Latest news with #AnxiousGeneration
7 days ago
- Health
Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study
Children, especially girls, who own smartphones before they are 13 years old may have worse mental health outcomes when they're older, a new study suggests. The study, published Sunday in the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, analyzed self-reported questionnaire results from more than 100,000 young adults between the ages of 18 and 24. The questionnaire asked respondents about mental health symptoms, such as having aggression, feelings of detachment, hallucinations and suicidal thoughts. Those who were given smartphones at an earlier age were associated with worse mental health outcomes for every year of smartphone ownership before the age of 13. Early smartphone ownership was associated with feelings of lower self-image and lower self-worth in both girls and boys. Girls reported lower emotional resilience and lower confidence, while boys reported feeling less calm, less stable and less empathetic. "The younger the child gets a smartphone, the more exposure to all this impacts them psychologically and shapes the way they think and view the world," Tara Thiagarajan, one of the study's authors, told ABC News in an emailed statement. About 48% of young women who had smartphones by 5 or 6 years old reported having severe suicidal thoughts, compared to 28% of females who had smartphones by 13 or older. In young men, 31% of those who had smartphones by 5 or 6 years old reported having severe suicidal thoughts and 20% of males who had smartphones by 13 or older reported having severe suicidal thoughts. Study authors attributed the differences between young women's and young men's mental health symptoms to social media usage. Other factors that seemed to impact mental health outcomes were cyberbullying, poor sleep and poor family relationships. The study's authors recommended restricting smartphone and social media access for kids under 13, promoting digital literacy education and corporate accountability. "Ideally, children should not have a smartphone until age 14, and when they do get a smartphone, parents should take the time to discuss with their children how to interact on the Internet and explain the consequences of doing various things," Thiagarajan added. ABC News' Dr. Tara Narula also said on "Good Morning America" Monday that limiting kids' access to social media appears to be a key step in protecting children and their mental health outcomes. "The longer we can push off allowing our kids to be on social media, we are learning, the better," Narula said. "I think lots of families are getting creative … landlines …. flip phones for kids [are] maybe an option so that they can have access to communicating without all the other things that come with smartphones." The study's findings come amid an effort led by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of "Anxious Generation," to limit kids' smartphone use due to the impact on their mental health. Haidt has proposed setting nationwide "norms" or guidelines, including not giving children a smartphone before high school, no social media before age 16 and establishing schools as phone-free zones. Pediatrician Dr. Natasha Burgert also recommended that parents demonstrate to children how to use smartphones responsibly. "Children watch everything you do -- and that doesn't stop until they leave your house," Burgert told ABC News via email. "Connect authentically and meaningfully for a few minutes every day, and show your children that the humans we live with are more important and worthy of our attention than our phones." The American Academy of Pediatrics also recommends families follow the 5 C's of media use, including teaching kids and teens how to be safe online, since content and advertisements may be targeting an older audience.
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Dr. Jonathan Haidt Is Leading a Parenting Movement—Here's What He Wants You to Know About Technology and Kids' Mental Health
Parents Next Gen winner and author of 'The Anxious Generation,' Dr. Jonathan Haidt, says he's helping parents create stability for their children by reclaiming childhood. In an age dominated by screens, social media, and shrinking childhood freedoms, renowned psychologist and one of Parents' Next Gen winners, Jonathan Haidt, is leading a growing global movement to help parents reclaim their kids' mental health, independence, and joy. With the release of his bestselling 2024 book The Anxious Generation and his activism throughout 2025, Dr. Haidt has emerged as one of the most influential voices in parenting today. Dr. Haidt, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, has spent years researching the mental health crisis among young people. His conclusion? The dramatic rise in anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal is closely tied to the early and excessive use of smartphones and social media. Dr. Haidt is on a mission to help kids "break up" with their phones and reclaim mental health, which is why he's a Parents Next Gen winner. Not content with just influencing parents, Dr. Haidt turned to children themselves. He co-authored an interactive graphic novel called The Amazing Generation—a playful guide to help 5th to 8th graders 'break up with their phones' and rediscover the joys of real life, out in December 2025. Parents across the country have embraced it as a tool for opening conversations and creating family screen-time rules collaboratively. Dr. Haidt's influence reached even wider after recently appearing with Michelle Obama on her podcast. Together, they tackled one of today's thorniest parenting issues: how to set boundaries in a tech-driven world. 'Understand that your children are not your friends,' Obama emphasized, echoing Dr. Haidt's call for strong, deliberate parenting. The episode prompted an explosion of online dialogue and further fueled the movement of parents supporting each other in creating healthier home environments. Dr. Haidt spoke exclusively to Parents. What motivates you to do the work that you do? What motivates me? Gosh, so many different motivations. It started as just scientific curiosity about why the mental health stats suddenly got so horrible in 2012. What happened? Then it moved on to be, 'This is the biggest problem I have ever seen. This is actually changing an entire generation of human beings.' So now it's become really more of a Anxious Generation we are helping families and organizations around the world to make change. It's become so many different motivations, but it's been really thrilling because almost everyone wants to change this. How are you raising your children to be changemakers? I'm raising my kids, first, to be independent. I haven't really thought about making them changemakers per se. My daughter's 15, my son is 18, and we focused on just giving them more independence than we were ready for, like pushing ourselves to listen to Lenore Skenazy, who advocates for free-range we focused on just letting them out more in New York City, letting them navigate, letting them do errands. Now my kids, they go all over the city on city bikes. They're confident. So I've just been focusing on getting them to fly and then they'll find their way in the world. It seems like devices can be particularly threatening to boys' outlook and sense of self. How can we raise young boys to thrive and not just survive? Well, the most important thing for raising boys is that they have to have thousands or millions of real-world experiences, some of which involve risk and our kids, our boys, are having thousands or millions of video games. And it's not just the video games. It's the porn. It's the vaping. It's so many online activities. So, we've got to delay boys descending into video games and got to send them out into the world to play and have adventures, even though that's kind of scary for us. We have to overcome our own fears and give our boys the kind of childhoods that their fathers or grandfathers had, at least to the extent that we can. What would you say to parents who have an issue with delaying—they have a teen who is feeling excluded and wants social media? Let's say we're first on the smartphone. You can give your kid a non-smartphone. It's fine to have your kid be in contact with their friends. But just try to hold out on a smartphone because that's a gambling casino and pornography, and everything else in their pocket. On social media, it can be harder. If your kid has one other friend who isn't on social media, it's a lot easier than if every single friend is on social media. And finally, just educate yourself about social media. On my Substack we have posts giving quotations from employees at Snapchat and TikTok. And if you know what they know, you wouldn't let your kids on TikTok and Snapchat. So it's hard. My daughter is 15. I've not let her have any social media and I am imposing a cost on her in the short run. But in the long run, I think I have a happier daughter who is going to flourish and fly the nest. What would be your word of advice for parents? We all feel anxious about letting our kids out, letting them out of our control, letting them out of our view. But we have to do what's best for the kids, not what's best for our own feelings. And we have to overcome our anxiety if we want to give our kids a chance of overcoming their anxiety. We have to let them grow up, take small risks by themselves without us there, to discover that they can do it. It can be as simple as sending your kid into a grocery store. If you have a seven-year-old child who's been shopping with you 50 or 100 times, knows how to do it, you say, 'Here's some money, go get a quart of milk. I'll wait here in the parking lot,' or 'I'll wait at the front of the store.' Just start small, and you will be anxious that first time, but your kid is going to be jumping up and down with excitement that you gave them this chance to do something. We all need to feel useful, and our kids have to feel useful, so let them do useful things. That's how they'll grow up. One last question, because you gave so many hopeful ideas there. Do you have any specific advice for dads? So my advice to dads is that while moms have been sort of leading the movement to push back on smartphones, the other half of this is you have to give your kids an exciting, real-world childhood, which includes thrills and risk-taking and running around and wrestling. And this is where dads excel. Dad is the one who's going to pretend to be a predator stalking the child and pretending to be a big, scary monster. That sort of stuff is incredibly healthy for kids. Dad's the one who's going to be throwing them up in the air. That mix of fear and excitement with safety is the most powerful thing you can give your kids to overcome their own anxieties and become a force in the world. Dads are uniquely qualified, or I should just say on average, they enjoy it more, and they tend to gravitate to that role. So this is where I think dads are really really crucial. Read the original article on Parents Solve the daily Crossword
Fox News
27-06-2025
- Health
- Fox News
Michelle Obama tells parents they must get tougher on kids' social media use despite the 'pain'
Former first lady Michelle Obama urged parents to get "tougher" on their kids' social media use during the Wednesday episode of her podcast, "IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson." Obama spoke with social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt about his 2024 book, "The Anxious Generation," in which Haidt argues that extensive social media and smartphone use have harmful effects on children's brains and well-being. Kids who grew up with a "phone-based childhood" are more likely to encounter anxiety, depression and other mental health issues, he says. During the hour-long discussion, Haidt talked about how social media rewires the brain by stimulating the release of the "reward" brain chemical, dopamine, which fuels an addiction to social media. Obama said that parents need to realize that making tough parenting decisions on things like social media will lead to long-term benefits for their child, even though giving in to their kids' wants, or their own social media fixation, may be tempting in the moment. "Parents suffer from this dopamine thing too when it comes to parenting. Because we want instant reward response from our children. We don't want to wait. We don't want to do the longer-haul thing. You know, a lot of times we have to ask ourselves, 'Are we doing this for our kids, or are we doing this for us?' Because we have the screen too," she said. "And we're being trained on that instant gratification. Maybe the 90-minute story is a problem for us, because we can't sit still. The bottom line is that we've got to get tougher. We've got to get more resilient for our kids. Because I know time and time again that a lot of parents do what's easy for them, you know, and not necessarily what's best for the kid," she continued. Obama told parents there would be "parental pain" that comes with this tough-love approach. "We have to become a little more resilient as parents. We have to become tougher for the sake of our kids… It's not fun. All of it is going to be really, really hard, physically, emotionally, one of the toughest things you do," she warned. "You will be disappointing them, and scaring them and making them hurt and arguing with them and doing all the things that you don't want to do with your best friends. But in the end, as parents, we are responsible for securing the safety and the health of the children we bring into this world. And that means, once we know that something isn't good for them… we've got to do the hard thing, we've got to take the substance from the addict," she said. "And it's not going to be fun," she added. Obama also told parents they shouldn't try to be "friends" with their kids.
Yahoo
27-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Michelle Obama says good parenting involves knowing that your kids are 'not your friends'
Michelle Obama says good parenting means understanding "that your children are not your friends." Parents must hold firm on their boundaries since kids will always test how far they can push. "All they have time for is to outlast you, to wear you down," the former first lady said. Michelle Obama says parents shouldn't give in too easily to their kids' demands. On Wednesday's episode of the "IMO" podcast, which she cohosts with her brother, Craig Robinson, Obama spoke about how parents can enforce rules around screen time and social media use for their kids. The episode featured guest Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and author of "The Anxious Generation." In response to a listener's question about the challenges she faced in managing her daughters' digital habits, Obama said that parents should "understand that your children are not your friends." She said it's important for parents to set clear boundaries that they believe in and that they stick to "all the time," since kids are always testing how far they can push before adults cave. "They're waiting for you to go back on your word. They're waiting to see how long it will take. How many times can I outlast you? Because, as I say, they've got time on their hands. Kids don't have jobs. They have no responsibility. They are not paying bills. All they have time for is to outlast you, to wear you down," the former first lady said. Reflecting on their upbringing, Robinson added that their mother believed saying no wasn't enough. "I was just thinking about how our parents parented and what my mom would say about saying 'No' is that it's not just saying 'No,' it's holding your 'No' accountable," Robinson said. "It is explaining why you're saying 'No,' and it's outlasting your kids." That's why parents need to be steadfast in their willingness to do the hard things needed to keep their kids safe, Obama said. "You will be disappointing them, and scaring them, and making them hurt, and arguing with them, and doing all the things that you don't wanna do with your best friends," Obama said. "But in the end, as parents, we are responsible for securing the safety and the health of the children we bring into this world." Drawing on his experience working with Gen Z, Haidt said that many of those in their 20s often say they're grateful their parents delayed giving them phones or social media access. "What you'll never hear is a 23-year-old Gen Z saying, 'I wish my parents had given me a smartphone and social media in middle school,'" Haidt said. Even though it may be difficult to keep kids off social media, it'll be worth it in the end, he said. Obama and Robinson aren't the only ones who have spoken up about the impact of social media and screen use on kids. In a January 2024 interview, Penélope Cruz called social media "a cruel experiment on children, on teenagers." "It's so easy to be manipulated, especially if you have a brain that is still forming," Cruz told Elle. In May, Kate Winslet's Gen Z daughter, Mia Threapleton, said she has "never had" social media and doesn't want it, adding that her mom encouraged her to make a list of pros and cons for joining Instagram when she was 14. "The cons completely outweighed the pros for me," Threapleton said. This comes as several countries around the world — including Australia and Norway — are exploring ways to implement stricter controls on social media use for kids. A representative for Obama and Robinson did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours. Read the original article on Business Insider
Arab News
26-06-2025
- Health
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Anxious Generation' by Jonathan Haidt
In 'The Anxious Generation,' Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences.
