Digital Contact Work

This is how Jonathan Haidt concludes his book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Health”. This book should be required reading for anyone working in the world teenagers including teachers, child psycologists, youth ministers, and especially parents. Haidt’s arguement throughout the book is that we have allowed a worldwide experiement to go forward on our kids unchecked and run by corporations and people who are more concerned about their bottomline than they are about the safety of our kids.

My hope in this post is to give a breif overview of the more poignant parts of the book (read it on your own though) and how, if at all, it should effect ministry toward teens and 20-somethings.

Quick Overview of “The Anxious Generation”

Haidt explores study after study in an effort to unravel why Gen Z (born after 1995) is more prone to anxiety, depression, isolation, and suicide, than previous generations. His general conclusion is that Gen Z is the first generation to undergo a “phone-based childhood” rather than a play-based childhood of previous generations.

This phone-based childhood comes along with four specific harms that Haidt points to that contribute to the decline in mental health we are seeing.

1. Sleep Deprivation – not getting enough sleep
2. Social Deprivation – not getting enough socialization from an early age and not learning how to interact with and relate to others
3. Attention Fragmentation – living in a way where attention is bouncing from brand new idea to brand new idea, from post to post, meme to meme
4. Addiction – social media and other companies using the latest in psychological understandings to create a digital environment that is almost impossible to look away from (including infinite scrolling, color choice, likes and comments, and notifications)

Haidt then goes on link these harms to the dramatic mental health crisis that is effecting teens and 20-somethings. He also brings attention to the disruption this phone-based childhood is having on education.

With all this depression (but not all that surprising) news, what should we do to help curb this problem, knowing that this type of social media is not going away anytime soon. Haidt offers four specific culutral changes we should make as a society to end this experiment for our kids.

1. No smart phones before the age of 13. While legislation does already use this age as the “age of internet consent”, very few websites or companies take it seriously, generally using a “are you 13 years or older” question, which is very easy to by pass.
2. No social media before the age of 16. The reality is that social media exists and is not going away. Teens need to understand how to use it properly and this learning should be done with the guidance of parents and/or adults who care. This is also after the age where most of the damage that we are seeing being done (preteen to 14).
3. Phone-free schools. Many schools already ban phones from schools, however they leave the actual implementation of this rule up to teach discretion. No teacher wants to be the bad guy/girl and so just “deals” with the challenge in their own way. There are several good options for schools to do this such as utilizing phone lockers or phone pouches (like Yondr). And there are schools who already do this with great success, including a recent ban from the UK government for all schools to implement this.
4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. Over the last 20-30 years we have seen an increase in fear related to allowing kids to play alone and/or in “risky” situations where they may get hurt. While understandable, the downside has been a lack of resiliancy in kids and a fear of making mistakes or some social faux pas. Their engagement in the real world is lacking and that lack is leading to stunted social growth and a “failure to launch” for many.

I encourage you to by Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” as his analysis is at times pretty chilling but his potential fixes are encouraging.

So What Does this Mean for Young Life and Youth Ministry in a Digital Age?

As you know, I am a proponent of using things like Instagram to engage with youth. After reading Haidt’s book, has my opinion changed at all?

Not really. While much of this information that Haidt presents is worry-some, the fact remains that kids are still “hanging out” on social media. In particular, the kids we (Young Life and youth ministry leaders) want to move toward are there. If we thought about social media ministry in a way where our hope was to gain followers or become “influencers”, this book reveals that we would be a part of the problem. We are not competing against other big names on Instagram or YouTube or TikTok. We are Christian adults that care deeply for the spiritual and mental health of kids in our towns. As we talk about all the time, if we see social media as just a new place where kids are hanging out, there isn’t much of difference.

Two examples to illustrate:

• Jesus many times (most of the time) moves toward broken people, into their world. In Mark 2:13-17 we see Jesus going to Levi’s house and having dinner with tax collectors and sinners.
• If there is a group of high school kids that hang out behind the gas station and smoke, we aren’t going to hope they come to our youth group or yell at them from across the street that what they are doing is bad for them. No, we are going to go behind the gas station and get to know them and share our lives and Christ with them.

Social media cannot be any different than this.