Kerby Anderson

Psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt has been researching the influences on teenagers and young adults. Several years ago, we interviewed him about his book, The Coddling of the American Mind. More recently, he has become known for his book, The Anxious Generation.

He was recently asked on a podcast, “Who makes better parents? Left-Wingers or Right-Wingers?” At first, he pointed to data that showed a slight gap where conservatives are a little happier than liberals. He added that it isn’t clear whether that is due to parenting or some other factor.

However, he then pointed to research he did for his book. The gap between Left and Right became a chasm after 2012. As we have discussed on previous commentaries, that date 2012 coincides with the mass adoption of the iPhone and social media apps.

The bottom line is that when kids are rooted in communities, they don’t get washed out to sea by the phone-based childhood, living by the virtual world. So over and over again, whether we look at Left-Right, whether we look at religion, what we find is it's the secular kids and the liberal kids who got washed out to sea, got really depressed after 2012. And much less effect on the conservative and religious kids because I think they’re more rooted.

This conclusion shouldn’t even be controversial. We know from numerous studies that children do best in a loving home with a father and mother. They do best when children don’t spend lots of time online. They do best when they are rooted in a community and have social interactions (such as we find in church).

We talked about the comments by Jonathan Haidt on my radio program and concluded that more and more research is confirming what the Bible has taught for millennia.