The Anxious Generation Book Review: Part II
Remember how, in Part I, I talked about Haidt's tendency to make dramatic claims without sufficient evidence? Well, his "phone-based childhood" concept falls into the same trap.
Haidt cites teens saying they're on their phones "all the time", which I already said isn't backed up by hard data. For instance, a recent study showed that self-reported screen time differed significantly from objective data (from the screen time on iPhones, for instance). But that doesn't mean we should ignore the sentiment. We all felt it: the feeling that our phones have taken over our lives. It comes with being connected 24/7, an endless news cycle that leaves us feeling drained and resenting our phones.
It doesn't have to be this way. Plenty of good work out there can help us manage our relationship with our phones. The idea is that the technology serves us, not the other way around. Our phones can be useful when we want to share our lives with others on the go (in a video call or a live session on IG) or learn a skill from the best teachers in the world. Or we can put them away and connect with what's in front of us. We get to decide—but we have to do the work.
Here's what's missing from Haidt's discussion of the phone-based childhood: We live in a phone-based society. We need to teach children how to have a relationship with their phones. In the same way we teach them how to have a relationship with food, money, and the world around them, we need to teach them what a positive relationship with their phones looks like.
I grew up a bookworm in an agricultural community. I was the weird kid, and I often felt alone. When I was fifteen, I finally met some people who liked reading and music, didn't like climbing trees and weren't good at sports. I sometimes think about the angst I could have been spared had I known these people existed when I was younger. When I was eight, ten, and twelve, I thought something was wrong with me because I'd never met people who didn't fit the mould around me. Children today can find a community online when they don't fit into the physical community they are embedded in.
This is what Haidt misses when he romanticises traditional forms of connection. Yes, face-to-face interaction is valuable, but it's not the only way meaningful connections form. Take his argument about synchronised movement, which he describes as a spiritual human collective ritual that creates connections. He argues that phones and social media disrupt these synchronicity games (think patty-cake or skip rope), particularly for girls. He clearly hasn't seen a teenage girl using TikTok. It's not just about dancing for fun - it's about creating together, synchronising movements across continents, and building communities through shared creativity. If that's not tapping into the "ancient power of synchrony", I don't know what is. The point is that a girl who loves dancing can find an online community, even if she is the only one who dances in her school. We know that for children who don't conform to heterosexuality or gender binary, for instance, the online community can be life-saving, especially if they are embedded in a community that is stricter about not fitting the mould.
What does teaching our children to have a positive relationship with their phones look like? I actually agree with Haidt that we need to empower parents to decide what's best for their children. Most parents, in a normative parenting model, know their children better than the teachers, better than the therapists, and definitely better than the policymakers. Unless the child is suffering harm, our job as a society is to support parents, not to override them. As parents, we have (or should have) a constant feel as to who and what our teens are watching, engaging with, and how it makes them feel. A good place to start is to ask them.
Children—and teens—learn from modelling. That means that to teach our children what a positive relationship with their phones looks like, we need to model it. We need to do the work. We need to think about the pros and cons we get from phones, how we like to use them, and whether we like getting sucked into doom-scrolling instead of having a conversation with the person in the room with us. Of course, it's much easier to ban phones.
What does this modelling actually look like? It starts with making our own phone use more intentional and visible. We might narrate our choices: "I'm setting a timer for 15 minutes to catch up on messages" or "I'm turning on Do Not Disturb while we have dinner together." When we catch ourselves mindlessly scrolling, we can acknowledge it aloud and course-correct: “Wow, I just spent twenty minutes on Instagram when I meant to look up a recipe.” We can demonstrate how phones enhance rather than replace face-to-face interactions - using them to look up answers to questions that come up in conversation, share memories through photos, or connect with far-away family members. The goal isn't perfection but showing our children that phones are tools we control, with benefits and drawbacks that require active management.
Instead of seeking headlines, we need the complex, nuanced work of caring for complex, nuanced children and teens growing up in a complex, nuanced world. In Part III, I'll look at how this plays out in the reality of modern schooling versus the kind of free play Haidt romanticises. Just like those truncated graphs I showed you in Part I, the solution isn't as simple as cutting off the parts we don't like.
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