If you are a parent, know a parent, or have eavesdropped on a parent lately, you likely have heard about Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation. The thing is pressed into hands and discussed with an urgency I haven’t seen since my childhood inner circle discovered the oeuvre of Judy Blume (or since my contemporary cohort came upon Miranda July’s All Fours). In the book, Haidt argues that youth mental health is plummeting due to the twin foils of the ubiquity of smartphones and the decline of the independent, free-play childhood of ye good olde days. Parents need to worry more about the dangers lurking in the dark corners of the Internet, he says, and less about the theoretical bugaboos of the real world. Skinned knees and solo trips to 7-11 good; Pornhub bad.
Now, whether due to some innate hyper vigilance, a mild case of PTSD resulting from my son’s premature birth and extended stay in the NICU, or the fact that I am just kind of a weenie, I found the first directive — to worry more — delightfully refreshing.
I can’t imagine that the reams of evidence pointing to the dangers of being constantly connected to the Internet before one’s brain is fully formed came as a genuine shock to anyone, but still, it’s nice to be vindicated. Indeed, every time I explain to my child that YouTube is a brain-sucking cesspool designed not to entertain but to monopolize and monetize his attention; refuse to let him play with my phone, even though — he swears, though I suspect he’s largely full of crap — everyone else’s mom does; or deny his request for the Wi-Fi password in order to play Brawl Stars with his best friend on the grounds that ImYrBestFriend249 is not his best friend at all but likely some random perv; I allow myself to bask, just for a moment, in the warm glow of my growing pile of imaginary gold stars.