Can childhood survive the smartphone?

Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation, sparked a global reckoning about mobile phone usage among children when it came out last year. So, I checked in with him to find out if he still thinks childhood is at risk from too much screen time.

Parents need help. I know from experience. It's really hard to get kids off their screens when all their friends are stuck on theirs. This addiction demands collective action.

In the days since I spoke with Haidt, there's been one thing that he said that I haven't been able to get off my mind. 

"I have not met one member of Gen Z who's in denial, who says, 'No, we love the phones, the phones are good for us,'" Haidt told me. "They all see what's happening, but they feel trapped." 

So, has anything actually changed in the year since Haidt's book? Was all the hype around mobile phones just a flash-in-the-pan moment of collective parental anxiety or did it produce the kind of action many parents are longing for?

Watch our full conversation, here:

Below is an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. 

Katty Kay: It's been a year since your book came out and caused a huge conversation. I wanted to start by getting a kind of report card of where we are on the various aspects of what you're trying to do: phones in school, age gating, social media, getting kids to have more free playtime. Who's doing well and who isn't in America on all of those issues? 

Jonathan Haidt: I knew that the book was going to be popular. What I wasn't prepared for is that this issue would spread like wildfire around the world, not just in the US. Because around the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time. Everyone hates it. Everyone sees it.

Where it took off most quickly was phone-free schools, because that is something that is very easily done. It's so hard to teach to a classroom when half of them are watching short videos and playing video games. So, the teachers have hated the phones from the beginning but they were afraid, especially in America – maybe it's the same in the UK – but in America, there are a lot of parents who want to be able to communicate all the time with their child, and they think they have a right to check in on their child. And, 'What if something goes wrong? I need to be there.' So, the overparenting —

KK: That's a paradox, then, because you've got the parents who are super worried about the phones; they see what phones are doing to their kids. But they also don't want their kids to relinquish their phones when they go into school.

JH: Hey, look, people are complicated! They contain multitudes. And I shouldn't say that everyone saw the problem, because there were a lot of parents who saw the phone as a lifeline. They see the world as very threatening and dangerous. And so, early on in this process, I thought there would be this uniquely American thing about overprotection, because we do have a lot more crime than you do in Europe or Canada. 

But the surprising thing, to me, as I've been studying this for a while now, is that the vast overprotection swept through all of the English-speaking countries in the '90s. So, all the English-speaking countries went through this at the same time. And now, all of them are taking action really quickly. UK and Australia, I'd say, are in the lead in terms of actually passing legislation.

KK: Here in the United States, we've seen some battles go through Congress, but this has not happened at a national level. What I am seeing is individual states enact laws to stop kids having phones in school. 

JH: That's right, because we don't have a functioning legislature in the United States. We have Congress. And Congress can't really do anything if anybody objects. So, from the beginning, I have not assumed we're going to get a damn bit of help from Congress. I've been focusing on the 50 US states and on the UK, Australia and the EU. If we get legislative change in those domains, we win.

KK: Is it too early to see what the impact is in schools that ban phones? Do we have any data on that yet or is this just a supposition that they're going to do better? 

JH: We have reports from schools that go phone-free. And I challenge people to look around for a school that went truly phone-free, not just during class time. If it's just a restriction during class time, that's not phone-free. That causes all kinds of problems. All the kids are on their phones in between classes. But truly phone-free, where you turn in phones in the morning and you get back in the evening, the reports are raves. 

The most common things they say are that discipline problems are down. There's just a lot less fighting, a lot less drama. Truancy is down. School is a lot more fun when you can actually talk with your friends and play with them and laugh with them. So, truancy goes down, tardiness goes down, kids arrive on time. And the most thrilling thing for me, and the most universal thing they say is we hear laughter in the hallways again. So, the reports are uniformly raves. There's often some resistance in the first week or two, but what they mostly say is —

KK: Who's the resistance from? 

JH: Some of the kids don't like it and some of the parents don't like it. But I've spoken to hundreds and hundreds of school superintendents. What they're telling me is they expected a huge pushback from parents, but they actually didn't get it. Because this year is different. The zeitgeist has changed.

Actually, it started in the UK even before my book came out. You had smartphone-free schools; they went viral in February of last year and my book didn't come out until March. So, it's a different environment now, and schools are ready to act. Now, there are some studies, there are some academic studies that have been equivocal, but when you look at them – there was one that came out in the UK, it was published in the Lancet.

It said phone-free schools don't help. No, it didn't. It looked at like eight schools that had a backpack policy, which is not very good, and then like 11 or 15 schools that had a classroom-ban policy. It was like there was a slight difference in policies. These are very different schools. So, we have a Substack post showing this Lancet study doesn't show anything of the sort. There was a study in the UK done by Policy Exchange, where they looked at several hundred UK schools, and only about 10% are truly phone-free. If you look at the schools in the UK that are truly phone-free, and you compare them to the others, then you do find academic benefits and behavioural benefits.

KK: I want to go back to something you said at the beginning about the 1990s and how that became a time of fear. I've been a working mother my whole life. I have four children: two of whom were born in the 90s, one was born in 2000, one was born in 2006. So, they've all had different experiences with screens. But from the research that I've done, something else happened in the kind of 80s and 90s, which was a sort of expansion of what we deem to be a good parent, and more specifically than that, a good mother, right? So, women were taking on full-time jobs and still doing the overwhelming share of household chores.

But it's not just that. In my research, women today are doing as much in the way of household chores as their great-grandmothers were in the early part of the 1900s. It's that society somehow deemed us not to be good parents if we weren't spending an enormous amount of time with our kids, spending our weekends running ragged taking them to events. And somehow you got, particularly perhaps if you were a working mother, the kind of guilt exploded. I feel like screens – and I've seen it with my own kids – screens just became a kind of form of relief for parents, and mothers in particular, from whom society was just asking impossible things. 

JH: Every word you said is true. I'll just try to add on to it. It is a puzzle. And I've got a really bizarre graph in the book showing that the amount of time that mothers and fathers spent parenting was fairly flat in the 80s and even into the 90s. And then all of a sudden in the mid 1990s, at least in the US, it jumped up. Something changed in the 90s. And it's the norm that you're talking about. 

KK: Great, I moved here in '96, so I just hit right at the right moment! [Laughter]

JH: You just hit it! That's right. So, that really did happen. Women today have fewer children than their grandmothers did, and they're working outside the home, which their grandmothers didn't, and they're spending more time with the kids. So, a lot of this has fallen on women. 

Now, why did this happen? The best answer comes from this really wonderful book called Paranoid Parenting by Frank Furedi. He's a British sociologist and he's focusing on what happened in the UK, not the US, although he points out that the same things happened in the US and Canada. And what happened, he says, is we lost trust in other people. And when that happens, then we don't trust our neighbourhood. We don't trust people to send our kids out. 

It's always been the case that raising kids was kind of a joint project. When you lose that, now every family is on their own. And that means it's mostly the mothers who are on their own.

KK: In your sort of meta analysis of screens and kids and schools, and whether we can have phones in schools, is it actually the case that we have to address those issues before we can really wean our kids off this screen addiction?

JH: We have to understand those issues first if we want to fully understand what happened historically. But I would not say that we have to address those issues first, because, frankly, we're not going to address them. I mean reversing the decline of community, you know, I go to all kinds of meetings about that. There are all kinds of foundations. But look, technology changes society —

KK: Can you just fix it all, Jon? [Laughter] I mean, I know you've done phones in schools, but really, step it up! 

JH: [Laughter] Yeah. Let's fix community next! So, no, we're not going to restore trust in our neighbours such that we can let our kids out. That's not going to happen. In fact, it's likely to get a lot worse as we go into the era of AI, when we have no idea what's true. We're never going to know what's true again for a very long time, if ever. So, rather, we have to adapt to this. And I think the way we adapt to this onslaught of technology is by saying, "Okay, you know what? Kids are not adults."

We have to focus on what it will take to allow kids to have healthy brain development through puberty. That's my mission. We've got to give kids a lot less screen time. A lot less fragmenting time. No TikTok. No short videos. That's the worst, and give them a lot more experience interacting with people.

KK: What do you say to poorer families where both parents have to work multiple jobs and for whom the invention of screen content that occupies their small children is just literally a lifesaver for them? Is there a different argument there or not?

JH: Yes, there is. So, the way to understand this is that in the 90s, when we were all techno-optimists, the internet was amazing. The early internet was amazing. And rich kids had computers and internet access and poor kids didn't. And so in the 1990s, we had a big thing, you know, it was educational equity. Bill Gates, all kinds of philanthropists donated hundreds of millions of dollars. Let's get every kid a computer.

So, in the early 2000s, we're all techno-optimists and we think, 'Well, okay, I don't trust my kid to walk three blocks to a store, but he's on a computer. What could happen? He's learning! That's great!' We think it's good that our kids are upstairs on a computer. And, of course, this is one of the central ideas in the Netflix show Adolescence is, you know, parents think their kids are safe when they're on a computer. And in the 90s, they mostly were. There was some bad stuff, too, but they mostly were. 

But once the internet gets taken over, or at least once childhood gets owned by three or four big companies – TikTok, Snap, Meta and Google – once childhood is owned by these companies that are using algorithms to send them content, to keep them hooked, this is when things get much darker. Kids on computers now, they're not learning to program. They're not learning any useful skills. They're just basically lying there consuming content. And this is when it gets really sick and really dark.

But we don't quite realise that. And so what's happened now is the educational equity issue has reversed. It used to be "get poor kids computers". But by the 2000s, what was clear was that the rich people, and especially the people in Silicon Valley, don't let their kids have this stuff. So, now the great educational equity imperative is we've got to give the poor kids the same protections that the rich kids have. We've got to get them less time on screens. You said it's literally a lifesaver. I would say no, it's not literally a lifesaver. It literally is a brain-scrambler.

KK: A lot of what you write about and the way you write is targeted at adults. If you were to go into schools and talk to middle school children, what would be the most effective argument you could make to them?

JH: I'm glad you asked that, because just before our conversation, I was in an hour-long conversation with my team. We're creating a version of The Anxious Generation for 8-to-12 year olds, for kids who don't yet have a smartphone. And the main thing that we want to convey to them is that there are these companies that are going to try to hook you. And they've hooked most kids. If you look at the kids older than you, they're not having fun. They're lonely, they're sad. Because they all got sucked into just being content consumers, that's all they do. But do you want to have an amazing, exciting life? Do you want to do things? Do you want to have fun with your friends?

Don't go down that route. Don't let these companies trick you and suck you in. One of the key ideas in The Anxious Generation is this is not a book about screens; this is a book about childhood. What kind of childhood do we want for our kids?

--

If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.