Keen On

It's become the new orthodoxy: social media is the cause of the epidemic of anxiety amongst adolescents. So the way to fix this is by taking away their smartphones. But according to Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times writer Matt Richtel, things are actually a lot more complicated than blaming everything on digital technology. In fact, we may have got things a bit upside down. In his new book, How We Grow Up, Richtel argues that parents have, ironically, become what he calls "the social media" in their kids' lives. Smartphones enable parents to constantly observe not just their kids' movements but even their thoughts through constant surveillance of grades, texts, and location data. We are, indeed, creating a "surveillance state with our children," he warns - which could be one explanation (amongst many) why today's teens engage in significantly less risky behavior than previous generations. Understanding adolescents might actually require grown-ups to face up to their own parental anxieties. "Love, lead,