The Anxious Generation in the Classroom

Why are young Americans behaving differently?

Written by Adam Smeester.

If you are a teacher or parent of a Gen Z child, you will be aware that in 2024 mental health is a major issue – even a crisis. This year will be my twentieth as a secondary English teacher. Within the last ten, I have seen a profound shift in the social and emotional behavior of students in my classes. It took a while for me to realize that the incremental changes I was observing amounted to a permanent shift that I was witnessing in real time.

Over the years, I have had my own theories for the changes I observed. It wasn’t until I read Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, that I began to understand the larger picture. Haidt demonstrates that Gen Z (children born between 1997 and 2012) is indeed experiencing worse mental health than previous generations. He then explains why he believes the main culprit is social media, an external force acting on the internal forces of adolescent development. Finally, Haidt outlines what we can do to address this crisis. 

About five years ago I realized that changes in student behavior (which I’d started to notice four or five years earlier) were becoming more consistent and more widespread. I teach both freshmen and sophomores, and in my classroom it has become harder and harder to get students to participate and engage. Most students don’t raise their hands when we have class discussions. I now have to score the discussions and give points to get students to participate. 

Disagreement is much harder for students. In the past, they would get excited at the prospect of a debate; now they shy away from even mild disagreements. They seem almost scared when called on to give an opinion, especially if it’s a hot topic. When I play devil’s advocate, students are reluctant to consider other points of view. Some even become visibly uncomfortable.

In my class, I greet each student at the door with a fist bump (before COVID it was a handshake). Most used to return the greeting in a socially competent way. Now, many students will not look up at me or even smile when I greet them, and some try to slip in unnoticed to avoid the greeting altogether.

I have pouches on the wall that all students must drop their phones into when they arrive; they then collect their phones at the end of class. In the past, extra time meant that students would go talk to their friends and the class volume would greatly increase. Now students go get their phones and the class is dead silent until the bell rings.

I use a seating chart in my room with assigned seats, and the number of students requesting to sit next to a friend has gone down. I also find myself re-teaching content more often than I used to, such as specific writing strategies, because students simply don’t remember it. 

The reasons for the change in students’ behaviour, to my mind, were the rise of cancel culture and the Covid pandemic. I assumed that because students were so afraid of getting canceled they wouldn’t say anything in class. At best, they seemed uneasy and at worst, they seemed scared. I also thought that remote learning had normalized working on a computer without much peer-to-peer interaction.

I have known for a handful of years about worsening mental health in Gen Z. Every year, there are more students identified by counselors who struggle with anxiety/depression and may need more frequent breaks, extra time with assignments, or who just look visibly unhappy. But I’d never attributed the changes I saw in my class to this trend.

For anyone who is suspicious, Haidt provides copious evidence that the overall mental health of Gen Z has been declining relative to previous generations. Here are some numbers: since 2010, reported anxiety in 18 to 25-year-olds has increased by 139%, but has decreased by 8% in those aged 50+. Since 2010, emergency room visits for self-harm by 10 to 14-year-olds have increased by 188% among girls and 48% among boys. The suicide rate has increased by 91% for boys aged 10 to 14, and by 167% for girls of the same age.

The main cause of declining mental health, Haidt argues, is social media addiction. He cites data showing that in 2015, one in four teens said they were online “almost constantly”. By 2022, this number had almost doubled to 46%. The Department of Homeland Security reports that in 2021 teenagers were on social media for an average of eight hours a day. Social media is quite literally a full-time job. For most kids at my school, if there is any chance to be on their phones, they will take it. 

This coincides with other research pointing to an increase in “internet addiction”. Sufferers exhibit classic withdrawal symptoms when they don’t have access to the internet – such as irritability, anxiety, insomnia and dysphoria. These symptoms affect everyday functionality such as relationships, social interaction, school and work. The study cited above used MRI data to show that internet addicts experience developmental changes in cognitive control, reward valuation and motor coordination.

In his book Scarcity Brain, Michael Easter notes that this kind of addiction develops via the “scarcity loop”, which has three stages:

1. Having the opportunity for reward (scrolling and potentially seeing a great video worth sharing, keeping up with gossip and drama, comparing oneself to others, etc.)

2. Receiving intermittent rewards (one is not rewarded every time they scroll so the reward is unpredictable).

3. Having the option to repeat the process.

The “scarcity loop” is seen in rats when they press a lever (opportunity), receive an unpredictable reward (food) that sometimes comes and sometimes doesn’t, and have the option to repeat the process. A rat will press that lever all day; they become addicted. The engineers of social media sites, gambling games, or any other platform that makes money off your attention, specifically design their products using the scarcity loop. It is feature, not a bug.

Anna Lembke, in her book Dopamine Nation, describes how this process hijacks the dopamine system. We get the dopamine hit not only from receiving the reward, but also from anticipating the reward – which is the rationale for scrolling on social media. After understanding the “rat in a cage” analogy, I began seeing the scarcity loop everywhere, and I can’t unsee it. Not to be a pessimist, but we are all just rats in cages pressing a lever. And yet for some reason, we allow our children to take part.

Some might say, “So what if kids spend a lot of time on social media? I spent a lot of time in front of the TV when I was a kid and I turned out fine.” Haidt shows there are harms specific to constant social media usage.

As we grow up, humans go through several developmental stages of “attunement”. Young children will observe and copy their parents, which sets a foundation for social and physical development. They learns about body language, emotions, facial recognition, physical play, etc. What’s more, humans are prone to conformism and prestige bias: we want to be like those who have high status or who excel at something. Being prestigious or excellent can give us status, which is a huge motivator of human behavior (see Rob Henderson’s writings on this).

In adolescence, the developmental stage of attunement prompts kids to look outside the home to the real-world and observe the traits that give people status. They will then copy the trait, evaluate the outcome, and revise for better results. Since adolescents now spend eight hours a day in the virtual world, their attention is given to those role models with virtual prestige and without real-world context. 

Thanks to social media, kids do not need to take the time to observe, copy, evaluate and revise their behaviors – to see if they will gain status. They can now take the easy road of just viewing the likes below a video to evaluate the status conferred by some behavior. This can backfire, Haidt points out, because ways of behaving, talking, or emoting online do not necessarily carry over to the real world. 

I have come to think that the conformity I see in my classroom is explained by students skipping or not practicing the adolescent stage of attunement. Because they don’t observe the way behaviors play out in the real-world, they don’t really know how to behave in different contexts. Students have only observed online and out of context, which doesn't lead to them ever feel excellent or prestigious – but rather anxious and unconfident.

Haidt points out that when we detect new opportunities, as in a classroom setting, our behavioral activation system (BAS) turns on and we enter “discover mode”. This makes the world a great place to live and is what school is all about. However, when we detect threats, our behavioral inhibition system (BIS) is activated, prompting us to enter “defend mode”. This leads to feelings of anxiety when the system is chronically activated. 

It seems to me that many of my students are permanently in “defend mode”. Why wouldn't they be? Since they have not developed the skills and behaviors that come with observation of real-world interactions, they are more anxious, uncertain, and less confident about how they come off to others. In a classroom setting, this manifests in conformist behaviors such as not raising one’s hand, not wanting to divulge personal opinions, and not wanting to engage with other students.

Some of the documented damage from social media comes via social comparison, teenage drama and bullying. But Haidt warns of four other major harms: social deprivation (a reduction in normal social interaction) and addiction (both of which I discussed above), as well as sleep deprivation and attention fragmentation. 

Haidt points to many correlational studies showing that a teenager’s amount of social media usage is negatively related to the quality and amount of sleep they get. Haidt’s graphs show that the percentage of teens who get less than seven hours of sleep has increased from around 32% in 1991 to almost 50% in 2019 among girls, and from around 26% in 1991 to a little over 40% in 2019 among boys. This can lead to lack of focus, poorer memory, poorer grades, and poorer decision making. Not good. 

When students constantly go back and forth from one task to another, their executive function suffers, as does focus and memory. This is the fourth harm from overuse of social media, and is called attention fragmentation.

Neuroscience has shown that when someone is frequently distracted by switching between multiple tasks, they become less likely to enter a state of flow (being in “the zone”), less able to understand cause and effect relationships, and will feel generally lost because no pattern of meaning emerges in their lives. As a result, they may be unable to develop the skill of concentration. 

We are exposed to massive amounts of information in a given day and when we are constantly distracted, we don’t give our brains a chance to “dump” (select which memories to get rid of and which to file into short term or long-term memory). The brain therefore ends up dumping everything. A student can follow the content of a lesson while looking at their phone, but they probably won’t remember the content. This is the same for adults who try to “multitask.”

So, what should we do? Haidt’s advice is: don’t give smartphones to kids before the age of 14. I strongly agree. Every year I have one or two students whose parents either didn’t give them a phone or got them a flip phone. And I see a large difference between these students, and the ones who have smartphones. The former groups can focus better in class, have better grades, and seem happier. Haidt also recommends that phones be put away at night (though not in a child’s room). He encourages face-to-face interactions between children, including free play for younger children – and he advises teenagers to get a part-time job. 

In my experience, parents really need to monitor their student’s phone time. They don’t want their kids to get bored. In Dopamine Nation, Lembke remarks that boredom can be terrifying because “it forces us to come face-to-face with bigger questions of meaning and purpose.” But she says “boredom is also an opportunity for discovery and invention. It creates the space necessary for a new thought to form, without which we’re endlessly reacting to stimuli around us, rather than allowing ourselves to be within our lived experience.” 

Parents say they want to give their kid freedom. Ok, but that doesn’t mean you hand them a dangerous dopamine device with zero guardrails. There should have times at home when all devices are put away, as well as times when you do things out of the house as a family. If it is up to the kid to put the device away, they will almost certainly cheat. Even students who are mature for their age can’t handle the siren’s song of the phone; its melody is just too sweet. 

Parents don’t want their child to feel left out. But if you had to choose between a child feeling left out and one getting bullied online, you’d take the former. If there are no boundaries on phone use, you don’t get to choose the impact social media has on your kid; simply hoping for the best isn’t a strategy.

As a parent, you need to fight the battle, teach your child about potential harms, and maintain strict boundaries. If you’re a teacher, you need a system that prevents accessing their phones in class. I myself have such a system, and it largely works. Kids and adolescents need us to set boundaries for them because most aren’t mature enough to set boundaries themselves. If we do set healthy boundaries, we can start to reverse the damage done in our homes and schools.

If you liked this article, then do check out Liegent. They provide book summaries in both text and audio format, and have a number of relevant titles, including The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. Use promocode APORIA to get 10% off your sign up.

Adam Smeester is a writer and a secondary literature teacher.

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