18/08/2025
Must read!!!
10 key takeaway quotes from The Weekend Australian Magazine’s August 16-17, 2025 piece, ‘The Kids Are Not Alright’ by Ros Thomas.
“My phone's like a magnet. I'm permanently distracted and then I feel really bad about myself."
“According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 29 per cent of girls and 17 per cent of boys aged 15 to 24 were diagnosed with depression or anxiety in 2023. The current generation of teens is on track to become the loneliest and most socially isolated cohort in human history.
The data is grim. Our kids are not OK.”
“Evidence shows the launch in 2007 of the first iPhone with its inbuilt "selfie" camera, followed by Instagram (2010), Snapchat (2011), and TikTok (2017), coincided with a marked decrease in adolescent sleep and the time they spent with friends - two factors linked to the deterioration in young people's mental health.”
“Instagram internal research, leaked by an employee in 2021, revealed the app is aware it creates anxious girls. "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls," a slide from one internal presentation in 2019 stated.”
“I ask him if boys are choosing social media over a real relationship with a girl. "Absolutely.
It's easier, more available and less effort, with no risk of humiliation, embarrassment or failure. It's there for you whenever you want, you don't need to put any time or effort into it."”
“The American social psychologist and New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Haidt, 61, has been vehemently arguing the case against social media for children since 2019 He's convinced that teenage phone addiction doesn't simply correlate with the youth mental health crisis, it's the driver of it. "Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and unsuitable for children and adolescents," he says.
Haidt wants parents to understand the consequences of this. "We have vastly overprotected our children in the real world - we have to give them more freedom. And we have vastly under-protected them in the virtual world - we give them an iPhone and an iPad and we say, 'Here, we're going to let you be guided into adulthood by a bunch of random people on the internet chosen by algorithms for their extremity'. That's how you're going to rewire your brain."”
““Thirty per cent of my time in this school is spent dealing with parents' inability to parent. They don't know how to do boundaries. They don't know how to remove the phone when kids are being inappropriate. They allow their kids to have their phones by their beds all night, pinging them non-stop. No wonder they're not sleeping and seeing stuff they shouldn't see. They come to school in a mess. Too exhausted to learn. And this is the cycle destroying our kids.””
““Phone addiction is particularly lethal for teenaged brains. And yet there is this weird reluctance from State Departments of Education to mandate a proper ban on phones in schools. Maybe it's fears of parental blowback, I don't know. But if just one Minister came out and said, 'Right, phones are now completely banned in schools and here are the locked boxes or pouches to implement that, just imagine how much that'd help?' We don't let our 13 year olds drive or drink - why on earth do we let them keep something this lethal in their pockets at school? As educators, we've got to put child safety first."”
“A 2023 survey by University of Chicago researchers studying "collective traps" in product markets. They reported that out of 1000 college students, 58 per cent said they would pay to "live in a world without social media".”
““What we find is a surprising consistency of
regret, among parents and among the young adults who went through puberty on smartphones," he said.
"Most of the parents and nearly half of the young adults wish that the major social media platforms had never been invented."”
Head to the comments to grab the link to the article. It’s free to read at the moment.
