Digital Childhoods Are Undermining Deep Friendships and Causing a Youth Loneliness Epidemic
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rhiannon-lucy-cosslett. "Friendships meant everything to me as a child. I worry today’s young people are being robbed of that | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | The Guardian." September 7, 2026. www.theguardian.com
The Gist
The author argues that because kids today spend so much time online instead of hanging out in person, they're missing out on the deep, meaningful friendships that shaped her own life. She backs this up with a scary statistic about rising loneliness and her own fond memories, and suggests things like banning social media for under-16s could help bring back real-world friendship.
Conclusion
Today's young people are being deprived of the deep, formative friendships that come from unstructured face-to-face time, because digital childhoods (combined with the loss of physical 'third spaces') have replaced the in-person interaction necessary to build such bonds, and we must act to preserve real-world friendship.
Premises
- A new IPPR report found the number of young people with no close friends has risen fivefold since 2014, with one in 20 16- to 21-year-olds having no close friends at all
- The author's own lifelong friendships, formed mostly face-to-face in adolescence, have provided lasting emotional support, ease, and joy throughout her life
- Deep friendship requires large amounts of unstructured time spent together doing seemingly nothing (hanging out, mooching, wandering) rather than curated digital exchanges
- The decline of physical 'third spaces' (such as youth clubs closed by austerity measures) has removed the settings where young people used to build these bonds
- Adolescence is a uniquely important developmental period for memory and identity formation (the 'reminiscence bump'), so what happens then has outsized long-term impact
- The language of online friendship, which frames relationships in transactional terms of what a friend 'gives' or 'adds', reflects a shallower mode of connection compared to time-intensive offline bonding
- Making friends in person is a skill that must be learned young, and digital childhoods deprive young people of the opportunity to develop it
Assumptions
- Face-to-face interaction is inherently superior to digital interaction for forming deep, lasting friendships
- The rise in youth loneliness reported by IPPR is primarily caused by digital childhoods and lost third spaces, rather than other confounding factors (e.g., economic pressure, mental health trends, family structure changes)
- The author's personal experience of 1990s/2000s adolescent friendship is broadly representative of what young people today are missing
- A ban on social media for under-16s would increase face-to-face socializing rather than simply be replaced by other solitary or digital activities
- Nostalgia for one's own youth accurately reflects real generational loss rather than selective or idealized memory