I was just reading yet another terrible review of Jonathan Haidt’s books about how mobile devices are destroying a whole generation. I am not going to link to it—not because the review is bad but rather because that book has already sucked up more than its fair share of oxygen.
While I am fairly sure that everyone having Internet devices in their pockets is not great, I am also pretty sure that it is not as universally awful as people like Haidt make it out to be. Of course, “It depends” is not the sort of argument that sells books or gets one prime placement on high-profile op-ed pages.
What I will say—as someone who was a kid in the days before mobile phones, helicopter parenting, and lots of scheduled activities—is that arguments like Haidt’s rely upon an overly rosy picture of what those times were like. It is always some variety of “We didn’t have phones or the internet! Our parents sent us out and said don’t come home until dinner time! It was great and we had all sorts of adventures and it was the greatest time of our lives. Kids these days are too coddled and they need to get out and have fun!”
It is telling that so many of the people whole make this argument are upper-class white people who grew up in suburbia. I am squarely in that demographic and yet when I take off the lens of nostalgia, the era in which I grew up looks very different.
When people go on about how no one had food allergies when we were kids, I think of the kid in my first grade class who threw up at lunch nearly every single day. “That’s the kid that throws up every day!” we all said and the school janitor was constantly dumping the pink sawdust on the floor. But sure—no one had food allergies back then.
And was it really that we had to find things to keep us from getting bored and play in the woods that kept us from getting diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed medication? Or was it just that we had kids getting called “the class clown” and being made to sit in the corner or being sent to the principal’s office?
The people making these claims always want to point back to some prior age when everything was better but there never was such a time. I suspect what they really want is to be able to go back to feeling okay about others people’s suffering. It’s not that depression and anxiety and neurodivergencies and food allergies didn’t exist when we were kids, it’s that we as a society didn’t talk about them and everyone had to figure out how to deal with them on their own, with no support or acknowledgement.