Why Jonathan Haidt’s ‘Protect The Kids’ Proposals Could Make Things Worse For Kids

How much harm is done to children in the name of “protecting” them? Entirely too much. What if we drive them further into dangerous corners of the internet by cutting them off from their support networks?

Since the release of Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Anxious Generation,” a few months back, there has been plenty of discussion and debate about his claims and his proposed solutions. In my own review of the book, I discussed how the data supporting Haidt’s claims were extraordinarily weak, but spent more time talking about how flimsy the support for his “solutions” were.

Haidt has, at other times, suggested that even if there is no evidence to actually support his policy solutions, we should support them anyway, because they couldn’t do any harm, and the mere chance that they might benefit kids is worth it. As I wrote:

While it doesn’t make it directly into his latest book, while he was working on it, Haidt responded to critics of his thesis by citing Pascal’s Wager—that it makes more sense to believe in God than not, because the cost of believing and being wrong is nothing. But the cost of not believing and being wrong could be eternal damnation.

Similarly, Haidt argues that we should keep kids away from social media for the same reason: even if he’s wrong, the “cost” is minimal.

The scariest part is that the cost of being wrong is not minimal. Indeed, it appears to be extremely high.

If he’s wrong, it means parents, politicians, teachers, and more do not tackle the real root causes of teenage mental health issues.

The research has shown repeatedly that social media is valuable for many young people, especially those struggling in their local communities and families (multiple studies highlight how LGBTQ youth rely heavily on social media in very helpful ways). Taking that lifeline away can be damaging. There are numerous stories of kids who relied on social media to help them out of tricky situations, such as diagnosing a disease where doctors failed to help.

I then went on and detailed how little Haidt seemed to understand about his own policy proposals. At least he provided some studies to support his position about the problem. But when it came to his policy proposals, they were totally based on “feels” rather than facts (or data).

Similarly, Haidt is no policy expert, and it shows. In the book, he supports policies like the “Kids Online Safety Act,” which has been condemned by LGBTQ groups, given that the co-sponsor of the bill has admitted she supports it to remove LGBTQ content from the internet. That’s real harm.

Now, Candice Odgers, a researcher who has done the actual research work Haidt has never done, and who published a fantastic takedown in Nature of the misleading claims Haidt made about the research, has a new piece in the Atlantic. The piece details the very real harms that might occur if everyone focuses on smartphones as some sort of horrible depression-making boxes.

Again, Odgers reminds everyone about the lack of any real evidence on these claims of initial harm:

I am a developmental psychologist, and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.

Many other researchers have found the same. In fact, a recent study and a review of research on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”

In the piece, she notes that these claims from Haidt and others have “an intuitive appeal” because social media and mobile phones make for “an easy scapegoat.” But we should be concerned that the data doesn’t support these claims because it will mean we’ll make very wrong decisions in trying to figure out how to deal with these challenges.

Indeed, if the cause and effect is the opposite direction, as Odgers and others have found, then these “solutions” could do more harm:

The reality is that correlational studies to date have generated a mix of small, conflicting, and often confounded associations between social-media use and adolescents’ mental health. The overwhelming majority of them offer no way to sort out cause and effect. When associations are found, things seem to work in the opposite direction from what we’ve been told: Recent research among adolescents—including among young-adolescent girls, along with a large review of 24 studies that followed people over time—suggests that early mental-health symptoms may predict later social-media use, but not the other way around.

Odgers then highlights how experimental studies that might tease out actual cause and effect tend to have real problems, studying the wrong age group, or platforms that kids don’t really use these days (hello Facebook!).

But, as I noted in my review of Haidt’s book, and as Odgers also highlights here, the risk of falsely jumping to the conclusion that removing social media and phones from kids will somehow solve these problems risks making the problems worse:

But the problem with the extreme position presented in Haidt’s book and in recent headlines—that digital technology use is directly causing a large-scale mental-health crisis in teenagers—is that it can stoke panic and leave us without the tools we need to actually navigate these complex issues. Two things can be true: first, that the online spaces where young people spend so much time require massive reform, and second, that social media is not rewiring our children’s brains or causing an epidemic of mental illness. Focusing solely on social media may mean that the real causes of mental disorder and distress among our children go unaddressed.

Offline risk—at the community, family, and child levels—continues to be the best predictor of whether children are exposed to negative content and experiences online. Children growing up in families with the fewest resources offline are also less likely to be actively supported by adults as they learn to navigate the online world. If we react to these problems based on fear alone, rather than considering what adolescents actually need, we may only widen this opportunity gap.

We should not send the message to families—and to teens—that social-media use, which is common among adolescents and helpful in many cases, is inherently damaging, shameful, and harmful. It’s not. What my fellow researchers and I see when we connect with adolescents is young people going online to do regular adolescent stuff. They connect with peers from their offline life, consume music and media, and play games with friends. Spending time on YouTube remains the most frequent online activity for U.S. adolescents. Adolescents also go online to seek information about health, and this is especially true if they also report experiencing psychological distress themselves or encounter barriers to finding help offline. Many adolescents report finding spaces of refuge online, especially when they have marginalized identities or lack support in their family and school. Adolescents also report wanting, but often not being able to access, online mental-health services and supports.

All adolescents will eventually need to know how to safely navigate online spaces, so shutting off or restricting access to smartphones and social media is unlikely to work in the long term. In many instances, doing so could backfire: Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces, and we should not give them additional reasons to feel alienated from the adults in their lives.

This is why I find Haidt’s idea of “well, we should do these ideas anyway, even if I have no proof to support them, because they can’t do any harm” so problematic. They can do real, and lasting, harm. They take attention away from dealing with the very complex realities facing teens about mental health today. They especially give parents and teachers an easy excuse to avoid tackling those real issues.

On top of that, if it is true that mental health issues (and a lack of proper resources to deal with them) are driving kids to social media as an alternative, taking that away can have real negative consequences. As Odgers notes, it can also make things worse by driving kids into darker corners of the internet, seeking answers.

We’ve already seen this come true with eating disorder content online. Attempts by social media companies to block such content and shut down groups discussing eating disorders did not diminish the existence of eating disorders among teens. Because it was a “demand side” problem (kids looking for such communities) rather than a “supply side” (kids deciding to explore eating disorders because they were encouraged on social media), it meant that when those communities were shut down, the kids still sought it out. And they found it, but in darker corners of the internet, where there was less oversight and fewer people within those same communities helping to guide the members towards useful recovery resources.

For all the talk of “protecting the children” online, and so much focus on Haidt’s utter nonsense, shouldn’t we be at least somewhat concerned that Haidt’s solutions have a very real chance of doing real harm to kids?