End the Phone-Based Childhood

The Anxious Generation Book Review

February 28, 2025

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt is a book that I think everyone should read and I’ve already put my money where my mouth is with that statement and bought an extra copy to give to some friends and it will likely be what I give people as a wedding gift for the next few years. The book’s subtitle is How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness which implies an important question that most people probably already know the answer to but parents and schools are too afraid to base any action off of. Smartphones have been a disaster for Gen Z.

Haidt didn’t originally plan to write a book on this topic, he wanted to write a book that was a bit more broad about the effects of social media on society but once he dug into the impact it had of Gen Z he realized it was a much more important problem, “And it wasn’t just about social media. It was about the radical transformation of childhood into something inhuman: a phone-based existence.” (page 289)

Early on in the book he defines two terms, a “play-based childhood” is the sort of childhood that would have been the norm for every generation up to Gen Z, kids who were allowed to play out in the street until the lights turned on would have enjoyed the best a play-based childhood had to offer. The play-based childhood began to die off in the 90s as parents became more focused on safety but the “phone-based childhood” didn’t fully take over until much later. Haidt marks the period between 2010 and 2015 as the beginning of the phone-based childhood as that is when smartphones and social media became common sights in a high school cafeteria. Of course smartphones aren’t the only pieces of technology that have defined the phone-based childhood; laptops, tablets, social media, video games, and internet pornography all share some sort of blame in the decline of teenage mental health.

The book is split up into four parts, but parts 2 and 3 are where most of the meat is. Part 1 contains a single chapter which Haidt spends citing several statistics that report a spike in teenage mental health issues between 2010 and 2015 where he claims the phone-based childhood begins. He does this to prove to any skeptics that the phone-based childhood is a problem. Part 4 contains multiple chapters worth of Haidt’s suggestions for governments, big-tech, schools and parents to pull us out of this phone-based childhood mess. Despite taking up nearly 80 pages part 4 feels like an elongated conclusions section. We’ll get to the most important of Haidt’s suggestions later.

Haidt titles Part 2 “The Backstory: The Decline of the Play-Based Childhood” but it covers more than just that. In this section Haidt explains the purpose of childhood, for kids to learn their physical limits and to learn how to interact with others.

In one part he reports on the work of Norwegian researchers Ellen Sandseter and Leif Kennair who focus on the need for “risky play” which they define as, “thrilling and exciting forms of play that involve a risk of physical injury.” (page 77) They found six types of risks that kids will take on when they are given the freedom to do so: heights, high speed, dangerous tools, dangerous elements, rough-and-tumble play, and disappearing. (paraphrased from page 77) Kids need to be able to take these risks so they understand their limits, sure they may get hurt by going beyond those limits but they almost never go far enough past them to get much more than a few scrapes and bruises.

Haidt calls the merry-go-round, “the greatest piece of playground equipment ever invented,” (page 78) because it is a bit dangerous so it allows kids to take some risks. But it is also great because it forces kids to cooperate if they want it to spin fast. Haidt explains to us that in a play-based childhood kids should be given lots of free time together with other kids to take risks together and to make up their own ways of having fun. Their time should be synchronous and in person so that they can learn social cues, have opportunities to get in and resolve conflicts, learn how to share and take turns, and understand so many other things. It is important to note kids who spend a lot of time with other kids in heavily supervised adult-led activities like sports practices music lessons won’t get all of these benefits, kids need to learn to govern themselves.

As I mentioned earlier the play-based childhood began to decline as parents became more and more enthralled in “safetyism”. It is scary for a parent to watch their son climb a tree that they know he won’t be able to get down from by himself so most parents these days won’t let him do it, but if he never does it he will never learn his limit. Ironically, as Haidt points out, parents these days are overly focused on their kids’ physical safety that they have paid almost no attention to their internet safety, and a kid getting caught up in the wrong stuff online is a lot more dangerous than climbing a tree.

Part 3 of the book digs into the phone-based childhood. In the first chapter of this part Haidt describes what he calls the four foundational harms of the phone-based childhood:

While there are several pieces of technology that contribute to these harms social media is the biggest, and girls are hit much harder than boys are by social media (and the whole phone-based childhood in general) which is what Haidt dedicates the next chapter to discussing. In it he reports on some studies and experiments done concluding, “Social media use is a cause of anxiety, depression, and other ailments, not just a correlate.” (page 148) A young teenage girl given access to social media will rapidly experience decreased mental health, it is a poison for them.

Despite this some people still claim that social media has benefits for young people. Former U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy is among those people, Haidt included a long quote from that guy on page 136. Haidt also points to several surveys that were administered to teens where the vast majority reported believing social media improved their lives. Haidt is skeptical of these claims for several reasons. One of these reasons that I found interesting comes from a survey Haidt reported on that found, “LGBTQ girls were more than twice as likely as non-LGBTQ girls to encounter harmful content related to suicide and eating disorders.” (page 138) Many activists insist that social media is important for that demographic of teens because it gives them, as surgeon general Murthy stated, “It can provide access to important information and create a space for self-expression.” (page 136) But if the information these girls are getting is constantly promoting suicide or eating disorders social media is not a safe space for them and their lives are better off without it.

When Haidt turned to look at what was causing the mental health decline in boys things got a bit harder to pin down. Social media does harm boys, but boys aren’t drawn to it as much as girls are and don’t spend nearly as much time on it, so it can’t be the main cause of their troubles. Haidt initially wanted to point to video games as the villain behind declining mental health in boys but the data couldn’t support that claim. In moderation video games are perfectly fine and sometimes even beneficial to mental health. However pornography is a threat to boys’ mental health that has no upside and should be banned, it has a huge role to play in the mental issues boys face and is way too commonly used by young boys, many start at age 11.

Another harm that all technology has to boys and girls is simply the time loss, or social deprivation in Haidt’s terms. More time in front of a screen means less time engaged in risky play. It can be speculated that the reduction of risky play has made it so boys are less likely to take risks later like the risk of asking a girl on a date. Social media has undoubtedly hit girls harder than boys but I think the loss of the play-based childhood may have hit boys harder than girls.

Section 4, as I stated earlier, includes Haidt’s recommendations on how to get out of this mess. There are several, some of them are more doable than others, but he gives us four that he says are most important and should be implemented as soon as possible:

  1. No smartphones before high school - Haidt never really mentions tablets but I’d assume this would apply to those as well. Simple phones with no internet access are fine.
  2. No social media before 16 - Personally I’d push that back even farther but Haidt advises us that we should be giving kids more pillages as they age, at 16 teens have passed their most mentally vulnerable stage of adolescence so they should be able to learn to use social media responsibly.
  3. Phone free schools - This does not just mean kids can’t use their phone in class, it means no phones in schools period. No phones in between classes, no phones during lunch; they should be kept inside backpacks or a locker where students can’t access them. This will encourage kids to interact with each other rather than stare at some object in their hands.
  4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence - Don’t fill a kid’s life up with tons of time spent doing whatever an adult tells them to do, let them do what they want. Also trust them more, let them walk home from school or ride their bike to a friend’s house, encourage them to do things they’ve never done before so they can grow their skills and confidence.

These suggestions are simple, but simple doesn’t mean easy. All of these things were normal twenty years ago, but now all of these things are almost taboo. Your kid will feel cheated if he is seemingly the only kid in their middle school without an iPhone. Your kid will feel left out if all his friends are sharing memes on Instagram when he doesn’t have it. You can’t change your school’s phone policy by yourself. And you could have the police knock on your door and take you away if a nosy Karen sees your eleven year old playing in the park without adult supervision.

The changes Haidt advocates for in The Anxious Generation are necessary for our society to lift itself out of the mess we’ve found ourselves in where seemingly an entire generation is mentally ill. I encourage you to read this book to gain more insight on this issue and know how we can help the next generation of teens be better off than the last. Then encourage your friends to do the same so that we can create a community of people united in ending phone-based childhoods and letting kids play.