A few months ago, my 15-year-old daughter admitted that she was addicted to her phone and hated it. She deleted TikTok and asked me to buy her one timed safe so she could take breaks from her smartphone, and I also asked for a flip phone so I could stay in touch when she took time off. I accepted with pleasure. But my heart ached at the thought of her being a addicted to the phone– and about how she still struggles daily to stop herself from scrolling and actually using the vault – has not been disbanded.
That’s why the gospel of Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU Stern School of Business and author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Remake of Childhood is Driving an Epidemic of Mental Illness, resonates so deeply, not only with me, but with the tens of thousands of devotees who have kept his latest book on the New York Times bestseller list for 12 weeks and counting. (Which doesn’t mean he didn’t do it confronted a lot repelwhat he has.)
Inspired to Get to the Bottom of the Teen Mental Illness Epidemic, What He Says started around 2012and encouraged by the findings of other social scientists, including San Diego State University Jean Twenge (author of iGen), he turned to years of correlational, longitudinal, and truly experimental studies – all kept track publicly. And the book, in summary, concludes that as parents, we have overprotected our children in the real world but underprotected them online, and that this must stop in order to heal our children’s mental health.
And the best way to do that, as he explains in his book, is to follow four “fundamental” rules to “lay the foundation for a healthier childhood in the digital age.”
Below are the rules, with context.
1. No smartphone before high school
“Parents should delay their children’s 24-hour access to the Internet,” writes Haidt, a father of two teenagers, “in only giving basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (around age 14).
“Millennials went through puberty with flip phones, and flip phones aren’t particularly bad. You just use them to communicate,” Haidt told ABC News. “That’s when we gave kids smartphones, and around that time, they also got… social media accounts. When kids move their social lives to social media like that, it’s not humane. It doesn’t help them develop. And right away, mental health collapses.”
While speaking At Wall Street Journals“At the Future of Everything festival in May, he added, “you don’t give a kid Internet access in his pocket, where strangers can reach him and he can watch beheading videos.” »
Bill Gates, to begin with, agrees. And at least 60,000 American parents agree: They’ve signed a campaign pledge. Wait until the 8thwhich aims to let parents come together to wait until eighth grade, just a year earlier than Haidt recommends, to get their children’s smartphones.
So when do children tend to have their first smartphone? According to research from Common Sense Media (2021), 42% of American children own a phone by age 10 – and by age 14, smartphone ownership jumps to 91%.
2. No social media before 4 p.m.
“Let children go through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to an algorithmically chosen network of social media and influencers,” Haidt emphasizes in his book, adding at the end. WSJ Festival in May, “Don’t let children go through puberty on social networks, it’s the really vulnerable time. »
US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who last week called for social media platforms to be equipped with a warning label, it stressed in its Notice 2023 that up to 95% of young people aged 13 to 17 report using a social media platform, with more than a third saying they use social media “almost constantly”. And although 13 is generally the minimum age required by social media platforms in the United States, he noted, nearly 40 percent of children ages 8 to 12 use social media. . And what’s more, Murthy said in an interview with CNN“Personally, based on the data I’ve seen, I think 13 is too early. »
He added: “If parents can come together and say you know, as a group we will not allow our children to use social media until they are 16, 17 or 18, or whatever age that is of their choice, it is much more. effective strategy to ensure that your children are not exposed to dangers early.
3. Schools without phones
As Haidt writes in his book: “In all schools, from elementary to high school, students should store their phones, smart watches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive text messages in phone lockers or locked pouches during school. school day. This is the only way to free up their attention on each other and on their teachers.
Because, as he pointed out during the WSJ event: “Imagine, for those of you who went to school before the Internet, imagine that school had a new rule: you can bring your TV from home, you can bring your walkie talkie, you can bring your record player. , put it all on your desk, we’ll give you an outlet, and you can do it during class while the professor speaks. This is total madness. But that’s what we did.
Instead, when schools allow children to keep the phone in their pocket, he added: “You have to hide it behind a book or under your desk if you want to text, watch videos and watch porn, what the children do. »
Earlier this month, the board of directors of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the country,approved a total ban on phones at school, which is expected to take effect by the spring 2025 semester. In Massachusetts, more than half of the districts Completely ban phones at school. In New York, as Gov. Kathy Hochul considers a statewide ban, leaders of New York City Public Schools, which lifted the phone ban in 2015, say a total ban will return in 2025.
4. Much more unsupervised play and children’s independence
This is how children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety and become independent young adults.
“There can’t be one adult babysitting them all the time until they get to college,” Haidt said at the news conference. WSJ event.
He credits at least some of his revelations on this issue for Children on the loose Founder and advocate Lenore Skenazy, famous nickname “The Worst Mom in the World” in 2008 when she wrote about letting her 9-year-old take the New York subway home alone. Haidt joined Skenazy to found Let it growwhich advocates, through legislation and school programs, in favor of the independence of childhood.
On the New York Times Hard Fork Podcast in March, he expanded on this fourth rule: “My story is not a simple story that it’s all about smartphones and social media. It’s actually a two-part story about the decline of play-based childhood, where we’ve repressed free play from the 1980s onwards, milk cartons, abducted children, all that. We don’t let our children go out. So we reduce what they need, which is free play with each other, from the 80s to about 2010, and then we introduce phone-based childhood, the great rewiring.
