The torrents of stimuli affecting youth and those who support them
It was a couple of years ago that I did a quick informal survey of the prevalence of mental health diagnoses among young adults in my world. It aligned with what the Canadian Association of Mental Health reported, that “Mental illness is the leading national cause of disability among those aged 15-29, with an estimated one in four Canadian youth in need of mental health services each year” [1]. As a concerned citizen and parent, I started reading sources that would help me grow in mental health awareness, but nothing on the relationship of the phone-based world that our young people have grown up in.
Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation presents his argument for the rise of mental health suffering as a two-fold tragedy involving the decline of play-based childhood and the rise of the phone-based childhood [2]. Having a sister who did her Masters degree in educational technology, and family and friends with youth who are right in the phone-based world, I have been looking forward to reading and reflecting on Haidt’s work as part of my own response.
In particular, I want to interact with his comments on the loss of sequential introduction of adult content and experiences [3] and the accompanying loss of rites of passage [4] which have exacerbated particular harms upon Gen Z youth, and the families who support them.
Loss of Sequential Introduction of Adult Life and Rites of Passage
Haidt lays out that what was normal in a play-based childhood was, “the sequential introduction of age-appropriate experiences, tuned to sensitive periods and shared with same-age peers”[5]. One of the dangers that accompanied the sudden shift into a phone-based childhood is that, it accelerated exposure to “everything, all-at-once, all the time”. Haidt expresses that
children are plunged into a whirlpool of adult content and experiences that arrive in no particular order. Identity, selfhood, emotions, and relationships will all be different if they develop online rather than in real life. What gets rewarded or punished, how deep friendships become, and above all what is desirable-all of these will be determined by the thousands of posts, comments, and ratings that the child sees each week [6].
I applaud that Haidt connects this to the elimination of most rites of passage in Western societies [7]. As parents who raised four children from the 1990s to the 2010s, my wife Christie and I introduced milestones as part of our parenting philosophy — “we are raising adults, not children” [8]. In Western societies, these rites once held a significant place in the sequential development towards adulthood, intent on securing some building blocks for adulthood. But the online world that opened up in the 1990s, “eventually buried most milestones and obscured the path to adult. Once children began spending much more of their time online, the inputs to their developing brains became undifferentiated torrents of stimuli with no age grading or age restrictions” [9]. But there is also an upward generational creep for these dynamics too.
The Youth are Not Alone
One can notice an increasing change in behaviour of older adults, along the same lines. Particularly, the harms of “attention fragmentation” and “addiction”, mentioned by Haidt [10] are becoming a reality across the generations. Environics, a Canadian-based research body, in a 2023 report, revealed four social media values of Linkedin users, across a multi-generational spread. They are:
- Need for Status Recognition
- Ostentatious Consumption
- Attraction for Crowds and
- Pursuit of Novelty
These all play into the need for validation, which affect mental well-being [11]. Adults are pursuing what Alexis de Tocqueville calls “a better life with feverish ardor”[12]. Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott argue in The 100 Year Life that older adults have the opportunity to stay youthful longer by retaining “features previously associated with the young: youthfulness and plasticity; playfulness and improvisation; and the capacity to support novel action taking” [13]. Yet the harms from all the torrents of stimuli are bringing harmful effects into older adulthood too.
And so, we have anxious generations. The solution to invite adult legislators, educators, and parents to help young people overcome the harms will take thoughtful, transcendent and mindful leaders who begin to model a deeper way of being for all of society. Otherwise, it’s the blind leading the blind.
To all those raising the phone-based generation, I do hope that we will implement some of Haidt’s practical strategies to minimize the harms, from phone-free classrooms to longer recess times, to parents who create boundaries around kids’ phones usage, but also to keep vigorously discussing how to undo some of our dependence upon screens. It’s time to find the sacred again, in the cathedral and the grove.
___________
[1] “CAMH to Create Groundbreaking Youth Mental Health Data Platform.” n.d. Accessed February 20, 2025. https://www.camh.ca/en/camh-news-and-stories/camh-to-create-groundbreaking-youth-mental-health-data-platform.
[2] Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, (London: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2024), 15.
[3] Anxious, 57.
[4] Anxious, 86,96.
[5] Anxious, 57.
[6] Anxious, 57.
[7] Anxious, 86.
[8] Our rites of passage included marking their early years, around age 6, as the time to begin with assigned chores. When they turned “double-digits”, we gave them their own house key to take care of, in an Evangelical faith tradition which dedicates children to the Lord, and practices “believers’ baptism” at an un designated age of accountability, we pushed our young people to delay this step, avoid joining their peers getting baptized as young as 8, to try and ensure they owned their own faith (with some limited success). We tried to limit restricted movies, and discussed content in video games and movies. We taught them to drive a car at 16, and introduced them all to driving a vehicle with a manual transmission (2 out of 4 stuck with it). We had a first legal drink of alcohol when they reached Canada’s legal drinking age of 19. We had a send-off blessing for they left for post-secondary education. We encouraged taking a gap-year.
[9] Anxious, 96.
[10] Anxious, Chapter 5.
[11] “Social Media in Canada | Generational Differences & Social Values.” n.d. Accessed February 21, 2025. https://environics.ca/insights/articles/social-media-in-canada-generational-differences-social-values/.
[12] As quoted in Daniel Z. Lieberman, Michael E Long, and Vince Hyman, The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity – and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race, (Dallas, Tex: BenBella, 2019), 194.
[13] Gratton, Lynda, and Andrew Scott, The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 171.
About the Author
Joel Zantingh
Joel Zantingh is a catalyst for peacemaking and intercultural teams, speaker, theologian and consultant. He is the Canadian Coordinator of the World Evangelical Alliance's Peace and Reconciliation Network, and the Director of Engagement with Lausanne Movement Canada. He has served in local and national roles within the Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada, and led their global mission arm. He has experience teaching in formal and informal settings with Bible college students and leaders from various cultures and generations. Joel and Christie are parents to adult children, as well as grandparents. They reside in Guelph, Ont., situated on the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, and home to many past, present and future First Nations peoples, including the Anishinnabe and Hodinöhsö:ni'.One response to “The torrents of stimuli affecting youth and those who support them”
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Joel
Thanks for sharing your rites of passage in your notes.
In thinking about longer recess time at schools. When I read that in Haidt’s book and reminded by you about it. I have contemplated what that looks like. Our laws dictate how much instruction time our children need each day/year. While I love the idea, even allowing it through older ages, I’m just not sure of the logistics. Our typical elementary school day is 9 – 3:30. Those days are also schedule around the school bus routes. Our bus drivers finish their high school/junior high route and then start their elementary routes. So, if you extended the school day, the bus drivers would be sitting at the elementary school longer, getting paid for not doing anything, which would ultimately frustrate the tax payers.
Any suggestions?