Almost half of British teenagers say they feel addicted to social media, according to a recent report. And those who deny it are probably, well, in denial. Or so it might be supposed, going by the latest feverish outbreak of alarm over teen and pre-teen smartphone use.

Have you noticed the sheer scale of it? It’s been everywhere in the last few months. The  on-going Millennium Cohort Study was an early frontrunner, foregrounding the self-assessed addiction crisis noted above. Since then there has been a steady drumbeat of demands for a ban on mobile phone use in schools, and even for younger teenagers and pre-teens to be barred entirely from having smartphones.

Parents’ worries have been all over the news and opinion pieces. They are said to be anxious over their kids’ phone obsession  and alarmed by the content to which they are exposed.

Is this a real problem or a baseless “moral panic” of the familiar threat-to-youth variety? Every generation in my lifetime has agonised over such alleged threats, only to calm down after a while and realise it was all a fuss over nothing. In the 1950s it was horror comics; by the 1980s it was video “nasties”. Media developments have figured strongly, triggering panic, a theme continuing into the internet age.

One reason for doubting just how much parents are really worried, as opposed to what the lurid doom mongering we see in the news is telling us, is to take a glance at the behaviour of parents themselves. In any café or pub you will see them with their eyes glued to a screen, often totally ignoring toddlers who are begging for some attention! And giving this revealing phenomenon its own attention has been Dame Rachel de Souza, Children’s Commissioner for England. Parents must address their own phone addictions before banning kids, she told MPs recently, pointing out that some parents scroll at night in front of families in “a totally uncontrolled way”.

Note, however, that the good dame is not dispelling any panic there might be. On the contrary, she endorses the addiction theme, saying many parents need to behave more responsibly and that young people themselves were in favour of it. Young people, she said, had told the Commissioner’s Office that they want “boundaries around screen time” and they want their parents to take away their phones before bed.

Really? Is this just what a handful of goody-goody kids have been saying to win Brownie points? Well, there’s that Millennium Cohort Study as confirmation, which would have been anonymous, so no Brownie points to be won there. Plus, this was a large study (of over seven thousand 17-year-olds) with statistical credibility. And there’s much more. A big piece in The Times was entirely given over to youth views on phone use, most of them expressing clear anxieties.

There was “George”, for instance, age 16. He goes to a performing arts school, where everyone knows “all you need is one video to go viral on social media and you can be making money out of it”. But even this apparently sophisticated youngster says, “My parents take my phone away at 10pm every night. Deep down, I know that’s what’s best for me”. Does he have a point? Or has he been gaslit by authority?

“Carolina”, 17 – quite elderly by MAP standards! – pinpoints two recurring themes, FOMO and doomscrolling: “You do feel a pressure to have a phone and social media because people my age only use Snapchat to communicate, so if you don’t have it you don’t get invited to group chats or invited to parties as much…. Instagram is my most used app. I deleted TikTok before Christmas because I couldn’t control myself. It’s impossible to stop doomscrolling.” Sure, she eventually self-deleted TikTok. Others might not.

If even older teenagers such as these two are worried, maybe there is something to worry about. While their concerns are focused on obsessive use, adults are more inclined to home in on allegedly  harmful content. Some of it we can dismiss without too much agonising – such as that old favourite, “sexualisation” of the young. We, the well-versed heretics at HTOC, will not be clutching our collective pearls in horror over kids making their own sexy TikToks. Indeed, these youthful expressions of agency, artistry, and, yes, sexuality, were celebrated here a couple of years ago by guest blogger Zen Thinker.

But we would have to be blind not to see a dark downside, some aspects of which are sexual, some not. For instance, “catfishing” is no urban myth. The term, which means using a fake identity online for any nefarious purposes, includes blackmail in which the victim is encouraged, or in legal language “incited”, to upload sexual images of themselves online. These are then used as a threat: send more images, and make them more explicit, or the ones I already have will be posted to your social media.

We need little imagination to understand how devastating this could be. After a recent tragic case, though, we do not need to be left wondering. A 12-year-old girl killed herself after being blackmailed in this way. The perpetrator has pleaded guilty to her manslaughter.

We would need to be blind, also, to be unaware of websites that encourage troubled teens to harm themselves in a whole bunch of awful ways, including a morbid focus on weight reduction (anorexia), self-cutting, and even the promotion of suicide. The fact that youngsters are driven in substantial numbers to resort to such sites tells us something is deeply amiss, of which smartphone internet access might be merely a symptom but perhaps also a cause as well.

The latter view is taken by the famed social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has dug up plenty of evidence to show that youth mental health has nosedived spectacularly in the last 15 years or so – which corresponds very closely to the period during which smartphones have been available to teens and pre-teens. Rates of teenage feelings of isolation, loneliness, self-harm and attempted suicide rose in the UK and widely elsewhere, as reported by Helen Rumbelow for The Times in her review of Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Children is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

Haidt himself has contributed a whopping 8,000-word piece for The Atlantic that captures the main themes of the book – an article I have read so you don’t have to, although it is interesting and recommended. The “great rewiring” of his book’s sub-title is meant to be taken fairly literally (in terms of effects on children’s neurological development), but more broadly it refers to the short period from 2010 to 2015 in which, he contends, “childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development”, with smartphones playing a massive role in what has been a social disaster.

Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States – fairly stable in the 2000s – rose by more than 50% in many studies from 2010 to 2019, he reports. The suicide rate rose 48% for adolescents aged 10-19. For girls ages 10-14, it rose 131%. Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. Haidt adds that surveys show members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations. As if all that were not bad enough, from 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70%, to more than one in five.

So, what is to be done? It’s a tough one for those of us with a firm commitment to acknowledging that child “protection” has been massively overdone for the best part of half a century, and that the last thing kids need is yet more repressive control over their lives, whether by schools, parents, or the law of the land. The knee-jerk response, the authoritarian impulse, to perceived problems is invariably to look for what can be banned.

Knees have duly been jerking like crazy in recent weeks. In a climate that has included entirely understandable lobbying from the parents of prominent child victims of online content, along with extensive media coverage, the UK government issued new guidelines calling for a ban on the use of smartphones by kids at school. One thing this failed to recognise was that most schools have a ban in place already, albeit often more honoured in the breach than in the enforcement: kids and their phones are not easily parted. Also, government efforts to force the big tech companies to stop harmful content appearing online have been half-hearted, partly for fear of running up against substantial freedom of expression issues, and partly because falling foul of the tech titans could put Britain at an economic disadvantage: money talks. So that line of attack may have only very limited potential.

Haidt’s focus is rather different, and may surprise those who are aware of an earlier book of his, The Coddling of the American Mind. Among much else, he and co-author Greg Lukianoff criticised the rise of over-protective “fearful parenting” and the decline of children’s unsupervised play. He sees a connection to them growing into “snowflake” students who need “safe spaces”, and excessively risk-averse adults, unwilling to be boldly enterprising. No wonder, then, that he has worked with Lenore Skenazy, author of the refreshingly pro-liberation book Free-Range Kids and custodian of its associated website.

And yet, in seeming contradiction of their anti-“coddling” stance, Haidt and Skenazy are both now promoting a restrictive approach to smartphone use. Is this inconsistent? Does it make sense? Well, let’s look briefly at the rationale. To do so, we need to recall what those teenagers, “George” and “Carolina”, were telling us earlier. Both of them – and presumably many others who consider themselves “addicted” to social media, would actually welcome the introduction of some sort of collective restriction on the use of social media. Remember that word “collective”. It’s important. Haidt even gives details of a psychology experiment that shows they would even pay to make it happen:

Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes – 58% for each app.

Haidt calls it a classic collective action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. So, rather than asking individual youngsters to shun social media use, Haidt suggests collective action is necessary, and he recommends such action on four fronts that he feels could realistically be introduced at community level: No smartphones before age 14. No social media before 16. Phone‐free schools. That’s the first three. So far, so bad. Sounds grim and authoritarian, right? Just the same as the primitive knee-jerk reaction: ban it, ban it, ban it!

But it’s number four that’s the biggy. Haidt says kids should have: More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. Addressing parents’ fears over allowing this, he wisely says, “Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a nine-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly.”

Now we are talking! This is the point at which we can begin to see why the famously pro-freedom Skenazy would be cheerleading a guy like Haidt with his at least partially restrictive approach. He is talking about younger kids above, but the principle extends to teenagers: don’t infantilise them. Let them do as much stuff independently as possible. They need their own space in which to grow and mature.

In an article last week backing Haidt’s approach, Skenazy quoted him on his big fourth recommendation: “It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.”

Exactly! All stick no carrot is never going to work. As Skenazy adds, “To open the world, just open the door. Tell the kids to be home by supper.”

NAMBLA LOSES LAST STEADFAST VETERAN

Many heretics here will by now be aware of the sad death last month of NAMBLA legend and my good friend Peter Melzer, who used to write under the name Peter Herman (including as a guest blogger for HTOC) and for many years steadfastly kept NAMBLA’s flag flying long after its other key activists had bitten the dust or moved on.

The news was broken briefly on BoyChat on 10 February, followed by a fuller obituary there a couple of days later. Peter, who had been diagnosed with an advanced stage of pancreatic cancer late last year, died at his New York, home overlooking the Hudson River on 9 February at age 83. Friends were there at the time.

I was not among them as an ocean separated us, but on this side of “the pond” we had met many times over the course of a quarter century or so, after I first encountered him on one of his regular trips to Europe in connection with his MAP activism. That would have been in Munich, as I recall, at an IPCE meeting in the late 1990s, followed in the early years of the new millennium by others in the Netherlands and Denmark.

We became good friends over time and he was a house guest of mine in northern England a number of times, in the course of which we went hiking together in the mountains. This was an outdoor pursuit we both loved, but well into his late 70s Peter, unlike me, enjoyed winter skiing holidays and loved to keep in touch with youngsters (not literally, I think, but socially) through kayaking with them on the Hudson.

Peter was “steadfast”, as noted above, in keeping NAMBLA going in the teeth of intense, never-ending public hostility and eventual disownment by the wider gay community out of which it had been born, as the mainstream of the movement opted for a more “respectable” assimilationist political strategy.

I knew him as steadfast in his personal dealings too. I will be ever in his debt as a staunch, reliable supporter and sponsor of my own work. You knew you could always rely on Peter. He was a man of integrity.

An amusing (to me at least) flipside is that steadfastness also went along with being downright stubborn and cantankerous at times. I found it lovable; but some, it has to be said, found it literally insufferable. A classic occasion was an IPCE conference in Copenhagen, I think it was, chaired, in the absence of the usual host Dr Frans Gieles, by another guy, let’s call him Mr X. Peter for some reason got into an alpha male, locked horns battle with a guest speaker. Neither of them would let go, in a “robust” exchange that seemed set to go on forever. And what neither of them were aware of was that Mr X was feeling the strain, being a sensitive “highly strung” type with Asperger’s. Unable to cope, he suddenly bolted out of his chair and ran screaming from the room!

It never got that bad for me, but Peter could certainly be exasperating!

Perhaps Peter’s stubborn streak owes something to the tough circumstances of his childhood, from which he was a survivor in a far more meaningful way than some other so-called survivors we hear about these days. Born in Brussels on 16 April 1940, his first language would be French and he would be known as “Pierre” until his high school years in the US. His mother, Regina (“Gina”) , was born in Vienna and had a good job there, but with the rise of the Nazis and Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 it was wise for Jewish families, including the Melzers, to leave the country. So Gina and her husband Herman (whose name was presumably the inspiration for Peter’s later pen name) went to Belgium, where work was scarce for refugees and times were hard.

Worse still, a month after Peter’s birth, the German occupation of Belgium began and the lives of any Jews were put in jeopardy there as well. Sure enough, at some time during Peter’s infancy his father was arrested by the Nazis; after being taken to France and made to undertake forced labour there he was eventually sent to Auschwitz death camp, where he met his fate in the Holocaust.

In 1942, two-year-old Peter had whooping cough. Gina, afraid her son’s illness would attract too much attention, had him hospitalised, partly to avoid detection as part of a Jewish family. Peter was then separated from her, starting a new life in Anderlecht in the none-too-tender care of a stern Belgian woman paid to harbour Jews, including a couple of other boys. And there he stayed for two and a half years until the Allied forces liberated Belgium, when his mother was at last able to retrieve him.

Young “Pierre”, who was an only child, and Gina would remain in Belgium until 1951 when, through the assistance of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) in New York City, they were able to emigrate to America, their ship docking in Hoboken, New Jersey on 31 July.* By this time he of course spoke fluent French, and also German, like his parents, but English would now have to be mastered.

And so it was. As a clever, artistic boy, also with an aptitude for science, “Pierre” reinvented himself as Peter, an American, able to fit in and do well enough at school to go to City College of New York (part of CUNY, the City University of New York) and graduate with a degree in physics. Then he went into teaching, after a while becoming a physics teacher at The Bronx High School of Science, New York, where he taught for many years (1968 to 1992), serving as a classroom teacher for 31 years in all.

It should be understood that “Bronx Sci” was no ordinary school. It has produced the most Nobel laureates in science of any secondary school in the world (even one would be very rare, of course). Bronx Science alumni have also won two Turing Awards, effectively the Nobel Prize in computer science; six National Medals of Science, the highest scientific honour of the United States; and nine Pulitzer Prizes. To teach there was obviously a huge distinction in itself.

All the more tragic, then, that Peter eventually lost his job there not for any misdemeanour or shortcomings as a teacher – on the contrary, he won numerous teaching commendations – but because his membership of NAMBLA, his “paedophilia”, and his BL activism, were exposed in the media. Even The New York Times ran a sympathetic editorial, on 9 October 1993, saying “three decades of teaching without complaint and an expressed willingness to follow societal norms in his role as teacher provide no basis for denying Mr. Melzer his civil rights”.

But it was deemed he had to go. Characteristically, Peter mounted a stubborn legal campaign to keep his teaching post. This was partially successful: an appellate court ruled that he could not be fired simply on the basic of his paedophilic identity, nor what he chose to do lawfully in his time outside of his teaching duties. He could, however, be moved out of the classroom. And so it was, that Peter kept (and increased) his salary for another 10 years, earning a good pension, but having to work outside the classroom, so he landed on his feet financially. Although he lost the job he loved, he was – ironically – paid substantial sums to do virtually nothing teaching related, and left with ample time for BL / NAMBLA activism. Provocatively, one could argue that he was effectively paid to do NAMBLA work. Further, it has been suggested on good authority that his estate will include a substantial bequest to the furtherance of MAP-related scholarship. Arguably, it is stubborn Peter who will have the last laugh.

* By a strange coincidence, I also found myself, at the age of six, aboard a ship with my mother bound for New Jersey in 1951, just a few months after Peter. But we had left with my father from Southampton, England. He was travelling to take up a good job in the state, taking his family with him. Very different circumstances to Peter’s.