SPECIAL REPORT: Increased Screen Time Has ‘Rewired’ Modern Childhood

If our screen-saturated world is the experiment, what’s the outcome? The data suggests it’s not good.

Statistics show that between 2010 and 2021, the number of U.S. teen girls who reported at least one major depressive episode went up by 145 percent. For boys, it went up 161 percent. During that same time, the percentage of young adults reporting high anxiety went up 139 percent. Suicide rates for boys ages 10 to 14 went up 91 percent. Girls that age are now 167 percent more likely to take their own lives.

Mounting evidence ties these terrifying numbers to what may be in your hands right now.

How We Got Here

Zach Rausch, the research scientist behind “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt, explained that childhood underwent a “great rewiring” between 2010 and 2015. Devices sold as ways to connect kids instead began to isolate them.

“We started to notice that something fundamentally changed in the lives of young people in the early 2010s, and this was not just happening in a small pocket in the U.S.,” Rausch said. “This was happening across income, across race and across culture.”

In the book, Haidt argues it started with kids being over-protected in the real world and ended with them being under-protected online.

In the 1990s, kids started to lose some independence; they were meeting up with friends less and less. The 24-hour news cycle was making many parents more fearful, and things like TV and video games made it easier to shelter kids at home, according to Monitoring the Future.

Then, in 2007, something revolutionary arrived — the smartphone.

By 2012, 23 percent of American teens had one, according to Pew Research. By 2016, 79 percent of teens carried constant access to social media, games, streaming services, YouTube, and even pornography in their pockets. Twenty-eight percent of children ages 8 to 12 had their very own smartphone by this point, according to Common Sense Media. During that same time, Common Sense Media found that teens reported spending an average of nearly seven hours per day of leisure time on a screen.

Local clinical psychologist Dr. Corey Gonzales agrees that what happened to Gen Z was a phone-based childhood.

“That generation was the first generation to have social media in middle school. We found out that was a huge mistake,” Gonzales said. “We saw a huge drop in the mental health of that population.”

Opportunity Costs

In “The Anxious Generation,” Haidt talks a lot about opportunity cost. Even if what was on the screen was benign — and research shows it’s often not — what are we losing by those hours every day spent staring at a screen?

For kids, it’s play.

“You’re not out in nature, not playing with friends, you don’t have a bunch of variables going on,” Gonzales said. “It’s two-dimensional. You’re not dealing with real risk, you’re not falling off a tree, you’re not being called out by friends for doing the wrong thing.”

Rausch says the promise of making digital connections with one another has come up short.

“As kids have much more quantity of relationships, the quality is declining. That’s the irony; in the technological world, we are so much more connected than ever with so many more people, and yet we feel more alone than ever before,” he said.

Americans are said to spend an average of 4 hours and 37 minutes every day on a phone, according to the Journal of Consumer Research. That comes to a total of 70 days every year. That number does not include time spent looking at a computer or television.

The numbers increase drastically for young adults, teens, and pre-teens — seven, eight, even nine-plus hours every day.

As the minutes and hours of screen time add up, Bakersfield 4th grade teacher Tangie Piper has seen a shift.

“People ask me, have kids changed? Kids haven’t, but unfortunately what they’re exposed to has and the peer pressure, the screen time, the phones, it’s just created this anxiety,” Piper said.

Even though phones are supposed to be powered off in the classroom, you can’t shut off their effects.

“They’ll tell me, ‘I stayed up all night watching YouTube.’ I’m like, ‘What?! You were supposed to be sleeping,’ Piper said. “I often have to make that phone call to parents and say, ‘your child is falling asleep in class.'”

What Can We Do?

Haidt and other experts recommend four key reforms: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, phone-free schools, and more unsupervised play to foster independence. These reforms aim to combat the detrimental effects of phone-based childhoods and restore healthier behaviors in the younger generation.

Some changes are already in progress.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two pieces of legislation in the past two weeks. SB976 prohibits online platforms from knowingly providing an addictive feed to a minor without parental consent and prohibits social media platforms from sending notifications to minors during school hours and late at night. And, the Phone-Free School Act, will require every school district, charter school and county office of education to adopt a policy limiting or prohibiting the use of smartphones by July 1, 2026.

Nationally, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and COPPA 2.0 aim to safeguard children’s privacy and limit harmful content exposure; but neither has been signed into law.

However real change starts with us. Experts say that adults need to model responsible phone usage.

“Do we look at our phones as the last thing we do before we go to sleep and first thing we do when we wake up?, Rausch asked. “All of us need to reset and ask is this how we want to live our lives.”