Psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book shows that since 2010 American adolescents have experienced a profound, dramatic mental health crisis. 

Their anxiety and depression rates are way up. Preteens and teenagers are more likely to be withdrawn, isolated and, by choice, homebound and unprepared for the outside world rather than being eager to confront it.

We are raising a generation of fearful, anxious, overly protected isolated children.

Haidt’s book is so compelling because it’s not some kind of “kids these days!” screed. The research is solid and clear.

Social media is the driver of this dramatic change. We have, Haidt says, moved from a play-based culture to a phone-based culture. And not just in the U.S. but in diverse countries around the world.

Play? So what? Play is such a diminishing word for such an extraordinarily vital concept.   

Play isn’t “kid stuff,” as in “Will you please stop with that kid stuff already!”

Play is much more. It’s the foundation for human development and stays vital throughout adulthood.

To help you appreciate this and keep me from sounding like I’m giving a Ted Talk, let’s make a brief detour before taking a closer look at Haidt’s argument.

Peter Gray fell off his bike.

Don’t worry about finding the school nurse and calling his mom. Gray is an 80-year-old psychologist who recently broke his pelvis when he fell off his bicycle while on his regular trail ride in the woods near his home.

As he put it, because of the injury “I became a 2-year-old.”

But he did not mean that in a boo-hoo-look-how-helpless sort of way, like “Oh God, Uncle has become like a 2-year-old!”

Gray, whose specialty is the study of play, was delighted by this comparison because he was like a kid again in the best ways. He was adventurous, taking chances, scaring himself then rewarding himself, stumbling to be as independent as possible, looking for new adventures. 

He experienced the “frustrations and joys I see in the faces of toddlers,” as he put it.

Gray does this through play. He makes up a crutches course and loops around and around it inside the house. Each activity is an adventure, not a chore or something supervised by a physical therapist.

He’s using his initiative and imagination to create an environment, psychologists would say.  Right. He’s making lemonade out of lemons.

He feels the same sense of triumph his son felt when that toddler first learned to walk. Not the obvious limits of an octogenarian. But the adventurousness of a chubby kid who falls down, gets up sometimes crying, sometimes laughing and sometimes both, and tries that thing again. 

What Gray does is play. It’s not trivial to him, a pastime for a bedridden old man to take up like Wordle or watching cable news.

No doubt, he first formed this attitude and behavior as a kid, and they have become a part of his lifelong learning.

This kind of life that Gray tries so hard to keep and so enjoys is disappearing for our children. The consequences are awful.

According to Haidt, what’s happening is a “historic and unprecedented transformation of childhood.”

The dramatic change is part of a bigger picture that has to do with “The Great Rewiring of Childhood.”   Social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast for adolescents over the course of just five years — from 2010 when the smartphone came out and 2015.

This is how the movement from play-based to phone-based works.

Childhood and adolescence used to be about play. Now it’s about social media. From real-world adventures and experience to the isolated, falsely protective confines of your own home. Adolescents are much less likely to leave the house and meet friends. They take fewer risks, good in some ways but bad in others.

Other changes reinforce the fearfulness, cocooning and coddling. There has been a rise in fearful parenting. It began in the 1990s. Haidt calls this “safetyism,” which is “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concern.”

Parents overprotect their children from the outside word, which gives the boys and girls full opportunity to fill that gap with social media.

Children need play, particularly unsupervised, sometimes risky play. It’s necessary for brain development and for the growth of independence, confidence, initiative and self-worth. Children overcome their fears by taking risks. They are thrill seekers. They need to be thrill seekers.

Kids need unsupervised play where they and their friends go off to where they want and play with whatever’s around them unsupervised and untracked by adults.   

Think organized youth sports and the typical parent-surveillance-enabling Oahu playgrounds. 

Now picture the opposite. That’s what “adventure playgrounds” are.

I think Haidt is right about play. It’s a crippling crisis and so sad. But I worry about play advocates starting a drumbeat. For sure we need many drums beating to get children on the right track and social media off our backs. 

Still, there is a pattern about these things that can reduce the spontaneity of play by instructing people how to be spontaneous. Parent guides lapse into rules. Opportunities for adventure play become requirements.

“We know best. So, we will tell you how to do it.”

Gray did not do what he did because he was guided by a “Four Key Ways to Play Yourself into Healthy Pelvis Recovery” brochure.

Adults need to play too, as many experts are more than willing to point out. Some of their discussions capture the rapture that Gray experiences 

Others, though, morph into those annoying and disempowering instructional material-like lectures about categories and tips that replace helicopter parents with helicopter experts. They remind me of those lists of things old people are supposed to eat to maintain “proper geriatric well-being.”

Animals play pretty much for the same reasons that people do. But it drives scientists nuts when they can’t explain why some animals do what they do — why piglets suddenly flop and summersault, orcas tip yachts and wear dead fish on their heads or the turtle that sneaks up behind the shark in its tank and nips its tail.

Maybe there are no reasons. Maybe it’s just fun or goofing off, Sallie Tisdale says in her review of a recent book about animal play.

“If we always reduce play to some sort of utility,” she says, “we are returning animals to the status of automatons.”

That’s true for humans too, children as well as adults.