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When my oldest son was 10, my husband and I gave in and gave him the phone he’d been asking for. Well, not the phone — my tween got one of our janky old Androids — but a smartphone nonetheless. And then he basically forgot about it for more than a year. He really didn’t start using it until he started walking by himself to the neighborhood park, roughly five blocks from our apartment, to play with friends.
Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of the The Anxious Generation, might say we made one good decision there — and one not-so-good one. The not-so-good, of course, is the smartphone. “No smartphones before high school” is one of the four tenets Haidt proposes in the book, along with no social media before age 16, phone-free schools, and more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. That last one is the “good” decision that maybe (hopefully? possibly?) counteracts the lack of the first three. My kids, both of them, may have had phones at a young age, but they also have some free rein and responsibility.
In the year since the release of The Anxious Generation, which celebrates its first publishing anniversary today, Haidt has changed the conversation around tweens, teens, and tech. The book, one of the most talked-about tomes in parenting circles in recent years, quickly became a number one New York Times bestseller and gained A-list fans from Oprah and Barack Obama to Drew Barrymore and Dr. Becky (the latter of whom collaborated with Haidt on a toolkit for parents).
Celebrity fans help build buzz and sell books, to be sure, but Haidt is quick to praise the regular moms doing the daily work of parenting for galvanizing around the “free the anxious generation” cause.
“Oh, my God, the most gratifying part has been to see change happening around the world, even in countries I haven’t been to,” he told SheKnows in an exclusive conversation ahead of the anniversary. “What’s driving [this] around the world is mothers. At a macro level, there’s a global movement. And at a micro level, mothers are thanking me.”
Pressing Pause on Smartphones & Social Media
In The Anxious Generation (and on his After Babel substack), Haidt points out what almost everyone agrees on — that today’s teens are experiencing a mental health crisis — and lays out the case that two main factors are at play: too much time on smartphones, social media and the internet, and not enough freedom and responsibility in the real world. Not everyone is aligned on the role of technology, and Haidt’s work has faced its share of critiques. He admits there’s been “active academic debate” with other researchers “who say the correlations are too small, or they say it’s correlation, not causation,” but finds a silver lining in the criticism. “Critiques have been helpful in that they show me where I haven’t fully explained and where I have to learn more,” he says. “The main critique is, this is a moral panic, just like previous moral panics. So I’ve had to learn more about past moral panics, and that has helped me articulate why this time is so different.”
In previous moral panics, Haidt explains, “the panic was spread through the media about cases that probably never happened, or maybe happened once. But this one is people. It’s not spread through the media — it’s people seeing it in their own children or their friends’ children.” As for the main academic debate about whether the social media connection is causal or correlational, “this has forced me to gather many kinds of evidence of causality,” he says. “It’s pushed me to have a more active lab group analyzing the experiments, because there are a lot of experiments with random assignment that show benefits to getting off social media, and it’s also encouraged us to think about different kinds of evidence, one of which is confessions from the perpetrators. We have all kinds of quotes and reports from Meta and Snap and TikTok that came out during lawsuits. So we’re publishing that — we have a post on our Substack called TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale, mostly just with quotes from TikTok, like they know what they’re doing.”
What’s not up for debate is that change is afoot. Late last year, in what Haidt considers a “game changer” for the anxious generation movement, Australia’s parliament voted to ban kids under 16 from using social media. (“If it works in Australia, lots of countries are going to copy that,” he says.) More and more schools are enacting cell phone rules and regulations. And more than a dozen states have actually signed or enacted laws or policies around students’ phone use in elementary, middle, and high schools. Hoping to join that list is New York, whose Governor Kathy Hochul this year proposed a statewide plan to restrict smartphone use in K-12 schools.
While Haidt — and parents — might be in favor of such laws, many kids, unsurprisingly, are less enthused. When we asked a handful of high schoolers from SheKnows’ Teen Council whether they were in favor of school phone bans, the majority said “no” or “not sure.” That matches the results we found when we conducted on-the-street interviews with teens in New York City, too. “The more restrictions adults set for phones, the more the attraction to phones grow,” one admitted.
Real-World Responsibility
If saving teens from smartphones and social media has been largely met with approval, one element of Haidt’s plan to help free the anxious generation has received less publicity and parental support. That fourth step — giving kids more independence, free play, and responsibility, starting at a tender age — is, by Haidt’s own admission, lacking the same public relations push.
“On the phone side, we didn’t have to persuade anyone. Everybody already saw it, they just didn’t know what to do about it,” he says. “But persuading parents that they need to back off and give their kids the kind of freedom that they themselves had when they were young? It wasn’t like we just put it out there and everyone said, ‘Oh, of course.’”
That’s where Let Grow, the organization Haidt co-founded with Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids fame, comes in. Let Grow encourages parents to give their kids more independence; it also encourages schools to actually assign “Let Grow” tasks as homework (with parental permission). One big benefit to that, he says, is that in an age where people call the police when they see a child walking alone on a street, suddenly there are groups of children expressing their independence in a community, as opposed to one lone child.
“This has a transformational effect on the whole community because nobody has seen an 8-year-old walking around since 1991, so the Let Grow experience is our most powerful tool for changing the norms and making parents feel more comfortable trusting their kids,” he says.
Age 8 is actually the age when Haidt thinks kids should start doing such things. “If there’s a way that a kid can walk a few blocks to a store and buy something, at age 8, they should be doing that,” he says. “And the kids who go out and do something, they come back and they’re jumping up and down. They are so excited. It has a huge impact on the kids, but the really important thing is that it has an impact on the parents, because we don’t know what the right age is to let them out. We’re afraid.”
Haidt recently posted an Instagram reel of a mom who read The Anxious Generation and accepted the challenge of letting her kids do something on their own; she shared the story of her 7-year-old who wanted to go into Chick-fil-A by himself and order. Climbing back into the car, delivering food to his mom, he said, “I want to do that again. That is so fun.”
If just reading that has you breaking out in hives, Haidt understands. In writing about the Let Grow project in The Anxious Generation, he writes, “We shouldn’t blame parents for ‘helicoptering.’ We should blame — and change — a culture that tells parents they must helicopter.”
“We’ve gotten very deep into this paranoia,” he tells me when I bring up all the ways parents today are punished for allowing kids the simple freedoms we enjoyed. “What you’ve put your finger on is the collective action problem. If one parent does it, they are at risk of being reported to the police. But the fact that we got into this because of the collective action pressures tells us that’s the way to get out, also.”
So schools can play a role. Rallying other like-minded parents in your community can play a role. Let Grow even has a “kid license” as part of its “independence kit” that kids can carry to show they have parental permission to be outside alone.
The Anxious Generation includes an entire section on solutions and action steps for parents, Collective Action for Healthier Childhood, as well as all of the accompanying online tools and aligned organizations. It’s all part of the plan to stop underprotecting kids online and overprotecting them IRL.
Teens themselves play a role, too. Some of the organizations on Haidt’s website are, in fact, run by members of Gen Z, many of whom aren’t exactly racing to voluntarily stash away their phones and stave off social media use. Still, Haidt has hope.
“Gen Z organizations are generally advocating to make the online world less harmful, less dangerous, so that’s good, but what I’m really hoping they’ll do is stand up and advocate for raising the age for social media to 16,” he says. “Their voices would be so powerful.”
Beyond that, he wants older kids to start organizing and advocating to protect younger ones. “What I would most love to see would be older members of Gen Z going back to their own middle schools and testifying,” he says, “[to] say, ‘don’t make the mistakes that we made.’ Because most of the older ones, they know that it was a mistake. A lot of them say they wish they had not gotten a phone or social media so early.”
Never Too Late
As for the parents whose tweens and teens already have smartphones in their hands and social media in their heads? Haidt has hope for us, too. You may not be able to put the horse back in the stable, he says, “but I know that it’s not too late.”
Teens need to regain control of their attention, and parents can help. Haidt’s first step is to get social media off your teen’s phone. (Not get them off social media completely, mind you — just the phone.) Get screens out of bedrooms so kids don’t doom scroll before bed. Enforce phone-free dinnertimes. And encourage more real-life fun. Haidt has faith these steps work because he sees them work in the 19-year-old college kids he teaches in a class called ‘Flourishing’ at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
“I think that’s part of the success of the book,” he adds. “It wasn’t just doom and gloom, you know, it was actually, we got into this just 12 years ago. We can get out of it.”
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