Social Media (and Overprotective Parents) Changed Childhood

Many adults struggle to find a healthy relationship with smartphones and social media. But for kids and adolescents … it’s something closer to a full-blown mental health crisis.

Consider this: In 2011, only 23% of American teens had a smartphone. Just five years later, 79% of them did. And between 2015 and 2022, the number of teens who said they were online “almost constantly” basically doubled.

As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes in his book, "The Anxious Generation", all that screen time coincides with dramatic rises in teen depression, anxiety, and suicide.

But while Haidt’s criticisms of the digital lifestyle’s effect on young people gets most of the attention, There’s another aspect to his indictment: overprotective parenting. At the same time that kids are often being left to navigate online life without any guardrails, parents are increasingly limiting their activities in the real world — which turns out to have devastating consequences for their development into capable adults.

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