Can We Get Kids Off Smartphones?

The exact causes of the Gen Z mental-health emergency will be parsed for years to come, but the severity of the crisis itself is, at this point, beyond question. Members of Gen Z, who were born between the mid-to-late nineties and the early twenty-tens, tend to be lonelier than the members of previous generations. They are more anxious and depressed; they get less sleep. They more commonly think that their lives hold no meaning. They are more likely to harm themselves or experience suicidal ideation. (Suicide deaths among children ages ten to fourteen more than doubled between 2007 and 2017.) They are more wary of, or just less interested in, the things that were once milestones of freedom: drinking, dating, having sex, getting driver’s licenses, moving out of their parents’ houses.

“On average,” the social psychologist and N.Y.U. professor Jonathan Haidt writes in “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” “people born in and after 1996 were different, psychologically, from those who had been born just a few years earlier.” From childhood, Haidt suggests, they suffer from a weak “psychological immune system—the ability of a child to handle, process, and get past frustrations, minor accidents, teasing, exclusion, perceived injustices, and normal conflicts without falling prey to hours or days of inner turmoil.” This immunosuppression persists into adolescence and beyond, fostering higher proportions of nervous, avoidant young adults.

For Haidt, the explanation is partly cultural and partly technological. The oldest members of Gen Z were in middle school in 2009 and 2010, when Facebook added the Like button, Twitter added the Retweet option, and smartphones’ front-facing cameras became ubiquitous, launching the age of the selfie. The effect of these tools, Haidt writes, was to attach kids to “a firehose of social comparison” that pummelled their self-esteem at a critical moment of cognitive and psychological development. Studies show that, the more kids use social media, the more likely they are to experience anxiety and depression; girls, Black children, and L.G.B.T.Q. youth are hit hardest. (Boys over all, hypnotized by porn and video games, don’t fare hugely better than girls.) And constant discussion and self-diagnosis of mental-health disorders on TikTok, Instagram, and elsewhere may contribute to what two University of Oxford researchers call “prevalence inflation,” in which people mistake everyday stress and discomfort as signs of a serious disorder “in a way that is ultimately self-fulfilling.” As an example, the scholars note that “interpreting low levels of anxiety as symptomatic of an anxiety disorder might lead to behavioural avoidance, which can further exacerbate anxiety symptoms.”

By the time that smartphones and social media were becoming omnipresent, in the late two-thousands and early twenty-tens, children were also spending less and less time engaged in unstructured, largely unsupervised play with their peers. This deprivation owed to their parents’ concerns for their safety—a fretfulness known as “safetyism”—and to a competitive, college-fixated mind-set that prioritized adult-led, résumé-building, and “enrichment” activities. Unaccompanied kids doing normal kid things like walking home from school or visiting a playground became conspicuous, strange, perhaps even the subject of a 911 call or a C.P.S. investigation. The suburban or small-town nine-year-old who, a generation before, would have been running around outside with the other neighborhood kids all afternoon is now indoors, staring at her phone.

Alas, for her, children who miss out on free play are worse at taking risks, reading social cues, making friends, and resolving conflicts. Improvisational, unmonitored play functions as exposure therapy for life itself. In a commentary published last year in The Journal of Pediatrics which summarized the causal links between free play and mental health, the authors declared that “the decline in children’s independent activity and, hence, in mental wellbeing is a national and international health crisis and should be treated as such.”

Of course, fretting about the deficiencies of contemporary youth is an ancient tradition. Elders have always overreacted to the supposedly mind-altering properties of certain technological advancements, from the printing press to the television set. Haidt is one of America’s more prominent hand-wringers about kids these days, owing to a viral Atlantic piece that he co-authored, in 2015, with the attorney and free-speech activist Greg Lukianoff, headlined “The Coddling of the American Mind.” In that article, and in the 2018 book of the same name, Haidt and Lukianoff portrayed a bubble-wrapped generation that had been raised to be “fragile, anxious, and easily hurt,” and railed against what they identified as a student-directed movement “to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.” The corrosive cleaning agents, according to the authors, included trigger warnings, spurious talk of “microaggressions,” and demands for “safe spaces.” Haidt and Lukianoff argued that Gen Z victims of safetyism were also, in higher ed, its most aggressive perpetrators.

“The Coddling of the American Mind” was a somewhat better book than its reactionary title promised, but Haidt and Lukianoff’s reflexive disdain for left-leaning youth and weakness for caricature had a flattening effect on their analysis. Haidt had risen to public-intellectual fame in the early two-thousands via his work on positive psychology, but “Coddling” turned him into a folk hero in a frequently specious war against cancel culture, winning him fans among the revanchist likes of Joe Rogan, Bari Weiss, and Jordan Peterson. He has often taken a both-sides approach to political conflict that equates leftist activism with deadly right-wing extremism. (A section in “Coddling” that deals with the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally of white supremacists and the counter-demonstrators it drew, in Charlottesville, is an especially egregious example of this tendency.) He has been beset by a troubling fixation on the heritability of I.Q.—a contention widely dismissed as scientific racism—and the purported accuracy of stereotypes. He once argued against a proposal to diversify New York City’s specialized high schools, saying that it would exacerbate racism. On Twitter and Bluesky, I have frequently doomscrolled past the balding, scruff-bearded man who is the visual shorthand of the Clickhole classic “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point,” but I had never felt the heat of his proud, stoic gaze until I found myself nodding along in agreement with much of “The Anxious Generation.”

The cognitive dissonance is especially uncomfortable because “The Anxious Generation” is, to a considerable extent, a reiteration and expansion of “Coddling.” But it is also a vastly superior work. It’s less hung up on campus-outrage stuff, and it benefits from six additional years of research on how smartphones and social media dice the nerves and tamp the spirits of young people, particularly those between the ages of ten and fifteen. These established links are now the stuff of Surgeon General’s advisories, alarming C.D.C. reports, and class-action lawsuits. What was maybe still an educated guess even half a decade ago is now a grim, clinical certainty.

There is also a surprising degree of certainty about possible countermeasures for what Haidt sums up as “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world.” In “The Anxious Generation,” Haidt makes four core appeals to parents and educators: more unstructured free play for children, no smartphones before high school, no social media before age sixteen, and no phones in schools. All of these strike me as not just reasonable but irrefutably necessary. What is less clear is whether there is enough collective and institutional will to accomplish them.

During the past year, I’ve been interviewing parents who have attempted to block or strictly limit their tween and teen-age children’s use of smartphones and social media. Conversations with these parents—all of whom live in the New York City area, and whose kids attend a mix of public, charter, and private schools—hit common refrains. Parents worried about their kids saying or doing something foolish that, if captured and circulated via smartphone, would haunt them for the rest of their lives. They were infuriated that tech companies, abiding by federal law, effectively give kids online emancipation from their parents at the arbitrary and absurdly young age of thirteen and, even then, barely bother with age verification. (One talked about falsifying her kid’s birth date on Google’s Family Link in order to keep full control over the service.) They lamented the friction and distrust sown by devices—I heard about kids who kept surreptitiously changing the parental settings on their social media, or who have finstas full of duck face and provocation, or who sneak phones into their bedrooms and stay up with them all night.

A thread of safetyism still prevails among these parents. Some resisted buying their child a device but felt they had no choice once the kid started taking the subway or walking to school without adult accompaniment. And I was surprised by the extent to which G.P.S. location-tracking of kids is treated as a given, as ubiquitous and indispensable as backpacks and sneakers. Several parents said that they weren’t sure how to balance preserving their children’s privacy—their ability to have a sacred space carved out from their parents to grow into themselves—and monitoring their online and offline behavior in order to keep them safe. One told me, “I am definitely a helicopter parent, and my generation is full of helicopter parents, because we’ve given them access to this, like, horrifying void.”

These parents noticed how lonely their kids often seem to be, and how social media simultaneously fills and widens that emptiness. Although online forums can provide some of the togetherness that young people crave, ideally, Haidt writes, most of their interactions should unfold in person, unmediated by screens, which requires emotional effort and investment. In reading “The Anxious Generation” and speaking with parents, I frequently thought about what the late literary and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant called “the inconvenience of other people”—the “affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation. At a minimum, inconvenience is the force that makes one shift a little while processing the world.” Using your mind and body to interact extemporaneously with other minds and bodies is a skill that dulled during the pandemic; it can be boring, or frustrating, or distressing; it demands time, compromise, and accommodation. The inconvenient person, Berlant wrote, is “someone you trip over, even just in your mind.” Kids need to trip over people and ideas, at the risk of scraping up their psyches, in order to learn how to move through the world and how to connect meaningfully with the people in it.

Many teens are aware that smartphones disrupt their sleep, their moods, and their self-image, but they believe, as several parents told me, that giving up their phones would kill their social lives. Research has shown that, when adolescents abstain from social media for a while, their mental health improves even as their isolation from their friends who are still on the platforms increases; a smart, emotionally intelligent kid can recognize the merits of this trade-off and still choose to keep their TikTok and Snapchat accounts. (A University of Chicago working paper published last year found that fifty-seven per cent of college students who are active users of Instagram would “prefer to live in a world without the platform.”) One parent talked about her daughter’s experience at a prestigious summer program, where, not long after arriving, she found herself sitting with a group of other new arrivals; rather than getting acquainted, the rest of the kids were all staring at their phones, and she didn’t have one. She told her mother, “It was so stupid. But, in that moment, I wanted to be stupid, too.”