How Parents Have Become the Social Media in Their Kids' Lives: So Taking Away Phones Won't Alone Fix the Teen Mental Health Crisis

It's become the new orthodoxy: social media is the cause of the epidemic of anxiety amongst adolescents. So the way to fix this is by taking away their smartphones. But according to Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times writer Matt Richtel, things are actually a lot more complicated than blaming everything on digital technology. In fact, we may have got things a bit upside down. In his new book, How We Grow Up, Richtel argues that parents have, ironically, become what he calls "the social media" in their kids' lives. Smartphones enable parents to constantly observe not just their kids' movements but even their thoughts through constant surveillance of grades, texts, and location data. We are, indeed, creating a "surveillance state with our children," he warns - which could be one explanation (amongst many) why today's teens engage in significantly less risky behavior than previous generations. Understanding adolescents might actually require grown-ups to face up to their own parental anxieties. "Love, lead, let go," is Richtel's general advice for parents navigating our brave new world. Adolescence was invented in 1904, he notes, to help young people adapt to the economic complexity of the industrial age. A century later, we all risk becoming adolescents as we struggle to process the rapid change and information overload of our digital age. Everybody needs to learn to grow up.

1. Adolescence is a modern economic invention. Before 1904, there was no period between puberty and adulthood. People hit puberty, entered the workforce, married, and had children quickly. Adolescence emerged because complex economies required time to prepare young people for participation in sophisticated society.

2. Parents have become "the original social media." When parents constantly share anxiety at dinner tables about college admissions, economic doom, and life's difficulties, they're flooding their children with the same kind of overwhelming information they criticize social media for providing.

3. Technology has created involuntary parental surveillance. Modern tools allow parents to monitor grades, locations, and activities constantly. Richtel argues parents feel "irresponsible" if they don't use these capabilities, creating a surveillance dynamic that previous generations couldn't maintain even if they wanted to.

4. Today's teens are actually less risky than previous generations. Contrary to crisis narratives, current adolescents drink less, have less sex, smoke less, and engage in fewer dangerous behaviors than teens in the 1980s and 90s. The anxiety epidemic coincides with decreased risk-taking, not increased recklessness.

5. Simply removing phones won't solve the underlying issues. The research on social media's effects is mixed - some users become happier, others more anxious. The real problem may be that attention-grabbing technologies displace activities known to help brain development: sleep, exercise, and in-person community interaction.

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