In the introduction to his new book The Anxious Generation, titled “Growing up on Mars”, Jonathan Haidt tells a fanciful piece of science fiction about a child conscripted into a dangerous mission to the red planet that will deform the young person as they grow. The journey is undertaken without the parents’ consent. The ham-fisted metaphor is that technology companies have done the same to children and teenagers by putting smartphones into their hands.
Haidt, a New York University professor of ethical leadership who researches social psychology and morality, goes on to argue that smartphones ignited a wildfire of anxiety and depression in gen Z around the world, by granting them “continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities”. He says there are four foundational harms in this degradation of youth: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.
“This great rewiring of childhood, I argue, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s,” he writes.
The Anxious Generation has squatted atop the New York Times bestseller list for four weeks now and garnered florid, positive reviews – it hit a nerve. But it has also sparked fierce debate over the effects of our now ubiquitous devices, the causes of mental illness, and just what to do about the kids. Haidt’s critics argue that he took advantage of very real phenomena – depressed and anxious children, overattachment to technology, disconnection from other humans – to make a broad indictment of smartphones, when it’s not as simple as that.
***
We can split The Anxious Generation into two parts: the first details the supposed digital destruction of childhood around the world, while the second recommends ways to fix it.
There is, in fact, a crashing wave of teenage anguish. Studies in Haidt’s book and elsewhere show an alarming surge in teenage depression, anxiety and suicide attempts from 2010 to 2023. This is happening at the same time as widespread social media and smartphone adoption. The psychologist Jean Twenge, an associate of Haidt, asked in 2017 on the cover of the Atlantic: “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?” In the fall of 2021, a “national emergency in child and adolescent mental health” was declared by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children’s Hospital Association.
But as the University of California, Irvine, psychology professor Candice Odgers asked in her critique of The Anxious Generation in Nature, “Is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?”
The answer, per Odgers, is no. Blisteringly, she accuses Haidt of “making up stories by simply looking at trend lines” and says his book’s core argument “is not supported by science”. Haidt makes the basic error of mistaking correlation with causation, she says.
In a review of 40 previous studies published in 2020, Odgers found no cause-effect relationship between smartphone ownership, social media usage and adolescents’ mental health. A 2023 analysis of wellbeing and Facebook adoption in 72 countries cited by Odgers delivered no evidence connecting the spread of social media with mental illness. (Those researchers even found that Facebook adoption predicted some positive trends in wellbeing among young people.) Another survey of more than 500 teens and over 1,000 undergraduates conducted over two and six years, respectively, found that increased social media use did not precede the onset of depression.
For Haidt to draw such a sweeping conclusion as “teens troubled, ergo smartphones bad” from such unsettled science is wrong, Odgers argues. He engages in post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning: after this, therefore because of this. The irony is palpable –Haidt himself has argued in his own academic research that “moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction” that follows a judgment already made. His fellow scientists now say his book falls into the same trap in pronouncing that immoral technology has corrupted the youth of today. The Oxford psychology professor Andrew Przybylski told the tech newsletter Platformer: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Right now, I’d argue he doesn’t have that.” The Stetson University psychology professor Christopher Ferguson said Haidt’s book was fomenting moral panic about social media reminiscent of the debate over video games and real-world violence.
“Overall, as has been the case for previous media such as video games, concerns about screen time and mental health are not based in reliable data,” Ferguson noted in a 2021 meta-analysis of more than 30 studies that found no link between smartphone or social media use and poor mental health or suicidal ideation.
Responding to social scientists’ critiques of his book on the New Yorker Radio Hour, Haidt said, “I keep asking for alternative theories. You don’t think it’s the smartphones and social media – what is it?”
Haidt was making an appeal to ignorance, a logical fallacy: an alternative is absent, ergo my hypothesis is correct. Simply because there are no other explanations for the deterioration of the mental health of teenagers on the bestseller list right now does not mean his book is right – a drought of certainty does not mean the first idea we find is water. And scientists and doctors have, in fact, put forward ideas that compete with his, or else acknowledged smartphones as part, but not all, of the problem.
What’s more, The Anxious Generation barely acknowledges the effect of school closures during the pandemic had on kids and teens’ mental health and development, the Washington Post technology reporter Taylor Lorenz pointed out on her podcast. The Anxious Generation includes graphs showing that adolescent mental health grew even worse beginning in 2020, but Haidt insists that the pandemic was only an accelerant to an already raging fire caused by smartphones.
“The mess is not because of Covid. It was baked in before Covid. Covid didn’t actually have a long-lasting impact,” he said in a podcast interview with a fellow NYU professor, Scott Galloway.
A rebuttal in the language of a TikToker: be so for real. Studies definitively say that school closures due to the coronavirus pandemic caused and continue to inflame mental distress among children and teenagers. These disruptions hindered students’ social and emotional development, academic progress and physical health, multiple researchers have found, without equivocation. Worse still, studies have found that these measures did little to limit the spread of coronavirus as much as they hurt young students, an ineffective tradeoff.
Haidt needed to substantively contend with the problems caused by lockdowns and school closures, which are correlated with the worst period of teen suffering in the last 15 years, to give real, current solutions to the mental health crisis among youth. He offers little in that regard.
***
If the first part of Haidt’s book – teens suffering, phones to blame – reads as sensational generalization, the second half is full of recommendations you have probably heard before, because Haidt cites nationwide professional associations of doctors and authorities.
The Anxious Generation proposes four solutions to the epidemic: “No smartphones before high school. No social media before 16. Phone-free schools. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.” With the exception of age-gating policies, these are not unreasonable things. Schools have seen remarkable results when they ban smartphones. Many educators are in favor of such prohibitions. Teenagers do struggle with appropriate use of social media, and many say it makes them feel worse about themselves. Allowing children playtime free of surveillance does not seem beyond the pale. Parents limiting children’s phone use before bed and in the early morning, as Haidt advises, is decent counsel.
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry goes a step further, advising that parents themselves should attempt to model the habits of screen time they wish to see in their children.
That same organization that declared a mental health emergency among young people offers a measured approach to technology and teens in general: “Screens are here to stay and can offer many positives,” its website reads. But Haidt can see none of these positives in smartphones or social media, an unrealistic attitude. He rightfully points out that social media can be a nightmare of compare and despair, of the fear of missing out. The other side of the same coin is that it forms aspirational and inspirational communities, and outlets for creativity. Smartphones are likewise tools of productivity for young people: in 2012, squarely in the years that Haidt says the ruination of childhood began, Reuters reported that more than a third of surveyed American teenagers were doing homework on their phones. “Influencer” has become a derisive term, but the job of creating content for social media has minted a generation of young business owners. And how do you think the teenage students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school organized a global movement against gun violence?
Children have always inhabited worlds that seem foreign and foreboding to their parents – the internet is one such place. It is unsettling and unfamiliar to those who did not grow up with it. What The Anxious Generation does successfully is smooth on a salve over the hurt of being disregarded by a loved one in favor of a phone. It provides an answer to the painful parental question of “Why is my child ignoring me? Why are they spending so much time online and alone in their room?”
But the question of teen mental health is complicated and resistant to any single explanation. And overlooking all that smartphones can be for teens and adults – maps, digital cameras, novels, encyclopedias, Walkmen and whatever else Haidt dismisses as “other internet-based activities”– is a reductive understanding of our devices as mere gaming and gabbing machines. In 2024, these devices contain our lives.
I was reminded of Haidt’s book on the subway the other night. A woman asked her daughter in the seat next to her a question. Her daughter did not answer; she was staring at her phone playing a game. The woman’s smile faded. They did not speak for another minute. Then the daughter handed her mother the phone and looked her in the eyes: it was the mother’s turn in the game. The woman looked at the phone and laughed at something the young girl had done, some funny misstep or a clever move. They both smiled. Though only an anecdote, it did remind me of the possibility of connection, both online and off.
• In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org. The charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111, and in the UK and Ireland Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Support is also available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636 and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
