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This past week was the first day of school in our area. I’m a table runner for a family – a girl with her new backpack, her mom and dad with cameras as the bus pulls up.
It’s shocking to think that by the time a smiling girl reaches high school, she’ll be anxious, depressed, or cutting herself. According to the Surgeon General, 19% of high school students have seriously considered suicide. Nor is it just fooling around. In the year Between 2007 and 2018, the suicide rate among young people between the ages of 10 and 24 increased by 57%.
As Jonathan Hight and Greg Lukianoff explore, the widespread adoption of smartphones in 2012 marked a sudden and dramatic shift in adolescent well-being. Children, especially girls, became more depressed, anxious and weak.
Before Covid, children and teenagers spent hours a day on their phones, a result that worried many observers. Jean Twain of San Francisco State University reviewed studies of high school students nationwide since 1976 and found that children are not as physically connected as they used to be. They attend fewer parties, spend less time with friends in person, and even less socializing than kids in previous decades.
To be sure, being independent as a teenager had some undeniable advantages. Teenage pregnancy rates have declined over the past two decades, as has drug experimentation and alcohol abuse. But the level of unhappiness has increased dramatically.
The addition of covid to this sick social system was a serious blow. In the year A 2020 survey sponsored by Children’s Hospital of Chicago found that 71% of parents believe the pandemic has had a significant impact on their children’s mental health. A national survey of high school students found that nearly a third felt happier or more depressed than usual.
The data on emergency room admissions for mental health crises suggests that something is indeed changing. ER visits in They increased by 24% in 2020 compared to 2019 for children aged 5 to 11 and 31% for those aged 12 to 17. The trend of children in crisis is so dire, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children’s Hospital Association released a joint statement in October 2021, “A National Emergency in Child and Adolescent Mental Health.” Mental health professionals recognize that resources such as psychiatric beds and child psychiatrists and psychologists are very limited, requiring approximately 80%. To abandon the treatment of children with serious illnesses.
Covid was a respiratory epidemic, but it revealed a perhaps even more damaging underlying disease – an epidemic of loneliness. Health insurer Cigna has published a study showing that 3 out of 5 Americans feel lonely and isolated, misunderstood and friendless.
We should pause in this post-Covid moment to reflect on some lessons about the way we live now. One of them is that we spend a lot of time alone. People need to meet face to face.
We shouldn’t need social science to tell us that people need friendships, but sometimes our convenience clouds our better judgment. I can’t imagine living without a smartphone and I would never suggest a Luddite reaction to technology. But we need to better address our social needs.
We’ve lived in groups for 300,000 years, but we still don’t fully understand the complex role that facial expressions, body responses, and scents play in our well-being. We need to stop and think before adopting habits that violate our group nature.
Youth loneliness is not relieved by social media; In fact, social media makes it worse. The Wall Street Journal reported in Facebook’s internal memos that “32 percent of teenage girls said Instagram made them feel bad about their bodies, and “(a) Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13 percent of British users and 6 percent of U.S. users reported self-harm. They found Killing Desire on Instagram.
Scholars and researchers have proposed improvements in raising children and our use of social media. Jean Twenge, Clare Morrell, and Brad Wilcox recommend a series of steps state legislators should consider to limit the harm social media can do to children and teens. One is to mandate age verification for sex sites and social media. Another is to close social media platforms to all children overnight. Excessive use of social networks is a real problem of insomnia, which itself contributes to depression.
These are good starts, but we need to be aware of our social identities and our needs for each other. We need to reorganize our lives and especially our children’s lives to make sure they live IRL and not just online. We want that smiling classmate to become a bright teenager.
Monacharenis is the policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the “To Be Separated” podcast.
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