‘Great Rewiring’ or moral panic: are young people really the ‘anxious generation’?

Portraits by Antonio Olmos and Christopher Lane

In the year since the book was published, Haidt says, parental, school and legislative action has taken place at a pace that he describes as “stunning”. In the US, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders sent a copy of the book to every other US state governor as a rallying cry. Haidt is keeping track of each state’s actions on his website. There are pushes in various countries to ban phones from schools. In Australia, the wife of a state premier read Haidt’s book and told her husband he had to do something about the crisis the author described. Months later: the country passed a bill that will raise the minimum age for opening a social media account to 16 and put the onus on tech companies to enforce this (it’s worth noting that age verification is still an unsolved problem in the tech space, particularly with regard to data privacy concerns).

Here in the UK, there was already momentum to this discussion before Haidt’s book. The 2023 Online Safety Act puts more responsibility on tech platforms to ensure they are safe for users, especially children. It is one reason that Haidt calls the UK “the leading country on protecting kids online”.

Haidt is a persuasive writer and speaker, and his book struck a chord with readers because it addressed something to which we can all relate: we’ve noticed that we’re suddenly terribly reliant on these little screens that live in our pockets. We wonder whether maybe there’s something wrong with that, but we don’t know for sure. It’s easier to assume it’s fine. After all, as well as causing anxiety and distraction, smartphones and social media are also very useful for adults, offering social connection, business opportunities and myriad productivity tools. Haidt agrees with this.

For children, he says, it’s different. Again, he’s addressing something familiar: we’ve all seen children get sucked into devices and grow eerily numb to the physical world. “All over the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time. Everyone’s caught up in this, everyone wants help,” says Haidt. Yet many parents are also reluctant to pass judgement. An iPad can be handy during childcare. Besides, we all grew up with technology that our own parents didn’t understand, and we mostly turned out OK.

Some critics claim that Haidt is exacerbating a moral panic. Just as previous generations of adults claimed that television, hip-hop, video games and comic books were corrupting the youth, they say Haidt is the latest avatar of the old guard inventing horror stories around new culture and technology they don’t understand.

Despite his avuncular demeanour and his pleasant habit of murmuring agreement with me while I speak, Haidt has arrived ready to prove every point in his book. “There certainly have been moral panics,” he says, “and whatever technology the kids are using, the adults are going to be sceptical of. It’s a valid criticism as a starting hypothesis. The obligation is on me to show this time is different. And I can very easily do that.”

His response to the moral panic accusation is twofold. One: he argues there has never historically been an introduction of new technology followed so directly by a precipitous global decline in youth mental health. Two: in previous generations, if you asked children how they felt about their comic books or video games, they would say they loved them, please don’t take them away. But when young people today are surveyed about social media, significant numbers regret how much they use them, find them harmful, and in some cases wish they’d never been invented.

Even if Haidt isn’t stoking a moral panic, it might still look that way because his writing often leans into the alarmist tone of previous panickers. While reading The Anxious Generation, I often found that his penchant for hyperbolic phrasing and dramatic metaphors detracted from the scientific seriousness of his argument. When I raise this with Haidt, he unexpectedly shifts gears. He takes out his laptop to pull up data and dons a pair of round black spectacles, which feels like the intellectual equivalent of rolling up his sleeves.

“Find the charged language,” he challenges me. “I think I was very moderate in the book. I didn’t do much moralisation. I didn’t do much demonisation.”

I reel off a few of the dozens of examples I’d found in his book. That he says teens are “hunched over” smartphones rather than merely “using” them, that social media platforms are described as “a fountain of bedevilments” spraying “a fire hose of addictive content ... through kids’ eyes and ears”. At one point he adopts the metaphor of a crime to explain a point to me, but instead of using terms such as “witness” and “victim”, he paints a lurid picture of a young girl who is tempted into an alleyway by three young men who rob and beat her. This language is calibrated to shock and frighten.

“OK, all right,” he concedes, “fair enough, fair enough.”

If you’re going to express yourself like this, I reflected, then perhaps it’s not surprising that some people will think you’re stoking a moral panic. But if the colourful language served a purpose in grabbing more attention to the very real crisis going on, perhaps the ends justify the means?

“It’s a sad indictment of our society that we have to make polarised rants in order to get action,” says Sonia Livingstone, a social psychologist at the London School of Economics who researches children’s lives in the digital age, “but it doesn’t make it not true. And it is very, very hard to mobilise politicians about something as important as children’s wellbeing. Quite extraordinarily so. Especially when there are major dollars on the table from big tech lobbying.”

While Haidt admits there is emotive language in his book, he refutes that this comes at the cost of the rigour and accuracy of his science. “I’m not fear-mongering,” he says. “That would mean saying things that aren’t true. I don’t think I’m exaggerating.”

“There is some debate around that,” I say.

“I’m going to win that debate,” he replies, with a steely edge.

So what is the controversy around the data? It boils down to a single, difficult question. Experts agree that mental health problems among teenagers are rising at the same time as smartphones and social media are playing increasingly ubiquitous roles in their lives. But is this mere correlation? Or is the technology causing the mental illness?

Several prominent academics have argued that Haidt’s claim of causation is an oversimplification; that there is no one simple answer to such a complex sociological problem. A particularly searing review in the academic journal Nature argued that Haidt’s central thesis “is not supported by science” and that “the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people”. Others have argued that the research around this topic is unreliable and ambiguous, or even conducted studies that contradict Haidt’s claims.

Livingstone says that we don’t know which way the data points: are smartphones causing poor mental health in children? Or are children with poor mental health turning to smartphones for entertainment and escape? Academics have also offered alternative reasons why young people might be struggling, from the state of global politics to the economy to the environment. Haidt raises a couple of these in his book and claims they don’t fit his timeline, but other experts are not so quick to dismiss the other theories. On his blog, Haidt has posted a series of detailed responses to his critics. He is determined to be right.

Ultimately, there’s enough doubt to concede that there is no scientific consensus around the topic. So how much public policy and parenting advice do we want to generate from unsettled science? Haidt argues it’s better to act before it’s too late. He writes: “At a certain point, we need to take action based on the most plausible theory, even if we can’t be 100% certain that we have the correct causal theory. I think that point is now.”

Perhaps part of the reason that Haidt riles up members of the scientific establishment is because of how he positions himself publicly – as part scientist, part crusader. He is adept at self-promotion and has turned his book launch into a global campaign, telling me that his goal is to “roll back the phone-based childhood in three years”.

This campaigning approach has precedent in his career: he has launched a series of non-profits over the years. He has also written books and taught classes that lean into the idea of self-improvement, casting him as something of a lifestyle guru. He tells me he wrote a personal mission statement in 2011: “To use my research in moral psychology and the research of others to help people better understand each other and to help important social institutions work better. That’s my mission on this Earth.” I wonder how many other social scientists have written down what they believe is their “mission on this Earth”. While this crusading image may work for getting attention and building Haidt’s personal brand (it’s probably lucrative too), it also flattens how his argument enters the public sphere. Critiques of his work often mischaracterise his thesis as a neo-Luddite assault on all screen time, when in fact his book is quite specific about which technology is harmful to whom, even making some – if not abundant – space to discuss where the argument gets tricky or the science unclear.

There is also some blurriness around Haidt’s politics, which is tricky considering how easily children’s issues become politicised. He grew up in a secular Jewish family in Scarsdale, New York, and once identified as a Democrat. But Haidt now calls himself a centrist and uses conservative-coded language – for example describing himself on Joe Rogan’s podcast as “an extremely alarmed patriotic American citizen who sees my country going to hell”, and later comparing the revolution he’s leading in the digital environment to the fall of communism in 1989. The fact that his book does not mention the threat to boys of far-right radicalisation from “manosphere” influencers, as chillingly depicted in the TV show Adolescence, could be because of a reluctance to alienate his engaged conservative fanbase. When I put this to him, he bats away the question, saying: “that didn’t occur to me”.

Reading Haidt’s book, I couldn’t help reflecting on my own teenage years online. I had many positive experiences and made significant friends on forums and online video games at a time when I felt that I didn’t fit in at school. When I was coming to terms with my sexuality aged 14, I found vital resources and community on the internet.

The Anxious Generation argues that digitally-mediated relationships are inherently less meaningful than their real-life counterparts. This is not true in my experience. Where the book does bring up the benefits that can come from virtual communities, they are briefly raised and then tossed aside. In our conversation, Haidt points out that I grew up on a different, less harmful version of the web, before social media companies deliberately employed addictive design features such as algorithmic feeds, conversation streaks and auto-playing videos to juice users for maximum engagement, and therefore maximum profit.

This is true – the internet of my formative years was a simpler one. But does that really mean young people can’t have positive experiences on today’s social media? Haidt concedes that the internet can still be a valuable resource for marginalised groups such as queer people, but he also says that these groups are disproportionately the target of online harassment and abuse. In his view, the cons outweigh the pros.

Livingstone disagrees. “Haidt puts these two sides on the scales and says the bullying outweighs the expression and finding your community, but there are some really good things here. We need to work out how to regulate big tech so that the bullying stops and the hate is not amplified.” This is part of the more middle-ground approach she advocated while advising on the UK’s Online Safety Act. Livingstone thinks we should try to curtail tech companies’ addictive, data-driven business models to make social media platforms better, safer places before resorting to an outright ban.

Because there are benefits to social media too. “Children are absolutely clear that they love being in touch with their friends,” Livingstone continues. “They love that when something bad happens, they can get social support. When they’re stuck at home and their parents are fighting, they can go somewhere and say: ‘Bloody hell, dad’s shouting at mum again.’”

For all the attention The Anxious Generation has received, media focus has entirely been directed at only half of Haidt’s argument. While he states that we have underprotected children in digital spaces, the flipside is that he thinks we are overprotecting them in the physical world. In recent decades, parents lost their trust that children can go out safely by themselves, depriving them of the lengthy periods of free, unguided play, which is crucial for their healthy development (and which could replace some of their screen time).

Livingstone agrees. “When you talk to British parents,” she says, “they’re truly terrified of letting their kids cycle to school, run around the woods or try risky play activities of any kind.” It’s not just the children who are an anxious generation; it’s their parents too.

I ask Haidt why he thinks this side of his argument has received less attention. Partly he thinks it’s because it’s less controversial. The experts agree, so there’s no juicy debate. But he also thinks it’s because rather than confirming parents’ worries about technology, this point contradicts their instincts. “The play side speaks to parents’ anxieties and says: ‘You’re wrong; you have to overcome your anxiety, you have to let your kids out.’ And that’s not appealing to parents. Even though consciously most of them know it’s true,” he says.

“It’s just not as sexy an argument,” says Livingstone. She adds that it’s unclear where children would go if we let them out to play unaccompanied, following funding cuts to children’s services. “We used to pay for parks, for public libraries and librarians for kids, for nursery and youth centres. Now we’re not investing in kids at all.”

This point gets at a broader issue around Haidt’s campaign. You can apply his four rules, and they might be helpful; they’re unlikely to do much harm. But there is no silver bullet. This will only truly make a difference if it comes as part of a wider suite of social changes that spans parents, institutions and governments. These changes must start with more reliable research and a more comprehensive understanding of just what is making young people unhappy.

Livingstone believes that we need to look at the question with a wider lens. “What do we think a good childhood looks like?” she asks. “If we don’t let children go on social media till they’re 16, what is our plan for them being in touch with their friends? Are we going to let them out after school and let them walk home by themselves and hang out at the bus stop, or are we going to report them as hoodlums and menaces?”

We live in a world where we have welcomed technology into every crevice of our work, social and leisure time. Countless services force us to create digital accounts to access them; educational technology is being rolled out across schools; AI is being inserted everywhere, and even being used to make decisions about social welfare. “We have invested in tech across the board,” says Livingstone. “It’s becoming our infrastructure. And in that context, to say ‘kids shouldn’t be anywhere near it’ – what’s the vision in terms of restricting them, and what is the vision in terms of providing something better for them?”

“We can ban smartphones,” she says, “but we’re not going to make kids happy overnight.”

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin Books Ltd, £10.99). Order a copy at observershop.co.uk for £10.99. Delivery charges may apply.