my response to the New Yorker article "Can We Get Kids Off Smartphones?" by Jessica winter

I strongly agree with the article’s findings that smartphones are dangerous for teens. 
N.Y.U professor Jonathan Haidt wrote “People born in and after 1996 were different, psychologically, from those who had been born just a few years earlier.” From childhood, Haidt suggests, they suffer from a weak “psychological immune system—the ability of a child to handle, process, and get past frustrations, minor accidents, teasing, exclusion, perceived injustices, and normal conflicts without falling prey to hours or days of inner turmoil.” This is only the introduction of the text.
By the late 2000s and early 2010s, people began to notice that children were gradually spending less time engaged in outdoor or unstructured activities. Parents have found new concerns for their children’s safety, which can be referred to as “safetyism.” Parents have been led to protect their children, maybe more than needed. Those who have childhoods insufficient of free play are proven to take less risks, are worse at reading social cues, resolving conflicts, and making friends. Free play that is unmonitored or improvisational serves as exposure therapy for every child. 
“The suburban or small-town nine-year-old who, a generation before, would have been running around outside with the other neighborhood kids all afternoon is now indoors, staring at her phone.”
The generation that grew up with access to smartphones is now called the “Anxious Generation.” The immunosuppression caused by the use of them has increased proportions of teens and young adults who are more avoidant and nervous. There are studies that show the use of social media may influence both anxiety and depression, especially among girls, people of color, and LGBTQ+. “Prevalence inflation,” two University of Oxford researchers describe, is when people mistake normal discomfort and stress as signs of a serious disorder. Through the use of social media, children interpret their levels of anxiousness as a symptom of mental illness. What most of these adolescents are experiencing, which comes natural, is exacerbated much further. These children have become behaviorally avoidant. 
The list could go on. The early access to smartphones and social media has been proven to lead children to suffer from a weaker psychological immune system. Children are spending too much time indoors on their cellphones and their parents have begun to guard them exceedingly. Exposure therapy is becoming absent in the younger generation. It is a fact that smartphones are destructively changing our generation and those to come.