Read Text I below and answer the question that
follow it.
Text I
Jonathan Haidt: How to make the 'anxious generation' happy
again
Academics researching wellbeing have for a long time almost
unanimously agreed on one thing: over the typical lifetime,
happiness tends to follow a U-shaped curve, peaking at 30,
plummeting at age 50, before spiking again after 70. It’s a pattern
replicated using data going back as far as the 1970s in almost 150
countries.
But around 2011, researchers noticed an astonishing reversal in
this trend. “This empirical regularity has been replaced by a
monotonic decrease in ill-being by age,” they reported in an
NBER working paper. In plain English, younger people today are
unhappier, both compared to previous generations and to their
older peers. Or, to quote the title of the most recent book from
Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York
University, they are the anxious generation […].
Today, rather than playing with their friends, kids stay at home
on their devices. Instead of hearing chatter and laughter in the
corridor of schools, we hear the gentle tapping of screens. The
social isolation many of us experienced during pandemic-induced
lockdowns was nothing new for children, Haidt said. “They began
social distancing as soon as they got smartphones.”
The good news for parents is that, while this trend is worrying, it
is not inevitable. There are things we can do. “We can turn this
around with four new norms,” Haidt proposed.
The first norm is a commitment to not give our children a
smartphone until they are at least 14. “Give them a flip-phone if
you want to, so they can call and text you,” he said. “But don’t
give the entire world access to your child.” The second is to not
allow our children to use social media until they are at least 16.
“Social media is wildly inappropriate for children — you have
strangers trying to talk to them, cyberbullying, explosive drama.”
The third norm is that schools should be a phone-free
environment. “All schools need to be phone free from bell to bell
— from the morning when kids arrive to the end when they
leave,” Haidt explained.
And finally, the fourth norm involves going back to a time where
parents felt more comfortable letting their kids walk to the shops
or play outside with friends. “The fourth norm is to give them
much more independence in the real world,” he said. “Ultimately,
our mission is to restore childhood: the kind of wonderful, fun,
exciting childhood we all had, which was full of conflicts, failures,
exploration, adventure, risk-taking, thrills and all those emotions
that you experienced not with your parents, but when you were
out, away from your secure home base.”
Adapted from https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/jonathan-haidt-digitaltechnology-social-media-childhood/
When the author argues that the trend “is not inevitable” (4
th
paragraph), he means that it is
