Expert Says There’s ‘No Evidence’ Social Media Causes Teen Anxiety. Here’s What He Says Does. | #childpredator | #onlinepredator | #sextrafficing

What if all you ever thought about social media and childhood anxiety was wrong?That’s the viewpoint developmental psychologist Peter Gray lays out in his new book, Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety, which makes the case against phones and social media being culprits in the youth mental-health crisis.More from SheKnows“I can completely understand why people might intuitively think that it’s phones,” Gray says.Still, “there is essentially no evidence that there is a relationship between smartphone use and mental health among young people,” says the Boston College research professor of psychology and neuroscience. “There’s not even a meaningful correlation.”If this is a shock to hear, it’s likely because of what you’ve learned from ubiquitous social psychologist and New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, author of seminal book The Anxious Generation and cofounder — with Gray and free-range parenting advocate Lenore Skenazy — of the nonprofit Let Grow. Haidt believes strongly and speaks out frequently about the idea that phone- and social-media-based childhoods have prompted a global rise in teen anxiety, depression, and mental illness.”It’s not a bad hypothesis,” though there is “no evidence for it,” Gray says.Peter Gray, right, and the cover of his newest book, Restoring Childhood. (Photos courtesy of Penguin Random House)”If you look at how many studies [Haidt] refers to that actually are relevant to this question, it’s a tiny percentage of all the studies,” he says, noting that Haidt does not refer to any review studies or meta-analyses, but to “a handful of studies,” consistent with his hypothesis, which he claims are not convincing.”So, the book presents a distorted view of the research. There’s no question about that,” Gray says. “That’s why I reject that theory.” (It’s also why Gray left the Let Grow board following the publication of Haidt’s book.)Haidt did not respond to a request for comment on Gray’s stance from SheKnows.Gray says that once a hypothesis is developed and then repeated, and we are told “by a well-known scholar” that it’s true, the belief “takes on a moral stance.” That’s when the fear, he says, becomes “a moral panic,” just as those we’ve seen in the past with hand-wringing over everything from cheap novels in the Victorian era to television in the ’50s and video games not that long ago.What, then, is behind the rise in adolescent depression and anxiety?The problem is two-fold, Gray believes — starting with the loss of childhood independence due to modern, fear-based parenting. A Loss of Independence Children come into the world with strong drives to exert as much independence as they possibly can, he says. “So that’s a normal childhood: behaving increasingly independently of parental or other adult control, with every passing month and year of your life. And that’s what we have been preventing from happening in modern societies,” he explains, noting it’s a change that has been building since the 1950s.”What has happened over time is a kind of moral sense that children need adult protection all the time wherever they are,” says Gray. “You either have to be there with them as a parent, or there has to be some other responsible adult who is protecting your child from any possible danger.”If we falter in that at all, despite how healthy it may be for our kids, he says, “we feel we’re bad parents, and we get pegged as being bad parents, and might even be hauled into court as bad parents,” as happened recently to the Virginia mom who let her 5-year-old walk alone in their gated community.Gray is in strong agreement with Haidt (and Skenazy) about the impact of children being kept from independent, exploratory play.Where they differ, though, is with the pièce de resistance of Gray’s hypothesis: that the culprit behind the youth mental health crisis is none other than school. The Common Core Argument More specifically, Gray blames the removal of joy, creativity, and freedom from education by restrictive Common Core State Standards that were adopted in school systems across the country by 2011 — the very same period that Haidt points to because of the introduction of the iPhone 4 and the rise of Instagram use among teens.”I ask the question: what else happened beginning in 2010? School got much worse,” he says.School, says Gray, has always been far and away the leading cause of stress and anxiety for school age kids. “There’s no question about that. We don’t want to admit that, but that’s always been true, and the data has always been out there,” he says. “Almost nobody talks about it, but it’s clearly there.”But there was also always at least a chance that school could be something other than stressful. That’s because, for a long time, “teachers had considerable freedom to modify what they were doing based on their own compassion, their own wisdom, and what interests them. Because if it doesn’t interest you, you’re not likely to interest the kids,” says Gray. “And my view of education is that children learn when they’re intellectually engaged.”When you’re solely focused on improving test scores for fear of losing funding, he explains, nobody is engaged.”That dramatically changed schooling. It made it more stressful for everybody, including, of course, the kids,” says Gray, who recommends returning autonomy to teachers, bringing back long recess and lunch hours, fewer hours of instruction, less homework, and, if necessary, a shift towards homeschooling and alternative schools.”If school is already the leading source of distress, an increase in it is going to result in a nationwide increase in all measures of anxiety and depression and even suicide among school-age kids,” he says. “It should be a no-brainer that [school] should be the first place people would look.”Best of SheKnowsSign up for SheKnows’ Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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