If one book in the past year not explicitly about education has had an outsized effect on educational practice and policy, it is undoubtedly Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. Though the book’s subtitle, “How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” accurately reflects Haidt’s aim in writing, the more pragmatic policy fallout from the book has been perhaps the most straightforward lever to pull: the now-nationwide drive to ban cell phones in the classroom or the school building altogether. This issue is, miraculously, bipartisan. Left and right, coastal metropolises and flyover country, California and Florida—it feels like the lion is about to lie down with the lamb.
And let’s give credit where credit is due: no one has moved the national dial on smartphones and schools to the degree Haidt has in the past year. For this, every educator owes him a tip of the hat. Ten years ago, we could pretend to be ignorant about what smartphones were doing to our teenagers. Now, we can no longer do so. The data are in, and they are damning. Haidt has the charts to back up his case. Since roughly 2010, teenagers in the United States endured an inexorable rise in mental health diagnoses. Something changed around then, and that change was the mass adoption of smartphones and the apps, games, and pornography accessible on those phones.
A growing unrest about the state of things with our teens has simmered beneath the surface for some time.
Like many school administrators, I picked up The Anxious Generation last spring when it first appeared. Haidt’s previous work—namely, The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind—has proven helpful in the classroom, and I knew this would be a worthy read. If luck is when opportunity meets preparation, Haidt picked the right time to publish this book. A growing unrest about the state of things with our teens has simmered beneath the surface for some time. Haidt’s book gave voice to these frustrations, which were felt acutely by teachers, administrators, parents, and the young men and women who had been unwittingly plunged into a massive social experiment. His four encouraged reforms are worth considering and would enrich the experience of most students, teachers, administrators, and parents. They are as follows:
- No smartphones before high school.
- No social media before 16.
- Phone-free schools.
- Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. (15)
Haidt makes these recommendations after carefully portraying the scope of the current crisis. Perhaps the superlative contribution of Haidt’s book is that it has broken the spell cast by the supposed inevitability of our increasing digital saturation. We are, Haidt reminds us, making choices. And we can make other choices. We can, as he argues, “regain control of our own minds” (17). Inevitability breeds passivity. Haidt awakens us from our lethargy.
We are, Haidt reminds us, making choices. And we can make other choices.
In this space, I do not have time to do justice to the scope of his argument. In particular, I would love to unpack his delineation of the different effects experienced between boys and girls. But here, I want to focus on three things: 1) Haidt’s central claim about the way we raise kids today, 2) his chapter on “spiritual elevation and degradation” (199), and 3) his hope, despite it all, for Gen Z and the future lives they still might lead. I trust that this constellation of issues will benefit those of us called to educate young people in the traditions and practices of the Christian faith.
Growing Up on Mars
In the book’s introduction, Haidt uses a metaphor to explain our current milieu: we have trained our children for an earthbound life, but they are growing up on Mars. Haidt describes the members of Gen Z as “test subjects” in a Silicon Valley-funded experiment that has rewired their brains. Growing up with powerful devices in their pockets that pull them out of the real world (embodied and synchronous, with few simultaneous interactions, and having communities with standards) and into the digital world (disembodied, asynchronous, having vast audiences and a low bar for entry), this generation marked the final transition—first begun in the 1980s—from what Haidt calls a “play-based” childhood to a “phone-based” variety (5). Worse, this transition to a phone-based childhood came with precious few protections. The big internet companies have done little to verify the age of people signing up for accounts or searching for pornography. Kids can check a box that “verifies” their age, but no other accountability measures exist.
This Wild West of a digital landscape is complemented by a weirdly protective parenting culture that arose in the 1980s, blossomed in the 1990s, and reached its fruition with Gen Z. Parents became fixated on the physical safety of their children to the detriment of their children’s social, physical, and psychological development. The upshot is a cultural mishmash of overprotection and underprotection. This bipolar state leads Haidt to his central claim: “These two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation” (9).
In my opinion, Haidt’s argument here gets at something that can apply independently of social media or smartphones. As his chronology shows, parenting had already changed two decades before the advent of smartphones. In an Atlantic article responding to Haidt’s work, “America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety,” Derek Thompson challenges Haidt’s causal relationship between smartphones and anxiety. Thompson notes that there has indeed been a rise in anxiety and other mental health conditions since 2006 but that this only applies to the Anglosphere, or the English-speaking world. While suicide attempts and self-harm rates have skyrocketed in those countries, Thompson relays this interesting fact: “There is no rise in suicide or self-harm attempts in similar high-income countries with other national languages, such as France, Germany, and Italy.” We are, he argues, exporting American anxiety to English-speaking regions around the globe.
Thompson locates part of the cause for this discrepancy in what psychologists call “prevalence inflation,” the phenomenon “of people developing apparent anxiety disorders from the sheer ubiquity of concern about anxiety disorders that swirl all around them.” Americans and other Anglophone teens have been encouraged to fixate on their “traumas” and anxieties. They have complied accordingly.
In his response to Haidt, Leonard Sax, a psychologist and physician, places the blame squarely on parents and parenting culture. Rather than drawing appropriate boundaries and policing their children’s technology use, parents have been all too quick to hand their kids an iPad in the grocery store. Sax argues, “It’s not enough to just say ‘No’ to the world of social media and smartphones. We also have to say ‘Yes’ to a healthier culture” (“Toxic Phones”).
Both Thompson and Sax indicate that the “great rewiring” phenomenon extends beyond smartphones and social media. Those two things might exacerbate the problem but did not create it.
Spiritual Elevation and Degradation
One of the causes of the current crisis is a degraded spiritual condition on a national scale. Smartphones, Haidt argues, pull us downward, further into ourselves and away from transcendent experience. You can sense Haidt’s discomfort as he, an atheist, “needs words and concepts from religion” to understand our malaise (201). Religion is not always purely about theology; the practices and mindsets inherent in a traditional faith system teach us how to live as well as what to believe. As we have lost broad religious practice, we have lost these tools that help us cope with life. Haidt even admits to the classic “God-shaped hole” argument: “Many people feel a yearning for meaning, connection, and spiritual elevation.” A phone-based life, by contrast, consists of the “trivial and degrading” (218).
As such, the phone-based life has left people unsatisfied. It is good for Haidt to sense that the crisis is not only technological or psychological but also spiritual. Our struggle is not against smartphones and social media. But while he is right that religion consists of more than theology, it does not consist of less than theological conviction. While it may be tempting to imagine the beneficial accouterments of religion without the exasperating doctrines, the two are intertwined. This is an abridged version of this article. To read more, subscribe to the print or digital edition of Christian Educators Journal.
Works Cited
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin, 2024.
Sax, Leonard. “Toxic Phones—or a Toxic Culture?” Institute for Family Studies, 30 September 2024, ifstudies.org/blog/toxic-phones-or-a-toxic-culture. Accessed 4 January 2025.
Thompson, Derek. “America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety.” The Atlantic, 19 June 2024, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/mental-health-crisis-anglosphere-depressed. Accessed 4 January 2025.
Toby Coffman is the Dean of Humanities at Valor Christian High School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, where he has served since 2014. He and his family live eight thousand feet above sea level. They are regularly visited by bears, bobcats, herds of elk, and debilitating snowstorms.