“The biggest debate across every school right now? It’s not curriculum. Not testing. It’s not mental health. Not the pressure of college admissions. It’s whether to ban phones.”
Everyone’s watching this new wave of anxiety roll in, wondering if confiscating devices might be the life raft we’ve been waiting for.
And the match that lit this conversation? Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation. It didn’t just add to the discussion—it poured gasoline on it. The book is now #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and Haidt’s face has been everywhere—he even popped up on my Instagram feed, sitting with Oprah, who was singing its praises.
What The Anxious Generation Says
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist known for pulling no punches, argues that sometime around 2010, childhood fundamentally changed. We swapped unsupervised outdoor play and scraped knees for front-facing cameras and filtered selfies—and now, our kids are not okay.
He argues:
- Mental health issues are skyrocketing, especially for girls.
- Kids don’t play in the real world anymore.
- Phones and social media are the culprits.
- He recommends banning smartphones for kids under 14, keeping social media off-limits until 16, and creating phone-free schools.
It’s bold. It’s urgent. And depending on who you ask, it’s either exactly what we needed—or completely missing the point.
Even Bill Gates weighed in, wondering aloud if he would have become Bill Gates if smartphones had existed when he was growing up:
“Reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation has made me wonder: Would I have developed [my] habit if I had grown up with today’s technology? If every time I was alone in my room as a kid, there was a distracting app I could scroll through? If every time I sat down to tackle a programming problem as a teenager, four new messages popped up?
I don’t have the answers—but these are questions that everyone who cares about how young minds develop should be asking.”
(Source: Gates Notes)
So I Asked My Teen
After reading the book, I’ll admit it—I started to panic. Haidt’s writing sometimes leans heavily on fear, making parents—especially mothers, who are often the ones reading these books—feel terrified and guilty in ways that are both unproductive and unfair.
So I did the most obvious thing: I asked my 16-year-old daughter.
She has Instagram. Snapchat (we have a 210-day streak going, which I take absurdly seriously). TikTok. Her school bans phones during class and meals, but otherwise, she navigates tech like most teens today—intuitively, constantly, and with a healthy dose of eye-rolling whenever adults hover too long.
When I asked her, “Do you think your phone is what’s making your generation anxious?” she paused, thought for a moment, and said:
“There’s a difference between causation and correlation. Yeah, we’re anxious. But it’s not just because of phones.”
She rattled off her reasons:
- Growing up during a global pandemic
- Living with the looming climate crisis
- (And, okay, the leader of the free world—maybe that one was my addition)
- The insane competition for college admissions
- The pressure to know exactly what you want to be at 14 for said college admissions
- Her math test next week
“The world is crazy,” she said. “And yeah, tech can make some things worse. But honestly? It makes a lot of it better too. I can connect. I can learn stuff. I can call you whenever I want.”
Then she grinned and added,
“This Haidt guy sounds like a no-fun dude. It’s such a polarizing view—it just makes me want to rebel.”
She wasn’t finished. She pointed out that a lot of the statistics in these conversations are skewed or ripped out of context. She argued that today’s teens are actually more aware of their mental health, more willing to self-advocate, and more open about what they’re going through than previous generations ever were.
“Social media isn’t just hurting us,” she said. “It’s showing kids that mental health matters. It’s helping people get the help they need.”
And that, right there, is the nuance so many conversations about The Anxious Generation are missing.
It’s Bigger Than Phones
To be fair, Haidt acknowledges that it’s not just a case of better mental health awareness. He argues that real harm is rising in ways that would show up even without surveys or self-reports.
He points to harder-to-inflate statistics like:
- Hospitalizations for self-inflicted injuries
- Completed suicide rates
- Clinical-level diagnoses—not just feelings of sadness or anxiety
Those numbers are sobering. And they demand our attention.
But there’s still a bigger question Haidt doesn’t spend enough time exploring:
What if teens are feeling anxious and depressed not just because of screens—but because of the overwhelming world they’re inheriting?
The nonstop news cycle. The viral images. The constant flood of emotionally charged headlines. It distorts perspective. Add in a polarized world of filter bubbles and “alternative facts,” and it’s no wonder today’s defining crises feel less like rallying cries—and more like existential threats.
Haidt’s theory about overprotective parenting ties into this too. He argues that kids are “antifragile”—they grow stronger when they’re allowed to experience discomfort, failure, and uncertainty, just like saplings that need the wind to grow resilient roots.
When we shield kids from every risk, every disagreement, every setback, we don’t make them safer. We make them brittle.
He’s not wrong; But banning phones without teaching resilience won’t solve that problem either.
Not “Phones Are Bad”—But “Let’s Talk About How We Use Them”
I’m not here to dismiss Haidt. The trends he points to are real. The data is sobering. Something has shifted—and we need to pay attention.
But I also believe this:
It’s not the screens. It’s our relationship with them.
There’s a huge difference between a kid doomscrolling TikTok at 2AM, and a kid texting a friend who’s having a rough night. Between numbing out with hours of YouTube, and editing a short film for a school project.
Screen time isn’t the enemy. Mindless time without intention is.
And if we want to raise kids who can thrive in the digital world, we can’t just take the phones away. We have to teach them how to live with them.
Infinite Screentime: What We Believe
At Infinite Screentime, we believe in:
- Coaching, not controlling
- Connection, not coercion
- Curiosity, not shame
- Digital fluency, not digital fear
We don’t raise kids to fear technology.
- We raise them to understand it.
To notice how it makes them feel.
To know when it’s time to walk away.
To use it to create, not just consume.
To reach out for help when they need it.
We want them to walk the digital hallways with their heads up—and their values intact.
What Haidt Gets Wrong
There’s a moment in The Anxious Generation that made me stop and reread:
“There’s a God-shaped hole in every human heart,” Haidt writes, paraphrasing Blaise Pascal. “If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.”
That phrase stuck with me.
Because as much as Haidt explains everything through the lens of evolution—brains getting bigger, religions forming for social cohesion—I couldn’t help thinking:
- “That makes sense… because we were made this way. For a purpose.”
Where Haidt sees randomness, I see design.
Where he sees social invention, I see deeper intention.
And honestly?
Sometimes it feels like it would take more faith to believe humanity is a complete accident than to believe we were meant for something more.
Our hunger for love, for community, for transcendence—these don’t seem like evolutionary leftovers.
They feel like clues.
Clues that we’re wired for something bigger than just survival.
Maybe the real thing we’re missing isn’t less screen time.
Maybe it’s a deeper kind of connection—one that no scroll, swipe, or search bar can satisfy.
Final Thought
When I asked my daughter what she thinks adults get wrong about all of this, she didn’t hesitate:
“Everyone keeps trying to fix the phone, especially the ones who didn’t grow up with one. But we’re asking for help fixing the world.“
I’m still sitting with that.
Life isn’t about these black-and-white choices we keep making. It’s about balance. About discernment. Yet the conversation around tech—and around childhood itself—so often feels polarized.
My daughter, half-joking, asked, “So who is this Haidt dude anyway? I bet he’s super old and grew up being told to ‘toughen up’ about everything.”
And honestly? She’s not wrong.
That’s the real challenge of parenting today: we are constantly being asked to reframe our understanding of the world through our children’s eyes.
I grew up hearing, “Don’t be sad, be cheerful. Don’t dwell on your problems, fix yourself.”
The message was clear: if something hurt, the problem was you, not the world.
Haidt flips that message—he argues the world is the problem now, but by shielding kids from the technology hardship, ironically, he is making it even harder for them to grow strong in the face of technology. Just like the saplings that he argues in another part of the book!
And here’s where I land:
Yes, phones have changed childhood.
But maybe the bigger shift is that our kids are growing up in a world more overwhelming, more connected, and more complicated than anything we ever knew.
Instead of fearing the tech, maybe the real work is walking with them through it.
Not to save them.
To join them.
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