Dispatches from the anxious generation

In a famous 1968 social psychology experiment, researchers piped smoke into a waiting room as participants filled out questionnaires to see how they would respond. When individuals were alone in the room, most lost little time in running to report the smoke. When multiple people were in the waiting room, however, only 1 in 8 did anything about it, no matter how thick the smoke got. The lesson? If no one else seems worried, neither are we. Often, this herd mentality is helpful, keeping us from overreacting to unreal threats. Sometimes, though, it means we will all suffocate together.

While we all know the dangers of yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, sometimes someone needs to have the courage to do so when no one else will. When it comes to kids and smartphones, Jonathan Haidt has dared to be that someone. In his new runaway bestseller, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Haidt finally says loud and clear what many of us have long known—that giving children an uncensored perpetual distraction machine preloaded with a personal popularity tracker and bottomless pornography is disastrous for them and our society. Cutting through the years of obfuscation by Big Tech’s apologists, Haidt offers page after page of compelling data in support of this commonsense conclusion.

After reading it, one is left wondering why we would have needed such data to prove the point. Most parents would never let their kids into a strip club—indeed, by law, neither would the club. But many have been happy to give them a pocket strip club for their 10th birthday. No parent would allow a stranger to spy on their children through their bedroom window—but are they fine with it if it’s through a phone? Many Christian parents, in particular, have gone to great lengths to protect their kids from secular indoctrination, spending thousands of dollars to insulate them at private Christian schools—and then have given them unlimited access to radical woke influencers through their own private screens.

Why have we been so slow to notice the smoke filling the room and our children’s lungs? I’d suggest at least three reasons.

First, we’ve learned to treat ourselves like lab rats. C.S. Lewis called it right in Abolition of Man eight decades ago: When we stop believing in human nature, we start to think of ourselves like the rest of nature, fit to be experimented upon. Rather than testing each new technology against ancestral wisdom and common sense before uncritically adopting it, we decide to test it on ourselves and, above all, on our kids. Haidt cites studies showing that having phones in classrooms hurts learning outcomes. Ya think? Was this really a decadelong experiment we had to run before we knew that kids learn more when they’re attending to a teacher rather than an Instagram feed?

Second, we’ve bought into the myth that freedom means the maximization of individual choices. Smartphones and their endless apps are marketed on this basis, and even when we feel like they might be bad for us, we think that only individuals can decide that for themselves. The reality is that in many cases, we are only free when we take action together. Christians know this every week in public worship: Left to make up our own minds, many of us would sleep in on Sunday mornings or abbreviate the service to just a couple of our favorite passages and songs. If we want to be free to worship together, we need a local church to help us limit our choices. Just so, we need communities like churches and schools to teach our children that freedom consists as much in saying no as saying yes and to have the courage to say no together, providing tech-free zones where children are free to be children again.

Third, although Haidt is right to focus on the threats to childhood, the period of life when our brains are most malleable and vulnerable to being hijacked by high-intensity stimulants like candy or Candy Crush Saga, his analysis is incomplete. The reality is that most of us adults know we have an unhealthy relationship with our devices, one that we constantly model to our children. The biggest obstacle to commonsense tech policy is not Big Tech lobbyists; it’s staring us in the mirror. We prefer not to admit what phones are doing to our kids because that would require us to admit what they’re doing to us.

Obviously, the solution is not a societywide ban on smartphones, which most of us will continue to use, but neither is it merely a few tweaks around the edges. With the advent of artificial intelligence threatening to tilt the power balance even further against the willpower of individuals and the wisdom of parents, it is critical that we take collective commonsense action sooner rather than later to make our technologies useful servants rather than cruel masters.