The Anxious Generation — should phones be taken away from teens?

Even though much of The Anxious Generation will be familiar — it arrives amid a huge amount of publicity, and pundits have been talking of little else these past few weeks — the book is a hard read. Author Jonathan Haidt makes the case that, for the generation who went through adolescence after 2009 and with smartphone in hand, the advent of social media and gaming has disastrously “rewired childhood”.

The message has certainly struck a chord; Haidt, a social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has a knack for capturing the zeitgeist. The Righteous Mind (2012) looked at the role of emotion and reason in moral convictions. The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), co-written with Greg Lukianoff, described a culture of “safetyism” in which helicopter parents and educators protect their young charges from potential harm, including even thoughts.

Policymakers and parents in many countries worry about the impact of smartphones. The British grassroots movement Smartphone Free Childhood has been spreading, set up by parents who aim to keep the devices out of their kids’ grip. In the UK, the issue has also gained a higher profile because of the case of the transgender teenager Brianna Ghey, murdered by two fellow school pupils last year; her mother, Esther Ghey, has campaigned vociferously for controlling social media for under-16s. Last week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a law enacting similar restrictions; other US states are considering such interventions.

The issue also taps into a deep unease among adults about their own smartphone-fuelled distraction. While reading this book, I found myself scrolling through X or Googling an interesting factoid. It’s not hard to imagine many others doing the same.

Mostly, though, The Anxious Generation is a difficult read because its conclusions are so grim. Haidt writes that “Gen Z” — people born between 1997 and 2012 — is the “first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and . . . unsuitable.”

Despite the fact that many tech companies set a minimum age for users of 13, social media is particularly pernicious for young adolescents, whose brains are still developing, Haidt argues, drawing on reams of data; its “likes” and comparisons can have powerfully destructive effects.

While acknowledging that huge increases in self-reported anxiety and depression might relate to greater awareness about mental health — the number of US teenage boys reporting at least one major depressive episode a year jumped by 161 per cent between 2010 and 2020, and the increase among girls was only marginally less — Haidt nonetheless cites the number of adolescents brought in for emergency psychiatric care in the US. Between 2010 and 2020, he reports, the rate of self-harm among young adolescent girls “nearly tripled”, while that for girls aged 15-19 doubled: “So whatever happened in the early 2010s, it hit pre-teen and young teen girls harder than any other group.”

Placing the blame entirely at Big Tech’s door lets everyone else off the hook

How could one not worry? And yet I couldn’t help remember I’ve lived through such panics before. As a teenager in the 1980s and 1990s, girls’ low self-esteem and eating disorders were linked to skinny supermodels and the unattainable beauty standards on display in glossy magazines. Furthermore, as Pete Etchells writes in his new book Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time, data that links smartphones to anxiety, depression and loneliness is ambiguous. Moreover, mental health is a complicated phenomenon.

I blanched, for instance, at Haidt’s description of a sweet child being transformed into an adolescent who finds it hard to converse with adults. Hold on: haven’t teens always been prone to awkwardness?

This is not to absolve tech companies of responsibility. In many cases, they are rapacious and have been uncooperative with researchers and politicians. In 2021, the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen claimed that the company’s “own research says it is not just [that] Instagram is dangerous for teenagers, that it harms teenagers, [but] that it is distinctly worse than other forms of social media”. (Mark Zuckerberg called this a “mischaracterisation” of Meta’s research.)

But placing the blame entirely at Big Tech’s door also lets everyone else off the hook. In the UK, for example, spending on children’s mental health services fell over the five years after 2009. Research suggests that housing costs might contribute to teens’ delay in becoming independent adults.

Haidt does point the finger at parents for not allowing their children freedom to take physical risks, arguing that they “should supervise less in the real world but more in the virtual”. He also suggests that schools should encourage free play rather than being so focused on testing. Collective action, in which groups of parents agree to only give their kids dumbphones or teachers ban smartphones, is certainly easier than letting a teen be the only one in the class without Instagram.

Other of his recommendations — talking to children about their tech use, declaring that schools should be phone-free, and encouraging teens’ responsibility and independence in the real world — seem eminently sensible and realistic. I was less certain about his suggestions that under-14s should be allowed no smartphones at all, and delaying access to social media entirely until the age of 16.

Still, by the end of The Anxious Generation, I felt some optimism. Not just because of Haidt’s tips. But because I’ve read enough parenting books to know that they thrive on fear — a reminder that it’s not just kids who are anxious, but their parents too.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt Allen Lane £25/Penguin Press $30, 400 pages

Emma Jacobs is an FT features writer

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