Places to Play

Jonathan Haidt has a new book coming out at the end of the month called “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”  His premise is clear.  Young people are in trouble because of the devices that dominate their lives.  I knew about the book because of a column this week by NY Times opinion writer Michelle Goldberg, which not only laid out Haidt’s concerns, but also suggested a key piece of a potential solution.  Goldberg argued that we need more safe, engaging spaces for kids to hang out and be . . . just kids.  Hello, Church!  If ever there was an example of a need we are uniquey qualified to fill, this is it.

First off, let me get you the links and context.  Here’s the link to Haidt’s new book, which comes out on March 26^th, if you long to have something heavier than eggs in your Easter basket.  Haidt, the social psychologist and best-selling author, penned the classics, “The Coddling of the American Mind” and “The Righteous Mind” (my favorite book to work with any small group interested in exploring our national political divide – it’s a great exploration of how some of us are hard-wired to have a conservative outlook and some of us otherwise).

Here’s the link to Michelle Goldberg’s column in this week’s NY Times, “The Internet is a Wasteland, So Give Kids Better Places to Go.”  (Sorry, subscription required, but if you are one of the first couple of people to email me and request a ‘gift’ link, I’ll hook you up.)

Haidt includes loads of research that documents the decay in mental health directly linked to a generation’s experience of growing up wired.  He also considers policy initiatives that may turn this tragic tide.  Here’s a summary straight from the book blurb:

[S]ocial psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

If you’re like me, you read this material and say, “Of course!”  If you have exposure to young people, you’ve seen this digital obsession firsthand – heck, we old folks struggle with it, too.

In Goldberg’s column, she summarizes Haidt’s arguments and cites other elected officials across the political spectrum who are increasingly concerned about the future of our kids.  She also notes that the emergent crisis is particularly acute for girls:

Female adolescence was nightmarish enough before smartphones, but apps like Instagram and TikTok have put popularity contests and unrealistic beauty standards into hyperdrive. (Boys, by contrast, have more problems linked to overuse of video games and porn.) The studies Haidt cites — as well as the ones he debunks — should put to bed the notion that concern over kids and phones is just a modern moral panic akin to previous generations’ hand-wringing over radio, comic books and television.

Additionally, she offers ways to think about how we will respond to the challenge:

In “The Anxious Generation,” Haidt argues that while kids are under-protected on the internet, they’re over-protected in the real world, and that these two trends work in tandem. For a whole host of reasons — parental fear, overzealous child welfare departments, car-centric city planning — kids generally have a lot less freedom and independence than their parents did. Sitting at home in front of screens may keep them safe from certain physical harms, but it leaves them more vulnerable to psychological ones.

You may be like me and wax rhapsodic to your own kids about about how “when I was young, we headed out as soon as we got home from school and didn’t show back up at the house until it was too dark to see outside.”  Ah, the golden days!  Neighborhood free play and exploring the woods til the cows came home (as we said in that halcyon era before our pockets were weighed down by microcomputers).

Yet any honest assessment would conclude that the world is in many ways a more dangerous place than when I was an adolescent.

Also responsible for a big impact on my formative teenage years: Youth Group at church.

Here are some ways that churches might respond to this societal problem:

• Provide more opportunities for kids to congregate for no-strings opportunities to just hang out and free play.
• Partner with community agencies to provide facilities in which they can offer more relational opportunities for kids.
• Provide more structured options for local kids to participate in clubs, tutoring, support groups, sports activities, camps, special days, one-time events and celebrations, arts activities, and hobby clubs. These can all be done in-house or with partnerships.
• Structure budgets to focus on these priorities.
• Support children’s programs and youth groups in every way possible.
• Give parents and kids tools to de-digitize. Encourage activities and relationship building that does not depend on the digital space.  Give people instruction in mindfulness and spiritual development that rejects the toxic effects of social media.
• Leverage the church’s social media feeds to focus on good habits and practices.
• Encourage people to regularly unplug.
• Have our leadership model good practices and healthy digital hygiene.

In an interesting parallel development this week, The Gallup World Poll released its latest findings about wellbeing around the globe.  Yet again, we are reminded that perhaps it’s time to move to Finland!  The big headlines out of this story were the U.S.’s drop from 15^th to 23^rd in the global ranking, but my attention was snagged by the dramatic generational differences:

People aged 60 and older in the U.S. reported high levels of well-being compared to younger people. In fact, the United States ranks in the top 10 countries for happiness in this age group.

Conversely, there’s a decline in happiness among younger adolescents and young adults in the U.S. “The report finds there’s a dramatic decrease in the self-reported well-being of people aged 30 and below,” says editor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a professor of economics and behavioral science, and the director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University.

Perhaps this generational difference is an opportunity for local churches.

As churches face a decline in attendance and a monumental demographic shift in the composition of congregations — that is, in many locales, a “graying” of the regular participants – maybe there is a useful connection that can be established between the contented oldsters and the anxious youngsters.  Of course, this can only happen in congregations in which those who are well-established and contented are willing to push outside their comfort zones to embrace new ideas and new people, particularly the many challenges that come with actively engaging young folk.  But the need is there, obvious and apparent.

How is your local church doing at providinAs churches face a decline in attendance and a monumental demographic shift in the composition of congregations — that is, in many locales, a “graying” of the regular participants – maybe there is a useful connection that can be established between the contented oldsters and the anxious youngsters.  Of course, this can only happen in congregations in which those who are well-established and contented are willing to push outside their comfort zones to embrace new ideas and new people, particularly the many challenges that come with actively engaging young folk.  But the need is there, obvious and apparent.g a place for kids to be kids?  Are you giving families the tools they need to help kids resist this submission to digital expectations?  Are there opportunities for free play and relationships building beyond the digital space?  Do you welcome the community (without an explicit demand that they submit to religious indoctrination as part of the bargain)?  Share your ideas, concerns, and hopeful success stories in the comments, please.