Do the kids think they're alright?

Do the Kids Think They’re Alright?

by Jon Haidt and Eli George from After Babel

A common criticism I have received since 2015 is that I am misunderstanding the younger generation; I’m just another in a long line of older people lamenting the behavior of “kids these days.” As a social psychologist long active in the field of cultural psychology, I know that this could be true. Even more than previous generations, Gen Z has created an online culture that us older folk can’t even see, let alone understand. So I have been on the lookout for writings by members of Gen Z explaining their generation to outsiders, and I would especially like to find criticisms of The Coddling of the American Mind, or of my more recent writings about social media.

So far, I have found almost none. When I speak to high school and college audiences, I usually ask those who think I got the story wrong to raise their hands and then come forward and ask the first questions. I rarely get a hand raised or a critical question. I therefore asked my two research assistants, Zach Rausch and Eli George, for help finding voices of Gen Z. Zach was born in 1994, so he’s a late millennial. Eli, however, was born in 1999, so he’s Gen Z, and he took on the task. He graduated last May from Harvard with majors in philosophy and musicology and with a good deal of academic research in the humanities. Below is his report. He too, failed to find much disagreement about the path Gen Z is on, although he found some keen observations about additional sociological and economic factors that are contributing to Gen Z’s difficulties. I hope in particular that members of Gen Z will read it and tell us what they think Eli got wrong.

— Jon Haidt

I’m Eli George, a researcher working with Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch on this Substack and Jon’s book. I was born in 1999 and came of age with a smartphone in my pocket. I’m intimately familiar with the addictive effects of social media on young people, having watched so many people around me become less curious and more fragile as they went through adolescence on Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr. I also know that living my social life online as a teenager made me addicted to my phone, ruined my sleep, and gave me a general feeling of social anxiety and dread that persisted whether or not I was with other people. The connection between social media use and poor mental health that is found in so many studies feels intuitive to me. But that means that I share Jon’s confirmation bias.

So, Jon asked me to find young people who disagree with us. We think social media has changed childhood and adolescence for the worse, so much so that it constitutes a “great rewiring of childhood.” Beginning in the 1990s, a childhood based heavily on outdoor play began to fade away and was replaced by a phone-based childhood in the early 2010s, when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones.

Can we find young people who disagree with that thesis? Do my peers think that we’ve been set up for success? Our hope was that engaging with conflicting opinions would help to better understand how young people see their relationship to smartphones and social media and add qualitative depth to the story that we are developing on this substack and in Jon’s book. Jon likes to quote John Stuart Mill on this subject: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

1. What Do Quantitative Studies Find?

I first spent some time with several existing studies that try to capture what young people think about their social media usage (collected in section 4 of Jon and Jean Twenge’s open-source Google doc, Social Media and Mental Health: A Collaborative Review).

A 2018 study of over four thousand Australian youth aged 12 to 25, for example, reported that 62% believe that mental health of young people is declining (as opposed to 23% who say it’s improving), and a plurality (37%) blame social media (see Figures 1 and 2). The next most common response, “expectations from family, school, and community,” was given by 17% of respondents.

Figure 1. Views of Australian young people (ages 12-25) on their mental health. Participants were asked: “In your opinion, is the mental health of young people in Australia getting better or worse?” Headspace National Youth Mental Health Survey, 2018.

Figure 2. Views of Australian young people (ages 12-25) on the cause for declining mental health. Participants who indicated that mental health was declining were given an open-ended question — “Do you have any ideas why the mental health of young people in Australia is getting worse?” — and responses were categorized by researchers. Headspace National Youth Mental Health Survey, 2018.

A 2017 study by the Royal Society for Public Health asked about 1500 UK teenagers aged 14-24 to score the quality and health effects of their time spent on the five major social media platforms: Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.¹ Participants were given a list of factors related to health and mental well-being that social media use might affect (e.g., anxiety, sleep quality, fear of missing out [FoMO]). They were then told to score each platform's effect on each factor, on a scale from -2 (very negative) to +2 (very positive). The researchers averaged the score for each factor on each platform. They also offered a mean score among all the factors for each platform to estimate the overall positive or negative effect of a platform as a whole. Figure 3 shows these ratings for Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.

Figure 3. Effects of Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube on various aspects of British Teenagers' mental health. #StatusofMind survey, Royal Society for Public Health.

The aggregated scores revealed that young users had, on net, negative opinions of the effects that highly social apps like Instagram and Snapchat were having on their mental well-being. Both Instagram and Snapchat were said, by teens, to worsen anxiety, depression, loneliness, sleep, body image, bullying, and FoMO. Interestingly, though, Facebook and Twitter received neutral net ratings, and YouTube had a positive rating (see Figure 3).

It is also evident that, even if the average young Instagram user has an overall negative opinion of the health-related effects, they see many parts of their experience as beneficial. Self-expression, emotional support, and community building have positive average scores for both Instagram and Snapchat.

Conversely, while YouTube’s overall score was positive, it received the worst score of any platform for sleep loss and earned negative ratings for body image, real-world relationships, bullying, and FoMO.

Other surveys further complicate the picture. In a 2022 Pew study that surveyed 13-17-year-old American teenagers, respondents reported perceiving valuable opportunities to receive emotional support and express themselves on social media websites, which, for many, outweigh the negative social pressures they feel.

As Figure 4 shows, 32% of interviewed teenagers believed that the benefits outweigh the costs for them personally, while only 9% believe the effect is negative. Interestingly, though, that flips when teens are asked about social media’s effects on other teenagers: 32% of respondents indicated that social media usage has a net negative impact on their peers, compared to 24% who think it had a positive impact.

Figure 4. Teens’ opinions on the effects of social media on themselves and others. Connection, Creativity, and Drama: Teen Life on Social Media in 2022, Pew Research Center.

Work done by the American Psychological Association for their Stress in America: Generation Z project suggested similar ambivalence:

It’s clear that social media is an enormous part of Gen Zs’ lives, and for more than half of them (55 percent), it provides a feeling of support. The flipside, however, is that nearly half say social media makes them feel judged (45 percent), and nearly two in five (38 percent) report feeling bad about themselves as a result of social media use.

These studies suggest three conclusions:

1. A large number of young people believe that social media is having a negative impact on the mental health of their cohort, though this might be isolated to intensely social apps like Instagram and Snapchat. They come to this conclusion more often when invited to consider their peers’ experiences instead of their own.

2. The platforms' negative effects on teenagers’ body image, sleep patterns, FoMO, and overall level of anxiety are key reasons that young users see the platforms as harmful.

3. A significant number of young users think that social media helps them participate in a social community, express themselves, and receive emotional support.

More studies with similar results can be found in section 4 of Jon’s collaborative review document.

2. What Do Qualitative Studies Find?

I next looked at qualitative studies, in which members of Gen Z are interviewed and their answers are coded and analyzed. Such studies also find a mix of negative and positive reported effects.

I noticed a consensus emerging across many of the qualitative studies. Interviewees appear to hold similar views about the potential dangers and benefits of social media, and those views mirrored the conclusions of the quantitative studies.

The interviewees’ assessments differed in how they weighed the value of any risk or possible benefit, and in how they changed their behavior to respond to potentially negative experiences. One study led by Amber van der Wal, Patti Valkenburg, and Irene van Driel (awaiting review) of 55 young teenagers suggests this kind of complexity:

[S]ome girls expressed that the continuous stream of “perfect pictures” on social media leaves them feeling insecure and jealous. Some try to counter those feelings by, for example, following accounts that revolve around body positivity, such as Feminist, an activist Instagram account that promotes body positivity. One girl (15) disclosed: “Feminist, that’s something I follow and that makes me less insecure.” Another girl (15) even decided to only follow accounts “from people who look like me” so that she would keep feeling good about herself.

The authors concluded that “It’s the experience that matters” when judging the impact that a social media platform will have on any given teen. Young users who are prepared to alter their behavior in response to negative experiences––for example, feeling discomfort about one’s body or noticing an addictive desire to scroll––can reap benefits from the platforms. Those who don’t change their behavior can get lost in traumatizing material and addictive usage.

In a literature review published in 2022, Anjali Poppat and Carolyn Tarrant identified five major social media impacts that young users have reported across 24 qualitative studies, as seen below in Figure 5. They classified each as positive, negative, or both, and noted corresponding well-being concepts that individuals might refer to.

Figure 5. Five kinds of effects that a social media platform might have on a young user. Exploring adolescents’ perspectives on social media and mental health and well-being – A qualitative literature review, from van der Wal, Patti Valkenburg, & van Driel (pre-print), re-graphed by Zach Rausch.

The authors highlight the extent to which these five effects, or “themes,” interact in ways that are sometimes counterintuitive. For example, the pleasure of connection can quickly turn into an addictive desire:

[T]here was significant interplay between the five emerging themes, reflecting the complexity of factors at play. For instance, Singleton et al. (2016) found that although online connection was positive, it resulted in the need to stay informed about others’ lives, which led to compulsive use of the sites in fear of not knowing. Similarly, in the study by O’Reilly et al. (2018), adolescents admitted that the positive connection aspect quickly turned into reliance on social media to stay connected, fuelling addiction.

Similarly, the fulfillment of online self-expression can quickly turn into self-policing when users are aware that they are being watched and judged:

[A]lthough self-expression was reported as hugely positive, there was constant fear of judgement and strict adherence to ‘virtual norms’ to protect against this (Kennedy & Lynch, 2016; Weinstein, 2018). In addition, the expectation to share was a heavy burden; some would prefer to keep their lives private and only accept close friends on their profiles, but feared judgement from others regarding numbers of online friends (Calancie et al., 2017).

They also cite evidence that the quality of a young user’s experiences online is highly dependent on his or her real-world personality and circumstances:

[H]igh self-esteem and effective parental management of internet use were protective factors, whilst pre-existing anxiety or depression made individuals more vulnerable to online harm. Furthermore, individuals with higher digital resilience could better recognise and manage online risk and hence buffer against potential harm. Importantly, those more vulnerable to offline risk were more likely to be vulnerable to online risk (Bradbook et al., 2008).

This literature review adds further evidence to conclusions 2 and 3 from the quantitative studies: it suggests a similar ledger of social benefits and mental health harms. Both of these qualitative analyses also provide evidence for another conclusion:

4. A young user’s overall social aptitude and worldly circumstances has a strong impact on whether they experience more of the positive aspects of social media platforms or the negative ones.

There are two additional qualitative studies in section 4 of the collaborative review document, with similar findings

3. The Common Sense Media Study

As I was finishing this post, an important study was published by Common Sense Media. The study, led by Jacqueline Nesi of Brown University, examined the way American girls aged 11 to 15 feel about their experiences on social media. A major focus of the study was the value or harm of particular platform features (e.g., appearance filters or comment sections), as opposed to the value or harm of different kinds of experiences a user might have (e.g., self-expression, cyber bullying). They discovered that young teen girls had net negative opinions of location-sharing features and public accounts, as Figure 6 shows. The study found net positive opinions of the other ten features, like private messaging, notifications, and video recommendations. In 10 of the 12 categories, neutral opinions represented the largest category of responses.

The study also found that people who had strong opinions about platform features were more likely to be depressed. That was true even if their strong opinions were positive.

It is worth noting that the features which received the most positive responses are associated with video sharing or messaging platforms, like YouTube or iMessage. It is, however, unclear whether the features which received the most negative scores can be tied to Snapchat and Instagram (the platforms which the Royal Society for Public Health study found to have the most negative effects): location sharing is native to Snapchat, but also iMessage; Youtube is built on public accounts; Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have endless scrolling, but Snapchat does not.

Despite this ambivalent data on platform features, the study includes quotes from many girls who struggle with logging off and have ideas for improving the apps. They talk about the opportunity cost of time spent on addictive apps:

“I felt the app wasted my time, and it just made me more predisposed to get sucked into my phone (Snap, TikTok,etc.) for prolonged periods of time.”

About the distressing content they were encountering:

“I watched one or two videos and they took over my algorithm with really depressing and anxiety videos.”

About the possibility of endless cyberbullying:

“I was being bullied by other kids at my school who made accounts about ugly people and posted about me being ugly and doing cringey things.”

And about the way their expectations had been warped:

“I had unrealistic ideas of what I should look like and how my life should be.”

The feature breakdown in this Common Sense Media study challenges the division between good/neutral apps (YouTube, messaging apps) and bad apps (Instagram, Snapchat) that the Royal Society of Public Health report seemed to suggest. The quotes throughout the Common Sense Media report detail lived experiences of many girls who find the apps to be harmful places overall, even though they enjoy many of the specific features of the apps.

4. A Request To Disagree With Us

While these studies provide important data on the opinions of young people using particular platforms, they still didn’t give us what we were looking for: commentary from members of Gen Z about their overall prospects in light of their phone-based childhoods. We wanted to hear from young people who would tell us that their generation was doing fine or that Jon had misunderstood them.

We wondered what young people would say if they were given more space to write about the ramifications of a phone-based childhood for their generation as a whole. So, we invited people directly to tell us what they thought and encouraged them to disagree with us on the fundamental questions. Is Gen Z actually doing ok? Has social media been good for Gen Z overall?

To do this, Jon asked young people on Twitter to respond to us and tell us where we were getting things wrong.²

The Tweet directed members of Gen Z to a Google doc, and at the top of the doc were these additional instructions:

My name is Eli George, I’m a young person (born 1999) working with Jonathan Haidt on his book and his After Babel substack about what social media has done to the mental health of Gen Z. We have been writing about the teen mental illness epidemic that began around 2012, and have argued that Gen Z is more depressed and less resilient than people at the same age in previous generations. We certainly are not blaming members of Gen Z––our argument is that Gen Z was deprived of many of the things that help children develop into healthy adults.

We want to hear from young people, especially those who disagree with us. Do you think young people are doing fine? Do you think that our generation is turning out well, and there’s no need to change much? Do you think that social media has been good for Gen Z, overall? If so, why?

Please leave your thoughts, or link us to essays in which other members of Gen Z have given an answer, or a defense of Gen Z.

Twenty-two people left thoughtful comments, which I organized here along with the original prompt.

We received two main kinds of responses: those that argued that Gen Z is doing just fine (4 responses); and those who don’t (18 responses). That second group breaks down into two subgroups: those that primarily blame social media (6 responses) and those that provided explanations for Gen Z’s bad outlook beyond social media (12 responses). Below I highlight particularly persuasive or interesting selections from responses in each category.

4.1 Those Who Said Gen Z Is Doing Well

To our surprise, we had a tough time finding the key thing we asked for. Only 4 of the 22 responses made arguments that stated or implied that Gen Z was doing well or was set up for success, while the other 18 said they were doing poorly. Though it's true that Jon’s Twitter audience is not a representative sample, the document was shared widely, including on a number of large email lists. We did not expect that such a small proportion of the respondents would argue that Gen Z is doing well. It was also surprising that, even among those four responses, only one viewed social media itself as a positive influence without qualification: Andrew, in response #2, argued that social media gives people the freedom to avoid opinions or people with whom they disagree, which he characterized as a positive development:

“I think that Gen Z is actually uniquely positioned to have an outsized impact. In terms of culture, I have found that there has been a large growth in strictly positive interpersonal relations. If you have a problem with someone’s opinion on something, you just don’t engage them on that topic and mitigate time spent with them to highly controlled times.”

The other three offered qualified accounts of Gen Z’s prospects and relationship to social media.

In response #3, Jose Luis argued that, while social media can be harmful, it has been crucial in motivating young people for political causes.

Jack, in response #1, argued that Gen Z is “the most mature generation in history” precisely because the internet gave them access to such horrible stuff:

“[W]ith the rise of the social media and unfettered, mostly unmonitored access to the internet, we’ve been exposed to heavy topics very early on in our lives. If you go onto tiktok, sometimes you’ll see videos along the lines of ‘13 year old me eating dinner with my family after watching …(insert mature/heavy topic here).’ As a result of this, we don’t have the same luxury of living in a dreamlike childhood where we grew up thinking everything was going to be ok. …I’d actually argue that exposure to these things poises us to handle stress better than previous generations.”

In response #4, Kendra argued that Gen Z is doing exactly as well as their parents––that is to say, poorly––because they are both addicted to their phones:

“My brain chemistry most certainly changed as a result of growing up in tandem with the internet, but I do not believe that I am any more addicted to it than my own parents.”

Both of the latter two responses disagree with the basic premise of Jon’s project but do so in roundabout ways which actually draw attention to some of social media’s negative consequences.

4.2 Those Who Said Gen Z Is Doing Badly, in Large Part Because of Social Media

All of the other 18 responses acknowledged, in one way or another, that Gen Z has not been set up for success:

“Gen Z has nothing to fight for.”

“Altogether, can you really blame Gen Z for having to grow up in such a shit point in history, but also have the technology and information to verify it?”

“I agree with most of the comments that social media has caused significant fragmentation in society that has never before been seen.”

“I think that social media is a huge, unimaginable stressor [on Gen Z]”

Six of them agreed with our premise without much qualification: Gen Z is doing badly, and it is their social media-based childhood that is to blame.

Henry thought that social media platforms work a bit like gambling or hard drugs—they can be fun for the people who have the mental clarity to use them well, but make life much harder for people who lack the required self-control and critical thinking:

“My main concern, as a young person, is that the new tools provided to us by the internet, social media, etc are going to further widen the gap in success and ability caused by natural factors (like IQ, socio-economic status, family status, etc.) I think that we’re simply given access to levels of stimulation and information that are historically unprecedented. Those who are naturally more able to sort through the static caused by the big data wave will be better off than previous generations, in the long run. Whereas those with less critical thinking skills…will drown.”

Aaron, from Australia, thought that social media inculcates a constant awareness that we are being watched and judged in public. This, he argued, leads to a constant focus on careful self-presentation, which can encourage anxiety:

“This constant exposure means that you have a chance of being thrust into the public eye, and soon you may be interacting with unknown groups of people who may even provide financial incentives (I suspect this is likely much more harmful to teenage girls for obvious reasons). As a result, maintaining a positive public image may become intimately tied with your life circumstances, which I suspect fuels much of the Gen-z obsession with identity.”

And William, also from Australia, considers social media to be the proximate cause for the breakdown of non-tribal social groups:

“While some consider this positive (people can be who they want/express themselves), the thousands of different social groups have fragmented otherwise culturally homogenous societies. Pre-internet there existed a broader cultural familiarity among members there were events, people, and media that everyone had in common. I think this it easier to strike up a conversation with strangers and quickly establish mutual understanding. Nowadays I meet people whose identities revolve around a specific piece of media, academic or political perspective reinforced by the echo chambers of social media.”

All six responses mention that social media changes the way we think, beyond just making us unhappy. Many cite the changes that have taken place in the news media and information sphere. All six think those changes have been largely for the worse.

4.3 Alternative Theories for the Cause of Gen Z’s Problems

The larger subcategory, however, were the twelve respondents who followed our instructions to disagree with us and did so by proposing alternate theories for Gen Z’s troubling outlook. Two major themes emerged across responses.

The first is the breakdown of social institutions. Ben, for example, cited the loss of “Third Spaces,” places that encourage socializing and provide the foundations for a community life beyond work and the home:

“Being 24, I do not know of any place to be around people in public besides the local bar(s), nor do I recall a time from before where they existed… Maybe I am being too reactionary and nostalgic for some kind of Friends-like (the Sitcom) coffee shop to hang out at, but I have a feeling that Gen Zers might be the first generation to not have ‘Third Places’ be common in our communities”

Declan made a similar point:

“One of these broader changes that I’ll use (at risk of oversimplification) to exemplify the whole process is the decline of institutions that previously supported community connection outside of the workplace or school - third spaces, religious spaces, dense and vibrant town centers (via urbanization) and city centers (via suburbanization), etc. These have been hollowed out over time and the replacement we’ve found for them is, essentially, entities that look like communities but are really elaborately (or not-so-elaborately) disguised ways of extracting data about user behavior (social media).”

An anonymous respondent from the UK mentioned his wish for shared experiences through mass public events:

“The thing i miss is the collective event. The thing that every single person in the school/university/work enjoyed separately but at the same time.”

Others echoed similar concerns:

“secular western culture has become toxic and we are living through unprecedented atomization.”

“We are no longer embeded in a communitiy to which we contribute to, we have not inherited any mythological narrative to guide our way forward, we have absolutely no institutional sources for acquiring wisdom available for us, and lastly, we are bombarded with bullshit (in the technical sense of the word)