Adapted from Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt, 2024. https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/book
The Problem: The New Phone-based Childhood
Adolescents are in a mental health crisis. Major depressive episodes among American teens have more than doubled since 2010 as their social lives moved onto smartphones loaded with social media apps. Self-harm and suicide rates are way up too.
The only available explanation for why this happened in many countries at the same time is that the ancient “play-based childhood” was replaced by the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. Specifically, children and adolescents began to spend much more time on smartphones, social media, video games, and porn, and much less time doing healthy activities such as face-to-face interactions with friends and family, sleep, exercise, and reading books.
Many parents feel hopeless or resigned. They don’t want their child to spend all day swiping at a screen, but they are afraid to let their kids have adventures in “the real world.” And they are also afraid to take away their kids’ phones or social media, lest they consign their child to isolation, because “everybody else” is spending all day online.
The Solution: Talk and Text only until 16yo
Parents can coordinate with each other to establish four new norms that will roll back the phone-based childhood, improve family life, and protect their children’s mental health:
#1: No Smart Phones until High School
There’s strength in numbers. Link up with the parents of your child’s friends to commit together to waiting until high school (at least) before giving a smartphone. Nostalgia is big right now; bring back the flip phone! It did no harm to the millennials.
#2: No Social Media until 16yo
Social media platforms expose children to a wide variety of harms, including sextortion, feelings of inadequacy, and contact with ill-intentioned strangers; there is no way to make it appropriate for children. Link up with the parents of your child’s friends to commit together to not allowing your children to open social media accounts until 16 years old.
#3: Advocate for phone-free schools
Policy changes follow public opinion. If other parents in your kids’ schools share your concerns (and they do!), then gather them together to sign and send a petition to the school’s leadership asking for the school to go phone-free and to offer more free play and independence. When children are in school they should be paying attention to their teachers and to each other, not to their phones.
#4: Give more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world
Kids develop social skills and overcome anxiety naturally through independence and unsupervised play. This means letting them do more activities and errands on their own, unsupervised, in the real world.
PhoneFreeSchools.org and PhoneFreeSchoolsMovement.org for support in implementing phone-free policies.