Mentions Jonathan Haidt

Lately, a moral panic has been brewing. People in the media, government, and across the internet are declaring that children are suffering an unprecedented mental health crisis and that smartphones and social media are to blame. But is this even true?

I talked to danah boyd, the top researcher on kids and social media use, about some of the problems that young people today are facing, why quick fixes like banning social media apps are never the answer, and what we can actually do to help younger generations.

Six years ago, NYU social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind. In the book, he and Greg Lukianoff argued that parents are doing a real disservice to their kids by overprotecting (coddling) them, rather than giving them more freedom and allowing them to make mistakes and learn.

This year, he’s back with a new book, The Anxious Generation, arguing the exact opposite in the digital world: that social media and smartphones have made kids under-protected, rewiring brains and increasing teenage depression rates.

Haidt tries to address this obvious contradiction in his book with the standard cop-out of the purveyor of every modern moral panic: “This time it’s different!” He provides little evidence to support that.

In this new book, Haidt is coddling the American parent: providing them with a clear, simple, and wrong solution to what is ailing their children. But—as with historic moral panics—parents, schools, and politicians will embrace it, absolving themselves of their own failings in raising children in our modern world and pointing to an easy villain.