Opinion Today: How does Gen Z feel about growing up with social media?

Not great.

View in browser|nytimes.com September 19, 2024 By Aaron Retica Editor at Large, Opinion Critics have dismissed worries about the potentially pernicious effects of smartphones and social media on children, especially teenagers, as a "moral panic" or even a function of "rising hysteria." Maybe so. We are always fearful of new technologies. But anyone who has tried to get a teenager to hand over her phone when she didn't want to (I am not, of course, speaking from personal experience) knows that the relationship between kids and phones can often look and feel like addiction. How do the people who grew up most deeply enmeshed in these technologies, now the adults of Gen Z, see it? Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who has spent years doing research on how smartphones and social media affect our lives and mental health, and Will Johnson of the Harris Poll put together a survey to ask that question. The results? Let's just say, "Gen Z Has Regrets." "Forty-five percent of Gen Z-ers," Haidt and Johnson write, "report that they 'would not or will not allow my child to have a smartphone before reaching high school age.' " (Good luck with that, Gen Z.) Perhaps most astonishingly, 47 percent of Gen Z-ers said that they wished TikTok had never been invented; 50 percent said the same about X/Twitter. (You can see all this and more in the wonderful graphics produced by my colleague Aileen Clarke). Haidt and Johnson are not filled with despair on this subject, and neither is Gen Z. But they all have strong feelings about social media in particular. Sixty percent of Gen Z-ers "say it has a negative impact" on society, and while "52 percent of the total sample say social media has benefited their lives" (a welcome counterpoint to all the gloom), "29 percent say it has hurt them personally." Twenty-nine percent of Gen Z is millions of people. 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