Kerby Anderson
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and author of books like The Coddling of the American Mind. I have interviewed him on that book and hope to interview him on his forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation. You can get a preview of his research in the attached article, “I’m Worried About the Boys, Too.”
The research on the problems girls face is well-known. He explains, “Since 2015, I have been trying to solve a mystery: all of a sudden, around 2013, rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm began rising rapidly for American adolescents.” Let me put that in perspective. Generation Z (those born after 1996) have the worst mental health of any generation, and that data goes all the way back to those born from 1900 to 1925.
The problems increase rapidly on any graph. It looks like a hockey stick with the bend beginning in 2013. He explains what happened in that year. That was the year Facebook bought Instagram. Girls of all ages flocked to the platform.
In previous commentaries, I have mentioned Professor Jean Twenge who noted the same sharp increase. She referred to this youngest generation as the “iGen Generation” because they are digital natives who never knew a time when we didn’t have an iPhone and an iPad or other digital devices.
The conclusion of these various researchers was simple. Social media harms girls through multiple well-known mechanisms. This includes social comparison, early sexualization, perfectionism, cyberbullying and relational aggression, and emotional contagion.
Dr. Haidt ends his article by acknowledging that understanding the impact of social media solved the mystery with girls but doesn’t solve the problem with boys. I will talk about that tomorrow.

Kerby Anderson
On this Christmas day, I think it would be good to reflect for just a moment on the Incarnation. God became man and took on human flesh. This is a great theological wonder and mystery.
Malcolm Muggeridge wrote this to describe the importance of the birth of Christ. “Thanks to the great mercy and marvel of the Incarnation, the cosmic scene is resolved into a human drama. A human drama in which God reached down to relate Himself to man and man reaches up to relate himself to God. Time looks into eternity and eternity into time, making now always and always now. Everything is transformed by this sublime drama of the Incarnation, God’s special parable for man in a fallen world.”
God reached down to us by sending the second person of the Trinity to earth to become part of the human drama and human dilemma. God stepped out of eternity into time to become part of the human community. What an incredible act of love and mercy.
God did not just come to dwell among us and comfort us. He came that He might raise us up through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Although we celebrate the birth of Christ today, we also look to the death and resurrection of Christ that we celebrate at Easter. Romans 5:8 proclaims: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” 1 Peter 2:24 says that Christ “bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness: by whose stripes you were healed.”
On this Christmas day, we should pause to reflect on why Christ came to earth and what He did for us on the cross.