Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
I think it&#x27;s somewhat important to ask <i>why</i> this effect is more observable for girls than for boys, and Haidt does not seem to really reflect on that. Social media in and of itself is really just an accelerant for the particular set of social expectations we stack on girls and women around appearance and how that relates to self-worth. Boys have more capacity to transcend social media&#x27;s focus on image and beauty by finding other ways to be valued as human beings. What does it say about our society that we are not equipping girls and women in the same way?<p>I&#x27;m a little confused about Haidt&#x27;s pearl-clutching in this instance, when he has elsewhere argued against &quot;coddling&quot; and bugaboos like &quot;intersectionality&quot; and &quot;identity politics&quot;. While there is certainly much to criticize in these areas, you would think one solution to this issue would be to advance a society in which women are valued equally to men. Reading between the lines of his body of work, it appears Haidt wants to return to a type of mid-century traditionalism, where children and young people are both protected and challenged by traditional adult authority figures (who are conveniently mostly people like him and his collaborators). I&#x27;m not so sure that&#x27;s the direction we should be going in, but heavy-handedly cutting off the exploration at &quot;social media as cause&quot; certainly precludes any further analysis of an underlying dynamic.