‘The harm is staggering’: Jonathan Haidt on how smartphones and social media are fuelling the youth mental health crisis 

The kids aren’t alright these days.

According to the Canadian Mental Health Association, 40.3 percent of Canadian youth ages 16-24 report feeling anxious, while 32.3 percent report feeling depressed. The Mental Health Commission of Canada estimates that 1.6 million children and youth have a diagnosed mental health condition. The Canadian Institute for Health Information says one in four hospitalizations among children and youth is for mental health reasons. Suicide is also the second leading cause of death for Canadian youth.

American social psychologist, author, and professor Jonathan Haidt believes that smartphones and social media are to blame for much of the youth mental health crisis. In his new bestselling book The Anxious Generation, Haidt argues that there are “four foundational harms” affecting children’s health: social deprivation (as kids spend less time with others and more time on screens), sleep deprivation (as screens negatively impact mental health and lead to less sleep), attention fragmentation (as phones constantly interrupt and distract), and addiction (with kids becoming hooked to their devices).

Haidt also proposes “four foundational reforms” to counter these harms: no smartphones before high school (a recommendation Ontario has taken to heart) and phone-free schools, no social media before 16 (which Australia has implemented), and increased unsupervised play and childhood independence.

The Hub spoke with Haidt about the youth mental health crisis, the effects of phones and social media, and the solutions he proposes to these pressing issues.

ÉLIE CANTIN-NANTEL: You talk about “phone-based childhoods” in your book. Could you explain what exactly that means and how phones impact children’s experiences and development?

JONATHAN HAIDT: The work of childhood is play. Children are supposed to play, try out new things, and practice new skills. In that way, their brains develop, and they gradually become adults. But touch screens are extraordinarily addictive. It’s not just that they’re like television in the palm of your hand; with a touch screen, there’s a stimulus-response feedback loop. When children have access to touch-screen devices, the device tends to take over every possible moment. In the United States, 50 percent of teens say they are online almost constantly—meaning the phone is always in their hand, and they are going back and forth between life and the phone all day long.

My argument is that phones have become “experience blockers.” They block out experiences, especially relationships. This explains why, as soon as Gen Z got hyper-connected—around 2012, with smartphones and Instagram—that’s exactly when they began getting more lonely and depressed.

ÉLIE CANTIN-NANTEL: In your book, you describe four foundational harms caused by smartphones and social media. Could you elaborate on these harms and their impacts on children’s mental health?

JONATHAN HAIDT: There are dozens and dozens of harms happening. Some are particularly hitting girls, and some are particularly hitting boys. The four foundational harms—these are very deep harms, very deep obstacles to human development—are affecting boys and girls equally.

The most obvious one is social deprivation. We are an ultra-social species; we need to spend a lot of time with other people. I remember my own childhood when I was little, wrestling with my friends, hugging them, pushing them around playfully. Childhood used to be very physical, and now it’s all mostly, you just sit or lie down, and you’re on a screen. So that prevents a lot of development.

Secondly, if you’re spending between 8 and 12 hours a day on your phone, especially at night, then you’re not going to get as much sleep. And sleep is foundational because children sleep for brain repair, brain development, and learning.

Thirdly, a phone-based childhood allows open season for companies to try to addict children, to hook them. That’s what they say they are doing, that’s what they do. A life spent with many hours a day getting quick dopamine from simple behaviours is a life that changes your brain to require more stimulation. For many members of Gen Z, it’s very difficult to just look out a car window for half an hour on a ride. For some, it’s very difficult to go to bed at night because they need stimulation. It’s hard to be alone with your thoughts when you’re trying to go to sleep.

Finally, there’s attention fragmentation. In adolescence, we need to develop executive function. The frontal cortex begins to lock down in its adult format, and as it’s locking down, it’s developing executive function—the ability to make plans and stick to them. But if everything is an interruption, and even our interruptions have interruptions, our days can pass as just a haze of small actions, each interrupting the other. And if that’s the way you go through puberty, there’s a chance that you will have permanent damage to your ability to focus and function.

ÉLIE CANTIN-NANTEL: Government responses to the pandemic—such as lockdowns and school closures—have been linked to declines in mental health among youth. To what extent do you believe the pandemic has impacted youth mental health and how might the mental health landscape look today if the pandemic had not occurred?

JONATHAN HAIDT: When you look at the [youth mental health] trend lines. They were flat from the late ’90s through 2011, and then they began rising. They began rising very quickly after 2012 and continued rising throughout the 2010s, all the way to 2019. Then COVID comes in, and they rise a little faster—not a lot faster, but a little faster. When COVID ends, they either plateau or come down a little bit, but they are still basically on the trend line. COVID was terrible for many kids, and it did push more kids to spend all day long on screens. But it is wrong to say that the Gen Z mental health crisis is the result of COVID. It is not. It was all there in horrific form in 2019.

ÉLIE CANTIN-NANTEL: You propose four foundational reforms to combat the foundational harms, including no smartphones before high school and making all schools phone-free. What is the justification for these recommendations?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Educational statistics show that academic progress rose slowly until 2012 and then began to fall after 2012. And it’s not just in the United States; it’s also happening all around the world, according to the Program for International Scholastic Assessment. When everyone traded in their flip phones for smartphones they paid less attention to their teachers, less attention to their friends, and far more attention to TikTok, Instagram, and pornography. And are we surprised that they’re lonely and uneducated? Countries spend tens of billions of dollars on education, and then we just throw it all away by letting kids stay on phones all day long.

ÉLIE CANTIN-NANTEL: Why is it considered inappropriate for middle school students to have phones, yet acceptable for high school students to use them?

JONATHAN HAIDT: It is vital to get all of this nonsense out of middle school. If we could keep it out of high school, I would. But I decided that if I proposed waiting until 16 or 18 to get a smartphone, it wouldn’t work, and it wouldn’t be possible to get people to really do it. Whereas waiting until the end of middle school or eighth grade [age 13], I thought, was possible. So I decided to set it there.

ÉLIE CANTIN-NANTEL: What would you say to parents who feel their children need a phone to stay connected with them?

JONATHAN HAIDT: First of all, if parents want to communicate with their child, they should give them a [flip] phone. They shouldn’t give them a supercomputer that allows the whole world to manipulate them. Just give them a [flip] phone or a [smart] watch. Secondly, if you feel the need to reach your child all day long during school, there’s something wrong with you. You should not do that. You should let your child focus on school during school. We should not cater to parents who want to reach their children all day long. And third, it is obviously absurd to send children to school with the greatest distraction device ever made. Why bother going to school if they’re just going to be on their screen all day long? Why not just stay at home?

ÉLIE CANTIN-NANTEL: Another one of your proposed reforms is that children should not be on social media before the age of 16. Do you believe this should be a recommendation, or should it be mandated by law—like has been done in Australia?

JONATHAN HAIDT: This needs to be a law because social platforms are, by design, socially addictive. As long as a third or a quarter of the students in a class are on [them], there will be pressure on everyone to join.

In the real world, we put age limits on a lot of things: graphic sex, graphic violence, addictive things, and products that pose health dangers. If you’re on social media from the age of nine or 10, you’re going to be exposed to all of those things. You’re going to see graphic pornography. Your feed is going to show you horrific real-world violence, like people being killed. At least 10 percent [of kids] are going to be truly addicted. And the harm is staggering—Snapchat receives 10,000 reports of sextortion not per year, but per month, every single month.

When you add it up, millions of kids are being severely harmed every year. I think it’s completely insane that our norm has been that as long as you’re old enough to lie about your age, you’re old enough to talk with strangers who want a picture of you.

ÉLIE CANTIN-NANTEL: Your book also emphasizes the importance of unsupervised play and independence for childhood development. Over the past few decades, free play has declined amidst concerns about children getting hurt or being abducted. What would you say to parents who are genuinely worried about their children’s safety while playing outside?

JONATHAN HAIDT: If you live in a country where kidnapping is common, I understand it. Canada is not one of them. Even in the U.S., kidnapping is extraordinarily rare—it almost never happens. When a child is taken, it’s almost always by a family member. This was an extreme moral panic over events that essentially almost never happened, whereas kids growing up stunted, depressed, lonely, and suicidal are very common. The suicide rate for teens in the U.S. is up more than 50 percent. We calculated that there are about 10,000 additional dead teens in the U.S. since 2010.

By stunting our children’s development, we’re actually putting their lives in danger from suicide, and we’re stunting their growth. Play is essential for all mammals.Human children—especially in English-speaking countries—are now severely play-deprived.

More information about Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation can be found here.

This conversation has been revised and edited for length and clarity.