Recently, I attended a talk by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, organised by the grassroots parent group that’s sprouting up in the UK, ‘Smartphone free childhood’. Haidt’s new book, ‘The anxious generation’ is set to release on March 26th 2024, and I’ll be reading it with interest. Packed with the most recent research on the impact of the widespread use of smartphones and social media, Haidt focuses on the current adolescent generation, who are growing up as smartphone and social media ‘digital natives’.
As a psychotherapist who has worked with adolescents in various settings for years, it’s hard to ignore the impact of smartphones and social media. This is the ‘cultural elephant in the room for this generation’s adolescents’, as Peter Cosgrove, a consultant in paediatric emergency medicine, recently suggested to me.