You thought that the Gen Z kids were bad enough.
Humorless, entitled, doomsday-focused from the climate change, pandemically ill-educated, socially awkward — they’re scarier in many ways than even previous unfortunate chronological cohorts: the boring Men in Gray Flannel Suits, and, shudder, the Hippies, the male communal leaders of whom so often were merely Little Hitlers in shaggy disguise.
But things just got worse. It turns out that the Zers have turned their heads back to gaze upon the generation creeping up behind them, and what they see in the 14-and-unders is so scary they’re calling the Alphas positively feral, and they’re very, very scared.
Alpha is seen as so illiterate, from only knowing screens, and annihilation-focused that they make Gen Z look like pie-eyed optimists about our world.
“Beauty-store barbarian Sephora tweens stampeding through skin-care aisles and slathering their baby faces in retinol? Alphas, allegedly,” writes Sonja Sharp of the L.A. Times, a parent, if I am not mistaken, of an Alpha herself.
Scariest thing? Only that, worldwide, the Alphas are the largest generation in history.
So, what’s a humanity to do?
If you’re Jonathan Haidt, the NYU social psychologist and author of the new “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” you have a prescription.
It’s simple: you don’t let kids have smartphones. At least not till high school.
Flip phones, text and talk — sure. Parents have become used to having that leash on the little buggers. Haidt, who I believe has young children, too, goes right to the heart of the feral matter. About 15 years ago, “Many parents were relieved to find that a smartphone or tablet could keep a child happily engaged and quiet for hours. Was this safe? Nobody knew, but because everyone else was doing it, everyone just assumed that it must be okay.” Not.
Haidt’s publisher knows that the prescription is so scary and big that most of us, addicted as well to our smartphones, don’t want to hear it. In the publicity for the book, the answer to the “psychological damage of the phone-based life” is only described as “four simple rules,” not as what it really is: not giving children smartphones. Plus, what many of us have been saying for decades: restoring “play-based childhoods” in the great outdoors, or at least on the city streets and sidewalks, nothing electronic involved.
I’m going to tie this all into an entirely related story released last week. “Angst among youth knocks US out of top 20 in the World Happiness Report,” went the headline on the New York Times version.
For the first time since the annual report began publishing in 2012, “the United States fell out of the Top 20 and dropped to 23rd, pushed down by cratering attitudes of Americans under 30,” the story said about the report that ranks Finland first.
“Among the 143 countries surveyed, the United States ranked 10th for people 60 and older, but 62nd for people under 30,” Sopan Deb reports.
So not as unhappy as the youth of Afghanistan, who have good reason to be the unhappiest on Earth. But pretty damn mopey nonetheless.
Problem I see here is, also take away the phones from let’s say all your Gen Zers and your younger Millennials as well, you think there’s going to be an outbreak of great happiness, at least at first? I don’t want to be around the house, or the classroom or workplace, when that great experiment is tried. So I’m just going to step outside for a little bit. Want to get bucked up with a pep talk or maybe a Dad joke or two, young fella? You know where to find me.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.