13 Other Explanations for Adolescent Mental Health Crisis. None Them Work
jonathanhaidt.substack.com
jonathanhaidt.substack.com
"Social media" is a super vague and amorphous term. Does it include platforms like TikTok and YouTube, which are closer to the "Television/movies" category? Even Instagram has largely pivoted to Reels and influencer content over pictures of your friends. The usage of "pictures/texts from your friends"-type social media is likely to have declined over the last five years.
>American teens are also less likely to say that there is a lot of competition for grades at their school, suggesting academic pressure has not ramped up in recent years
College admissions, which conventional wisdom advertises as the next step after high school and the only path to a successful career/life, has become vastly more unpredictable over the last ten years. The amount of work (extracurriculars, "volunteering", clubs) you're expected to do for your app to look good has also significantly increased, while the expected payoff remains the same or has decreased. (Even excluding this, zero-sum games over prestige are probably depressing on their own.)
For the first time in human history, children, having unfettered access to the internet, are confronted with myriad ideas. Some, nay most, that they probably disagree with, that don't make them feel especially good, or are even perhaps unsettling. Truly, they have become uncoddled.
Rather than framing this as a bad thing, we should take it as a sign that it's working. We shouldn't then say, "Social media is making them feel worse" - that's exactly the mentality of the coddled mind. We should be implementing policy that increases internet and in particular social media use for children. After all, being confronted with uncomfortable ideas, especially ones that make you feel worse, in fact makes you stronger.
Fifth Element can serve as a Hollywood moral high bar.
The internet does not seem to expose people to a “myriad of ideas” that challenge them. It lets them shop for the community that exactly aligns with their preconceptions and reduces their need to find compromise with the disagreeable meatbags that are physically around them. This is as true for teenagers as it is for adults, but it also steals from teenagers a traditional opportunity to learn critical mediation and coping skills.
In other words, it quite specifically coddles them and makes them grossly ill-prepared for adulthood in a diverse world riddled with small and large conflicts.
When I first read your comment, I was shocked when there was no “/s” at the end.
Correct. If they were having the same experience, I'd expect opposite results to Alternative #13 (see article). Given that's not the case, I have to conclude that adults and children do not indeed share that experience.
The coddling pattern of behavior describes people who encountering ideas that made them feel bad, react by wanting distance themselves from that idea. We seem to have a case where kids are encountering things that make them feel bad and Haidt is making a case for distancing kids from it? Makes no sense.
If you’re thinking of the stress from that as a kind of training regiment, what would someone look like who thrives in that environment? What does success look like? Less coddled is an interesting take on that.
Also what social media have you been on that helps people engage productively with ideas they disagree with?
I'm not sure what you're getting at with the overly-simplistic strawman, when the issue is complex. Primarily, it's an issue that needs to be identified and mitigated to avoid tragedy and to what degree. That is the discussion that follows acknowledgement and western society isn't there yet.
Seems incredibly simplistic.