A Gen Z Psychologist Who Logged 10,000 Hours in RuneScape Says Screens Aren't Destroying Young Minds
Screens Aren't Destroying Young Minds. I Should Know
As a member of Gen Z who grew up obese, isolated, and addicted to RuneScape, I logged over 10,000 hours on screens. Now a Harvard-trained developmental psychologist, I argue that the scientific case for a youth mental health crisis caused by smartphones is weak. A 2024 JAMA Pediatrics analysis of 143 studies found only small, inconsistent links. Loneliness, family instability, and lack of social support predict youth well-being far better than screen time. Restricting phones won't fix those problems.
Screens didn’t cause my problems. They were coping mechanisms for preexisting problems: loneliness, family instability, social anxiety, an absent father.
- derektank
>Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.
All of these, with the exception of fewer high school dropouts, are examples of people doing less. Going outside less, doing less mischief, socializing less. The reason for that is almost certainly that phone use is monopolizing more and more of their time and crowding out these other activities. I would absolutely concede that access to phones is not an unequivocal ill, there are some positive upsides. But these supposed counterexamples I think are exactly what we would expect if phones were changing the behavior of children.
And, on the subject of high school dropouts, I think there’s at least some reason to think this is due to a declining set of standards. This probably varies by state and school district, but there has certainly been a movement to reduce the number of infractions that leads to expulsion, and outbursts that would previously have resulted in student punishment are now allowed to continue unabated in some jurisdictions. I don’t think it’s pivotal to the argument one way or the other though.
Finally, I take the author’s point that the causal relationship between screen time and poor mental health runs two ways. But isn’t th […]
- TFNA
The OP says that turned out fine even though he played an online video game for thousands of hours, and mentions he made friends to boot. He goes on to repeat this idea of "online connections". But screen time for young people (and old) today is not necessarily that; many of them are just consuming content from endless feeds and not building actual ties with other people. Modern social media is not a place for new friendships to blossom.
- wilbo
I'm a little under halfway through Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation. I feel like OP is arguing against a different version of the book than the one I'm currently reading.
First, Haidt's arguments primarily pertain to public schools and he spends significantly more time on the impact of social media on girls than on boys. The main problems he cites are that social media is creating a substitute for in person, synchronous, high stakes social relationships.
An isolated home schooler's use of social media is not substituting other, richer opportunities that are available.
In addition, Haidt strongly argues against social trends that long predate social media and mobile phones: the overprotection of children and elimination of unsupervised, child-led play in real world situations (specifically where there is physical risk taking).
Based on my read so far, OP is exactly the profile of a person who would have benefited from online social relationships.
It's possible for both to be true: mobile phone use is toxic children who are substituting online relationships for real world interactions. Mobile phone use is beneficial for children who do not have opportunity for real world interactions with peers.
- codeduck
Cooperative online shared worlds, even adversarial ones, are a wildly different use of time compared to spending hours staring at short-format video after short-format video.
- ohrus
> Maybe I’m the exception. Or maybe the harms are overblown.
Or maybe you are one person and one person is never a big enough data set.