{"id":40724,"date":"2025-02-21T07:45:34","date_gmt":"2025-02-21T15:45:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=40724"},"modified":"2025-02-22T05:06:48","modified_gmt":"2025-02-22T13:06:48","slug":"the-torrents-of-stimuli-affecting-youth-and-those-who-support-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/the-torrents-of-stimuli-affecting-youth-and-those-who-support-them\/","title":{"rendered":"The torrents of stimuli affecting youth and those who support them"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cMental 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\u201d [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. <\/span><\/p>\n

Jonathan Haidt\u2019s The Anxious Generation<\/em> 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\u2019s work as part of my own response.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Loss of Sequential Introduction of Adult Life and Rites of Passage<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Haidt lays out that what was normal in a play-based childhood was, \u201cthe sequential introduction of age-appropriate experiences, tuned to sensitive periods and shared with same-age peers\u201d[5]. One of the dangers that accompanied the sudden shift into a phone-based childhood is that, it accelerated exposure to \u201ceverything, all-at-once, all the time\u201d. Haidt expresses that <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

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<\/span>. 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].<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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 \u2014 \u201cwe are raising adults, not children\u201d [8]. \u00a0In 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, \u00a0\u201c<\/span>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\u201d [9]. \u00a0<\/span>But there is also an upward generational creep for these dynamics too. <\/span><\/p>\n

The Youth are Not Alone<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

One can notice an increasing change in behaviour of older adults, along the same lines. Particularly, the harms of \u201cattention fragmentation\u201d and \u201caddiction\u201d, 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:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  • Need for Status Recognition<\/li>\n
  • Ostentatious Consumption<\/li>\n
  • Attraction for Crowds and<\/li>\n
  • Pursuit of Novelty<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    These all play into the need for validation, which affect mental well-being [11]. Adults are pursuing what <\/span>Alexis de Tocqueville <\/span>calls \u201ca better life with feverish ardor\u201d[12]. Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott argue in The 100 Year Life<\/em> that older adults have the opportunity to stay youthful longer by retaining \u201cfeatures previously associated with the young: youthfulness and plasticity; playfulness and improvisation; and the capacity to support novel action taking\u201d [13]. Yet the harms from all the<\/span> torrents of stimuli are bringing harmful effects into older adulthood too.<\/p>\n

    And so, we have anxious generations<\/em>. The solution to invite adult<\/em> 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\u2019s the blind leading the blind.<\/p>\n

    To all those raising the phone-based generation, I do hope that we will implement some of Haidt\u2019s practical strategies to minimize the harms, from phone-free classrooms to longer recess times, to parents who create boundaries around kids\u2019 phones usage, but also to keep vigorously discussing how to undo some of our dependence upon screens. It\u2019s time to find the sacred again, in the cathedral and the grove.<\/p>\n

    ___________<\/p>\n

    [1] \u201cCAMH to Create Groundbreaking Youth Mental Health Data Platform.\u201d n.d. Accessed February 20, 2025. https:\/\/www.camh.ca\/en\/camh-news-and-stories\/camh-to-create-groundbreaking-youth-mental-health-data-platform.<\/span><\/p>\n

    [2] Jonathan Haidt,<\/span>\u00a0The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness<\/em>,<\/span> (London: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2024), 15.<\/span><\/p>\n

    [3] Anxious<\/em><\/span>, <\/em>57.<\/p>\n

    [4] Anxious<\/em><\/span>, <\/em>86,96.<\/p>\n

    [5] Anxious<\/em><\/span>, <\/em>57.<\/span><\/p>\n

    [6] Anxious<\/em><\/span>, <\/em>57.<\/p>\n

    [7] Anxious<\/em><\/span>, <\/em>86.<\/p>\n

    [8] Our rites of passage included marking their early years, around age 6, as the time to begin with assigned chores. When they turned \u201cdouble-digits\u201d, we gave them their own house key to take care of, in an Evangelical faith tradition which dedicates children to the Lord, and practices \u201cbelievers\u2019 baptism\u201d 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\u2019s legal drinking age of 19. We had a send-off blessing for they left for post-secondary education. We encouraged taking a gap-year.<\/span><\/p>\n

    [9] Anxious<\/em><\/span>, <\/em>96<\/span>.<\/p>\n

    [10] Anxious<\/em><\/span>, <\/em>Chapter 5.<\/p>\n

    [11] \u201cSocial Media in Canada | Generational Differences & Social Values.\u201d n.d. Accessed February 21, 2025. https:\/\/environics.ca\/insights\/articles\/social-media-in-canada-generational-differences-social-values\/.<\/span><\/p>\n

    [12] As quoted in Daniel Z. Lieberman, Michael E Long, and Vince Hyman, <\/span>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<\/em>,<\/span> (Dallas, Tex: BenBella, 2019), 194.<\/span><\/p>\n

    [13] Gratton, Lynda, and Andrew Scott, <\/span>The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity<\/span><\/em>, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 171.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 \u201cMental illness is the leading national cause of disability among those aged 15-29, with an estimated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":203,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3407],"class_list":["post-40724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-haidt-dlgp03","cohort-dlgp03"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/203"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40724"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40799,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40724\/revisions\/40799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}