‘No smartphones before 14; no social media until 16': The Anxious Generation author on how to fight back against big tech

The Guardian

19 hours ago

Jonathan Haidt is a man with a mission. You'll have to forgive the cliche, because it's literally true. The author of The Anxious Generation, an urgent warning about the effect of digital tech on young minds, is based at New York University's business school: 'I'm around all these corporate types and we're always talking about companies and their mission statements,' he tells me. So, he decided to make one for himself. 'It was very simple: 'My mission is to use my research in moral psychology and that of others to help people better understand each other, and to help important social institutions work well.''
This is characteristic of Haidt: there's the risk that writing your own brand manifesto might seem a bit, well, pompous. What comes across instead is the nerd's desire to be as effective as possible, combined with the positive psychologist's love of self-improvement (one of his signature undergraduate courses is called Flourishing, which sets students homework such as 'catch and analyse 10 automatic thoughts').
He is in London for a week or so and we meet in the deserted cocktail bar of a grand hotel off Whitehall at 8am (the early start makes me feel as if I'm being dragged into the orbit of a fearsome productivity routine). He speaks softly as a result of a vocal cord injury, which adds to an impression of scholarly courtesy – punctuated by bursts of excitement when he talks about, say, Socrates or the US constitution.
It also belies the fact that he's written a monster bestseller, and is now a busy campaigner. The Anxious Generation, out in paperback, follows books on happiness, political polarisation and campus culture wars. It's an evidence-based but thoroughly mission-driven call to action: smartphones, he argues, are largely responsible for a collapse in young people's mental health since 2010. The gloomy picture takes in increased anxiety, depression, even self-harm and suicide (with hard indicators such as an uptick in emergency room admissions for self-inflicted injuries meaning that it can't be down to increased 'awareness' or diagnosis creep). There are ways out of the mess, Haidt says, but time is limited, particularly if we want to avert the even greater threat posed by AI.
The book has sold 1.7m copies in 44 languages, capturing the attention of a different anxious generation – parents thankful they were born too early for the phone-based childhoods Haidt describes in dispiriting detail, but desperate for guidance now they have children of their own. His statement of the problem, and straightforward advice on what to do about it, has convinced policymakers, too. In Australia, where a ban on social media for under-16s will take effect later this year, his work has changed the law. The wife of the politician who helped design the legislation was reading The Anxious Generation in bed, Haidt told one interviewer, 'and she turns to him and says: 'You've got to read this book, and then you've got to effing do something about it.'' The day before we meet, he attended a session in parliament organised by the crossbench peer Beeban Kidron, whose rules to protect children's privacy on social media became part of the 2018 Data Protection Act ('she has been a force of nature'). And he's in touch with UK government ministers as well: 'I won't mention names. I will be talking to a couple by Zoom.'
So what is his prescription to reverse, or at least treat, what he calls the Great Rewiring of children's lives? He sets out 'four norms' that parents, and society at large, should adopt: no smartphones before the age of 14; no social media until 16; phone-free schools; and far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. Although The Anxious Generation has largely been seen as a book about digital devices, it's as emphatic about that last point. Boomers, gen Xers and even millennials enjoyed plenty of free play outside when crime rates were much higher than they are now. Modern parents, exposed to a diet of constant bad news, are more paranoid. This stunts development, reducing the opportunity to learn skills such as cooperation and conflict resolution, to overcome fears and, well, to have fun.
Essentially, he argues, we're guilty of overprotection in one place (the real world) and underprotection in another (online). 'I think that was one of the important points of Adolescence,' he says, referencing the Netflix show that dramatised the influence of the 'manosphere' on teenage boys. 'We all freaked out in the 90s about the outside world. We all thought our kids are in danger if they're not in our sight, and so we've stopped letting them out, and we thought: well, as long as they're on computers, that's good. They'll learn to program. They'll start a company. One of the poignant moments in [the show] was when the parents said: 'We thought he was safe. He was just up in his room.''
The four norms look simple enough on paper. But what about the fiendish reality of enforcing them, particularly if your children are already extremely online? 'What I found in the year since the book came out is that parents with young children love it,' Haidt says. 'They're excited, like: yes, we're going to do this. Whereas parents of teenagers have more mixed reactions, for exactly the reason that all of us are already so deeply into this.'
Haidt has two children of his own with artist and photographer Jayne Riew: a girl of 15 and a boy of 18. 'The advice that I give to parents of teenagers is, if you recently gave your child a smartphone or social media, you can take it back. Give them a flip phone, a brick phone, a dumb phone. The key is you want your kids to be able to communicate with their friends, but you don't want to give them over to for-profit companies [whose] goal is to hook your child.'
'Now, if your kids are 15 or 16 and their entire social lives are on Instagram and Snapchat, it would be very painful to cut them off,' he says, 'because they'll experience that as social death. So the key strategy … is to help them take back their attention by creating large parts of the day where they're not on it.' Ban devices in the bedroom, push for phone-free schools, do everything you can to expand the window of time spent away from addictive tech.
Back in 2019, when he was laying down ground rules for his own children, the evidence pointed to social media as the greater evil, particularly for girls. So he banned that, rather than phones per se. 'My daughter says she's the only person in her high school who doesn't have Snapchat.' Isn't he worried about her being left out? 'Her friends have compensated for it. They say when there's something important going on that she needs to know about, they'll text her so she's not entirely out of the loop, and it's been great, because she is really involved in the real world. She runs track, she does sewing and makes clothing.' Even so, he would do things slightly differently now: 'The rule I wish I had followed was no screens in the bedroom, ever. My kids seem to need their computers and their phones more than they would have if I'd had a better policy.'
Haidt clearly loves his job, and sets great store by what he regards as the truth-telling function of academic research. But with the book's success, is there a risk he morphs into a kind of activist? Yes, he concedes, though he doesn't seem unhappy about it. 'Once I came to realise the full extent of what is happening to literally hundreds of millions of children – I mean, human consciousness is being changed at an industrial scale – and the fact that AI is not yet entangled in our world, but in two years it will be very hard to do anything – I [felt] a kind of a campaigner's zeal to get this done, to get the norms changed this year.'
When I mention a colleague who hears from her kids that 'everyone does their homework using ChatGPT' he nods, and says 'this is a potentially unsolvable problem for education. Like all teachers, we're struggling to figure out what to do. It makes it easy for everyone to do their homework, but students need to learn how to do hard things.'
Does his newfound zeal mean it's harder for him to admit he might be wrong? To give counterarguments their due? 'Oh, yeah, I suffer from confirmation bias like everyone else. I have a whole book on confirmation bias, practically [2012's The Righteous Mind]. And so that's why one thing that we've done from the very beginning is seek out contradictory views, talk to our critics, have them publish on the Substack.' Haidt, with researcher Zach Rausch, maintains a running commentary on the evidence base for the Great Rewiring at afterbabel.com. There, he posts 'responses to sceptics' who question the link between screens and declining mental health. Some claim there are better explanations, such as Covid (though indicators of wellbeing started declining in 2010) or the climate crisis (though preteens, rather than more politically aware adolescents, seem to be particularly affected – the opposite of what you'd expect if climate worries were responsible).
In March 2024, psychologist Candice Odgers wrote a review of The Anxious Generation in Nature. She said: 'Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations,' adding that 'most data are correlative'. In other words: the problem may have coincided with the introduction of smartphones, but we can't say that there's a causal link. Odgers instead leans towards the idea that people with pre-existing problems use social media more, or in more destructive ways.
Haidt comes out fighting, though, citing 'dozens' of papers, including, for example, a meta-analysis of 26 studies that found the risk of depression increased by 13% for each extra hour spent on social media. 'She accused me of not knowing the difference between correlation and causation. That has structured the debate ever since. And the strange thing about that review, I just looked back at it the other day, what I realised is there's not a single word that indicates that she read past chapter one.' This seems hard to believe, but, Haidt says, 'I had a long section in chapter six specifically titled 'correlation versus causation''. When I asked her to respond to this later, Odgers said: 'The issue is not a failure to understand the distinction between correlation versus causation, it is the failure to apply this understanding when making causal, and frankly damaging, claims about young people that will be heard by millions of people.'
Our conversation starts to go down a rabbit hole as Haid attempts to show me a long rebuttal document he's writing on the five kinds of evidence of harm, with multiple subheadings, sections labelled 'Exhibit A' etc. 'I love debating and arguing, and that's what drew me to academic life … but the accusation that I don't understand the difference in correlation and causation, I guess that did get to me.'
One important part of the puzzle, he says, is that companies have acknowledged that children are vulnerable in internal reports never intended for public consumption. He cites one by TikTok, for example, admitting that the app was 'popular with younger users who are particularly sensitive to reinforcement in the form of social reward and have minimal ability to self-regulate effectively'. When contacted by the Guardian, TikTok declined to comment.
If the evidence is so strong, what does he think drives his critics? 'I think some of them seem to be motivated by an admirable desire to defend the kids, to say, 'Look, if this is what the kids are doing, we adults shouldn't criticise'.' He claims that 'some of the researchers are deep video gamers, and they went through this whole thing about 'Do violent video games cause violence?'. So they seem especially primed to see everything as just a replay of previous moral panics.'
I also wonder whether he's got people's backs up through his interventions in academic life, railing against what he sees as progressive overreach. His 2018 book with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, was based on an Atlantic piece of the same name, though it's more careful and caveated than the title makes it seem (editor Don Peck zhuzhed it up from Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions). The idea is that colleges have become highly risk-averse places, where students expect to be shielded from difficult ideas, and faculty and administrators live in fear of career-wrecking complaints based on offended sensibilities.
There are many reasons for this turn, Haidt argues, some of which overlap with those set out in The Anxious Generation: overprotective parenting raising a generation of fragile, nervous kids, for one. He cites the expectation of good 'customer service' driven by high tuition fees, and an administrative culture of 'CYA' (cover your ass). But he also blames a lack of 'viewpoint diversity' among faculty, leading to a moribund, timid intellectual environment and a failure to push back against overly empowered students.
This argument hits a little differently in 2025, with the Trump administration carrying out an unprecedented assault on universities, and using 'woke' culture on campus as its primary justification. A letter sent by officials menacing Harvard specifically demands 'viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring'. Is it a case of be careful what you wish for? Or, more directly, did Haidt's championing of this issue provide ammunition for the current war against academic independence?
'I don't think the fact that I've been calling for reform since 2011 should be used against me when the fact that there wasn't reform became a trigger for Donald Trump,' he says. Haidt believes the progressive monoculture that produced calls to, among other things, defund the police and abolish standardised tests alienated 'normies' to the extent that Trump rode into office 'on a wave of revulsion about what's happening on campus and more broadly in society'. Surely inflation, the cost of living, played a larger role in voters' rejection of the Democratic candidate? Haidt concedes that 'it contributed', but otherwise sticks to his guns in a way that, to me, suggests he's a little too immersed in this particular debate to see the bigger picture. Which is not to say he isn't outraged by the way things have unfolded. Still speaking softly and precisely, he unleashes the Haidtian version of a tirade.
'Trump is a deeply unstable, narcissistic man who has a zero sum view of the world and a strong sense of vengeance. And now [he's] using the power of the federal government and the department of justice to harass and harm his enemies … this is the most shocking transformation of America I've ever heard of. So while I have been a critic of schools like Harvard that, you know, was ranked as the worst university for free speech in the country … now everything is reversed.' He adds that '[Trump] is especially using antisemitism as a cudgel. I don't think that's his real motivation. And while I have always stood for the value of viewpoint diversity, so I think President Trump is not wrong to call for it, I've also always stood against government micromanaging what universities do.'
In The Coddling … Haidt declared himself 'a centrist who sides with the Democratic party on the great majority of issues' and said that he had never voted Republican for Congress or the presidency. More recently, he stated: 'I was always on the left. Now, I'm nothing. I'm not on any team.' Either way, he has undoubtedly annoyed progressives who take a more instinctively tribal approach. A contrarian by nature, he also sees that instinct as an essential part of any intellectual's toolkit. His postdoc supervisor, cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder, modelled 'an incredible playfulness with ideas and a joy in intellectual perversity, which means his dictum was: if someone asserts it, deny it and see how that goes. And if someone denies it, assert it and see how that goes.'
Does that make him a bit irritating? 'Oh, yes, it does,' he says, without a trace of offence. That's the point: 'The founding story of the academic world is Socrates being a gadfly.' Does it ever bleed into his personal life? 'My wife and I have long had a conflict of truth versus beauty, and in my view, she is willing to sacrifice truth for beauty. I have to have a footnote for everything. There has to be a source for everything. And that sometimes makes me annoying to her.'
'Carried to excess it [has] the risk of know-it-allism, and I've been accused of that by my wife – and several ex-girlfriends. So yeah, I think my strengths are also my weaknesses. The same is true for everyone.'
The Anxious Generation started life as a different book about the corrupting effects of social media on democracy. After he'd written one chapter, Haidt realised that the scale and urgency of the problem faced by children and teens meant it would have to be about them instead. He still has plans to go back to the first idea, but given everything that's happened, he's taking two or three years 'off' to support the movement he's started ('I don't have to drive it, I just have to help it along'). He says he's optimistic – 'very optimistic that we're going to, if not fully solve it, make enormous progress – we already are.'
This is energising, but I note that, when discussing 'green shoots' of hope back in 2018, he welcomed the new, socially responsible approach taken by Facebook and Twitter, including the latter's commitment to 'increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation'. 'Yeah, that died. That green shoot did not go very far,' he sighs. And in a follow-up exchange, he strikes an even darker note. I ask about the broader picture – as a student of societies, is he concerned about … the end of civilisation as we know it?
Somewhat alarmingly for a man who first made his name in the Pollyanna-ish field of positive psychology, he really is. 'I am extremely worried about social collapse,' he emails. 'Technology always changes societies, and we are just beginning the biggest technological change in history. It will only speed up as AI becomes entangled in everything. So we are headed into very dangerous times, especially for liberal democracies that require some degree of shared facts, shared stories and trusted institutions.
'This is part of the reason I feel such urgency to protect kids now, this year, 2025. The next two generations may face challenges beyond anything we can imagine. They need to be strong, competent and in control of their attention.'
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt is published by Penguin. To support the Guardian order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.