Student mental health – Why teens struggle with their social development, and what the solution might be
Alex Standish ponders whether schools might need a reset if they’re to accommodate the needs of what some have dubbed the ‘Anxious Generation’…
The rapid decline in teenage mental health over the past 15 years is the subject of the latest book by American psychologist Jonathan Haidt.
In The Anxious Generation, Haidt argues that rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, loneliness and suicide have grown exponentially in Anglosphere countries (USA, Canada, UK, New Zealand and Australia) due to a ‘rewiring’ of childhood.
Working in teacher education in London, it’s been impossible not to notice an increase in the incidence of mental health issues that young people bring with them, or experience as they’re training to teach in schools. Anxiety, in particular, rather than being accepted as part of learning how to do a challenging job, is now cited by some in talk around ‘Needing to work on my mental health.’
A generation inhibited
Haidt makes a direct link between the rise in mental health problems and growth of smartphone usage among teens from 2010 onwards. His book has thus become something of a launchpad for phone-free schools over the summer. However, the book is about much more than just the effects of smartphones and social media; it also points towards wider cultural changes that have been inhibiting the social and intellectual development of Generation Z (roughly speaking, those born after 1995).
Haidt’s thesis is that teens are over-protected in the real-world and under-protected online, hence their childhood having been rewired. He describes a growing culture of ‘safety-ism’, whereby adults are reluctant to ‘let go’ of children, challenge them and let them fail. Increasingly, he argues, adults mollycoddle children, denying them freedom and space to roam, take risks, make mistakes and learn from those mistakes.
He also includes graphs to illustrate a long-term decline in unstructured social time spent by teens with friends outside of school – a trend Haidt traces back to the 1980s when people first began expanding the use of concepts like ‘addiction’, ‘trauma’, ‘abuse’ and ‘safety’ into new areas (‘emotional safety’, rather than simply ‘physical safety’, for example).
Among the texts Haidt cites is the 2010 book Paranoid Parenting by British sociologist Frank Furedi, which traced changes to parenting practices in the 1990s – such as not letting children walk or cycle to school independently – to declines in adult solidarity and trust within communities.
Foundational harms
It was around this time that the term ‘helicopter parents’ (describing hyper-attentive, borderline controlling elders) started to ‘take off’. Teachers who have been around a bit may recall schools cancelling field trips, competitive sport fixtures and even games of conkers because they were perceived by some teachers and parents as being ‘too risky’ for pupils.
Against this backdrop of increasing safety-ism, however, teens have been presented with a largely unregulated online world via home computers, and latterly smartphones and tablets. In his book, Haidt includes an account by a 14-year-old girl hailing from Rhode Island, who shares the story of how she first encountered online porn age at the age of 10, before it then became regular viewing for her and a friend: “Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently coloured fruits and vegetables on the daily.”
Haidt holds smartphones as being responsible for four ‘foundational harms’ currently affecting young people: the inhibiting of their social development; their increased exposure to sleep deprivation; constant interruptions disrupting their ability to maintain attention and focus; and the fostering of addictive behaviours, stemming from how smartphones and apps are intentionally designed.
Across two chapters exploring how internet usage and smartphones affect girls and boys differently, Haidt finds that girls make more extensive use of social media, while boys typically withdraw more into online gaming. He concludes that social media is more harmful to girls – in part because they naturally lean more towards visual social comparisons and the managing of friendship groups. Gaming meanwhile takes boys away from meeting up with friends, but also away from the risk-taking and delinquency that this can sometimes entail.
Illusory images
Drawing on the work of French sociologist Émile Durkheim, Haidt reaches what I’d suggest is the nub of the problem – the tendency for young people to withdraw inwards, restricting their ability to engage socially and form a sense of rootedness within human communities.
A key concept for Durkheim was ‘anomie’; the absence of stable and widely shared norms, which tends to occur when individuals are deprived of social orders based on objective foundations. As long ago as 1897, Durkheim observed how “All that remains is an artificial combination of illusory images, a phantasmagoria vanishing at the least reflection; that is, nothing which can be goal for our action.” A description that could just as easily apply to smartphone scrolling in the 2020s.
To back up his claims, Haidt points to further data showing an increase (from 2010) in American girls and boys reporting that ‘Life often feels meaningless’ – though we could add the caveat that such sentiments are hardly uncommon during adolescence.
“They are less able than any generation in history to put down roots in real-world communities populated by known individuals who will still be there a year later,” suggests Haidt. “It is very difficult to construct a meaningful life on one’s own, drifting through multiple disembodied networks.”
Instead, he ventures, young people need community, structure and purpose to thrive: “People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely or useless.’ Haidt reasons. (See also the lockdown experiences of young people during the COVID-19 pandemic – likely a contributing factor to current behaviour patterns of withdrawal and isolation).
The profane and the sacred
Émile Durkheim’s work is perhaps most helpful in the distinctions he made between the profane (everyday) and sacred realms. He showed that nearly all societies had rituals and practices for pulling people up, into a realm where collective interests are asserted and self-interest recedes.
Here, I believe, is where schools can contribute to socialisation and help to prevent young people from withdrawing. As communities of learning, schools serve the dual purpose of both socialising and intellectually developing their students. For most children, schools provide them with a social life and foundational experiences for their development as individuals – in lessons, but also through extra-curricular clubs, participation in organised sports and the arts, school trips and more general experiences of growing up together.
Haidt wants to see schools that are phone-free, and which offer more opportunities for independence and growth, including free play. Yet while these are helpful suggestions, my own emphasis would be on the academic curriculum, as this is the sacred realm which defines a school.
A better antitode
Through the curriculum, teachers induct children into the knowledge, values, skills, dispositions and culture associated with scholarship. By introducing them to realms of knowledge in science, the arts, languages, philosophy and humanities, teachers ‘pull’ students up into an objective (sacred) world of knowledge where they’re forced to consider significant questions about time, space, culture, humanity, beauty, morality, justice, belief, belonging, nation, migration and truth.
We shouldn’t counterpose this objective world as being in opposition to the self, but rather as transformative of individuals; it opens up possibilities for young people to develop themselves, lead flourishing lives and make positive contributions to society.
I would argue that this is a far better antidote to what ails the Anxious Generation than a therapeutic curriculum focused on wellbeing and mental health. That’s not to downplay the growing number of young people with serious mental health conditions, for which schools and parents require better access to mental health professionals, rather than imagining that teachers are qualified to address them.
The reset I’d like to see is for greater intellectual challenge, and raised expectations of what all students are capable of, beyond the passing of exams (though qualifications do, of course, matter).
Dr Alex Standish is Associate Professor of Geography Education, UCL Institute of Education, Knowledge and Curriculum book series editor at UCL Press and co-editor of What Should Schools Teach? Disciplines, Subjects and the Pursuit of Truth
The Academy of Ideas Education Forum gathers monthly to discuss trends in educational policy, theory and practice. Find out more at academyofideas.org.uk/education-forum
