The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The digital poison flooding our schools
Parents, read Jonathan Haidt’s book – and learn what phones are doing to your children’s brains
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month, the Government issued new guidance to headteachers, giving them the power to ban mobile phones in schools. Phones are largely banned already, however patchy the enforcement; nevertheless, the announcement occupied plenty of column inches, as it followed a call by Esther Ghey, mother of the murdered transgender teen Brianna, for ministers to sort out the “mess” of children’s relationships with social media and the internet. A parent-led movement called Smartphone Free Childhood, meanwhile, now has thousands of members across the country, while a petition to ban smartphones and cameraphones for the under-16s has, at the time of writing, racked up more than 15,000 signatures.
The potential harms caused to our children by smartphones are legion, as Jonathan Haidt spells out in The Anxious Generation. Haidt is the co-author of the 2018 hit The Coddling of the American Mind, in which he argued that overprotection was having a negative effect on university students, and that the use of trigger warnings and safe spaces does more harm than good. This time around, he’d planned to detail the negative effects that social media was having on democracy. But when he finished writing the first chapter, he realised that the adolescent mental-health story was much bigger than he’d thought. The Anxious Generation methodically sets out the problem, the harm it’s causing and what we can do about it. It’s compelling, readable – and incredibly chilling.
Consider, for example, the fact that, by 2016, 73 per cent of American teenagers had access to a smartphone; today, it’s 95 per cent. In Britain, Ofcom says, 97 per cent of 12-year-olds own one. Haidt cites a 2015 Pew Research Center report in which one in four teenagers said they were online “almost constantly”. By 2022, the number had nearly doubled.
Now consider that the rate of self-harm for young adolescent girls in America nearly tripled from 2010 to 2020, and it increased in Canada and the UK, too. Hospitalisations for mental-health issues in young people grew exponentially during this time. There has been a surge in the prevalence of sociogenic illnesses, from Tourette’s to gender dysphoria; ever-younger boys are addicted to internet porn; attention spans are fraying; teenage sleep is suffering.
Haidt is unequivocal about the cause: smartphones. He points to several key developments: the arrival of the smartphone in 2007; the advent of the “like” and “share” buttons on social media in 2009; and the launch of the iPhone 4 in June 2010, the first with a frontfacing camera, which made it easier to take selfies. All of these factors combined have led to what Haidt calls “the great rewiring of childhood”.
Admittedly, parents come in for some stick, too. The great rewiring, Haidt writes, comes with “a second plot line… the well-intentioned and disastrous shift towards overprotecting children and restricting their autonomy in the ‘real’ world.” We do not let our children walk to school alone, or go to the shops or the park by themselves. (I have three sons, aged 12, 10 and seven, and I do; at this point, I felt smug.)
More broadly, as a society we’ve moved away from a “play-based childhood”, in which children learn about their own limitations through age-based play, to a phone-based one, in which, on the internet, everyone is effectively the same age, there are few boundaries, and children are fed a constant diet of highly addictive and often extremely unwholesome content. Girls and boys are affected differently: for girls, it’s social media that does the real damage; for boys, it’s gaming and pornography. But we have all, collectively, been caused a degree of spiritual harm by the ubiquity of smartphones, which drag us down rather than pull us up, encourage us to be quick to anger and judge, and drag our eyes away from the beauty around us.
Haidt is remarkably persuasive. I was, at the outset, interested in his premise, but sceptical. Few parents would deny that their own childhoods were more free-range than that of their offspring, but Haidt’s view of the past – all deathdefying playgrounds and healthy wrestling – seemed to me a little rose-tinted.
But, as he worked methodically through the evidence of harms, and I considered my own children (obsessed with the PlayStation, clamouring for phones) and those of my friends (often anxious, headsLast
Today, 97 per cent of British 12-yearolds own a phone. And rates of selfharm are soaring
down over screens, incapable of concentrating on conversations), it was hard not to agree with him. In fact, I only needed to examine my own reaction when someone “likes” a post I’ve made on social media, or when my phone’s battery dies. It’s almost physical. What on earth has this thing done to me?
But the equally pressing question is: what can we do? We live in a world that’s fully saturated with smartphones: it’s almost impossible, now, to carry out daily life without one, whether it’s looking up a bus time or paying for the ticket. We cannot keep our children away from them forever. Nor does Haidt recommend we should. Instead, he advocates four foundational reforms: more unsupervised play and childhood independence; no smartphones before high school (roughly aged 14); no social media before 16; and phone-free schools. They wouldn’t be hard to implement; they cost almost nothing; they’ll work even without legislation. It’s time, says Haidt, to end the ongoing experiment that sent our children, unprotected, into a completely alien and often hostile land.
I don’t disagree – but I am also, perhaps, more optimistic than him. Haidt thinks there’s no such thing as “Gen Alpha” – the next swathe of young people, the oldest of whom are about 13 – and won’t be, until we can change the conditions of childhood that are making young people so anxious. But my children are all Alphas, and I think they’re different from their predecessors. Gen Z-ers saw the arrival of broadband, the iPhone and social media. The
Alphas have always had these things, which means that their parents, including me, are not navigating this space blind. It won’t be easy to continue denying my children smartphones. But I know that I won’t be the only one doing so – and thanks to Haidt, I have a good deal of evidence on my side.