Imagination is one of God’s great gifts to humanity. It is essential to any good work. We would never begin any task without imagining that its completion will, somehow, either make life better for us or serve God and others.
As children, we all imagined what our future would be. As we age, we tend to spend less time in the realms of imagination, but we never stop trying to improve our situations by making plans for the future. However, pocket-sized electronic devices are now kidnapping children’s imaginations.
Imagination vs. Hallucination
A recent article in the New York Post notes this trend should be a cause of great concern. The headline sums this up succinctly. “Smartphone Use Leads to Hallucinations, Detachment from Reality, Aggression in Teens as Young as Thirteen: Study.” Sapien Labs produced the study titled “The Youth Mind: Rising Aggression and Anger.”
Sapien started with a well-known condition – that ten to eighteen-year-olds have shown increased rates of both depression and suicide over the last two decades. Furthermore, the situation is worse for young women than for young men. Indeed, most young people get smartphones between the ages of ten and thirteen.
Many parents, teachers, doctors and scientists have long suspected a connection between the two sets of facts. However, the exact connection and how it becomes established in some but not others is still largely unknown.
New Evidence and Startling Conclusions
Attempting to answer these concerns, Sapien assembled a group of 10,475 “Internet-enabled adolescents in the United States and India.” The study highlighted three trends.
- Smartphone use causes a “generational decline” in mental health. Those aged 13 to 17 are more affected by it than those aged 18 to 24, who are, in turn, more affected than those aged 25 to 34.
- In common with the older brackets, the effects on those aged 13 to 17 include sadness and anxiety. However, the younger subjects increasingly suffer detachment from reality and are more aggressive. They also experience hallucinations at a significantly higher rate than their elders.
- This generational decline can “in a large part be attributed to the increasingly younger age at which children are now getting a smartphone.” This effect is present in both sexes but is more acute in females.
Gradual Deterioration
The generational decline is easy to explain. The dangers of smartphone use rise dramatically as the age of regular users decreases. Those who were adults when the cellular phone was introduced – about 1992 – may use the devices, but their brains’ processes matured long before they first used a smartphone (circa 2007). Therefore, any mental harm is relatively slight.
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On the other hand, today’s thirteen-year-olds were born in 2011 or 2012. They never lived in a world where smartphones were uncommon, even in the poorest homes.
Measurable Damage
The mental damage young people face is no mystery to Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, a clinical psychologist now practicing in Austin, Texas. He has no trouble linking smartphones to declines in mental health. Almost a decade ago, he wrote Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids – and How to Break the Trance.
When contacted by the New York Post, Dr. Kardaras’s assessment was chilling. “People don’t fully appreciate that hyper-real and hyper-immersive screen experiences can blur reality at key stages of development. [The] digital world can compromise [children’s] ability to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not. Screen time essentially acts as a toxin that stunts both brain development and social development. The younger a kid is when given a device, the higher the likelihood of mental health issues later on.”
Even though new scientific studies confirm the harms, there are few signs that smartphone use among the young will decline significantly anytime soon. Fortunately, schools are finally moving to effectively prohibit the use of the devices during the school day. However, students spend a relatively small amount of time in school compared to the hours they spend on their smartphones at home or with friends. This problem isn’t going away any time soon.
The Deadly Connection
Moreover, a separate study by the U.S. Government’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) affirmed the dramatic nature of Sapien’s third trend.
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“According to new CDC data released today [February 13, 2023], nearly 3 in 5 (57%) U.S. teen girls felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021—double that of boys, representing a nearly 60% increase and the highest level reported over the past decade.”
In that study, the CDC did not specifically include smartphone use as a cause of this deteriorating situation. However, the coincidence between the Sapien findings and those of the CDC is too significant to be ignored.
No one can doubt that smartphones can provide literal lifelines in cases of emergency, help us stay connected to relatives and friends and allow users to locate massive amounts of information in seconds. They have largely replaced landline telephones, fax machines and telegrams.
However, they have also become a kind of social narcotic. It is time to wake America’s children from their electronically-induced stupor. It is time to ransom the kidnapped imaginations of countless children.
Photo Credit: © JackF– stock.adobe.com