Are smartphones really making our children sad?

Last week, the children’s commissioner, Anne Longfield, launched a campaign to help parents regulate internet and smartphone use at home. She suggested that the overconsumption of social media was a problem akin to that of junk-food diets. “None of us, as parents, would want our children to eat junk food all the time – double cheeseburger, chips, every day, every meal,” she said. “For those same reasons, we shouldn’t want our children to do the same with their online time.”

A few days later, former GCHQ spy agency chief Robert Hannigan responded to the campaign. “The assumption that time online or in front of a screen is life wasted needs challenging. It is driven by fear,” he said. “The best thing we can do is to focus less on the time they spend on screens at home and more on the nature of the activity.”

This exchange is just one more example of how children’s screentime has become an emotive, contested issue. Last December, more than 40 educationalists, psychologists and scientists signed a letter in the Guardian calling for action on children’s “screen-based lifestyles”. A few days later, another 40-odd academics described the fears as “moral panic” and said that any guidelines needed to build on evidence rather than “scaremongering”.

Faced with these conflicting expert views, how should concerned parents proceed? Into this maelstrom comes the American psychologist Jean Twenge,who has written a book entitled iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood – and What That Means for the Rest of Us.

If the book’s title didn’t make her view clear enough, last weekend an excerpt was published in the American magazine the Atlantic with the emotive headline “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?” It quickly generated differing reactions that were played out on social media – these could be broadly characterised as praise from parents and criticism from scientists. In a phone interview and follow-up emails, Twenge explained her conclusions about the downsides of the connected world for teens, and answered some of her critics.

The Atlantic excerpt from your book was headlined “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?” Is that an accurate reflection of what you think?

Well, keep in mind that I didn’t write the headline. It’s obviously much more nuanced than that.

So why did you write this book?
I’ve been researching generations for a long time now, since I was an undergraduate, almost 25 years. The databases I draw from are large national surveys of high school and college students, and one of adults. In 2013-14 I started to see some really sudden changes and at first I thought maybe these were just blips, but the trends kept going.

I’d never seen anything like it in all my years of looking at differences among generations. So I wondered what was going on.

What were these sudden changes for teens?
Loneliness and depressive symptoms started to go up, while happiness and life satisfaction started to go down.   

Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd