Friend, thank you for all the thoughtful comments here. Because there are so many, and because some overlap with others, I will not attempt to respond individually. Instead, I plan to write a follow-up "thread" that will address the comments. I'm not sure when I will get to that. I hope soon, but I will certainly aim to do it within a week. My wife and I are leaving tomorrow for a few days at our cottage in the little village of Cabot, Vermont, where I graduated from high school and where they have the best Fourth of July parade you will find in any little village anywhere.
I am struggling with my emotions a bit on this one. I highly respect your work and agree with most of your conclusions—but I feel the same way about Haidt’s work. And I hate to see you stand against him, especially because in many ways, your goals align. I worry by opposing his conclusions, you may be limiting the reach and effectiveness of your own, and your conclusions work really well together.
Anecdotally, with my own gen z children, I see the negative consequences of social media pretty strongly. Now, could some of it be simply the middle school struggles we all experienced because of puberty and other universal changes that come with reaching the teen years? Sure—but I also know that my son’s access to porn would be much lower, and my daughter’s opportunity to be drawn in by the transgender “influencers” would have been next to zero. Are both of them already experiencing higher than normal levels of anxiety—absolutely, but there is also a genetic predisposition that makes this unavoidable, and social media comparisons make it worse.
They absolutely reduced their outdoor and free play time when they got phones, and since their friends did, too, no one goes out to play anymore.
My younger (right on the edge of being considered gen alpha) daughter didn’t want a phone until she got to middle school and knows she will be out of the social loop if she doesn’t have one. So she has one. Ugh! She would prefer her phone to backyard play with her younger brother—the only person around without a phone and willing to play outside.
We DO need to change school culture and increase free play time. 100%. But right now, my son is surrounded by other highschoolers just nose in the phone during any free time there is—there is no play happening. These things go hand in hand.
Another aspect of Haidt’s work includes what I would consider a vital change that took place in the middle of the last century—the meaning crisis. His work addresses that.
With the momentum his book has, you would do better to ride the wave than try to swim against it. As we all know from politics, people usually are more strongly led by how they feel than by cold reason. I hate to think you will fall on the wrong side of that equation.
Hi Graham—I too, want to know the truth. I am not a power broker. These are my concerns, given the reality of the world and social climate we are in.
Absence of proof does not mean that a conclusion is false—it just isn’t proven (so Peter’s example doesn’t actually show Haidt is wrong, it just doesn’t show he is right.)
Haidt’s book is striking a chord with parents, parents like me who see a correlation between changes in our kids and in our communities that coincide with phones. Is it causal? Even if it isn’t, it FEELS like it is. If Peter wants to see his cause move forward (and he absolutely should, as should we) the current way (and perhaps always) to convince people is with their feelings. If Peter sets himself up in opposition to a popular position, he is likely to become irrelevant. Is this the way it SHOULD be? Maybe not. Do we have to operate in the world as it is? Unfortunately yes.
It remains to be seen if Haidt’s action items will actually be adopted. In addition to going on feeling, people are also lazy and resistant to change. The inertia of screens in little hands may be hard to overcome.
You may be right Jennifer but what a depressing take. Haidt is emphatically wrong and yet you and so many others want to believe him because you’re scared of tech. It’s incredibly disappointing to me how few parents are willing to grapple with the impacts of forced schooling and just go straight to the phones. The people I know jumping on Haidt’s bandwagon are completely unwilling to contend with the impacts of our school system. This is why I can’t take anyone who is anti-phones seriously- if you really cared about children’s mental health, you would be focused on schools. Phones are an easy scapegoat and too many adults are unwilling to see past their own biases.
Hi Megan, it’s ok if you don’t take me seriously. I am not a thought leader outside my own home (and maybe an extremely small circle of local friends). I homeschool one of my children because the schools here are a mess. My older children have various reasons for continuing in the school systems, but by no means do I think public school is just fine. But again, I am no thought leader. My influence extends to votes, one in a vast sea of parents with lower care levels.
I am not afraid of tech. I and my husband are in tech as careers (though I retired to care for our children some time ago). The whole reason I have anecdotal “evidence” that phones/social media are negative for kids is because we have consistently granted our children smart phones at 13. We have four, our oldest is 19, followed by a 16 year old, a 13 year old, and a ten year old. So I have seen the effects on both sons and daughters and their various group of friends and neighbors for over 6 years. I don’t think phones are the only problem, but they ARE a problem, and low hanging fruit in terms of actionability. Can we solve the meaning crisis? Maybe—but that is going to take more than parental zeal. Can we convince parents to return their kids to the real world and real world risks, as Peter advocates? Maybe—the scarcity of children may make that a tough hill to climb. But it appears from the response to Haidt’s book, that we could, just maybe, remove phones as a factor because it appeals to the emotions of parents.
I want to see the changes Peter advocates implemented. I just think he should be wise as well as truthful. He could have left this unsaid (since he less pointedly already said it) and made a case for using that freed-up non screen time for play. Our current cultural moment is likely to push his stance into the margins if the current is flowing in the Haidt direction and he is perceived as anti-Haidt.
My kids won't be getting phones and social media until they're much older than the norm, but I'm glad that I'm building a community now of like-minded parents. I've seen how play changes as soon as screens are involved - and it just stops. I'm hoping to keep play alive and well for as long as possible, and keeping away from smartphones is a big part of that effort.
This is such a hot topic in my town right now because our school board voted for a phone-ban via Yondr pouches for 6-12th grade. While I think overall it's a generally supported move, it's angered a lot of parents because *they* are particularly attached to texting their middle and high school aged children throughout the day. According to them, their kids are too anxious to get through the day without communicating with them, they don't trust the school staff (for various reasons), they think having access to the phone will save their kid in a school shooting, their kids don't know what they are supposed to do after school unless they text mom before the end of the day to ask - etc, etc. So, over the past two days of this conversation in my town - I see the anxiety being highly on the parents' ends, and the parents' desire to have that constant communication line to their teenage kids. In terms of encouraging childhood and adolescent independence, the phones on during school hours seem like a potential hindrance in some family scenarios.
Being able to tell kids of changes of plans is an important safety issue. As is the ability for them
I used to be called to say they were going to a friend's house rather than coming straight home. This offers them a useful freedom they otherwise wouldn't have had
You cute parental anxiety as if it's a silly thing, rather than something rooted in reason
Does this plan need to be communicated immediately at 10am in the middle of class, or can it be communicated or seen at 2pm when school is dismissed? Can this plan be communicated to the school secretary as it was always done prior to kids carrying phones to school in the past decade or two, or can it only be communicated to the student's cell phone?
1. So many people are eager to blame xyz - social media, gentle parenting, plastics, bottle feeding, and several other fairly easily removable factors like food dyes - but very, very few people are willing to have a discussion about the elephants in the room: modern daycare and modern school. I think this is because, while taking screens away is fairly straightforward, reengineering society so parents stop warehousing kids for 10 hours a day is too much to ask so people are in deep denial about it. I don’t know, just a thought!
(I say this as someone opposed to screens very very strongly, though for other reasons)
2. As a huge fan of your work, I know the value you place on child-led free play (ie the sandlot vs organized baseball with adult coaches/uniforms). It’s so important for kids to play in a world of their own making, not to always be in adult world, following adult rules. That having been said, does it bother you that “online freedom” involves kids playing video games/watching videos that are entirely programmed by very sophisticated adult programmers/developers? Isn’t it no different than playing coached baseball, only in a virtual sense? I just can’t believe online time is truly comparable to free play outside with friends.
3. Aren’t most studies that limit screen time equivalent to studies that increase free play? It’s not like the screen free kids are also assigned to get *more school.* So if their screen time is decreased, doesn’t their free time automatically increase? Of course you’d have to make sure that parents weren’t intervening with extra piano lessons…
Great point. Increase free play without specifically limiting screen time and I suspect the benefit would be clear (with the added safety that phones offer kids at the end of the school day)
I've followed both your and Haidt's work for some time now, and have read The Anxious Generation as well as some of the more academic rebuttals. I generally agree with your assessment that the structure of schools is much more important factor in increasing mental health issues in children, but I also think it is a good thing that Haidt's book has catalyzed some discussion on the topic of social media. Some thoughts:
It is well known (at least among statisticians) that there is a replication crisis in the social sciences which, as you point out, requires a careful read of each and every paper to even just do a basic filter of complete garbage from something that at least can't be immediately rejected. You pointed out the problem of picking out one weakly significant effect out of many possibilities (although there are statistical frameworks for multiple hypothesis testing which allow you to do this soundly. The caveat is that you need much more significance to reject one null hypothesis out of many). Even papers which appear to be methodologically sound can suffer from hidden problems like "the first 10 (different) experiments we ran didn't turn anything up, but this one did so it got published" which is just another form of this which is socially accepted in academic communities. This just means that it is all too easy for someone, whether with good or bad intentions, to look at the academic literature and pick things that support their point of view and dismiss things that don't under the guise of being "rigorous" which is what Haidt and collaborators at least appear to be doing (for the record, I don't doubt their intentions, and I also appreciate the difficulty of even attempting to filter through existing studies).
On another topic, I learned a thing or two from your post about the demand effect, which I hadn't come across before (I am clearly not a social scientist). My thoughts on learning about this is that it is actually much easier for a social media company to control for the demand effect and placebo effect because they can silently A/B test feeds without users noticing (unless the changes are very extreme). For example, they can see if slightly promoting more "engaging" (extreme) content gets more ad clicks, run a randomized controlled trial where the subjects don't realize they are participating (it is in the terms and conditions...) and have really good data on what works and what doesn't. The unfortunate reality is that the companies that control the platforms are in the best position to run good experiments and have some version of the truth compared to relatively neutral academic researchers or governmental oversight bodies. However, theses companies are optimizing for revenue, not user happiness or fulfillment, and there are certain questions which can't or won't ever be addressed in this way such as "are people better off without social media?"
In the end, I think approaching topics such as social media and education from an academic point of view can only get you so far. As Kuhn might have pointed out, science is good at answering question within a paradigm, but a lot of the current debate is about paradigms themselves, or at least there is disagreement about what we should be measuring and what should be driving policy. We're really discussing topics concerned with what makes life worth living, and on an individual level I like to think that most people have developed some sense for this. Waiting for the definitive study to use to base decisions on data leaves you open to manipulation by advertisers, politicians, and others who would profit from your attention and inaction. You don't need to wait for a study to come out to tell you that certain aspects of social media are negative, or that an emphasis on high-pressure testing is going to increase anxiety, you can use your gut and vote with your feet, wallet, or ad-viewing eyeballs accordingly. I think Haidt does a reasonable job on this point, even if you think the whole "send children to Mars" analogy is over the top. I think it is important to being open to being wrong, as certainly might happen when acting with incomplete information, but also use some discernment when evaluating evidence for or against your position.
Peter, I appreciate your push-back against Haidt because it seems that he is getting a lot of attention at the moment and that his book and his suggestions are gaining a lot of steam. It's useful to have someone say, "stop! let's think about this a bit more." I've read Haidt's Substack and listened to podcast interviews with him, and I have generally nodded my head in agreement with him. But I do so primarily from instinct and experience. My own experiences with phones and social media are generally negative. Sure, I like having easy access to Google Maps, but I long for the days (not that long ago!) when you could look at an actual menu in a restaurant, have uninterrupted conversations at dinner, and put aside the news/work/gossip for a few hours each day. For my kids, ages 5 and 10, I wish we were still in the days when kids in the neighborhood would play outside and run to each other's houses (I hear many stories from my older child about kids who play video games and watch movies all day during the summer). Do phones and other screens prevent spontaneous, unsupervised play? Absolutely, and I would support policies and cultural norms that displace phones and screens as central objects in daily life. The trouble is that we could easily restrict phones for children without bringing back the embodied, interactive activities that used to be second nature. We could restrict phones without acquiring and implementing the skills to build relationships and communities. I haven't read Haidt's book yet (I'm on the library waitlist), but he has mentioned in his interviews and on his Substack that children need more unsupervised, free play. I think that suggestion is the hardest to implement (it requires a culture shift, not just a policy change), and based on the media coverage of the book and Haidt's own pattern of emphasis (he really pushes the "smartphones are damaging our kids" angle), I think that most people will ignore the bit about expanding freedom for children in the physical world. I worry that we will limit digital freedom and physical-world freedom for the kids, and that we won't give a thought to rebuilding the communities and relationships that undergird the trust we need to to let our kids go out into the world without us.
A lot of people feel that our phone-based lives are diminished lives. A lot of people lament the erosion of community, belonging, and meaning. We don't want our kids to live that way. But a general feeling of "this isn't working" doesn't seem legitimate. At least, it's not legitimate enough to undergird policies and laws and allow us to feel confident about personal and parenting decisions. Haidt is an esteemed social scientist. He's giving all of us the scientific (read: legitimate, socially approved) basis for what so many of us have intuited or gleaned from personal experience. Maybe one thing that we need to reckon with is that we shouldn't rely exclusively on the science. You and Haidt make good points based on the science and they're valuable. We should certainly take them into account. But this problem requires us to bring many other skills, modes of inquiry (arts and humanities, for example), and wisdom traditions to our thought processes and to the public conversation.
What’s missing in the convo about how phones disintegrating community are the voices of disabled people for whom tech and SM has been life-changing. Or the marginalized communities (like CHILDREN) who have used SM in powerful ways to organize and push against the status quo.
This longing for the past is a uniquely white middle-class sentiment, and part of what Haidt is doing that’s so compelling is appealing to the parents of middle class girls because that is who is the most harmed by SM.
Maybe Haidt needs to be more specific and stop acting like he really cares about all children’s mental health when he so obviously has not considered marginalized communities and their relationships with tech.
Smartphones are like drugs - they reduce attention agency and personal power of those who already lack it. Who do you think is more likely to escape poverty and being marginalized- someone with a good attention span and ability to focus or someone who can't stop scrolling ? the smartphones are literally programmed to get people hooked, kids and those with little other options are the most vulnerable.
Do you know anyone who is marginalized and/or living in poverty? That’s not what they said when I asked them. This whole notion of knowing better what is good for people is very paternalistic
I have grown up in poverty actually. I know and speak to many people in poverty through my charity work. My husband is governor of a 'poor' school. I recommend Rob Hendersons book - Troubled . Someone who went from foster to foster home expands on the misconceptions people have on many issues (not just phones). He actually coined the term 'luxury beliefs' - the thing I think you are referring to . IT's not that rich or poor ONLY can know whats better for poor. Its not true that if you are rich you cant have a right view on whats good for poor and if you are poor you can. There is more to it
I appreciate the recommendation but growing up poor and your husband helping the poor doesn’t actually indicate you are hearing directly from people living on the margins. Nor does it seem your viewpoints are coming from their lived experiences. When I speak to family and friends who are Black, disabled and/or living in poverty, they see phones as a lifeline. Phones can make Black mothers feel a LOT safer letting their kids go out into the world, for example. They give disabled folx access to the world when they can’t leave their homes. 2 examples of many.
A dumb phone that can make parents feel safe is 10x cheaper than a smartphone. You can text and call. Disabled folks who can’t leave the home can use the internet . JH point are not against internet use at home . There is plenty of ways for a teenager to use tech in a responsible useful ways and connect to friends without Instagram and TikTok . Plenty do, including in marginalized communities where they don’t have enough money for a smartphone
Megan, have you read the book? Haidt does say social media has caused more harm to girls, and points out that the screen effect for boys coincides less with phones and more with video games that put risk-taking into the virtual realm and demotivate embodied play and risk.
I’m reading it now albeit begrudgingly as I find his voice condescending to say the least. I’m not sure how your comment addresses my point that Haidt does not acknowledge benefits of tech and SM, especially for marginalized groups. My point is bc he is mainly concerned about middle class girls, ie non-disabled and predominantly white, his argument is not at all inclusive to marginalized communities
You could be right. He is mainly dealing with the negative consequences (though he also acknowledges the benefits) of averages in western countries—since a lot of people and especially children with phones and social media are going to be middle class, that is probably the group that is most featured.
If we want to focus primarily on disabled and marginalized children, does Peter prove that unsupervised childhood is beneficial to those groups? I think he has been more general than that. That doesn’t change the thrust of the argument, that children and society would broadly benefit from Peter’s ideas.
The benefits of technology for marginalized groups absolutely bears concerted attention, but I don’t think that was the goal of either Haidt’s research or Peter’s.
Peter’s primary role is not to be a Haidt detractor, but it also doesn’t appear to be as an advocate for marginalized groups and their access to technology. His primary goal in this space seems to be to advocate for more freedom and play for kids in general, a goal that I see as being better served by embracing Haidt’s ideas and piggybacking off the success.
Peter has been clear that he sees tech as a non-issue, it is Haidt who is making a call to action so he bears the responsibility of creating a movement that is inclusive. Or not. At the end of the day, the anti-phones will persist but I want you all to know the movement is inherently ableist. Tech is access. Phones are mini-computers.
Peter has other pieces that discuss instruction for dyslexic children and he also mentions the limitations of social play for some autistic people. I am an extremely critical reader wrt race and ability and I have interrogated Peter’s work with the same veracity as Haidt’s.
Haidt doesn’t even consider the disabled community.
My wife and I have brought up four daughters, all adults now, two of them having their children now. What we have learnt is that bans do not work, and the best way to avoid "addictions" is to provide a diversity of experience. If a parent uses a phone just like a tool, facilitating quick communication when necessary, a child is likely neither to overuse, not fear it. We should not try to isolate children from technology, but make continuous effort of providing them with sane, often critical, but consistent with our own behaviour, patterns of use.
A few questions & thoughts because I’m not a social psychologist or researcher. How long do these studies usually take & then how long does the analysis + distribution take?
One would assume years upon years. But I just don’t have that kind of time to wait around hoping that in 10+ years the research shows that it actually wasn’t social media addiction but something else. What else was it? My husband & I are trying to be proactive & look at ALL the variables around us.
Being a mom to a pre-teen the convo about phones & social media is nearly a constant one in our home. It’s an incredibly lonely road to walk when it seems like “everyone else is doing it”. But real world experience, seeing the addiction in close friends kids & even family members has opened my eyes & given me my own “proof”. Enough that I’m able to draw my own conclusions about how we want to do things differently.
So we’re trusting our guts, and choosing differently when it comes to social media, endless gaming & youtube consumption.
I would still recommend Jon’s book to friends & family even if all the data came back as wrong or inconclusive.
**Because** if you’re raising a teen in this current landscape, the proof is in how our children in our homes are doing. Are they thriving with social media? Or are they struggling? Parents know things aren’t good. We talk with other parents about the constant struggle phones play in our homes, moms share with one another about the struggles their teens face while on these apps. We’re seeing this in real time.
Could there be other reasons as to why our kids aren’t well?! Yes, of course! But at the end of the day, the people who are going to make change on this subject are parents who keep asking questions, keep reading new books & research, but most importantly the parents who take the time with their children to have open & honest conversations with their teens.
I am a Norwegian child and adolescent psychiatrist and have written a book about childrens play in a neuroperspective some years ago - and I very much agree with Jennifer Engstrom/previous speaker here. I am an admirer of your and Jonathan Haidts work on why todays children do not thrive. You (and several critics) of Haidts book might be right about the fact that most research is mostly correlational and not causal. But it is still a fact that children and adolescents mental health problems started to increase just few years after the increase in social media-use. As far as I now is Odgers work mainly focused on screentime in general and not specifically on SoMe? In my clinical work in a psychiatric intensive care unity for adolescents I daily experience the negative effects from SoMe on my patients. From a clinical and experience based point of view there is no doubt that selfharm, the use of illicit substances and eating disorders get more rapidly "distributed" to vulnerable individuals these days than just ten years ago. The lack of free play in critical phases of development, increased school pressure and SoMe are all together changing the conditions of how children grow up today. These conditions all together influence very much how they thrive. The research evidence for a causality on the deprivational effects of lack of free play is also scarce - except in animal models - still we do think there is a strong connection.
This is fascinating. I read Zimbaro's reaearch in Psych 101 years ago and later his book and until reading your linked article somehow missed the role expectations place in psychology studies. I appreciate reading an intelligent response regarding Haidt's claims from you as his colleague and peer. If more scientists would get back to respected, published disagreement and dissent, we could move science (and it's reputation) forward again.
There is not much to be done about this, but many parents will listen attentively to a news report about their kids sooner than they would actually talk to their kids.
By the way, are you familiar with Dr. K. He wrote another book for general audiences called "How to Raise a Healthy Gamer". He is my favorite psychology YouTuber on his channel HealthyGamerGG
I have read the piece and the nine comments so far and I am convinced by the case made by you Peter. A lot of what parents seem to raise as concerns relate to the organisation of schooling and the reason for young people to pay more attention to social media. At Self Managed Learning Community in England parents who visit want to know about controls on social media and smartphones. My answer is that it is between the parent and their off-spring to sort that out. If a parent agrees that their young person can bring in a smartphone that's fine. When visiting parents go round the building and outdoors they don't see our students spending a lot of time on their phones. NB our students have complete freedom to do what they want so long as they don't interfere with the rights of others. We do have students who, as part of decompressing from school, may spend what looks like excessive time on computers on gaming. However over time they get more involved in the community. As an example a student who had experienced major problems in school did spend much of his time at the start on gaming. Then gradually he became interested in game making and is now about to start a degree in game making. All of this can, of course, be dismissed as anecdotal evidence. But what I would claim is that over a 22 year period we have not had evidence of the negative impact of social media - and our programme has been well-researched by doctoral students. One of the problems with social science is that it does not mirror the physical sciences where scientific evidence support technological change which then supports further scientific research - and the testing of scientific evidence with real life application. What we have wanted to do is to test, for instance, the value of freedom for young people within a bounded setting and to monitor if this freedom produces better or worse results for the young people. Clearly much more research is needed on the issue of smartphone use but such developments are not helped by less than rigorous research. We are clear about the limitations of research on our students but where follow-up studies show increased personal fulfillment, happiness and productive careers they provide some evidence to juxtapose against the evidence of those who have gone through schooling. Science is not about absolute truth but about using the best available evidence and testing it. In conclusion we don't have evidence that unrestricted use of smartphones increases mental health problems.
Thank you, Peter. I appreciate your desire to know, to analyze, and to share what you discover. I have a four year old and an eight year old grandsons whom I'm essentially parenting. Though social media is not an issue, playing on the iPad will grab the eight year olds attention such that he appears to not hear his grandma talk to him. Watching him play, I see a range of feeling flow through him and yet he persists to the point his grandma worries. He's enjoying himself, so I remain on his side. Given the choice to swim or play outside with friends, out he goes. My health care background knows the value of prevention. Though I'm not in the position of your readers who have teenagers, I believe the more joy I can assist my grandsons to experience in life, the healthier they will be.
Peter, I appreciate your breakdown of how to engage in critical analysis of the methodology of a study. As a layperson, this is super helpful.
The questions around how social media, internet, and smartphone use affect mental health are interesting. In my own childhood and teenage years, I had daily computer/internet access on a shared family computer starting at the age of 9. I got a smartphone at the age of 17, by which time I was out of high school and moved out. Although I had trouble moderating my own usage and sometimes felt 'stuck' scrolling when I wanted/needed to do something else, I would say that internet/social media/phone access was a net positive for me as a child. I was trapped in a dysfunctional family situation in a homogenous conservative town that was very hostile toward queer/gender nonconforming young people like me, and my online friends were my lifeline. I met people from many different countries/cultures/races/ethnicities/religions, and I befriended people with different personalities, perspectives, interests, and values from the ones I'd been raised with. I learned about world cultures, US history, sociology, etc far more effectively through my time online than I ever could have at my public school.
In my early-mid twenties, my relationship with social media began to shift and became a lot more negative. By this time, I was using Instagram for a couple of hours a day and was basically just doomscrolling and compulsively refreshing the app for new posts. Most of the time when I opened up the app, I wasn't actually communicating or connecting with friends (or meeting new people), I was just looking at post after post by Instagram-famous people. This made my anxiety worsen, and I noticed a huge positive shift in my mental health when I deleted all social media for good. Now I just keep in touch with folks via email, mobile messaging, or phone calls, all of which are easier for me to moderate my usage.
Having just spent a year working as an instructional assistant for English learners at a fairly 'high-achieving' public high school, I honestly can't blame my students for wanting to use their phones and for constantly defying the phone ban. Most of the students I worked with were by and large bored, if not outright miserable, every day in their classes. They used their phones a lot more in the classes where they didn't have friends, didn't understand the class material, etc. They hardly used their phones at all when they actually got to be together, and that was the only time they acted really happy.
Given the various factors contributing to young people's suffering, and with an acknowledgement that social media companies do absolutely design their apps to keep people hooked, I would be curious to see some more rigorous studies on the emotional/mental effects of social media that are conducted to avoid the demand effect you described above.
One of Haidt's push is to remove phones from schools. As an educator, I have witnessed first hand the harms of an iPhone in a students hands during the school day and I am thankful for his plight to help schools make this change. I have also been researching the connections between common core, the increased use of technology in schools and the negative impact on learning. Since NCLB and introduction of high stakes testing, there is less free play in schools which has impacted true social connectedness/social skill development further impacted by the rise of social media and increased reliance on technology in schools. The push for Common Core Standards and increased technology in schools is not surprisingly funded by big tech, check out my Public article: https://public.substack.com/p/big-tech-hubris-and-greed-behind and my edtech timeline: https://environmentalprogress.org/education-timeline. It is also important to note that individuals criticizing Haidt's work such as Candice Odgers, often have their own ties to big tech (see here: https://jacobsfoundation.org/activity/cella-the-center-for-learning-and-living-with-ai/). Bottom line, society needs to remember how sacred childhood is and that we are raising humans first.
the reason Jonathan Haidt book (and Smartphone free childhood) has taken off in this manner is not because of the research included in it, but because of the fact that many parents feel and see the various negative effects. You cant deny the parents intuition and discomfort just because the data is inconclusive (in some eyes). The way parents observe life IS valuable data too.
Yes someone should write a bomber book like this that resonates about overprotective parenting, lack of free play and the impact of general crisis of meaning in our society. Bad Therapy by Abigail Schrier albeit not perfect, taps into some (not all) other very valid observable issues.
Your points on other reasons for crisis are valid and have more effect when expanded on their own.
Friend, thank you for all the thoughtful comments here. Because there are so many, and because some overlap with others, I will not attempt to respond individually. Instead, I plan to write a follow-up "thread" that will address the comments. I'm not sure when I will get to that. I hope soon, but I will certainly aim to do it within a week. My wife and I are leaving tomorrow for a few days at our cottage in the little village of Cabot, Vermont, where I graduated from high school and where they have the best Fourth of July parade you will find in any little village anywhere.
I am struggling with my emotions a bit on this one. I highly respect your work and agree with most of your conclusions—but I feel the same way about Haidt’s work. And I hate to see you stand against him, especially because in many ways, your goals align. I worry by opposing his conclusions, you may be limiting the reach and effectiveness of your own, and your conclusions work really well together.
Anecdotally, with my own gen z children, I see the negative consequences of social media pretty strongly. Now, could some of it be simply the middle school struggles we all experienced because of puberty and other universal changes that come with reaching the teen years? Sure—but I also know that my son’s access to porn would be much lower, and my daughter’s opportunity to be drawn in by the transgender “influencers” would have been next to zero. Are both of them already experiencing higher than normal levels of anxiety—absolutely, but there is also a genetic predisposition that makes this unavoidable, and social media comparisons make it worse.
They absolutely reduced their outdoor and free play time when they got phones, and since their friends did, too, no one goes out to play anymore.
My younger (right on the edge of being considered gen alpha) daughter didn’t want a phone until she got to middle school and knows she will be out of the social loop if she doesn’t have one. So she has one. Ugh! She would prefer her phone to backyard play with her younger brother—the only person around without a phone and willing to play outside.
We DO need to change school culture and increase free play time. 100%. But right now, my son is surrounded by other highschoolers just nose in the phone during any free time there is—there is no play happening. These things go hand in hand.
Another aspect of Haidt’s work includes what I would consider a vital change that took place in the middle of the last century—the meaning crisis. His work addresses that.
With the momentum his book has, you would do better to ride the wave than try to swim against it. As we all know from politics, people usually are more strongly led by how they feel than by cold reason. I hate to think you will fall on the wrong side of that equation.
I find "truth be damned" statements like these very alarming:
"I worry by opposing his conclusions, you may be limiting the reach and effectiveness of your own, and your conclusions work really well together"
"With the momentum his book has, you would do better to ride the wave than try to swim against it"
I want to know the truth. Thank you Peter for remaining true to that and not compromising in the ways this commenter wants you to.
Hi Graham—I too, want to know the truth. I am not a power broker. These are my concerns, given the reality of the world and social climate we are in.
Absence of proof does not mean that a conclusion is false—it just isn’t proven (so Peter’s example doesn’t actually show Haidt is wrong, it just doesn’t show he is right.)
Haidt’s book is striking a chord with parents, parents like me who see a correlation between changes in our kids and in our communities that coincide with phones. Is it causal? Even if it isn’t, it FEELS like it is. If Peter wants to see his cause move forward (and he absolutely should, as should we) the current way (and perhaps always) to convince people is with their feelings. If Peter sets himself up in opposition to a popular position, he is likely to become irrelevant. Is this the way it SHOULD be? Maybe not. Do we have to operate in the world as it is? Unfortunately yes.
It remains to be seen if Haidt’s action items will actually be adopted. In addition to going on feeling, people are also lazy and resistant to change. The inertia of screens in little hands may be hard to overcome.
You may be right Jennifer but what a depressing take. Haidt is emphatically wrong and yet you and so many others want to believe him because you’re scared of tech. It’s incredibly disappointing to me how few parents are willing to grapple with the impacts of forced schooling and just go straight to the phones. The people I know jumping on Haidt’s bandwagon are completely unwilling to contend with the impacts of our school system. This is why I can’t take anyone who is anti-phones seriously- if you really cared about children’s mental health, you would be focused on schools. Phones are an easy scapegoat and too many adults are unwilling to see past their own biases.
Hi Megan, it’s ok if you don’t take me seriously. I am not a thought leader outside my own home (and maybe an extremely small circle of local friends). I homeschool one of my children because the schools here are a mess. My older children have various reasons for continuing in the school systems, but by no means do I think public school is just fine. But again, I am no thought leader. My influence extends to votes, one in a vast sea of parents with lower care levels.
I am not afraid of tech. I and my husband are in tech as careers (though I retired to care for our children some time ago). The whole reason I have anecdotal “evidence” that phones/social media are negative for kids is because we have consistently granted our children smart phones at 13. We have four, our oldest is 19, followed by a 16 year old, a 13 year old, and a ten year old. So I have seen the effects on both sons and daughters and their various group of friends and neighbors for over 6 years. I don’t think phones are the only problem, but they ARE a problem, and low hanging fruit in terms of actionability. Can we solve the meaning crisis? Maybe—but that is going to take more than parental zeal. Can we convince parents to return their kids to the real world and real world risks, as Peter advocates? Maybe—the scarcity of children may make that a tough hill to climb. But it appears from the response to Haidt’s book, that we could, just maybe, remove phones as a factor because it appeals to the emotions of parents.
I want to see the changes Peter advocates implemented. I just think he should be wise as well as truthful. He could have left this unsaid (since he less pointedly already said it) and made a case for using that freed-up non screen time for play. Our current cultural moment is likely to push his stance into the margins if the current is flowing in the Haidt direction and he is perceived as anti-Haidt.
I think you've put this perfectly!
My kids won't be getting phones and social media until they're much older than the norm, but I'm glad that I'm building a community now of like-minded parents. I've seen how play changes as soon as screens are involved - and it just stops. I'm hoping to keep play alive and well for as long as possible, and keeping away from smartphones is a big part of that effort.
Thank you for sharing your perspective and personal experiences. It’s important to consider all angles when discussing such complex topics.
This is such a hot topic in my town right now because our school board voted for a phone-ban via Yondr pouches for 6-12th grade. While I think overall it's a generally supported move, it's angered a lot of parents because *they* are particularly attached to texting their middle and high school aged children throughout the day. According to them, their kids are too anxious to get through the day without communicating with them, they don't trust the school staff (for various reasons), they think having access to the phone will save their kid in a school shooting, their kids don't know what they are supposed to do after school unless they text mom before the end of the day to ask - etc, etc. So, over the past two days of this conversation in my town - I see the anxiety being highly on the parents' ends, and the parents' desire to have that constant communication line to their teenage kids. In terms of encouraging childhood and adolescent independence, the phones on during school hours seem like a potential hindrance in some family scenarios.
Being able to tell kids of changes of plans is an important safety issue. As is the ability for them
I used to be called to say they were going to a friend's house rather than coming straight home. This offers them a useful freedom they otherwise wouldn't have had
You cute parental anxiety as if it's a silly thing, rather than something rooted in reason
Does this plan need to be communicated immediately at 10am in the middle of class, or can it be communicated or seen at 2pm when school is dismissed? Can this plan be communicated to the school secretary as it was always done prior to kids carrying phones to school in the past decade or two, or can it only be communicated to the student's cell phone?
1. So many people are eager to blame xyz - social media, gentle parenting, plastics, bottle feeding, and several other fairly easily removable factors like food dyes - but very, very few people are willing to have a discussion about the elephants in the room: modern daycare and modern school. I think this is because, while taking screens away is fairly straightforward, reengineering society so parents stop warehousing kids for 10 hours a day is too much to ask so people are in deep denial about it. I don’t know, just a thought!
(I say this as someone opposed to screens very very strongly, though for other reasons)
2. As a huge fan of your work, I know the value you place on child-led free play (ie the sandlot vs organized baseball with adult coaches/uniforms). It’s so important for kids to play in a world of their own making, not to always be in adult world, following adult rules. That having been said, does it bother you that “online freedom” involves kids playing video games/watching videos that are entirely programmed by very sophisticated adult programmers/developers? Isn’t it no different than playing coached baseball, only in a virtual sense? I just can’t believe online time is truly comparable to free play outside with friends.
3. Aren’t most studies that limit screen time equivalent to studies that increase free play? It’s not like the screen free kids are also assigned to get *more school.* So if their screen time is decreased, doesn’t their free time automatically increase? Of course you’d have to make sure that parents weren’t intervening with extra piano lessons…
Great point. Increase free play without specifically limiting screen time and I suspect the benefit would be clear (with the added safety that phones offer kids at the end of the school day)
how did free play / free time get defined to mean not-on-devices?
If it is "free" then they should be "free" to use it as they wish, not as others' wish??
I've followed both your and Haidt's work for some time now, and have read The Anxious Generation as well as some of the more academic rebuttals. I generally agree with your assessment that the structure of schools is much more important factor in increasing mental health issues in children, but I also think it is a good thing that Haidt's book has catalyzed some discussion on the topic of social media. Some thoughts:
It is well known (at least among statisticians) that there is a replication crisis in the social sciences which, as you point out, requires a careful read of each and every paper to even just do a basic filter of complete garbage from something that at least can't be immediately rejected. You pointed out the problem of picking out one weakly significant effect out of many possibilities (although there are statistical frameworks for multiple hypothesis testing which allow you to do this soundly. The caveat is that you need much more significance to reject one null hypothesis out of many). Even papers which appear to be methodologically sound can suffer from hidden problems like "the first 10 (different) experiments we ran didn't turn anything up, but this one did so it got published" which is just another form of this which is socially accepted in academic communities. This just means that it is all too easy for someone, whether with good or bad intentions, to look at the academic literature and pick things that support their point of view and dismiss things that don't under the guise of being "rigorous" which is what Haidt and collaborators at least appear to be doing (for the record, I don't doubt their intentions, and I also appreciate the difficulty of even attempting to filter through existing studies).
On another topic, I learned a thing or two from your post about the demand effect, which I hadn't come across before (I am clearly not a social scientist). My thoughts on learning about this is that it is actually much easier for a social media company to control for the demand effect and placebo effect because they can silently A/B test feeds without users noticing (unless the changes are very extreme). For example, they can see if slightly promoting more "engaging" (extreme) content gets more ad clicks, run a randomized controlled trial where the subjects don't realize they are participating (it is in the terms and conditions...) and have really good data on what works and what doesn't. The unfortunate reality is that the companies that control the platforms are in the best position to run good experiments and have some version of the truth compared to relatively neutral academic researchers or governmental oversight bodies. However, theses companies are optimizing for revenue, not user happiness or fulfillment, and there are certain questions which can't or won't ever be addressed in this way such as "are people better off without social media?"
In the end, I think approaching topics such as social media and education from an academic point of view can only get you so far. As Kuhn might have pointed out, science is good at answering question within a paradigm, but a lot of the current debate is about paradigms themselves, or at least there is disagreement about what we should be measuring and what should be driving policy. We're really discussing topics concerned with what makes life worth living, and on an individual level I like to think that most people have developed some sense for this. Waiting for the definitive study to use to base decisions on data leaves you open to manipulation by advertisers, politicians, and others who would profit from your attention and inaction. You don't need to wait for a study to come out to tell you that certain aspects of social media are negative, or that an emphasis on high-pressure testing is going to increase anxiety, you can use your gut and vote with your feet, wallet, or ad-viewing eyeballs accordingly. I think Haidt does a reasonable job on this point, even if you think the whole "send children to Mars" analogy is over the top. I think it is important to being open to being wrong, as certainly might happen when acting with incomplete information, but also use some discernment when evaluating evidence for or against your position.
Peter, I appreciate your push-back against Haidt because it seems that he is getting a lot of attention at the moment and that his book and his suggestions are gaining a lot of steam. It's useful to have someone say, "stop! let's think about this a bit more." I've read Haidt's Substack and listened to podcast interviews with him, and I have generally nodded my head in agreement with him. But I do so primarily from instinct and experience. My own experiences with phones and social media are generally negative. Sure, I like having easy access to Google Maps, but I long for the days (not that long ago!) when you could look at an actual menu in a restaurant, have uninterrupted conversations at dinner, and put aside the news/work/gossip for a few hours each day. For my kids, ages 5 and 10, I wish we were still in the days when kids in the neighborhood would play outside and run to each other's houses (I hear many stories from my older child about kids who play video games and watch movies all day during the summer). Do phones and other screens prevent spontaneous, unsupervised play? Absolutely, and I would support policies and cultural norms that displace phones and screens as central objects in daily life. The trouble is that we could easily restrict phones for children without bringing back the embodied, interactive activities that used to be second nature. We could restrict phones without acquiring and implementing the skills to build relationships and communities. I haven't read Haidt's book yet (I'm on the library waitlist), but he has mentioned in his interviews and on his Substack that children need more unsupervised, free play. I think that suggestion is the hardest to implement (it requires a culture shift, not just a policy change), and based on the media coverage of the book and Haidt's own pattern of emphasis (he really pushes the "smartphones are damaging our kids" angle), I think that most people will ignore the bit about expanding freedom for children in the physical world. I worry that we will limit digital freedom and physical-world freedom for the kids, and that we won't give a thought to rebuilding the communities and relationships that undergird the trust we need to to let our kids go out into the world without us.
A lot of people feel that our phone-based lives are diminished lives. A lot of people lament the erosion of community, belonging, and meaning. We don't want our kids to live that way. But a general feeling of "this isn't working" doesn't seem legitimate. At least, it's not legitimate enough to undergird policies and laws and allow us to feel confident about personal and parenting decisions. Haidt is an esteemed social scientist. He's giving all of us the scientific (read: legitimate, socially approved) basis for what so many of us have intuited or gleaned from personal experience. Maybe one thing that we need to reckon with is that we shouldn't rely exclusively on the science. You and Haidt make good points based on the science and they're valuable. We should certainly take them into account. But this problem requires us to bring many other skills, modes of inquiry (arts and humanities, for example), and wisdom traditions to our thought processes and to the public conversation.
I agree, Laura, well said!
What’s missing in the convo about how phones disintegrating community are the voices of disabled people for whom tech and SM has been life-changing. Or the marginalized communities (like CHILDREN) who have used SM in powerful ways to organize and push against the status quo.
This longing for the past is a uniquely white middle-class sentiment, and part of what Haidt is doing that’s so compelling is appealing to the parents of middle class girls because that is who is the most harmed by SM.
Maybe Haidt needs to be more specific and stop acting like he really cares about all children’s mental health when he so obviously has not considered marginalized communities and their relationships with tech.
Smartphones are like drugs - they reduce attention agency and personal power of those who already lack it. Who do you think is more likely to escape poverty and being marginalized- someone with a good attention span and ability to focus or someone who can't stop scrolling ? the smartphones are literally programmed to get people hooked, kids and those with little other options are the most vulnerable.
Do you know anyone who is marginalized and/or living in poverty? That’s not what they said when I asked them. This whole notion of knowing better what is good for people is very paternalistic
I have grown up in poverty actually. I know and speak to many people in poverty through my charity work. My husband is governor of a 'poor' school. I recommend Rob Hendersons book - Troubled . Someone who went from foster to foster home expands on the misconceptions people have on many issues (not just phones). He actually coined the term 'luxury beliefs' - the thing I think you are referring to . IT's not that rich or poor ONLY can know whats better for poor. Its not true that if you are rich you cant have a right view on whats good for poor and if you are poor you can. There is more to it
I appreciate the recommendation but growing up poor and your husband helping the poor doesn’t actually indicate you are hearing directly from people living on the margins. Nor does it seem your viewpoints are coming from their lived experiences. When I speak to family and friends who are Black, disabled and/or living in poverty, they see phones as a lifeline. Phones can make Black mothers feel a LOT safer letting their kids go out into the world, for example. They give disabled folx access to the world when they can’t leave their homes. 2 examples of many.
A dumb phone that can make parents feel safe is 10x cheaper than a smartphone. You can text and call. Disabled folks who can’t leave the home can use the internet . JH point are not against internet use at home . There is plenty of ways for a teenager to use tech in a responsible useful ways and connect to friends without Instagram and TikTok . Plenty do, including in marginalized communities where they don’t have enough money for a smartphone
Megan, have you read the book? Haidt does say social media has caused more harm to girls, and points out that the screen effect for boys coincides less with phones and more with video games that put risk-taking into the virtual realm and demotivate embodied play and risk.
I’m reading it now albeit begrudgingly as I find his voice condescending to say the least. I’m not sure how your comment addresses my point that Haidt does not acknowledge benefits of tech and SM, especially for marginalized groups. My point is bc he is mainly concerned about middle class girls, ie non-disabled and predominantly white, his argument is not at all inclusive to marginalized communities
You could be right. He is mainly dealing with the negative consequences (though he also acknowledges the benefits) of averages in western countries—since a lot of people and especially children with phones and social media are going to be middle class, that is probably the group that is most featured.
If we want to focus primarily on disabled and marginalized children, does Peter prove that unsupervised childhood is beneficial to those groups? I think he has been more general than that. That doesn’t change the thrust of the argument, that children and society would broadly benefit from Peter’s ideas.
The benefits of technology for marginalized groups absolutely bears concerted attention, but I don’t think that was the goal of either Haidt’s research or Peter’s.
Peter’s primary role is not to be a Haidt detractor, but it also doesn’t appear to be as an advocate for marginalized groups and their access to technology. His primary goal in this space seems to be to advocate for more freedom and play for kids in general, a goal that I see as being better served by embracing Haidt’s ideas and piggybacking off the success.
Peter has been clear that he sees tech as a non-issue, it is Haidt who is making a call to action so he bears the responsibility of creating a movement that is inclusive. Or not. At the end of the day, the anti-phones will persist but I want you all to know the movement is inherently ableist. Tech is access. Phones are mini-computers.
Peter has other pieces that discuss instruction for dyslexic children and he also mentions the limitations of social play for some autistic people. I am an extremely critical reader wrt race and ability and I have interrogated Peter’s work with the same veracity as Haidt’s.
Haidt doesn’t even consider the disabled community.
My wife and I have brought up four daughters, all adults now, two of them having their children now. What we have learnt is that bans do not work, and the best way to avoid "addictions" is to provide a diversity of experience. If a parent uses a phone just like a tool, facilitating quick communication when necessary, a child is likely neither to overuse, not fear it. We should not try to isolate children from technology, but make continuous effort of providing them with sane, often critical, but consistent with our own behaviour, patterns of use.
A few questions & thoughts because I’m not a social psychologist or researcher. How long do these studies usually take & then how long does the analysis + distribution take?
One would assume years upon years. But I just don’t have that kind of time to wait around hoping that in 10+ years the research shows that it actually wasn’t social media addiction but something else. What else was it? My husband & I are trying to be proactive & look at ALL the variables around us.
Being a mom to a pre-teen the convo about phones & social media is nearly a constant one in our home. It’s an incredibly lonely road to walk when it seems like “everyone else is doing it”. But real world experience, seeing the addiction in close friends kids & even family members has opened my eyes & given me my own “proof”. Enough that I’m able to draw my own conclusions about how we want to do things differently.
So we’re trusting our guts, and choosing differently when it comes to social media, endless gaming & youtube consumption.
I would still recommend Jon’s book to friends & family even if all the data came back as wrong or inconclusive.
**Because** if you’re raising a teen in this current landscape, the proof is in how our children in our homes are doing. Are they thriving with social media? Or are they struggling? Parents know things aren’t good. We talk with other parents about the constant struggle phones play in our homes, moms share with one another about the struggles their teens face while on these apps. We’re seeing this in real time.
Could there be other reasons as to why our kids aren’t well?! Yes, of course! But at the end of the day, the people who are going to make change on this subject are parents who keep asking questions, keep reading new books & research, but most importantly the parents who take the time with their children to have open & honest conversations with their teens.
I am a Norwegian child and adolescent psychiatrist and have written a book about childrens play in a neuroperspective some years ago - and I very much agree with Jennifer Engstrom/previous speaker here. I am an admirer of your and Jonathan Haidts work on why todays children do not thrive. You (and several critics) of Haidts book might be right about the fact that most research is mostly correlational and not causal. But it is still a fact that children and adolescents mental health problems started to increase just few years after the increase in social media-use. As far as I now is Odgers work mainly focused on screentime in general and not specifically on SoMe? In my clinical work in a psychiatric intensive care unity for adolescents I daily experience the negative effects from SoMe on my patients. From a clinical and experience based point of view there is no doubt that selfharm, the use of illicit substances and eating disorders get more rapidly "distributed" to vulnerable individuals these days than just ten years ago. The lack of free play in critical phases of development, increased school pressure and SoMe are all together changing the conditions of how children grow up today. These conditions all together influence very much how they thrive. The research evidence for a causality on the deprivational effects of lack of free play is also scarce - except in animal models - still we do think there is a strong connection.
This is fascinating. I read Zimbaro's reaearch in Psych 101 years ago and later his book and until reading your linked article somehow missed the role expectations place in psychology studies. I appreciate reading an intelligent response regarding Haidt's claims from you as his colleague and peer. If more scientists would get back to respected, published disagreement and dissent, we could move science (and it's reputation) forward again.
There is not much to be done about this, but many parents will listen attentively to a news report about their kids sooner than they would actually talk to their kids.
By the way, are you familiar with Dr. K. He wrote another book for general audiences called "How to Raise a Healthy Gamer". He is my favorite psychology YouTuber on his channel HealthyGamerGG
I have read the piece and the nine comments so far and I am convinced by the case made by you Peter. A lot of what parents seem to raise as concerns relate to the organisation of schooling and the reason for young people to pay more attention to social media. At Self Managed Learning Community in England parents who visit want to know about controls on social media and smartphones. My answer is that it is between the parent and their off-spring to sort that out. If a parent agrees that their young person can bring in a smartphone that's fine. When visiting parents go round the building and outdoors they don't see our students spending a lot of time on their phones. NB our students have complete freedom to do what they want so long as they don't interfere with the rights of others. We do have students who, as part of decompressing from school, may spend what looks like excessive time on computers on gaming. However over time they get more involved in the community. As an example a student who had experienced major problems in school did spend much of his time at the start on gaming. Then gradually he became interested in game making and is now about to start a degree in game making. All of this can, of course, be dismissed as anecdotal evidence. But what I would claim is that over a 22 year period we have not had evidence of the negative impact of social media - and our programme has been well-researched by doctoral students. One of the problems with social science is that it does not mirror the physical sciences where scientific evidence support technological change which then supports further scientific research - and the testing of scientific evidence with real life application. What we have wanted to do is to test, for instance, the value of freedom for young people within a bounded setting and to monitor if this freedom produces better or worse results for the young people. Clearly much more research is needed on the issue of smartphone use but such developments are not helped by less than rigorous research. We are clear about the limitations of research on our students but where follow-up studies show increased personal fulfillment, happiness and productive careers they provide some evidence to juxtapose against the evidence of those who have gone through schooling. Science is not about absolute truth but about using the best available evidence and testing it. In conclusion we don't have evidence that unrestricted use of smartphones increases mental health problems.
As a retired child psychiatrist I love this! Where is your school?
We are located on the edge of Brighton. www.smlcollege.org.uk
Thank you, Peter. I appreciate your desire to know, to analyze, and to share what you discover. I have a four year old and an eight year old grandsons whom I'm essentially parenting. Though social media is not an issue, playing on the iPad will grab the eight year olds attention such that he appears to not hear his grandma talk to him. Watching him play, I see a range of feeling flow through him and yet he persists to the point his grandma worries. He's enjoying himself, so I remain on his side. Given the choice to swim or play outside with friends, out he goes. My health care background knows the value of prevention. Though I'm not in the position of your readers who have teenagers, I believe the more joy I can assist my grandsons to experience in life, the healthier they will be.
Peter, I appreciate your breakdown of how to engage in critical analysis of the methodology of a study. As a layperson, this is super helpful.
The questions around how social media, internet, and smartphone use affect mental health are interesting. In my own childhood and teenage years, I had daily computer/internet access on a shared family computer starting at the age of 9. I got a smartphone at the age of 17, by which time I was out of high school and moved out. Although I had trouble moderating my own usage and sometimes felt 'stuck' scrolling when I wanted/needed to do something else, I would say that internet/social media/phone access was a net positive for me as a child. I was trapped in a dysfunctional family situation in a homogenous conservative town that was very hostile toward queer/gender nonconforming young people like me, and my online friends were my lifeline. I met people from many different countries/cultures/races/ethnicities/religions, and I befriended people with different personalities, perspectives, interests, and values from the ones I'd been raised with. I learned about world cultures, US history, sociology, etc far more effectively through my time online than I ever could have at my public school.
In my early-mid twenties, my relationship with social media began to shift and became a lot more negative. By this time, I was using Instagram for a couple of hours a day and was basically just doomscrolling and compulsively refreshing the app for new posts. Most of the time when I opened up the app, I wasn't actually communicating or connecting with friends (or meeting new people), I was just looking at post after post by Instagram-famous people. This made my anxiety worsen, and I noticed a huge positive shift in my mental health when I deleted all social media for good. Now I just keep in touch with folks via email, mobile messaging, or phone calls, all of which are easier for me to moderate my usage.
Having just spent a year working as an instructional assistant for English learners at a fairly 'high-achieving' public high school, I honestly can't blame my students for wanting to use their phones and for constantly defying the phone ban. Most of the students I worked with were by and large bored, if not outright miserable, every day in their classes. They used their phones a lot more in the classes where they didn't have friends, didn't understand the class material, etc. They hardly used their phones at all when they actually got to be together, and that was the only time they acted really happy.
Given the various factors contributing to young people's suffering, and with an acknowledgement that social media companies do absolutely design their apps to keep people hooked, I would be curious to see some more rigorous studies on the emotional/mental effects of social media that are conducted to avoid the demand effect you described above.
One of Haidt's push is to remove phones from schools. As an educator, I have witnessed first hand the harms of an iPhone in a students hands during the school day and I am thankful for his plight to help schools make this change. I have also been researching the connections between common core, the increased use of technology in schools and the negative impact on learning. Since NCLB and introduction of high stakes testing, there is less free play in schools which has impacted true social connectedness/social skill development further impacted by the rise of social media and increased reliance on technology in schools. The push for Common Core Standards and increased technology in schools is not surprisingly funded by big tech, check out my Public article: https://public.substack.com/p/big-tech-hubris-and-greed-behind and my edtech timeline: https://environmentalprogress.org/education-timeline. It is also important to note that individuals criticizing Haidt's work such as Candice Odgers, often have their own ties to big tech (see here: https://jacobsfoundation.org/activity/cella-the-center-for-learning-and-living-with-ai/). Bottom line, society needs to remember how sacred childhood is and that we are raising humans first.
the reason Jonathan Haidt book (and Smartphone free childhood) has taken off in this manner is not because of the research included in it, but because of the fact that many parents feel and see the various negative effects. You cant deny the parents intuition and discomfort just because the data is inconclusive (in some eyes). The way parents observe life IS valuable data too.
Yes someone should write a bomber book like this that resonates about overprotective parenting, lack of free play and the impact of general crisis of meaning in our society. Bad Therapy by Abigail Schrier albeit not perfect, taps into some (not all) other very valid observable issues.
Your points on other reasons for crisis are valid and have more effect when expanded on their own.