The rapid decline in teenage mental health over the past 15 years is the subject of the latest book by popular American psychologist Jonathan Haidt. The Anxious Generation argues that depression, anxiety, self-harm and loneliness in American and British youth are at ‘epidemic’ levels, caused by a ‘rewiring’ of childhood.

Haidt’s thesis is that teens are over-protected in the real-world while under-protected online. A culture of safetyism prevails whereby adults are reluctant to ‘let go’ of children, to challenge them and to let them fail. Yet the freedom to learn to manage risk for oneself is essential for developing autonomy, Haidt argues. He cites examples of schools reducing unstructured play time or parents preventing their children travelling to school independently. Adults have also come to interpret exams or the transition to a new school as potentially harmful. Only recently the National Education Union wrote to the education minister calling for primary pupils not to be tested on times tables, nor spend too much time learning grammar, for fear of increasing pupils’ anxiety.

Meanwhile, it has become the norm for 11-year-olds to own a smartphone with very little supervision. Haidt recounts the story of a 10-year-old who, like her friends, regularly watched pornography on her phone while her mother was next door making sure her daughter’s dinner contained differently coloured fruits and vegetables.

Haidt says that intentionally addictive smartphones are inhibiting teen’s socialisation, withdrawing them into social media and video games, increasing sleep deprivation and interrupting attention.

What position should schools adopt amid these trends? Mental health topics have become an established part of the curriculum through PSHE lessons, and many schools provide additional support initiatives too.

Yet is education of this kind really helping? Do pupils take it seriously, or merely let it wash over them? Or has a ‘therapeutic curriculum’ encouraged Gen Z, their parents and teachers to interpret the normal anxieties of growing up through the language of mental health? If so, what alternative approach could schools take? Teachers are hardly suitably qualified to tackle serious mental-health conditions. Does that mean external professionals should play a greater role in schools?

Is Haidt correct in his diagnosis that childhood is being rewired? And what of his proposed solution: that we start thinking of young people as ‘anti-fragile’?

SPEAKERS

Matilda Gosling
social researcher; author, Evidence-Based Parenting and Teenagers – The Evidence Base (forthcoming)

Dr Alex Standish
associate professor of geography education, University College London; co-author, What Should Schools Teach? Disciplines, Subjects and the Pursuit of Truth

CHAIR
Harley Richardson
chief product officer, OxEd and Assessment; organiser, AoI Education Forum; blogger, historyofeducation.net; author, The Liberating Power of Education

READING
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt is available via Amazon (UK).