Smartphones were introduced in 2007 but did not reach current capabilities until around 2012. These provide 24-hour internet access, online video games, selfie-based social media, news (real and fake) and all kinds of applications designed to beguile adolescents. Today, 98% of the Gen-Z cohort own smart phones.
Teens are now spending 6 to 8 hours per day looking at screens. This includes television, which in the 1990s was 2-3 hours per day, but watching TV is now decreasing steadily. The screen-time statistic does not include school work.
Due to their portability, phones constitute the bulk of the viewing time. There are messaging apps (for example, WhatsApp), social media apps (Twitter, Instagram), and news sites, to mention a few. These come with “alerts,” and the average teen receives 192 of them per day. This means the phone buzzes on average every five minutes.
Gen-Zers spend less time in in-person contact with friends. In 2010, they spent about 130 minutes per day with friends; in 2020, this dropped to 45 minutes.
The%age of students getting less than seven hours of sleep per day in 2020 rose dramatically from 2010: almost 50% for girls and 40% for boys.
If deprived of their phones, many adolescents display classic symptoms of addiction — irritability, anxiety, and insomnia.
In 2008, the prevalence of an anxiety disorder among college students was 10%. In 2020, it was 14%. The age group from 18 to 25 (Gen-Zers) suffered the most: the increase was 139%.
The prevalence of depression among teens, fairly steady at about 13% for girls and 5% for boys before 2010, increased to about 29% and 11%, respectively, in 2021.
And the big one, suicide rates, saw an increase of 91% for boys in 2019 compared to 2010. For girls, the rates increased by 167% over the same time period.
The inflection point on all the cited data was 2010, the year the negative statistics for those Gen-Z kids started to go the wrong way. So what happened in 2010?
In The Anxious Generation published in 2024 (the source of all the date from above), Jonathan Haidt lays out a grand hypothesis. All of the negative trends cited correlate with cellphone usage.
Governor Pritzker has recently proposed the banning of cellphones in schools. Maybe he is on to something.
James Whalen MD
Oak Park
