The anti-anxiety experiment: Friends without phones, adult-free camping

Teenage depression, anxiety and self-harm rates are soaring, writes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his new book, The Anxious Generation. He blames social media, smartphones and overprotective parenting, and says parents must band together to get their children into the real, physical world.

After interviewing Haidt for The Sunday Times, Decca Aitkenhead, a British mother, devised an experiment. She'd get her sons, 13 and 14 years old, and their friends to go smartphone-free, except for one hour a day, for a month. Then she'd send them camping, without adults, for a weekend.

The kids locked their smartphone in a kSafe time-lock container, which could be set to release for just one hour a day. "For the other 23 hours they would use a Light Phone, an American wi-fi-enabled device designed to allow calls, texts and group chats, with an alarm, calculator, basic music player, directions, calendar, note/voice memo — and nothing else."

None of the teens suffered from anxiety or depression. The boys played sports. The girls had busy extracurricular schedules. All had parents who limited their screen time.

The boys spent most of their screen time on Snapchat, Spotify and watching YouTube clips of football and basketball games. They occasionally post or comment on social media, but feel no pressure.

The girls she recruited felt lots of pressure.

“It’s a trap,” Edie says. “You’re stuck, because if you do escape, you’re classed as a weirdo, and you’ll fall behind on trends, you won’t understand what people are talking about.” Rose jumps in, “But if you do watch TikTok, you’re going to get influenced. You know it’s all fake, but you still feel like it’s real. You still can’t help comparing yourself with everyone who looks pretty, and feeling bad about yourself. And you’re going to get addicted. It’s literally like a drug.”

"There’s no escape, because your social popularity is totally linked to your social media," says Rose. "So if you don’t post, you get made fun of. But then if you lip-synch to the wrong song on TikTok, you get made fun of for the rest of the year.”

Both girls said they would uninvent social media if they could.

Haidt also thinks "safetyism" is keeping children indoors and fearful, writes Aitkenhead. "For millennia, every generation grew up playing together outside and unsupervised; it was how they learnt to manage risk, responsibility and relationships, and become adults."

The experiment included a weekend trip to the country. The teens, taking only their Light Phones, took public transit to a rural town, then walked to a house in a tiny village, where they camped on the grounds.

They built a fire. It rained. They loved it. "The biggest highlight of all was the discovery that spraying aerosol deodorant onto the fire made it blaze 'like crazy',” they told her.

"The no-adult aspect is literally the dream to us,” said Albie.

All the teens said it was hard to go without their smartphones at first, but then they began to realize how much time they'd been wasting.

Some broke their phone addictions, but they found it "hard not to slip back into old habits." The girls were the first to regress.

“It’s like an addict’s behaviour,” Dahlia’s mother says. “Like, ‘I’ve done the rehab. I proved I could do it.’ But now she’s straight back on it.”

Tech columnist Molly Roberts tried adult life with a "dumbphone," the Nokia TCL Flip Pro, that did much less -- and did it slowly. ("Reddit’s r/dumbphones or the nifty, searchable Dumbphone Finder" provides the options, which are many.)

"I started looking less at my screen and more at everything else," she writes in the Washington Post. "I walked through Central Park on a trip to New York and, podcastless, heard the buskers and the birds and the seniors and the summer interns all at once."

But, if everybody else has a smartphone, it's difficult to be without it.