I did not know this at the time, but apparently my children were part of a generation of guinea pigs. “It’s as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children,” Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
…
The picture, however, looks a lot less clear when you talk with an actual young person. In this episode, I spoke with my child Jacob, and we juxtapose theory with lived experience. You’ll hear a mother (me) wrestle in real time with the consequences of parenting decisions as Haidt makes the case that we should collectively agree to rescue our kids from this experiment.