🇬🇧 Хватит захламлять ленту! Твой идеальный English Hub здесь.

Мы перерыли весь Telegram и упаковали только топовый контент по английскому языку в одну папку. Больше никакого спама — только польза🔥

В этой подборке:
— Сленг, который реально используют в 2026 году.
— Удобные шпаргалки по грамматике и лексике.
— Погружение в менталитет англоязычных стран.
— Твой «билет» в мир карьеры без границ.

Забирай коллекцию, пока ссылка активна👇

СОХРАНИТЬ ПОДБОРКУ

This shift in the social landscape of childhood and adolescence, often referred to as the “Great Rewiring of Childhood,” has had a significant impact on the mental health of Gen Z. As their social lives have increasingly moved online through the constant access to social media, video gaming, and other internet activities, the first generation of teens in the United States to go through adolescence with this level of connectivity has become more anxious, depressed, and suicidal than any generation recorded before them. This troubling trend is not limited to the US; studies across Canada, the UK, and the Nordic states have reported similar findings, suggesting that this is a global phenomenon.

While other factors, such as anxiety surrounding global issues like climate change, may also contribute to the mental health outcomes of Gen Z, the ubiquity of smartphone usage and the corresponding changes in social dynamics appear to be the primary drivers behind this tidal wave of mental illness. As we grapple with the implications of this crisis, it’s clear that a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between technology, social interaction, and adolescent development is needed to develop effective strategies for supporting the mental health of our youth.

Play-based childhoods, not phone-based childhoods, promote healthy development
Why has the introduction of the smartphone been so detrimental to children’s and adolescents’ mental health? The answer may lie not just in what the smartphone gives them access to – social media, photo filters, addictive games, and more – but in what time spent on a smartphone takes away from them. Specifically, the introduction of the smartphone has eroded the traditional play-based childhood, with far-reaching consequences for the mental well-being of Generation Z.

Humans have a longer childhood than any other mammal, and there’s a good reason for this. The slower pace of human development allows the brain to undergo a critical process of synaptic pruning, where the connections that are used frequently are strengthened while those that are used rarely fade away. This process of pattern and habit formation is evolutionarily designed to occur through three key areas: free play, attunement, and social learning. Smartphones have enticed children into a virtual world, where it’s challenging to fully explore these three critical functionalities.

Through unstructured, undirected play, children learn to cooperate with each other, assess risks, form friendships, and exercise their imagination. A phone-based childhood, in contrast, is necessarily structured – the content and interactions have been designed by teams of experts. This structured virtual environment can’t offer the same developmental opportunities as the physical world of free play.

Attunement, or the art of connecting with others, is another crucial aspect of child development. From a young age, children learn to read emotional cues, take turns, and build social bonds through synchronous interactions with their caregivers and peers. These interactions are vital for developing emotional self-regulation and social skills. By 2014, a third of preteen girls reported spending roughly 20 hours a week on social media, potentially losing valuable opportunities for attunement.

Social learning, the process by which children emulate effective behaviors and social strategies from role models, is also impacted by the rise of smartphones and social media. While social media doesn’t take away children’s and teens’ opportunities for social learning, it turbocharges them. Children can now identify behaviors to emulate through metric systems, such as the number of likes and engagement on posts. But the role models they choose to emulate may display behaviors or embody values that are inappropriate, or that set impossible standards for children to live up to rather than organically identifying good role models in their communities.

Third, there’s attention fragmentation. The average teen receives eleven notifications per waking hour on their smartphone, with heavy users potentially experiencing one notification per minute of every waking hour. Smartphones and social media are designed to pull the user’s attention away from whatever they are doing, providing a constant stream of notifications and the accompanying dopamine hits. This fragmentation of attention can compromise an individual’s ability to focus deeply on a task or engage in slower, more reflective modes of thinking. Even the mere presence of a phone in the room has been shown to impede a teen’s ability to focus on a task! This continual access to smartphones during a crucial period of brain development can mean that some users’ capacity for focus and attention never fully matures, as evidenced by the upward trend in ADHD diagnoses. Not surprisingly, studies show that individuals with ADHD often spend above-average amounts of time online and on their smartphones.

Finally, let’s discuss addiction. Smartphones and the apps that live on them are deliberately designed to be habit-forming and addictive. Preteens and teens, with their more plastic brains, are particularly vulnerable to developing these addictions. Smartphones and social media employ advanced behavioral techniques to create compulsive habits in users – the activation of external triggers, like notifications, is paired with the promise of variable rewards, such as likes or comments. This variability actually makes the experience more addictive, as users find themselves unable to resist the urge to seek out these rewards, even in the absence of the initial trigger. The dopamine rush that users experience when indulging their addiction is countered by the symptoms of withdrawal, including dysphoria, irritability, insomnia, and anxiety, that occur when the addiction can’t be satisfied.
Taken together, these four core harms inflicted by smartphones – social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction – have set the stage for the surge in mental disorders we’re seeing among children and adolescents.

The negative impacts of smartphones and social media can be curbed
Many adults who care for children and teens in some capacity are already well aware of the deleterious impact that smartphone use is having on this group’s mental and social well-being. The question then becomes, What can be done to address this pressing issue and support the healthy development of young people in the digital age?

To achieve a lasting, positive transformation, structural changes need to occur at the societal level. In the United States, governments have taken a paradoxical approach to protecting children – zealously enforcing vague “child neglect” laws to overprotect them in the physical world while underprotecting them in the virtual realm. Governments should take proactive steps to address this imbalance, such as passing laws that compel online companies, including social media and gaming platforms, to treat underage users with an extra duty of care. The age of “internet adulthood” should be raised to 16, recognizing the unique vulnerabilities of adolescents. At the same time, governments should institute more opportunities for free play and recess in the school system, and narrow neglect laws so parents can legally allow their children to engage in unsupervised play.

Tech companies, which have demonstrated remarkable ingenuity in creating habit-forming products, should now turn that same level of innovation toward ensuring the safety and well-being of children online. This could involve developing better age verification methods and far stricter options for parental control over digital content and device usage.

While structural change is necessary, it may be slow in coming. In the meantime, there are steps that parents and caregivers can take to protect children and promote healthy development.

Essentially, children of all ages need less, and better, experience with screens – and more, and better, experience in the real world. So from the ages of zero to five, parents can limit screen time and maximize opportunities for free, unstructured play. While parent-child play is a wonderful connecting experience and provides educational development, children also need to engage in play with other children, ideally of a wide range of ages, to develop essential social and problem-solving skills.

As children enter elementary school, parents can encourage independence, such as walking to school or the local shops on their own. After-school time should be left mostly free for unstructured play, with limited structured activities. Families in the area can collaborate to create safe spaces for children to engage in free play while adhering to strict limits on screen time – for instance, no more than two hours per day – and utilizing rigorous parental controls and content filters on all devices in the home.

For preteens and teens, the focus should be on developing competence and self-efficacy through mastering modes of transportation, such as cycling or public transit; taking on more responsibilities at home, like cooking meals; and engaging with the real world through part-time jobs, camping trips with friends, and other independent experiences. Around the age of 16, parents can consider transitioning their child to a smartphone and active social media accounts – but they should maintain family rules about screen use and monitor for signs of addiction and mental or emotional distress.

At a minimum, the independence and competence that children are encouraged to develop in the real world should match – if not surpass – the autonomy they’re given in the virtual world. By striking this balance, parents and caregivers can mitigate the harmful impacts of excessive smartphone use and help their kids become healthier, happier individuals.

Final summary
The widespread adoption of smartphones has been the primary driver behind the dramatic surge in mental health challenges facing Gen Z. This is due to the ways in which smartphones have eroded the traditional play-based childhood and deprived young people of the essential experiences that foster healthy development. By limiting screen time, maximizing opportunities for unstructured play, and encouraging independence in the real world, parents and caregivers can help nurture the healthy development of young people in the digital age.