it seems pertinent that when Jonathan Haidt turns up for our interview, he finds me in the lobby of his London hotel scrolling mindlessly on my phone.
‘Don’t apologise!’ smiles the New York University professor and author of best-selling book The Anxious Generation: How The Great Rewiring Of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic Of Mental Illness when I point out the irony. ‘We all do it.’ Which is exactly why we’re here.
It would be an understatement to say his new book has hit a nerve. It’s dominated the best-seller charts, both here and in the US, where Haidt lives with his wife and two teenage children. Everybody from Oprah (who he recently sat down with to talk about the teen mental health crisis and our phone-obsessed culture) to MPs, newspaper columnists and campaigners is raising concerns about the issues it covers. Namely, what Haidt calls our children’s descent into a ‘phone-based childhood’, which data shows is making them anxious and depressed.
In his book he explains how the mental health crisis among young people, which had been stable for years, began to ramp up around the time the first smartphone was introduced, in the early 2010s. ‘The reaction to the book has been explosively positive,’ he tells me. ‘It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Usually it’s very hard to change people’s minds but, in this instance, I don’t have to change anybody’s mind. Parents know there’s an issue. Teachers know there’s an issue. They just don’t know how to find their way out of it.’
In the UK today, 55% of eight to 11-year-olds own a mobile phone. While almost all (97%) of 12-year-olds do, with smartphones being as ubiquitous in the first term of secondary school as a new blazer. Meanwhile, Haidt tells me he was shocked by new research from Ofcom that found nearly a quarter of five to seven-year-olds have a smartphone. ‘Basically, nobody in the UK starts puberty, which is an incredibly important time, without a smartphone,’ says Haidt. ‘We have to reverse that.’
He loves the work of Daisy Greenwell, the British mother who set up the movement Smartphone Free Childhood along with her friend Clare Fernyhough, and he contacted them to tell them so. Greenwell and Fernyhough’s campaign encourages parents to form class WhatsApp support groups where they all agree not to normalise giving young children phones. They’re also pushing for stronger rules at school around smartphone use and to increase the age limit of social media apps from 13 to 16.
Haidt says the community effort of campaigns like this are key because ‘it’s hard to be the only one not giving your child a phone’. He’s pushing for no smartphones before 14, no social media before 16 and phone-free schools (‘schools have an opportunity to keep children away from phones for seven hours a day’). And lastly, for fearful modern parents to allow their children the kind of unsupervised play and childhood independence many of them themselves had. Failing that, he says team sports are a great alternative, as long as they’re not too supervised (‘football in the park with jumpers for goalposts is ideal’).
‘It’s a tragedy in two acts,’ he explains. ‘Act one is the loss of the play-based childhood, which is hard to change because parents are afraid their child will be hit by a car or abducted. So they took that type of childhood away. And then in act two of the tragedy they replaced it with the entire internet in the palm of their child’s hand.’
He believes parents who currently have babies and very young children will be more likely to keep them away from phones, now the backlash has begun. But what about those with older children? Has the horse already bolted?
‘No, I don’t think so. I teach 19-year-olds who are very addicted to their phones, having had them since they were 10, and they’ve forfeited their most precious resource – their concentration and attention span – to these [tech] companies. I tell them, get rid of notifications on your phone, take social media off your phone and, if possible, get rid of it altogether.’
Ironically, when the smartphone was introduced in the early 2010s most parents were thrilled, he says. ‘Remembering this is crucial for understanding how we got into this. We thought the internet was the most amazing thing we’d ever seen and clearly the way of the future. Ten years ago parents were impressed if their toddler knew how to swipe on an iPad. But now we know very differently.’
Or, to put it another way, when I interviewed Greenwell recently she told me, ‘It’s like parents have normalised the online world that their children inhabit. I compare it to smoke slowly entering a building and nobody realising until the harm is done.’
Jonathan Haidt’s book, ‘The Anxious Generation’, is out now