There is probably no more respected or prominent compassionate social critic of millennials and Gen Z than Dr. Jonathan Haidt. Since his book The Coddling of the American Mind blasted on the scene, validating conservative fears about cancel culture while staying squarely in the classical liberal tradition, Haidt has managed to do something few academic public intellectuals can: gain a wide, bipartisan public following while retaining the respect of academic intellectuals.

Since the publication of that book, Haidt has continued his research into the mental health problems of the rising generation—problems which continue to grow—and has increasingly been turning his attention to the contribution of smartphones to that discussion both in interviews and on his own substack After Babel.

Enter Hadit’s latest book: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Here he examines the mental health crisis, both its social and technological causes, and proposes his own solutions.

Haidt’s strengths as a sociologist and a writer are on display. He uses compelling social science data to show that the rise of what he calls “safetyism” in the ’80s and ’90s, coupled with the addictive power of smartphones in the 2010s, caused the massive cratering of mental health among younger generations that we see. He defines “safetyism” as the parenting trend that limits childhood opportunities for adventure and exploration (such as walking places without their parents) in order to reduce the potential for harm. This, ironically, was coupled with a largely unregulated approach to children’s and teens’ lives online. The combination meant that while safetyism robbed kids of the opportunities to gain confidence and social bonds through risk-taking and real-world embodied friendships, they had unfettered access to the virtual cheap substitutes which left them feeling empty and they had no protections against the unique dangers of cyber-bullying and sexual predators.

Each step takes readers on a journey of discovery of how we got to this crisis of anxiety and depression among millennials and Gen Z. Haidt asks the questions and then goes where the evidence leads, but the short answer? The smartphone.

Haidt explains how the destruction of youth mental health in the 2010s was partially caused by smartphones and social media introducing an addictive but toxic substitute for the agency and community that adults had been slowly taking from kids since the 1980s. In the ’80s and ’90s, the rise of dual-income households and greater family mobility meant that most family units did not know their neighbors sufficiently to trust their kids to explore and go on adventures without adult supervision. (This was only exacerbated by the rise of a 24-hour news industry inventing the idea of “stranger danger” and putting every example they could find on loop.) As parents regulated more of their kids’ activities and prevented them from doing much without adult supervision, kids no longer engaged in the risky adventuring that they needed to build confidence and social skills.

Smartphones and social media then filled this gap in the 2010s with addictive alternatives that were in every young person’s hands and were largely unregulated by adults. (And the parents who tried were outmaneuvered by their more tech-savvy kids.) Social media provided a way to develop and maintain community without leaving adult-approved spaces. Online video games provide a way to go on adventures with friends without leaving adult-approved spaces. Porn provided a way to get sexual release without leaving adult-approved spaces. And yet, because humans are wired to get true satisfaction in these areas in person, and to gain confidence by imbodied risk-taking, the new alternatives still left the user feeling ultimately empty and insecure. Community doesn’t satisfy, the adventures don’t build real confidence, and you don’t feel true sexual bonding.

Further, these digital substitutes lack the safeguards against toxicity that in-person interactions provide. People can bully without embodied repercussions, and the users can’t get away from toxic people or fear-based algorithmic news since their phones are always with them. This was particularly harmful for young people, who became hooked on these things while their brains were still developing. This is partly because Congress set 13 as the age when kids could open a social media account without their parents’ permission, and partly because social media companies don’t enforce age verification much at all.

One of the biggest strengths of Haidt’s book is how methodically he follows the evidence to his conclusions. He walks through multiple objections to his thesis: that young people are not more depressed than previous generations but simply report it more; and that they are more depressed, but only because of all the tragedies that have happened in their lives (the 2008 financial crash, 9/11, or Covid), which previous generations didn’t deal with. To the first, he points out that rates of self-harm have risen with depression and anxiety, so it must be real. To the second, he points out how tragedies in previous generations actually fueled social bonding and optimism, and that the unity of the mental health fall is across all the areas that got smartphones, not the ones that experienced those specific events.

Another strength is how well he integrates his thesis with other areas of social science research, like male-female sex differences and the social benefits of religion. Cross-culturally, men most value what he calls “agency” and women value what he calls “communion,” and that helps explain why boys were more harmed by porn and video games and girls were more harmed by social media. He also points out that smartphones and social media are a kind of anti-religion, in the sense that people cross-culturally need religion to take part in embodied rituals that connect a whole community to its highest values. Yet smartphones and social media pull us further away from each other, removing us from embodied rituals around shared higher values, into algorithm-siloed individual, ordinary, immediate concerns that change minute by minute.

One of Haidt’s most devastating critiques of smartphones and social media in the book also leads to his most controversial solutions. Haidt identifies a “collective action problem” where big tech companies can’t make their products less harmful because if they did, another company would swoop in and take their market share. Facebook can’t make its product less addictive because people would just migrate to TikTok. Instagram can’t police the fact that young people are finding workarounds to age restrictions because then young people would just go to Snapchat who won’t check on them. Likewise, Haidt points out that large numbers of young people want to stop using their phones, but they can’t because then they’d be cut out of the social life of their peers who mostly interact on their phones. And parents who want to regulate their kids’ usage are often outwitted by their more tech-savvy kids—who find ways to get around whatever controls those parents put in place.

Haidt advocates for several solutions to these problems, including changing the parenting culture in favor of more risk-taking and changing laws against child endangerment to make them more specific and less likely to be used against parents who give their kids independence. He calls on schools to ban cell phones in the classroom and to instigate class projects that encourage parental-child collaboration for growing childhood independence (such as with the “Let It Grow” campaign).

He also advocates a big role for the government to regulate tech companies. He advocates for the government to raise the minimum age for minors opening a social media account from 13 to 16, and for making tech companies responsible for enforcing this and other standards of care for kids. One particular suggestion would require any social media app on smartphones to have age verification that is synced with a parent’s smartphone that parents must opt out of rather than opt into, making it harder for kids to get around parental limits.

It’s the “government regulation of tech companies” portion of his prescription that is naturally the most controversial. Most people don’t see school policies about what can be done in their halls as burdensome on individual rights. But government regulation of private businesses, particularly businesses that provide avenues for people to express speech, makes people more nervous. Haidt agrees in the book with the concern that regulating tech companies would regulate the kind of speech that is on the platform but argues that as long as the regulation is politically neutral, we shouldn’t worry. Still, columnist David French has raised the objection that regulating kids’ access to cell phones and social media is on its own limiting access to speech and therefore limiting their first-amendment rights—regardless of it being politically neutral.

People are understandably nervous about government regulation over businesses and citizens. It’s for this reason that Haidt should have spent more time giving a more comprehensive idea of where he believes in principle and practice such lines to protect liberty should be drawn, to avoid the feeling of a slippery slope. That said, the strength of Haidt’s analysis is the fact that his critics do not have a solution that addresses the collective action problem that Haidt describes.

Sometimes Haidt also betrays some tunnel vision in his analysis of the cultural and technological trends that brought us to this place. Obviously, one book can’t address every facet of the problems it highlights, but some of the issues he leaves out pose concrete problems. He blames the mental health crisis on the “safetyism” parenting of the ’80s and ’90s coupled with the introduction of the smartphone. The problem is, as Dr. Jean Twenge points out (someone Haidt rightly cites liberally in his analysis), mental health decline has been going on since the ’30s. It’s true that mental health was improving for Millennials, but given the larger trends, better mental health could be the blip, rather than the decline.

Indeed, the dissolution of community and a common culture oriented toward elevation have been going back since the breakdown of the extended family, as David Brooks points out in The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake. And Gilles Lipovetsky’s Hypermodern Times examines the advent of modern cities and a postmodern world built around choosing communities that suit you and leaving them as soon as they don’t. Haidt also references research on how the advent of the car and the increasingly mobile world set the stage for a world in which parents were—rightly—more afraid to let their children roam around.

Of more tangible and practical concern, he advocates rolling back the safetyism of the ’80s and ’90s without clarifying adequately which aspects of safetyism went too far and which ones were signs of progress. As he points out, the rise of safetyism was driven partly by the number of widely reported serial killers as well as sexual abuses and kidnappings of minors. He agrees that after we implemented much-needed reforms, these went down. But then he urges us to roll back reforms in these areas without clarifying which were good and which we should keep.

He also admits that one of the reasons that letting children run free worked was that everyone knew one other well enough in a community that parents could trust other adults to look after kids who were out of their sight. Given that such trust no longer exists, how are we supposed to go back to a free-range childhood?

Both of these gaps mean that even if all of Jonathan Haidt’s preferred policies were implemented, the results would be a) a slowing of the mental health crisis, rather than a true reversal of it, and b) a return of many of the pre-safetyism harms that inspired safetyism in the first place.

That said, there are a few reasons the benefits of Haidt’s analysis and prescriptions outweigh their weaknesses. First, even if all curbing smartphone harms did was minimize the catastrophic mental health trends for kids, that would be a worthwhile endeavor. Second, most of his policy prescriptions are not so much expanding the power of the government as they are using the government’s power in a smarter way to hand power back to parents. Why not clarify laws against neglecting children so that they’re less vague and less likely to be overbroadly interpreted? We already have government-mandated age restrictions. Why not have them at the more reasonable age of 16 and actually make them enforceable? Why not implement them in such a way that parents are better able to enforce them and kids are less able to circumvent them?

Finally, Haidt’s advocacy for a local, experimental rollback of safetyism largely mitigates most unintended harms such rollbacks might cause. With schools collaborating with parents to assign kids tasks to increase their independence—such as in the “Let it Grow” project Haidt recommends—communities can implement childhood independence piece by piece and find out for themselves and witness to others the tradeoffs and which ones do more harm than good.

In brief, Dr. Haidt’s new book is essential reading for those who want to understand the way that our parenting and our technology have made life worse for young people today, and how we can go about fixing their crisis. There may be limits to its analysis, but it must be thoughtfully and urgently engaged with to identify those limits.