Stop calling the smartphone generation damaged goods

Step up, but don’t despair

Photo by Chelaxy Designs on Unsplash

I have watched Jonathan Haidt’s campaign over the past year with mixed emotions. I am grateful he is taking on Big Tech and shaming them for targeting kids. Like Big Tobacco’s leaders before them, top tech executives have built addictive products and aim to hook kids early so they will stick around for life. Parents could long see this happening, but now they have proof, in the form of things like The Wall Street Journal’s bombshell investigation into Facebook (now Meta) in 2021 and testimonies before Congress from tech executives who have left their companies and documented those companies’ brazen lack of care. A business model to hijack kids’ attention as early as possible and monetize it over a lifetime may promise bottomless profits but also plenty of harm. Meta could have built the parental controls they announced in 2023 many years ago; they chose not to. Our kids are paying the price.

I am a fan of Haidt’s previous work, and of much of his latest book. But a lot of what made The Anxious Generation explode is not so much new insights, many of which are contested, others of which are decades old, as timing. His message met a moment of peak despair. Any parent with a young kid or teen at home sees how addictive phones are, and the opportunity costs kids face from that addiction. We are all tired of fighting with our children to put down their phones (while being unhealthily connected to our own). And we want a solution.

But the problems are more complex than just phones. And Haidt’s solution, a four-point plan to regulate and restrict phones and a call for more free play—too often comes wrapped in corrosive and harmful language that makes both parents and kids feel like shit.

In this video Haidt says that Gen Z is damaged, and we will “see a permanent effect” on them. He calls what’s happened to our kids due to their phones “the greatest destruction of human capital in human history.” He equates it to giving kids alcohol every hour. This is both dangerously incomplete and counterproductive.

Is Gen Z more damaged than the Greatest Generation coming back from war? Than Depression kids whose life experience was breadlines and mass unemployment? Were the children of the Blitz damaged beyond hope by the experience of having their homes destroyed, their families killed and all sense of safety literally blown up? No. Were they shaped by it? Of course. Was there damage? Yes. Did they find a way forward? Yes. Humans heal.

Brains are malleable well into young adulthood. As Dr. Pamela Cantor argues in this video, trauma is not destiny and humans heal through relationships and loving environments. She writes for popular audiences and has written an academic text on this, Whole Child Development, Learning and Thriving - A Dynamic Systems Approach (Cambridge University Press). She’s also lived it. She's also lived it. As a child, an uncle molested her repeatedly and when she finally worked up the courage to tell her parents, they said she could never speak of it because it would hurt the family. And yet, with professional help and through loving relationships, she not only recovered, she thrived. If her therapist had told her she was damaged goods instead of conveying that it was possible for her to heal, she might never have tried.

Conveying to young people that they are irrevocably messed up sends two messages: they have been harmed (with us watching); and there’s no fixing them.

On the first point, many people have challenged Haidt’s research, including Candace Odgers in Nature who writes that “Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.” She adds:

There are, unfortunately, no simple answers. The onset and development of mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression, are driven by a complex set of genetic and environmental factors. Suicide rates among people in most age groups have been increasing steadily for the past 20 years in the United States. Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation as leading contributors.

Both of these things can be true. Phones are causing harm. So is the fact that the world is falling apart—it’s more violent, more divided, sicker and more unhappy.

This leads to the second point. Whether the damage is irreversible and what we communicate about how humans cope with harm.

When you talk to young people, they tell you what they are feeling: helpless and hopeless. Unprepared for a wildly unpredictable and messed up world. We might agree with them—it’s hard not to if you are paying attention— but we also have the benefit of years of experience, living through adversity, and having fully formed prefrontal cortices. We can and should be helping them see what that can control, and helping them find ways to forge meaningful lives.

Hope itself matters, as economist Carol Graham shows in her book The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-being can Save us from Despair. “Hope may seem like a pipe dream. Yet precisely because it includes the will to make things better as well as believing they can be, it is a critical step,” she writes. Hope is not empty optimism nor feel-good platitudes but agency-infused medicine. Especially when paired with opportunities to engage with and find ways to contribute in the world.

Our book The Disengaged Teen is clear that smartphones, like Covid, have made life harder for a lot of teens*. We argue for limits around sleep and for getting phones out of classrooms. We encourage parents to make and enforce rules. But we also acknowledge that it is kids who must learn to manage their tech use, and parents have to be part of that (we offer ways). And we are emphatic that we have the tools to help our kids see there are many paths to productive, meaningful lives.

A lot of our book is about the learning skills that kids need to develop in order to thrive in the world right now. School, where they spend a lot of time, feels like prison to too many kids. They don’t feel they belong, they don’t feel seen, and their own unique learning needs are not met. Many don’t know how to learn and thus feel overwhelmed in the face of a world that will demand fluency in that skill. This is not the fault of teachers, most of whom are doing their damndest to work with a broken system. But if we can help kids feel they have a sense of control over their lives, they will feel better about living them.

Taking their phones away is helpful, but does not fill the gap left by the disengagement crisis and the world feeling broken and will not make them feel capable and motivated. For that they need more time in Explorer mode - when they are engaged in a learning activity that sparks real interest and feels authentic. As we argue in the New York Times (citing ample evidence), they need some agency.

The role parents play here is making that all seem possible. Not telling them they are damaged beyond repair, but that they—like every generation before them—have unique capabilities, shaped by the time they live in, and that they will rise to meet the challenges in front of them. If this sounds too Stuart Smalley, it’s not. When you feel hopeless, are you reassured by someone telling you there’s no way out, or someone helping you see there is a way out and you can get there - with some effort, patience and work?

Let me be very clear: This can feel hard right now. How can we instill hope when the world feels so broken?? Margaret Renkl, a writer, spoke to this recently in an essay in which she reached out to the children’s writer Kate DiCamillo: “I emailed her to ask if she had figured out yet how to keep letting herself be heartbroken without becoming broken forever.” Here is DiCamillo’s response:

I fall into the mineshaft of despair over and over again, and over and over again something (the moon, an eagle, the snow) or someone (a kid who tells me that Despereaux makes them feel brave, a stranger who looks me in the eye and smiles, a grandparent who tells me about reading aloud to their grandchild) will reach down to pull me out,” she wrote. “I’ve learned to not resist these hand-holds. I’ve learned to let the beauty of the world and the bravery of other people pull me up and out of the despair.

I support many of Haidt’s calls to action. Regulate Big Tech. Let little kids play and big kids have the freedom they need to find their place in the world. I love his line that we have overprotected kids in the real world and underprotected them online. I can also see that his rhetoric might be designed to shock parents out of compliance, or a sense of already being defeated.

But enough with the fear mongering and talk of a permanently damaged generation. Like every generation before them, Gen Z will wow us in ways we don’t understand and didn’t predict. There is no way we are giving up on our kids, no matter how hard and messy the path forward might be. Parenting is by definition a hopeful act: bringing a human into a world where good exists. It is around us and we have to help the young people we are nourishing to see that. As Graham writes, “without restoring hope and related aspirations as a starting point, it is unlikely that any solution will work.” We help create the conditions for our kids’ thriving. To manage their tech use, sure. But also to lean into the possibilities of their lives. Soon it will be on them to take those forward.

*It was also a lifeline to many, including a young woman named Calista in our book.