Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation Misses The Point

If you’ve had anything to do with adolescents in the last few years, you might be feeling more than a bit worried about their mental health. There are surging rates of anxiety and depression in teens, increases in death by suicide, a jump in the numbers of girls who are seriously considering attempting suicide. School absences are high, test scores are historically low, and teens in most developed nations have reported feeling lonelier than ever.

At the same time, they all have smartphones. Are these two things related?

If you read Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, or caught wind of it in the latest media frenzy, then you know his answer is a definitive yes. Haidt draws on an impressive range of studies to make the case for a relationship between declines in teen mental health and the tidal wave of technology that has hit our society since 2010. In fairly frightening language, he posits that the youth today have served as guinea pigs for technology that rewires their brains and their lives, creating a disembodied, asynchronous, multitasking life lacking in substantive relationships while simultaneously having their growth stifled under the thumb of overprotective parents.

The answer he proposes comes in the form of a pledge (not unlike the abstinence pledges of a decade ago): Parents should affirm that their kids will wait until they’re in eighth grade to get their first smartphone and that they won’t use social media until they are 16 — ages that he argues, reasonably enough, mean kids are better equipped, neurologically speaking, to handle the technology.

It’s worth noting that reporters and researchers familiar with the data on tech say he has carefully chosen studies that fit his thesis. Even if we take at face value that Haidt’s a reliable reporter of data others consider equivocal, we would still have to confront that old axiom that correlation does not equal causation — something Haidt vehemently argues he has controlled for (others disagree). The source of kids’ current discontent seems to be foiling us adults precisely because there are so many troubling things happening at once; that Haidt believes we can view them in isolation or extricate phones from all the other variables at play is optimistic at best (though he does try very hard).

It is easier to blame a shiny inanimate object and ineffectual parenting for our individual ills than to admit that policy mistakes have been made and targeted moderation could limit some of this harm — and that arrayed in opposition to systemic change are the people profiting off the flood of shit streaming onto those devices at all times. Laying the responsibility at the feet of overburdened parents (let’s be real, mothers) and suggesting that we should be the ones to resolve it is not only insulting, it’s pushing conservative notions of individual responsibility while ignoring the broader societal structures at play. One doesn’t have to strain to imagine a phone-free childhood becoming yet another marker of intensive parenting and breaking down along class lines. To actually help all children, not only would a not insignificant portion of the American families have to agree to this shift away from smartphones, we would have to repave the well-worn roads of modern socialization all while neglecting corporate responsibility measures to rein it all in.

Although Haidt dedicates space to solutions for tech companies, the marketing of the book is aimed squarely at today’s parents — who are, arguably, the original anxious generation.

Living in Germany during my child’s youth, I had the privilege of implementing the kind of phone-free childhood Haidt advocates for, even if I wouldn’t have called it that at the time. Thanks to a year’s worth of pay postpartum and free zoo passes, my kid didn’t see a smartphone in their first year of life. Come toddlerhood we had a spot in a full-day subsidized day care with well-trained caregivers who emphasized getting muddy over watching cartoons. We lived a block from a playground and our kids could play street hockey in a cul-de-sac after school. Elementary school students in Germany learn cursive penmanship and how to make posters on poster board instead of the ins and outs of PowerPoint and Google Classroom. The parents in my kid’s school defaulted to keeping our kids off phones and smartwatches, so we made play dates when we met in the school’s drop-off areas, something we could do because we nearly all had shorter working days that allowed us to walk or bike the kids to the neighborhood school. In other words, we could raise our kids with the privilege of living a non-phone-based lifestyle because the broader infrastructure was in place at every other level.

That idyll ended when the pandemic shut schools and playgrounds and forbade nearly every activity, including meeting with friends outdoors, for months. Schooling became divided between the have-Zooms and have-nots, and phones became a necessity. It was during that time of social isolation (and for some, economic devastation) that many kids also developed mental health issues. Were the phones to blame (those same phones that were connecting them to friends and teacher) for their struggles, or could it have been literally anything else happening around these highly attuned kids? How do you even control for the causes in as unprecedented a situation as that?

Haidt’s not wrong that we are all, as a collective, on our phones too damned much, and our kids are no exception. Children learn what they live. But have you seen the way adults behave online? Blame phone overuse on the underdeveloped prefrontal cortex all you want, but even if they can’t put it down, many teens today have a better understanding of what’s appropriate behavior online than their grandparents stuck in the newstainment outrage cycle do. And as one researcher, Christopher Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University, told Platformer via email, “Middle aged white men are three to five times more likely to kill themselves than are teen girls. There’s just no evidence for the common but largely mythical idea that somehow young people are more vulnerable to media effects than are adults.”

Child safety online requires not only kids (and their parents) turn off the social media spigot, it also demands the implementation of actual guardrails on those platforms; still, Haidt’s shifting arguments for how best to establish those guardrails worry those with knowledge of the industry. It’s important to protect kids, without removing vital pathways for connection and community. “It’s difficult to separate the technology of smartphones from the fact that they’re important sources of information, including about mental health, and even agency for young people,” Bradford Vivian, a professor in Penn State University’s Department of Communication Arts and Science and author of Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education, told me. “Banning phones will restrict many young peoples’ access to both, and possibly their rights in the process.”

Laying the responsibility at the feet of overburdened parents (let’s be real, mothers) and suggesting that we should be the ones to resolve it is not only insulting, it’s pushing conservative notions of individual responsibility while ignoring the broader societal structures at play.

Although Haidt dedicates space to solutions for tech companies, the marketing of the book is aimed squarely at today’s parents — who are, arguably, the original anxious generation. I wish instead of doling out advice aimed mostly at worried parents, this social psychologist who teaches ethical leadership at a leading business school had instead aimed his argument at the white men his age who are serving as business and political leaders in the same institutions whose lack of adequate governance has created this situation. Though I suppose it might be easier, or at least marginally better for the economy, to put restrictions on teenagers rather than on all the corporations — tech and otherwise — who profit off them.

Contextualizing The Anxious Generation alongside Haidt’s previous works, which include political treatises like, “Can’t We All Disagree More Constructively?” as well as The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Kids Up for Failure, you get the feeling that the problem is less with phones than with kids and where they are getting their information from. If current events play a role in the mental health crisis, he writes, it’s the result of the news of such events “suddenly being pumped into adolescents’ brains through their phones,” not the impact that a growing array of tragedies (climate change, mass shootings, crumbling democracies, etc.) might have had on kids as they enter adolescence. Not only does that underestimate how attuned teenagers are to societal ills, it suggests that their increased political awareness is something of a social media-driven fad and not because they are experiencing the consequences of disastrous policies firsthand.

As parents, there is only so much we can do individually without greater societal support. We aren’t handing off phones to our kids because we prefer spending our leisurely summer days indoors in front of a screen; we’re doing it because camps cost upward of our entire salaries and we don’t have 12 weeks of paid vacation. Our kids aren’t choosing to play Minecraft instead of hitting the swimming pool during yet another record-breaking heatwave — the pool’s closed because there’s no funding for lifeguards, and anyways, the air quality index is off the charts again because the oil companies won’t stop pumping or adhere to emissions limits. After all, kids can’t pass a math test if there are no math classes taking place. What are they supposed to do: log in to Khan Academy and take lessons on their phone?

Germany is often the butt of jokes due to its lack of digitalization, but unlike the United States, its privacy regulations and intense austerity measures under Merkel meant that prior to 2020, there was little to no tech in classrooms. At the same time, Jessica Grose writes in The New York Times, tech became omnipresent in public school classrooms in the United States: “Companies never had to prove that devices or software, broadly speaking, helped students learn before those devices had wormed their way into America’s public schools. And now the onus is on parents to marshal arguments about the detriments of tech in schools.”

Once our kids reach a certain age, it’s not our job to protect our children but rather to accompany them through life’s hard stuff.

In proposing solutions that involve loading more work onto already harried parents, we’re absolving the broader whole of their responsibility in raising the next generation. But I’m not even sure that we’re all on the same page of just what that entails anymore. After all, we live in a country that, out of concern that it would infringe on parental rights to educate and discipline our children, has not ratified the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. While Haidt cites its predecessor, the 1959 UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child, as enshrining children’s right to play, the declaration is meant to outlaw the use of child soldiers, child labor, and early marriage, not necessarily to secure their right to experiential learning or to meet friends at the playground. Given recent legislation rolling back child labor protections, I can see why we don’t have a chance of agreeing to even that shared value in the near future. Why are we asking kids to give up phones when we cannot even agree to afford them these otherwise basic rights?

In any case, credit where it’s due: Haidt recognizes a problem and the necessity of collective action to pull us out of the tailspin. We do, as a culture, need to stop entertaining ourselves to death. But why is the solution that we all make a pledge to do it alone? Go ahead and put down your own experience blocker, as Haidt calls them, and sign an unbinding commitment that your kids won’t get smartphones until eighth grade or be on social media until 16. Pull out your high school memory boxes and teach them the dynamics of 10-digit texting on their new flip phones, a retro throwback that’ll go well with the wide-bottomed JNCOs they’ve revitalized. Maybe they’ll even learn some responsibility by getting jobs at the mall — if they’re lucky enough to live within walking distance of one that’s still open. It won’t necessarily slow climate change or reverse learning loss or stop any wars or bring back the joy we had living through ’90s latchkey childhoods, but it will give us some illusion that we are each as individuals still in control of our children’s lives. At least those of us who can afford to be.

But I’ll be over here, reflecting on what one child-free friend who spent years peacebuilding in war zones reminded me about parenting: Once our kids reach a certain age, it’s not our job to protect our children but rather to accompany them through life’s hard stuff. That’s where I think we will find our middle ground in this war for attention — not by signing arbitrary pledges that further divide our kids between those who have the privilege of a play-based childhood and those who have unfettered access to tech. We need to establish firm boundaries of what we will tolerate in our society and contribute to one that fosters all of our kids in their growth as they navigate what feels like uncharted waters.