantly from 2010 to today. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the overall suicide rate for Americans aged 10 to 24 has increased roughly 60% from 2010, rising from roughly 6.8 per 100,000 to 11.0 per 100,000 today.
So is the mental-health demon social media, smartphones, and artificial intelligence, or is it high-stakes testing?
Or maybe it’s some of both?
What both reasons suggest is the importance of adult learning leaders to help young learners understand how to handle both social media and high-stakes testing stressors. Learning leaders need to start paying more attention to how kids are feeling about their lives and how adults can better assist young learners in their pursuit of becoming smarter and stronger, and just feeling better about themselves.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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