If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next

The Teen Mental Health Crisis and the Abdication of Adult Authority

An enduring tribute to the power of Republican Spain’s Ministry of Propaganda. Source: Wikimedia Commons

A Spanish Civil War poster of the 1930s shows the body of a dead girl lying against a background of warplanes. The caption reads, “The 'military' practice of the rebels. If you tolerate this, your children will be next.” Admittedly, I first learned of the phrase via the 1998 single by Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers, but I remain struck by its propagandistic power. The poster was used to recruit international volunteers to fight for the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalists, implying that fascist carnage, unimpeded, would eventually rain down on your children, too. But more broadly, “If you tolerate this, your children will be next” demands that we consider how our actions—or lack thereof—affect the world we leave to our descendants. The status quo we’ve come to accept is the environment that will help shape our children.

As the father of a 2-year-old daughter and a 3-month-old son, I have a vested interest in the zeitgeist of the age in which they’ll grow. The statistics for Gen Z, their preceding generation, are grim. As psychologist Jean Twenge has shown, we are in the midst of a teen mental health crisis, with smartphones and social media being major contributing factors. Suicide rates among US adolescents have doubled over 10 years, so it’s no exaggeration to link the state of the contemporary American teenager with the dead girl on the aforementioned Spanish Civil War poster. Twenge is right to point out that “Social media companies have poured billions into making their products as attractive as possible, especially for kids and teens, and it’s tough for parents to fight this,” but we can avoid blaming parents while still taking responsibility for making a change. That change must include, but go beyond, addressing the ills of childhood technology use.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has laid out several sensible recommendations to mitigate the negative impact of a “phone-based childhood,” including banning smartphones from school and restricting access to social media until kids are 16. However, a New York Times review of his recent book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, is right to criticize a “digital absolutist” approach to the teen mental health crisis. As the reviewer points out, Haidt and colleagues have also reported that “adolescents from wealthy, individualistic, and secular nations were less tightly bound into strong communities and therefore more vulnerable to the harms of the new phone-based childhood that emerged in the early 2010s,” indicating that cultural context matters in addition to social media and smartphone use. Haidt himself has also noted that the trend of delayed adulthood—teens are less likely to go on dates, have a part-time job, or drive than in previous generations—accelerated, but did not begin, with Gen Z.

Where data ends, philosophy begins. In her essay “The Crisis in Education,”¹ Hannah Arendt provides a deeper context to any crisis of meaning (which is often at the heart of depression and anxiety) among the young. She writes that “the authority of a group, even a child group, is always considerably stronger and more tyrannical than the severest authority of an individual person can ever be.” Thus, “by being emancipated from the authority of adults the child has not been freed but has been subjected to a much more terrifying and truly tyrannical authority, the tyranny of the majority.” Smartphones and social media strengthen, but are not the root cause of, this adolescent tyranny of the majority. The prevalence of “social media influencers” implies not just an increase in social media’s influence, but a decline in traditional sources of influence (eg, parents, teachers, religious leaders) who once provided guidance into adulthood.

Thus, for example, the New York Times reported on a 14-year-old girl who took her own life after a video of her getting beat up in school was posted on TikTok. Suicide is frequently a response to hopelessness, which Arendt describes in the context of children “emancipated” from adult authority: they are “handed over to the tyranny of their own group, against which, because of its numerical superiority, they cannot rebel, with which, because they are children, they cannot reason, and out of which they cannot flee to any other world because the world of adults is barred to them.” Cyberbullying may be the proximate trigger for many teen suicides, but the relinquishing of adult authority helps give the TikTok hive mind its tyrannical power. If children had confidence that the physically grounded adult world mattered more than the phone-based teen world, they would better be able to endure its digital slings and arrows. But that would also require adults to spend less time acting like teenagers on their own phones.

Education, for Arendt, “is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices.” She was writing before children literally had their own devices, their own online adolescent world at their fingertips, which makes her writing all the more prescient. Compare her warning that emancipation “was an abandonment and a betrayal in the case of children, who are still at the stage where the simple fact of life and growth outweighs the factor of personality” with the New York Magazine cover story arguing that “everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age.” The author’s statement that “parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom” is the consummation of adult betrayal, an abandonment of children to the digitally reinforced mob of their peers. Children are not, existentially, suffering from a lack of freedom: they are suffering from a lack of order in their lives and in the world.

This is not to argue for “helicopter parenting,” in which parents are afraid to let a 10-year-old walk to the corner store alone. Children should have macro order and micro freedom: freedom to reasonably exercise their independence (eg, going on errands by themselves, choosing their own extracurricular activities) and a respect for the order that allows them to be free (eg, the rules of the road, the value of time and money). Order necessarily includes hierarchy, which is paradoxically a source of liberation. When children recognize that the fickle opinions of peers rank lower than the stable guidance of adults, they are emancipated from peer pressure. When they feel part of a real-life community that matters more than any digital friend count, they are freed from the need for social media validation. A child with an internal locus of control, centered on the notion of a properly ordered world, does not need constant supervision. Such a child has earned the right to initiation into adult freedoms.

Children will eventually be capable of full freedom, and should be introduced to it gradually, in tandem with the rules that make freedom possible. But before human beings can responsibly drive a car, consent to sex, irreversibly alter their anatomy, or parent another human being, they need to developmentally and experientially transition to adulthood.² In the meantime, it is for adults to teach kids the responsibilities and implications of freedom. We are not born knowing that we have the power to hurt people, that we can make split-second decisions that lead to years of regret, that short-term pleasures can cause pain in the long run, and that we are subject to the limits of human nature. We come to this knowledge via the guidance of adults, the wisdom of tradition, and the accumulation of our own experience. Adults should strive to embody and impart the wisdom of tradition, and to guard children against experiences they are not yet ready to handle.³

The more children respect and feel they can turn to adult authority, the less they will be dominated by the algorithmically charged pressures of their peer group. Allowing kids to rewire their brains by spending unlimited time on screens, or permanently scar their bodies because of sexual confusion, is not liberating them to exercise their individuality. It is depriving them of adult authority—which is based on earned responsibility and inherited tradition—and abandoning them to peer tyranny—which is based on ephemeral popularity and social contagion. That adults often abdicate their responsibilities and discard their own traditions (as opposed to thoughtfully questioning them) is at the root of a deeper crisis of authority in the West. Children will not respect adults if adults can only offer them freedom, without any time-tested guidance on how that freedom should be used. Ending phone-based childhood is a worthy goal, but won’t on its own provide a sound basis for youth to grow. The teen mental health crisis is another reminder that if you tolerate societal disorder, your children will be next.

1. Published in her 1961 essay collection Between Past and Future.

2. In the not-too-distant past, this could be reliably called common sense. Now, it is disputed by a Pulitzer Prize winner in a (once) prestigious cultural magazine. As Arendt writes in the same essay, common sense is how “we are fitted into a single world common to us all and by the aid of which move about in it.” When a crack appears in our common world, “The failure of common sense, like a divining rod, points to the place where such a cave-in has occurred.”

3. In his 1987 jeremiad The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom writes that “The active presence of a tradition in a man’s soul gives him a resource against the ephemeral, the kind of resource that only the wise can simply find within themselves.”