As children and adolescents, our parents and grandparents spent their days splashing in rain puddles, attempting to climb the tallest tree and cruising through the streets of their town.
They used landlines to call their friends or partners, wrote letters and read books to pass the time.
For the newer generations, the picture is not quite the same.
For Generation Z, phones and tablets became a staple for adolescence. By the time Gen Z reached late elementary and middle school, everyone was on Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram and, at the time, Musical.ly.
This varies depending on certain life circumstances, but the results of this introduction to the internet can be seen by taking one brief look around. By doing so, one would see something comparable to what someone from the Victorian age might consider to be “dystopian.”
Gen Z’s psychological development as they grew into adults has likely suffered. In the future, the “iPad kids” may suffer, too.
“Brain rot” is a term ironically thrown around to describe the effects of consuming too many pointless memes and other forms of online media.
Lorin Lachs is the chair of the psychology department at Fresno State which specializes in worldly perception. He gave his thoughts with frequent references to the book “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haigt.
“There’s an early period [in the brain] with a lot of learning and then it kind of slows down, and during that slow down from age five or six to adolescence, the brain is sort of pruning and refining its understanding of the way that the environment works,” Lachs said. “Then during adolescence, it kicks off again, and exposure to social media; it’s the combination of social media and cell phones or smartphones that is particularly bad.”
Lachs said that the thesis of “The Anxious Generation” connects Gen Z’s rising mental health problem rates to premature internet exposure. For reference, The Annie E. Casey Federation reports that 65% of Gen Z report experiencing at least one mental health problem within the last two years, compared to Baby Boomers at 14%.
Lachs discussed the possible psychological reasoning behind this.
“It has to do with a lot of factors, but the biggest one is that you can have a brain that, [Haigt] calls it discovery mode, versus danger mode,” Lachs said.
Children and adolescents are constantly taking curious, healthy chances in the world and gathering information about these experiences as a part of development; however, on the internet, no chances exist.
“[Haigt’s] argument, and I think it sounds realistic to me, is that you’re constantly in danger mode when you’re on the internet because you say one thing as an adolescent that’s wrong, and your whole high school class is gonna freak out or it might go viral and you’ll be made fun of,” Lachs said.
It is possible that Gen Z-ers have been in fight or flight mode for years, and have never realized it.
Etisha Wilbon, the director of counseling and psychological services at the Student Health and Counseling Center at Fresno State, also weighed in on the topic and spoke about the future of parenting with the internet.
“With this generation, if we go back to say my mom’s generation, Gen X, when the internet came it was very much like shell shock; they didn’t know how to protect the millennial generation from themselves on the internet and how they were searching, but now we have parents, the millennials and the Gen Zs, who are able to kind of protect their kids because they went through the experience of social media,” Wilbon said. “So we have to really rely on the parents to take that extra step.”
Saying that parents need to step up is one thing, but facing this challenge in real time is another. Makenna Muirhead is a part of Gen Z and a mother to one-year-old Scott. Her views on her child’s screen time are backed by her own experience growing up with the internet.
“We don’t do any iPads or anything like that because, from what I’ve heard, they create more bad behavior,” Muirhead said.
Her son is still years away from the hands of Instagram and Snapchat, but Muirhead is prepared to face it when it comes.
“I feel like growing up with social media has taught me a lot about what to post online and the footprint that follows you, but also, we don’t know what’s going to happen with AI and how that’s developing, so the issue when it comes to identity theft online is a huge one and we don’t know the repercussions of how far social media is developing,” Muirhead said. “It’s the world we’re living in now, so I feel like at some point, he’s going to need to learn the online world as much as the social world, if that makes sense.”
The concept of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” seems to be the next, most logical step to handling social media intake with children. Teaching the next generation how to handle technology instead of completely stripping them of it may be the key to raising children in a society where it is nearly impossible to be internet-free.
This perspective offers a glimmer of hope for the future, but across the table from their children’s plate of mac n cheese and chicken nuggets, the parents, also known as Gen Z, may be suffering the blow of their unfiltered past.
Maya Thurman is a kinesiology major and a member of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority at Fresno State. She discussed her view on the subject.
“I definitely think [the internet and social media] can impact our attention span,” Thurman said. “We’re used to seeing things so fast and right away that it can be hard to be patient at times. I definitely think it affects our patience and it definitely impacts the way we perceive the world because not everything happens in such a fast way.”
It’s true. Just minutes after Kendrick Lamar performed his Super Bowl halftime show, the Daily Mail was already reporting on it and social media was buzzing.
The only way to truly determine what the future holds for modern children and Gen Z is to watch what happens as the years go by. Time will tell whether they learn how to manage living in the age of the internet, or if the media set in stone decades of restlessness and anxiety.
Maybe the parents were right. Maybe it is “those damn phones.”
