true · 3 min · ai-summarised

The phone in every childhood is now on trial

A contested but fast-moving idea — that a smartphone childhood rewired a generation — has left the seminar room and become law in country after country.

Jonathan Haidt's claim is blunt: the arrival of the smartphone and social media in the early 2010s coincided with — and, he argues, caused — a sharp rise in anxiety, depression and self-harm among adolescents, girls most of all. His prescription is just as blunt: no smartphones before 14, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and far more independent play.

What makes this a “right now” story is the response, not the book. Australia's ban on social-media accounts for under-16s took effect in December 2025, sweeping up millions of accounts in weeks. By early 2026 a majority of the world's school systems had national phone bans — up from roughly a quarter three years earlier — with France, Denmark and others extending them. The reader's own children, or nieces and nephews, are inside the experiment.

Honesty demands the other half. Haidt's causal claim is genuinely disputed: a prominent review in Nature argued he mistakes correlation for causation, and that most studies find small or mixed effects. Haidt counters with experiments pointing to real harm. The next five years will be the largest natural test yet — with the policy already racing ahead of the settled science.

Based on the work of

Jonathan Haidt

Social psychologist, NYU Stern School of Business

The Anxious Generation · 2024

The book that turned a research argument into a global policy movement — read it for the case, and its critics for the caveats.

Read the original on Bookshop.org

Fact-checked · AI can err — read the source

The correlation is strong; the causation is disputed. Candice Odgers' Nature review argues the effects are small and mixed, and may partly run the other way (struggling teens use more social media). The policy is ahead of the consensus.

AI-summarised · always labelled (EU AI Act, Art. 50).

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