'The Great Rewiring of Childhood'

Since Jonathan Haidt’s new book—The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness—came out last spring, the topic of screen time and social media access for children has gone, well, viral.

With provocative articles in publications like the New Yorker (“Jonathan Haidt Wants to Take Away Your Kid’s Phone”) and the New York Times (“First He Came For Cancel Culture, Now He Wants to Cancel Smartphones”), along with appearances on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher and NBC’s Today Show, among others, Haidt has been in high demand as a voice of caution, arguing that the use of smartphones among young people has correlated with the rise in anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. On Today, he articulated his hope that soon enough, “No mother will have to hear her kid say ‘I’m the only one’ without a phone,” nothing that “People say, ‘phones are here to stay.’ Well, cars are here to stay, but we don’t let 11-year-olds drive them.”

The idea for the book—a #1 New York Times bestseller—was born out of a course Haidt was teaching at NYU Stern, where he is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership. His research first led him to consider “what happened to Gen Z when they moved their social lives on to social media. But once it became clear how serious this issue was, I decided I have to focus on this.” 

The author of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt was named one of the "top global thinkers" by Foreign Policy magazine in 2012, and one of the "top world thinkers" by Prospect magazine in 2013.

In April, he participated in the NYU in Dialogue series, discussing his research and featuring some of the Gen Z students he is advocating for. Below, is a summary of Haidt outlining the evolution of the issues at hand and offering an essential, collective path forward.

What’s happening?

“We’ve had a play-based childhood for literally 200 million years because we're mammals and all mammals play. That's how we wired up our brains. Somewhere in the 1990s, it stopped—and stopped dead by 2010. It faded away and was replaced, very suddenly, by the phone-based childhood between 2010 and 2015. What it meant was that if you went through puberty on a flip phone, you're probably a Millennial, and your mental health is probably okay. If you went through puberty on a smartphone with a front-facing camera and Instagram and social media, and five hours a day of social media, nine hours a day of screen time, you are at much, much higher risk of being anxious and depressed. And you're probably Gen Z. So that's the big picture of what I think has happened. Another way to say this, and this is more for the parents in the room, is that we have overprotected our children in the real world, and we have underprotected them online. And both were mistakes. We have to reverse both of them.” 

What are the repercussions?

“Up until 2010, there were no trends. The mental health stats were pretty stable in the 2000s. The Millennials were actually a little bit healthier than Gen X before them. So there's no sign of a crisis, no sign of an epidemic. Things look fine. And then after 2010, here's what happens to the rates of anxiety and depression among American undergraduates. So it was 25 percent by 2019, just before Covid—meaning 1 in 4 had an anxiety disorder or depression. Students used to come to student health and counseling for relationship problems, addiction. And now it's overwhelmingly anxiety and depression. It's not like one day everything changed, but it's actually pretty quickly that everything changed. And the relative increase for boys is actually in the same ballpark. But because girls have higher rates, being depressed is now a normal part of being a girl in America. It doesn't mean you're probably depressed, but depression and anxiety rates are now in the 30s or 40s for American girls. Thirty percent of American girls have considered suicide in the last year. And it wasn't like that in 2010. Between 2012 and 2013, there was a 67 percent increase in suicides for younger teen girls in a single year, which is unprecedented. We see the exact same thing in the UK. We see the same thing in Australia, New Zealand. We see it in Scandinavia. It's not in all countries. We don't see evidence of this yet in East Asia or in Eastern Europe. But in most of the developed world, we do. 

“Why would this be happening around the same time in many countries with the biggest impact on younger teen girls? I won't draw out the mystery. I'll tell you. I think it's because we deprived kids of play and we gave them a life online. And that is not a human childhood. It is not a suitable way to grow up. And it has interfered with their development in almost every dimension.”

How did it come to this?

“By the year 2000, most American families had a PC. And they had a slow modem, a slow internet. And the millennials grew up with this. And for them it was amazing. And they were on, you know, AOL Chat Messenger or something. We were all like, okay, you know, they're using computers, they'll be very computer savvy. The kids are getting so smart. What technological marvels will they think of next? And that generation, the Millennials, boy did they think of technological marvels. They invented Facebook and the Silicon Valley revolution. So that's the first wave. And it was fantastic. And teen mental health doesn't get worse. It gets, actually, a little bit better, and democracy gets better and better. We thought the internet is going to be the greatest friend of democracy and the slayer of tyrants and tyranny. 

“And then we get the next wave, which is first social media around 2003 with Friendster, and Myspace, and then Facebook. And it's amazing. Like you can connect to everyone for free, keep up with your friends, post videos. It seems great. And then, oh wow, a smartphone—and you can begin to do this all on your smartphone. And that technology also was like the gods coming down and saying, think of all the appliances you would have paid a lot of money for in the 70s and 80s. How about you get them all on the phone just as an app and that's all you need. And so we were still all optimistic. And then the Arab Spring happens. And that just proves that this technology is going to change the world for the better. And it's going to wipe out authoritarian regimes. It's going to be a flowering democracy. So because we were all so optimistic about this, we didn't really notice that our kids were now spending almost all of their available time looking at their screens. I call it the great rewiring of childhood.”

What can we do?

“The reason why so many parents are giving their sixth graders smartphones is because your kid comes home and says, mom, everyone else has an iPhone. Everyone. I'm left out. I have to have this. Otherwise my social life is dead. And so it's a social dilemma. A social trap. And what I'm proposing is the way out of this is that we act together. Collective action traps can be solved collectively. And so here are four norms that we can follow. They're actually easy if we do them together. No smartphones before high school. As with the millennials, let them go through early puberty on a flip phone or a phone watch. No social media before 16. You know, I prefer that it was 18 for health reasons. But the point here is to have minimum norms that we could actually all do. You know, even if 70 percent of us do it, that's largely solving the problem. Phone free schools. This is a must. And this is happening. You know, you can use a phone to get to school, but then you lock it up in a phone lock or a Yondr pouch so that in between classes, everyone's not on their phone. It's so quiet now in schools, in between class, everyone's on their phone. Lunch is quiet because people are on their phone. That has to change. And finally, much more childhood independence and free play. So these are the norms that I think will help. And these are really pitched to adults. This is what the adults can do, the parents and the teachers, it’s what we can do to change the environment, to roll back the phone-based childhood now.”