I recall one particular delusion I had toward the beginning of the digital age. It was common to presume that we were on the cusp of a golden age. We would communicate far more easily, connect with others more intimately, and have the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. That pollyannish perspective has been dashed by a cold reality.  Our youth are depressed, anxious, and disconnected. Our politics are polarized in the extreme. And American democracy is legitimately threatened for the first time in my long life. Moreover, we might be on the precipice of losing our very humanity to forms of digitally superior machines (the artificial intelligence revolution). I am so glad I’m old.

Let me retreat from a generalized sense of the apocalypse to a more manageable fear. We are losing our young people in rather disturbing ways. In the most recent international hedonic survey (a study of happiness among major nations), the U.S. fell from 15th to 23rd place in average happiness. While we never have been among the leaders, we also had never fallen out of the top 20. Our recent sharp decline has been attributed to a growing sense of anomie and despair among our young. Older geezers, like me, have remained quite content, according to survey results (good for us).

This negative trend among youth has occurred despite a sound economy, a robust recovery from Covid, and a cessation of overseas military involvements. Our young are responding to something new and perhaps beyond our capacity to remedy, at least not easily. It is as if an alien and pernicious disease has struck the young.

The signs are everywhere. Kids, including college-age youth, are reporting high levels of anxiety, depression, and disturbing thought patterns. Girls are particularly vulnerable, with depression rates bordering close to one-third and over one-in-five attempting serious acts of self-harm. Generalized feelings of detachment and lack of purpose and direction are at higher levels than seen since such metrics have been measured.

The daughter of a good friend is married to a Brit and lives in the U.K. She does therapy with children through their NS health care system. She sees first-hand a disturbing trend that is especially evident in English speaking countries. The denand for child mental health services has exploded. She now sees a demand for their services that can not be satisfied as evidenced by exploding wait lists for help. It is disheartening and frightening.

One explanation for this generation that appears to be verging on a sense of nihilism has been attributed to the pernicious effects of social media. Facebook, Snapchat, Tic-Toc et. al. rely upon perverse algorithms to enhance their bottom lines. As I’ve noted before, profits are based on engagement. That, in turn, is premised on getting consumers to become engaged and stay engaged on their sites. Such levels of engagement requires consumers to click on their offerings and to stay on longer. Those are the metrics that sell advertising and bring in huge amounts of revenue.

This is not rocket science. Those running these multi-billion dollar empires know that emotionally engaging material is the way to keep consumers hooked. Their algorithms, in particular, lead vulnerable kids deeper into a labyrinth of content where dopamine and other hormonal stimulants are effectively excited. For the young, this often involves continuous assessments of how they are doing compared to their peers and key inflencers. Establishing one’s comparative status at this age is a priority need.

As they enter the critical teen years, appropriate reference sources (e.g., parents and adult figures) are replaced by a multitude of so-called influencers on the other end of their Smart Phones. Real and meaningful peers, close physical friends, and appropriate role models are lost. Virtual substitutes take their place. While males have see sharp rises in mental health issues in the 2010s and beyond, females have been harder hit. The negative impacts on their self images and identity more severe. The top officials know that this is happening. But the logic of the marketplace is severe. They just don’t care if they are scarring a generation of kids.

Jonathan Haidt, in his provocative work titled The Anxious Generation, has extended my thinking on such matters. He argues that the sharp uptick in youth anxiety and mental health challenges can be traced to the widespread availability of Smart Phones around 2010. After that point in time, even preteens had access to the social media platforms through easy access to the cyber world on a 24/7 basis, almost always outside of effective parental control (at least in spite of adult efforts at control). This technological revolution has exerted the greatest impact on the Gen X cohort, those born after 1994.

Soon, our youth were spending (on average) close to 5 hours per day on their phones. True, some of this time might be employed searching for useful information for educational purposes. On the other hand, too much time was spent comparing themselves with peers, exchanging gossip with others, doing endless self-comparisons with impossibly ideal images, and seeking affirmations and validation from remote others in impersonal ways … how many likes is one getting. This is one of the least effective ways of generating a positive sense of personal identity or in mastering appropriate adult behaviors.

Haidt also argues that technology (as a cause of this youthful crisis) has been abetted by at least one key change in parenting behavior. Beginning about 1980, and accelerating in the 1990s, parents began to restrict the freedoms permitted children. I don’t know how many times my cohort has exchanged the following discussion: Hell, when I was a kid, my parents kicked me out of the house and told me not to come home until the street lights came on. I surely can recall spending hours on the streets each day, exploring the world with an assortment of mischievous kids from our poorer working class environment with absolutely no obvious adult supervision. We discovered the world on our own.

Arguably, the ages 10 to 15 are key to our adult personalities. Essentially, the most important developmental time is from 0-3 years, with 90 percent of our brain size being attained by age 5. Yet, size is not all that critical. There are other mammals with larger brains than hours. Nurturing, what we learn and experience, are critical to which neurons and connections are maintained and strengthened (we actually lose the number of connections over time even as we get smarter) and which connections are mylenized or developed in a way that speeds electrical impulses. While our brains are not fully developed until sometime in our 20s, persistent patterns are formed and set by the end of high school. That is, those early teen years are not to be ignored.

There is too much to cover here but one concept struck me as quite critical. As the brain develops during this critical period, each youth can have a preponderance of discovery experiences or defensive experiences. Boiled down, ‘discovery’ experiences involve some threat but permit the individual to exercise and develop coping strategies, some better than others. These are essential steps toward adulthood.

After all, being grown up means coping with stress and challenges on your own. When we aren’t allowed to develop healthy responses to challenging experiences on our own (like when we are protected from the real world), we might well be left with ‘defensive’ modes of reacting where we find life a threatening place and where we are left with inappropriate coping tactics … anxiety and depression for example. At the extreme, one might even become a paranoid Republican.

Here is the problem. Today’s kids are being coddled to an extreme. Parents and adult figures are hell-bent on removing all threats from a child’s experience, both physical and emotional. Protection is one thing, sticking a child in a figurative, yet effective prison nonetheless, is another. Threats always existed, but now we are paranoid about them. There have been incidents where neighbors, seeing a younger child playing outside without obvious parental supervision, have called the police to report child neglect. What had been normal in my day now borders on felonies behavior.

I am reminded of a story a friend told that shocked several of us. Her daughter works at a high position in a nationally recognized corporation that hires many highly skilled technical workers. Today, according to her, it is not unusual for recent graduates (from the best universities) to bring their parents to their job interviews. Their parents for crying out loud!

I picked my college out on my own (and somehow paid my own way through). Upon graduation, I went off to spend two years in rural India while living in very harsh conditions. Then, I continued my education before embarking on an exciting academic and policy career. I guess my unsupervised childhood had some upside after all.

I don’t have a remedy on hand. But I am tempted to put this social challenge up there with climate change and AI on the A list of challenges that must be addressed. At a minimum, we ought to bring it forward to the front row of any national dialogue.