Childhood Regained

Neither man contented himself with simply decrying a bad situation. Rather, both offered concrete plans to remedy the situation. Rufo has already presented the incoming Trump administration with executive orders and legislation to reverse the hold of DEI in education and throughout the government. And Haidt developed four simple rules to guide parents and school authorities: (1) no smartphones before age 14; (2) no social media before age 16; (3) phone free schools, i.e., bell-to-bell; and (4) encouragement of free, unsupervised play, while giving children and teenagers more responsibility at earlier ages.

Olivia Reingold takes up the story of Haidt’s successful battle against smartphones in “How Jonathan Haidt Won the Fight Against Smartphones in Schools” (The Free Press, Dec. 30 2024). Across the political spectrum, from California’s progressive governor Gavin Newsom to Arkansas’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders, politicians are pushing for bans on smartphones in K-12 schools altogether, and the movement to dramatically limit smartphone use among teenagers is constantly gathering speed.

Reingold writes that she spoke to a dozen people in search of the explanation for the movement’s recent successes. All pointed to Professor Jonathan Haidt and his recently released book The Anxious Generation as the key. Haidt is far from the first to raise the alarms about the destructive impact of smartphones on youth around the world. Jean Twenge’s 2017 book, IGen, identified a major generational mental health shift around the introduction of iPhones. And computer scientist Tristan Harris starred in Netflix’s 2020 documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” about how social media algorithms warp our brains. But Twenge, whose research Haidt cites often and whose essays he has posted at his After Babel website, acknowledges that not until this year and the appearance of The Anxious Generation, did the “dam break.”

At the Tikvah Fund’s recent Jewish Leadership Conference, Haidt, in a discussion with Caroline Bryk, the director of Tikvah’s Jewish Parents Forum, compared the sudden shift of sentiment on smartphones and social media to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Almost all those living under Communism hated the system, until finally one day the whole rotten system came tumbling down.