The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt thinks the evidence is now conclusive: the smartphone and social media have ruined young people’s lives. He tells Decca Aitkenhead how we can save a generation.
Every author hopes to publish their book at a moment when the world will pay attention. Very few are better timed than Jonathan Haidt’s.
In the weeks before I meet the New York University professor, new UK figures reveal a 53 per cent rise in emergency referrals to youth mental healthcare services in the past three years. If the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service’s waiting list formed a physical queue, it would now stretch from London to Birmingham. The mother of Brianna Ghey, murdered last year by two teens, visits parliament to call for a social media ban for under-16s, backed by several MPs. Columnists write about regretting giving their 11-year-olds smartphones. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, even apologises to parents at a US Senate hearing.
Having spent the past six years writing The Anxious Generation, Haidt is relieved we’re finally having these conversations. But over Zoom from his home in New York, he is also frustrated that they’re still not the right conversations.
“People say, should we just try to improve things a little bit by making the social media content a little healthier? That’s like saying, can’t we design guns with bullets that are nicer? And my concern is that we talk so much about the phone. The other half of this conversation has to be about play.”
Haidt, 60, is the kind of rock-star academic, seldom found in British academia, who talks less like a professor than a TV personality. The social psychologist became famous with his 2018 bestseller (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff), The Coddling of the American Mind, about the peculiar mental fragility of Gen Z undergraduates who feel “unsafe” exposed to any opinion they disagree with.
“But the book’s critics said Gen Zs are fine, there’s no mental illness epidemic, it’s just an illusion, it’s just self-reporting. They kept saying it’s a moral panic.” So Haidt began compiling more research, which soon showed that Gen Z’s mental health crisis was neither confined to self-reporting, nor to North America, and was “much worse” than he’d thought. By every objective metric — suicide rates, psychiatric hospitalisation, A&E self-harm admissions — all over the world their mental health was collapsing. For girls, in particular, the crisis is now off the charts. The father of a son, 17, and a daughter, 14, Haidt was stunned.
“In the past hundred years there hasn’t been anything like this affecting children.” He hadn’t planned to write The Anxious Generation — he was meant to be working on a different book altogether — but when the data led him to what he calls his Great Rewiring theory, “I realised this is one of the biggest — if not the biggest — public health stories ever.” It began, he says, 40 years ago.
Like every generation for millennia, Haidt had enjoyed an unsupervised “play-based” childhood. In the New York suburb of Scarsdale he was left to his own devices from the end of school until dinnertime. He messed about outdoors with friends, built fires, had rock fights with neighbourhood kids, experimented with alcohol. “It could have been dangerous — but that was the point.” Just as germs fortify children’s immunity, “the risk of harm is an active ingredient in learning how to manage risk”. Equally essential to social development is physical free play. “Like all mammals, we have evolved to mature through play.”
In the late 1980s, though, a new concept he calls “safetyism” began to pressure parents to prioritise safety above all else, leading to the anxious helicoptering and hot-housing parenting culture of today. In 1991 roughly half of children in the US aged 13 to 18 met up with friends outside school almost every day. By 2017 less than 30 per cent did so. They were no longer, as Haidt puts it, “doing the things it takes to become a confident, competent adult”.
The second half of the story began in 2010 with the arrival of the iPhone 4, which featured a forward-facing camera and placed the new “like” and “retweet” functions of social media platforms in the palms of our hands. Teenagers cooped up at home suddenly had a whole new online social world to enter from their bedrooms. “As parents,” Haidt recalls, “we discovered that if your child is crying and you just give them a smartphone, he’s happy, you’re happy.” Thus the “phone-based childhood” was born.
When none of the boys at my son’s seventh birthday party in 2018 knew how to play and demanded video games, I was puzzled. When those boys’ teenage sisters began cutting and starving themselves and talking about suicide, I was as baffled as everyone else. The correlation between the advents of social media and social anxiety didn’t prove causation, did it? Haidt’s book answers that question emphatically.
Today, 95 per cent of American teenagers own a smartphone. They average 50 hours a week on them, and 45 per cent say they’re online “almost constantly”. The opportunity cost of that alone makes Haidt describe phones as “experience blockers”, depriving children of everything else they could be doing and isolating them. If social media was truly social, the percentage of 17 to 18-year-old girls who have several close friends would not have plummeted after 2012. The number who “often feel lonely” rose by 10 percentage points between 1997 and 2019.
Boys’ loneliness also rose sharply: in 2000 less than a fifth of US pupils aged 13 to 18 said they often felt lonely; by 2019 it was close to a third. The Great Rewiring had replaced physical outdoor play with video games, isolating boys at their bedroom consoles. They can game online with friends and chat while playing — but while most video games involve fighting, players “never experience fear”, nor the rough and tumble that used to develop boys’ sense of masculinity. With limitless online porn, boys no longer even have to take the confidence-building risk of approaching girls in real life.
The phone-based childhood harms girls’ mental health so much more than boys’ because, Haidt explains, “for a start, they use it much more”. By 2017 twice as many girls than boys spent more than 40 hours a week on social media. They are also more susceptible to “visual social comparison and perfectionism”; research shows that social media camera filters lead “directly to [girls’] lower body image”. Two thirds of girls were satisfied with themselves in 1997, but by 2019 that fell to barely more than half.
Girls’ greater vulnerability to “sociogenic epidemics” can also make their mental distress contagious. When videos of people with Tourette syndrome on TikTok went viral during lockdown, doctors all over the world began seeing teenage girls with what looked like Tourette tics but no neurological disorder.
Pressure from boys to send nude photos creates a constant risk of public humiliation, fuelling girls’ anxiety. Adult sexual predators are a daily fact of life for girls online, further amplifying it. And since bullying moved from the playground to online, from physical to emotional, its new victims are overwhelmingly girls.
“Unless someone finds a chemical that was released in the early 2010s into the drinking water of North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand that affects adolescent girls most, and has little effect on the mental health of people over 30,” Haidt concludes in his book, “the Great Rewiring is the leading theory.”
Climate change is often cited as an alternative explanation, I suggest. “If the mental health crisis started among girls in 2018, I would say, wow, Greta Thunberg really affected girls. But why did this start, especially with preteen girls, in 2013? And why are 12 and 13-year-old girls particularly affected? So it doesn’t fit the timing or the demographics.” Similarly, if economic gloom was to blame, adolescent depression should have spiked in 2009, hit boys equally and subsided as the economy recovered. “But we’ve seen the exact opposite.”
What about the pandemic? Haidt shakes his head. “Covid is a tiny player in this story. When you look at the graphs, it is a blip in the long run. By 2023 the data was all now basically where it would have been if Covid had never happened.” If social media is so dangerous, why are we not seeing the same mental health crisis in adults? “Because the people with the least willpower and the greatest vulnerability to manipulation are children and adolescents.”
Haidt owns a smartphone and gave his own son an old iPhone at the age of nine, when he began walking to school alone. “We didn’t even think about alternatives.” By the time his daughter was eight, and beginning to pop out to the neighbourhood shops alone, Haidt had read enough data to give her a Gizmo watch instead, offering only GPS tracking and limited phone calls. By 11 she was begging to be allowed on Instagram, because “everyone had it. And she is very much the sort of girl who would have gotten sucked into Instagram, had we let her. But by 12 she was telling me that she doesn’t even want it because the girls on Instagram in her school are stupid.” Now 14, his daughter is begging for Snapchat, but won’t be allowed any social media until 16.
The developmental necessity of children’s play feels intuitively unarguable. But any argument framed around evolutionary determinism, I say, always makes me wary. Chauvinists used to say women should be housewives because they “evolved” to raise children, not go out to work.
“Well, once we understand some basic facts about childhood, it does put a strong moral obligation on us to give kids what they need. If you had a country where they suddenly said, ‘You know what, we have this new food. It’s great. The kids love it, it’s cheap, it has no vitamin C, our kids are getting rickets, their teeth are falling out. But we are not going to give them vitamin C, because so what if we evolved to need vitamin C? We don’t care, we’re using this food.’ That would be completely insane.”
If the data now conclusively proves social media is bad for children, how come some studies continue to reach the opposite conclusion? Haidt says these are outliers, which he puts down to researchers’ reluctance to appear critical of adolescents; they want to be down with the kids. They would say he is biased by the perennial lament of every grumpy old man who thinks the younger generation is going to the dogs. Might they have a point?
“There are certain known biases that will come with age. That is true, so we must look out for that. If the evidence suggests this generation is not really very different from prior generations, you probably are just a grumpy old man,” he agrees. “But there was never a generational change like the one we have now. Suppose we built a new city and used all lead pipes, and then a year or two later all the kids started getting neurological damage, I don’t think you’re being a grumpy old man to say, maybe we should stop them from drinking leaded water. And I think that’s where we are now with social media.”
America might ban the Chinese-owned TikTok on national security grounds, but it’s notable that in China there is no such thing as TikTok; addictive algorithms are against the law. The Chinese access an altogether more wholesome app called Douyin. Public opinion and political pressure are certainly now shifting against social media. The problem with the current debate, Haidt says, is its false premise that some social media has positive benefits for children, so we just need to get rid of the harmful content.
“This is a red herring. It’s the wrong conversation and a distractionary one that the tech platforms would actually like us to be having. Raising girls to spend literally the majority of their waking hours thinking about what people are saying about their looks — even if everything’s positive and everyone tells them they look lovely — is an insane thing to do. It is intrinsically bad for girls, and there is no way to make it good for them. That’s why I do not participate in conversations about content moderation.”
The term “social media platform” is instructive, he says. What were originally called networks, designed to connect us, are now stages on which to perform. Child stars have been having mental breakdowns ever since Hollywood began; Noel Coward famously warned Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage some 90 years ago. Social media is now turning all our children into aspiring child stars, on stage every single day.
Parents of LGBT or ethnic minority teens often tell Haidt their children have found great support in social media communities. He points out that the online abuse data shows these are the very children most trolled and victimised online. When Zuckerberg testified to the US Senate in January that Meta spends billions on content moderation and cares deeply about online safety, Haidt practically laughed.
“He wants us to believe that ‘we are making an effort to clean it up. We’re going to give your kid better content.’ But no, it’s, like, ‘We’re going to shoot your kid with smaller bullets.’ Your kid is still going to die.”
So what, I ask, is his solution for my 12-year-old son, the only child in his entire school year without a phone, for which he has paid a social price? If I renege on my promise of a smartphone for his 13th birthday, I’ll perpetuate his social exclusion.
“What you’ve described is a perfect illustration of a collective action problem. So the rational thing for a parent whose kid is literally the only one is to give them a phone and then fight with them, eternally trying to place limits. And that’s what we’re all doing. So the worst possible overall outcome is what we’re all trapped in. None of the parents want their kids to have a phone, other than because everyone else does.”
Collective problems require collective solutions, and he has a long list of proposals. Parents can group together and make a pact not to give their children smartphones until they turn 14, so that no child is the only one with a “brick” phone. Parents should write en masse to ask schools to introduce a no-phones policy. Most UK schools have already banned phones in class, but this, Haidt writes, is “nearly useless”. Policing it becomes a full-time job for teachers, and even if they do so successfully, the moment the bell rings “students check their posts and feeds”, fracturing their attention. Schools should instead install lockers to store pupils’ phones for the whole day.
Governments should mandate a legal age restriction of 16 on all social media platforms, just as they do at 18 for alcohol and cigarettes. Tech companies should be obliged by law to install age-verification systems that actually work, and pay prohibitive penalties for failure to enforce them.
This all sounds brilliant, I say — but for two obvious problems. If age-verification software could actually work, wouldn’t it have been invented by now? My 14-year-old son read Haidt’s suggested verification systems and took less than five minutes to devise ways to outfox them. However right Haidt may be about everything else, if no restrictions can ever be enforceable, doesn’t that render this entire conversation moot?
“No law is completely enforceable,” he replies. “Shoplifting is illegal, yet people still do it. But would we want a world in which anyone can walk into a shop and take whatever they want with total impunity? We need some speed bumps, obstacles, penalties. That is what we do with law, and that’s what we should do here.”
The second problem may be trickier. Parents say they hate their kids spending hours on phones. But isn’t their dirty secret that it makes their life easier? They don’t have to play board games and ping pong and football with their kids when they’re on their phones. We all say we want to solve climate change, after all — but not if we have to stop eating meat and flying abroad.
Haidt laughs. “There’s a finding in social psychology called solution aversion. If you tell a bunch of people that global warming is a problem, we’re going to have to stop using cars — and then when you ask them, do you think global warming is man-made, they can become very sceptical. If confronted by a solution they find horrible, they will change the facts so that they don’t have to do it.”
But parents, he adds, don’t want their child to get depressed, self-harm or reach adulthood too emotionally and socially ill-equipped to leave home, a modern phenomenon known as “failure to launch”.
The Coddling of the American Mind was fiercely debated in America, and its critics cast Haidt as an anti-woke conservative — much to the liberal professor’s surprise. It was one of the first books to address the new US campus culture of trigger warnings and deplatforming, but did not reverse it. On the contrary, when Haidt gives talks “sometimes they have extra police guards, thinking that there could be a protest”. These haven’t yet proved necessary, but one invitation to speak at a private New York school in 2019 was cancelled after someone objected.
“But I actually predict we’re going to win this one. The world I come into with this book is a world in which almost all the parents are upset and afraid. They don’t know what to do. And almost all the teachers hate it and wish we could ban the phones.”
Only a week later I read about a website created by parents providing template letters to request a phone-free policy at schools. In February the education secretary announced national guidelines to ban phones in schools. But none of this will work, cautions Haidt, if we don’t replace phones with independent, unsupervised play.
“There really are two halves here. If you give your kids independence but let them have their smartphones all the time, they’re going to sit outside on their phone. So you have to do the phone thing. But if you restrict the phones but don’t give them independence, they’re going to sit and stare at the wall. So parents should not think of this as a deprivation exercise. It’s a childhood improvement exercise.”
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (Allen Lane) is available now.
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London