Building H #99: The Great Rewiring of Childhood

photo by Gary Cassel from Pixabay

The controversial social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a new book coming out entitled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Haidt excerpts the book in his article, “End the Phone-Based Childhood Now,” in The Atlantic. In it, Haidt steps back and describes the enormous transformation that has occurred in the experience of childhood and links it to dramatic negative shifts in mental health, social connection and academic achievement, along with declines in dating, sexual activity, and teenage employment. In short, Gen Z is struggling relative to previous generations. Much has been researched and written about these changes, the broad diversity of experiences among Zoomers – not everyone is doing badly, of course – and the complexity of pinpointing a particular cause. But Haidt believes that we’re ignoring the obvious:

“I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected.”

Haidt delves into the developmental experience that is childhood and notes some of the changes in the environment, the resulting behaviors and the societal norms that have evolved. He’s most compelling in discussing the demise of independent, physical, outdoor play. The roots of that decline go back to the 70s and 80s, as parents grew concerned over safety, less connected to their neighbors, and competitive pressures led to more programmed activities. But, Haidt argues, the arrival of the always-on-always-with-you Internet propelled this trend into something completely new and different. 

Whether you accept Haidt’s arguments – and some have accused him of fomenting moral panic – it is hard to contest that the last dozen or so years represent a massive uncontrolled experiment in redesigning childhood. It has been, to use our Building H terminology, a dramatic revamping of the “product environment.” Because it has been uncontrolled, we cannot be definitive about the sources of the harms; because these changes are deeply embedded in all aspects of society, we cannot simply unwind them. The product environment changed, social norms changed with it, and childhood became a different experience – with seemingly dismal consequences for some young people. That raises the question of how such an experiment arises, the responsibility for monitoring its consequences and, as concerns emerge, for adapting. Haidt is perhaps weakest in discussing what is to be done about his diagnosis. In a modern society, three groups share these responsibilities: individuals and families (individually and collectively); government; and the corporations whose products form the changing environments. (One could argue that “civil society,” or the nonprofit and philanthropic sector, plays an important role in influencing the other three.) While Haidt recognizes that the changes he prescribes require collective action, he leaves much of it up to families to change norms and advocate for local policy changes. Haidt acknowledges the traditional role of government in solving collective action problems but is clearly not sanguine about its abilities to do so in this case. (The corporate responsibility apparently doesn’t merit a mention at all.)

So what might be the role of the corporations who created the smartphones, the high-speed networks that connect them and the social media apps that form this landscape? We shouldn’t appeal to their sense of social responsibility, according to a provocative new paper by Eduardo J. Gómez, Nason Maani and Sandro Galea in a recent Milbank Quarterly. In “The Pitfalls of Ascribing Moral Agency to Corporations: Public Obligation and Political and Social Contexts in the Commercial Determinants of Health,” Gómez and his colleagues argue, in effect, that blaming companies for pursuing profits above social impact considerations is tantamount to blaming a compass for pointing north. Given the laws governing their creation and their obligations, corporations are simply doing what they must – delivering returns for shareholders – and if we expect them do differently, government and civil society must reshape the policy environment in which they operate. In other words, corporations pursue profits at the expense of health because government and civil society grant them the power to do so. By ascribing moral agency to the corporations and chastising them for their moral failures, we are, argue Gómez et al, letting government off the hook. 

We wrestled with this question of corporate accountability at length in a previous newsletter (see Building H #95: “If You Are Pro-Health Are You Anti-Capitalism?”) and we won’t rehash all the arguments here, other than to note that there are situations where delivering products and services with positive health impacts is indeed highly profitable and that there are strategies, besides government regulation, to shift the incentives such that delivering better health becomes more profitable.

Our inadvertent experiment of redesigning childhood demonstrates that society must be intentional and mindful as we embark on major social experiments that are sparked by emerging technologies and propelled by market forces. And whether that responsibility is best executed by government, by collectives of concerned individuals, or by the corporations themselves, we will need to understand the nature and the extent of the effects of a changing environment. That's why we, at Building H, call attention to the ways that emerging technologies might shift behavioral norms; that’s why we highlight solutions that communities and companies are building; and that’s why we focus so much on making these effects clear and transparent through efforts like the Building H Index.

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