by Jonathan Haidt
I heard Jonathan Haidt interviewed on The Ezra Klein Show and really wanted to hear his full argument backed by all his research. The critical time period he zooms in on is the early 2010s, when I started my ten-year stint as the librarian at South Pasadena Middle School, and I had a front-row seat to take in the various forms of dysfunction that smartphones have unleashed on our emerging adolescents, all so fully documented in this book. Depression and anxiety were rampant among my students, cutting was common, and I even had a child threaten suicide by climbing over the railing of my library’s second floor balcony. As a parent I feel like we really dodged a bullet with our own three sons, who came of age with flip phones and had a little more maturity under their belts by the time they started carrying the world around in their pockets. It does seem, though, that the parents of daughters have had it harder.
Jonathan Haidt’s recommendations for policy changes are so rooted in common sense, but their implementation is going to require a generation of parents to unwind themselves from their own cellphone and social media addictions in order to advocate for what is best for their kids. I have heard from more than one source that parents who work in the tech world themselves strictly limit their own children’s access to the products they themselves invent and sell. What is up with that?