anxious generation – Mike Paul

The Problem with The Anxious Generation — and What the “Ban All Screens” Movement Gets Wrong About Education

There is a real crisis in children’s mental health. I believe this because I see it daily in the schools I work in. The data supports it. The children themselves are telling us. On this point, Jonathan Haidt and I agree completely.

Where I part ways — and where I think the current panic about technology in schools is leading us somewhere counterproductive — is on the question of cause. And because cause determines response, getting this wrong has real consequences for real kids.

Let me be direct: The Anxious Generation is a compelling, well-written, emotionally resonant book built on a scientific case that is significantly weaker than Haidt presents it. The conclusions it has inspired in education policy are, in many cases, the wrong conclusions drawn from the wrong diagnosis — and I think educators and parents deserve a more honest accounting of where the evidence actually stands.

What Haidt Gets Right

Before the criticism, the credit.

Haidt is correct that something has gone badly wrong with childhood and adolescent wellbeing. He’s correct that overprotective parenting and the decline of play-based, independent childhood are serious problems. His advocacy for letting children take risks, experience failure, and develop resilience outside adult supervision — what he calls “antifragile” development — aligns closely with Peter Gray’s research and with what I see as an instructional coach working with students every day.

He’s also correct that smartphones and social media are not neutral tools for developing adolescents. The attention-capture dynamics, the social comparison mechanisms, the algorithmic amplification of outrage and anxiety — these are real design features with real effects. None of that is made up.

The problem is what he does with these legitimate observations. He builds an enormous causal argument on a foundation that the researchers who actually study this area largely reject.

The Scientific Case Against the Thesis

Candice Odgers, a developmental psychologist at UC Irvine, put it plainly in a review published in Nature: “The book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.” She added that the “bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.”

This isn’t one dissenting voice. The critics are numerous and credentialed. Andrew Przybylski, a professor of human behavior and technology at Oxford, describes Haidt’s approach as “vote counting” — prioritizing quantity of studies over quality, accumulating a long list of weak evidence and presenting it as a compelling case. Christopher Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University who has studied media effects for decades, has pointed out that older adults in the US have experienced worse mental health deterioration than teenagers — which raises an obvious question: why would social media, used most heavily by the young, be causing problems worst in those who use it least?

One critical review examined the actual statistical rigor of the key studies Haidt relies on and found them wanting: “The book is over 400 pages long and waxes lyrical about the spiritual degradation we sustain as a result of social media… I would not have the nerve to write a several hundred page book calling for significant government intervention while summoning only five pages of statistical evidence. To make matters worse, the evidence is weak. The data quality is poor, the studies are flawed, and researchers are divided.”

The studies themselves have serious methodological problems. Many don’t study actual depressed teenage girls or heavy social media users — they study mostly adults, mostly average users, without serious psychological issues. You cannot establish the effect of heavy social media use on teenage depression unless you actually study heavy social media users who are depressed. Most of the studies Haidt cites don’t come close to that standard.

The Pattern I Keep Seeing

I grew up in the 80s and 90s. My generation was going to be ruined by television and video games. We were rotting our brains, becoming socially isolated, losing the capacity for deep attention and real connection. Parents panicked. Legislators proposed restrictions. Books were written explaining the neurological catastrophe underway.

Before my generation, it was comic books. Before that, rock music. Before that — and this is the one I find most useful to remember — novels. In the 18th and 19th centuries, novels were genuinely considered a moral hazard for young people, particularly young women. The idea that you would sit alone for hours, absorbed in a fictional world, engaging your imagination in ways that couldn’t be supervised or directed — this was seen as dangerous. Corrupting. The kind of thing that led to hysteria and bad decisions.

Every generation has a technological panic. The technology changes. The structure of the panic doesn’t. And the panic is always most persuasive to the people who didn’t grow up with the thing being panicked about. Ferguson draws a direct comparison to Seduction of the Innocent, the 1954 bestseller by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham that declared comic books had created a wave of juvenile delinquency — a book that caused enormous policy consequences before the evidence caught up with the panic.

I’m not saying social media is fine. I’m saying we’ve been here before, and the track record of these panics — as predictors of actual causal harm — is not good. The TV and video game generation didn’t turn out markedly worse than the generations before it. The novel-reading generation produced the Enlightenment.

What changes in each iteration is which thing we’ve decided is uniquely, irreversibly corrupting the youth. What doesn’t change is the confidence with which we assert it, the weakness of the actual evidence, and the policy consequences that follow before the evidence is properly interrogated.

What’s Actually Happening in Schools Right Now

The policy landscape has shifted fast. As of early 2026, some state legislators and witnesses have suggested banning 1:1 device programs in schools entirely, with calls for younger students to return to analog learning with pencil and paper. The Distraction-Free Schools Policy Project developed model legislation that would prohibit all screen technology in grades K-5 and ban school technology using generative AI at every grade level.

Parents across the country are forming networks teaching one another how to opt their children out of school-issued Chromebooks and iPads. One parent in California described pulling her children off school-issued devices as an “analog education” — framing it as a victory.

I understand the impulse. I genuinely do. Screen time management is a real issue. Distraction in the classroom is real. The feeling that technology has gotten away from us and we need to reclaim something is legitimate.

But the leap from “smartphones in pockets during class are a distraction” to “all screens in learning environments are harmful and we should return to pencil and paper” is enormous — and it’s a leap that the evidence doesn’t support.

Easier classroom management is not the same as better learning. And limiting students to pen and paper does little to prepare them for a world in which thinking, writing, and collaboration increasingly happen through digital tools.

There’s also an equity issue that gets papered over in these conversations. The children of affluent parents who are choosing analog education for their kids will still encounter a fully digital professional world. They’ll learn to navigate it eventually — at home, through tutors, through the social capital their families provide. The students who most need schools to close the digital literacy gap are the ones who will lose the most if we strip that from their education.

The Right Diagnosis, the Wrong Villain

Here’s what I think is actually happening, and why Gray’s framework matters more than Haidt’s for understanding it.

The mental health crisis in children is real and has been building since roughly the 1950s — decades before smartphones, social media, or the internet. Gray’s longitudinal data makes this undeniable. The primary driver, in Gray’s reading, is the progressive elimination of children’s independent, unstructured time: the reduction of recess, the increase in adult supervision, the overscheduling of childhood, the cultural shift toward treating independent children as negligent parenting.

Smartphones accelerated some of these dynamics and added new ones. But they arrived into a childhood that was already significantly impoverished of independent developmental experience. Children who have no free time, no unstructured outdoor play, no practice at self-regulation and conflict resolution — those children are developmentally primed for anxiety. Of course they reach for the nearest source of stimulation, connection, and escape. Of course the smartphone fills the vacuum.

The phone is a symptom as much as a cause. Taking the phone without restoring what the phone replaced is treating the symptom.

This is why I find the pencil-and-paper movement in education so frustrating. It’s addressing the wrong variable. A student who sits at a desk for six hours a day, goes home to an overscheduled afternoon of structured activities, and has never had two consecutive hours of genuinely unstructured time is not going to develop resilience because their school gave them a pencil instead of a Chromebook. The problem runs deeper than the device.

What Schools Should Actually Do

This is where I land, after years in the classroom and coaching teachers, watching students, and reading the research:

Cellphones during instructional time are a legitimate problem. Personal smartphones in pockets during class are a distraction issue, not a technology issue. Addressing that specifically — with clear policies, consistently enforced — is reasonable and has some evidence behind it.

1:1 device programs deserve scrutiny, but not abolition. The question isn’t whether devices belong in schools. It’s whether the learning design built around devices is pedagogically sound. The problem was never laptops. The real issue is the learning model we built around laptops. Bad technology implementation is a professional development and curriculum problem, not a technology problem.

The equity argument matters. Any policy that removes digital tools from schools disproportionately disadvantages students whose families can’t provide those tools and experiences at home.

Unstructured time is the real deficit. If we genuinely want to address the root causes of the mental health crisis Gray’s research describes, we need to give children back their unstructured time — at school and at home. More recess. Fewer scheduled activities. More space for boredom, conflict, and self-direction. That’s the intervention the data supports.

Teaching students to use technology critically is education, not capitulation. We live in a world saturated with algorithms designed to capture attention. The answer is not to pretend that world doesn’t exist or to seal children off from it until they turn 16 and then release them into it untrained. The answer is to help students develop the critical capacities to navigate it. That’s what education is for.

A Final Thought on Haidt

I’m not saying don’t read The Anxious Generation. It’s a book worth engaging with, and the parts of it that align with Gray’s research on free play and independent childhood are genuinely valuable. Haidt is a smart person thinking hard about a real problem.

But read it skeptically. Read the critics. Notice how much of the emotional weight of the book rests on anecdote and moral argument rather than the statistical case. Notice that the researchers who spend their careers studying this specific question — screen time and adolescent mental health — largely disagree with his conclusions.

And notice, most importantly, what the book makes it easy to avoid thinking about: the choices adults make about how to structure children’s time, how to design schools, how to build neighborhoods, how to value childhood independence. Those are harder conversations because they implicate us directly. Blaming the phone is easier. It usually is.

Free Play Is Not a Luxury: What Peter Gray’s Research Means for Every School and Every Parent

person wearing black round analog watch on left wrist while holding basketball on right hand — Photo by THE 5TH on Pexels.com

I want to tell you something I’ve noticed in my years as an instructional coach that I’ve never quite figured out how to say in a faculty meeting without sounding like I’m blaming everyone in the room.

The kids are struggling. Not academically — though that too — but in the more fundamental sense of not knowing how to handle conflict, setbacks, boredom, or problems that don’t have an adult available to solve them. I watch students freeze at the first sign of ambiguity. I watch them escalate minor peer disputes immediately to adults rather than working them out themselves. I watch them sit in unstructured moments — the rare ones — with visible discomfort, as if the absence of instructions were a failure of the environment rather than an invitation.

I don’t think this is a character problem. I think it’s a development problem. Specifically, I think we have systematically removed the conditions under which children develop the capacity to manage themselves — and we’ve done it with the best possible intentions.

This is, in short, exactly what research psychologist Peter Gray has been saying for over a decade. And the evidence behind it is more substantial than most people realize.

The Research Nobody Wants to Sit With

Gray is a research professor of psychology at Boston College and one of the foremost scholars on childhood play. His work takes an evolutionary approach: what do children’s play behaviors look like across cultures, across species, and across history — and what does that tell us about what play is actually for?

His central finding, documented across decades of research, is this: rates of anxiety, depression, and psychopathology in children and adolescents have been rising continuously since roughly 1955. Not spiking — continuously rising, decade after decade. And over that same period, children’s opportunities for free, independent, self-directed play have been continuously declining.

In 2023, Gray published a paper in the Journal of Pediatrics with co-authors David Lancy and David Bjorklund, laying out multiple lines of evidence for a causal relationship between these two trends. The paper summarizes decades of data on what independent activity does for children’s psychological development — and what its absence does to it.

The suicide rate among school-age children is now roughly six times what it was in the 1950s. The rate of mental health hospital admissions for children is double during the school year compared to summer, when school is not in session. These are not subtle correlations.

Gray also published a piece in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health in July 2025, continuing this line of argument, cementing a body of work that is difficult to dismiss as ideological and increasingly hard to ignore.

What “Play” Actually Means (And What It Doesn’t)

The word gets muddied, so it’s worth being precise about what the research actually refers to.

Play, in Gray’s definition, is “an activity that is self-chosen and self-directed — something you do because you want to do it.” By this definition, organized sports are not play. Adult-supervised classroom activities are not play. Structured recess with rules enforced by a teacher is not play. Even a child following a parent’s suggested activity is not, in any meaningful developmental sense, playing.

This is a harder truth than it sounds. Many of the things we offer children as “play” aren’t. A soccer league is exercise, social development, and competition — all valuable — but the child isn’t deciding the rules, resolving disputes without a referee, or navigating the social dynamics of a group without adult mediation. Those are different skills, and they require genuinely unstructured time to develop.

As Gray explained in an NPR interview: “That’s how children develop the kinds of character traits that allow them to ultimately become independent adults. They learn how to deal with peers without an adult intervening. They learn how to deal with minor bullying… But if you’re always protected from bullies by some adult, you’re not learning how to deal with that yourself.”

This will make some readers uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable the first time I really sat with it. Because it means that a significant amount of what we consider protective parenting and good schooling is actually developmental interference — removing children from the exact experiences through which they learn resilience, problem-solving, and self-regulation.

How We Got Here

Gray argues that the shift happened in overlapping waves.

Television first — it brought children indoors and somewhat isolated them. Then came the gradual cultural shift toward the belief that children develop best when guided and controlled by adults, which led to increased schooling, organized activities, and adult-directed time outside school. And then, beginning especially in the 1980s, a fear of allowing children outdoors unguarded.

That last shift is worth pausing on. What was considered ordinary parenting in 1970 — sending your kids outside in the morning and expecting them back for dinner — began to be coded as negligence by the 1990s. Not because the world became dramatically more dangerous (by most measures, it became safer), but because the perception of danger increased and because cultural expectations of parental supervision tightened.

The result: a childhood increasingly spent inside, in structured activities, under adult oversight, with every problem either solved by an adult or at least supervised by one.

As an educator, I see the downstream consequences of this every day. Students who’ve never had to navigate a disagreement without a teacher moderating it. Students who don’t know how to occupy themselves when there’s no assigned task. Students who experience normal adolescent difficulties — which is to say, all of them — as catastrophic rather than manageable, because they’ve never had low-stakes practice at managing things.

A Note on Smartphones — and Why I’m Skeptical of the Simple Story

There’s a more popular explanation for the youth mental health crisis right now, and I want to address it directly because I think it’s incomplete in ways that matter.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation has gotten enormous traction with its argument that smartphones and social media are the primary drivers of rising anxiety and depression in young people. I understand why it lands — the timing seems to correlate, the mechanism makes intuitive sense, and it offers a satisfying villain and a concrete solution (take away the phones).

But I find myself skeptical. Not because Haidt is wrong that screens can be harmful — they can be, particularly for young adolescents. But because the “phones did this” narrative has serious holes, and because I’ve watched every generation get this treatment.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s. For my generation, it was television and video games. We were told we were rotting our brains, becoming isolated, losing the capacity for real connection. For the generation before mine, it was rock music and comic books. Before that, novels — yes, actually, novels were once considered a moral hazard for young people. Every generation has its technological panic, and the panic is always most credible to the generation that didn’t grow up with the thing in question.

More importantly, the data on declining children’s mental health predates smartphones by decades. Gray’s 2011 paper in the American Journal of Play documented the trend using research from before the iPhone existed. The continuous rise in anxiety and depression among young people stretches back to the 1950s — long before social media, long before mobile devices, long before any technology Haidt is pointing at. If smartphones caused this crisis, what caused the preceding sixty years of the same trend?

Gray’s answer — which I find more compelling — is that the roots are structural, not technological. Children turned to screens partly because the alternative, outdoor independent play with peers, had already been progressively eliminated. The screen fills a vacuum. Restricting devices without restoring unstructured time is treating a symptom while leaving the underlying condition untouched.

I’m not saying screens are irrelevant. I’m saying the conversation we need to have is harder than “take away the phones,” and I worry that Haidt’s framing lets adults off the hook for decisions about schooling, scheduling, and supervision that are much more directly within our control — and much more directly implicated in the data.

What This Means in Schools

I work with teachers and students in a district that, like most, has systematically reduced recess time, eliminated free periods, increased structured supervision, and added academic programming into spaces that used to be unscheduled. We’ve done this in the name of academic achievement and safety. These are not bad intentions.

But Gray’s research suggests we are making a significant developmental trade-off that we rarely acknowledge. Every minute of structured, adult-supervised activity that replaces unstructured, child-directed time is a minute of developmental practice that doesn’t happen.

Some concrete implications for schools:

Recess should be genuine and protected. Not a supervised activity period. Not an extension of PE. Unstructured time outside where children decide what they’re doing and work out their own problems.

Conflict is developmental, not just a management problem. When children argue on the playground, our instinct is to intervene immediately. Sometimes that’s necessary. Often it’s counterproductive — we’re preventing them from learning that they can resolve conflict themselves.

The impulse to fill every moment is worth examining. Not every unstructured moment is lost instructional time. Some of it is essential developmental time that looks unproductive from the outside.

The school year vs. summer mental health data is important. The rate of mental health admissions being double during the school year compared to summer suggests that something about how we structure the school day contributes to the problem, not just external factors. This should prompt uncomfortable conversations.

What Parents Can Do

If you’re a parent reading this, the research points in a fairly clear direction — and it’s one that runs counter to most dominant cultural pressures around parenting.

Let them be bored. Boredom is not a problem to solve. It’s the precondition for self-directed activity. A child who says “I’m bored” and hears “go figure something out” is getting something valuable.

Let them go outside without you. Age-appropriate independence varies, and you know your child and neighborhood. But the research is clear that children need time in the world without adult oversight, and the age at which we tend to grant this has been steadily rising in ways that don’t match the developmental data.

Let them work it out. When your child has a conflict with a friend, resist the impulse to mediate immediately. Ask what they’ve tried. Ask what they think they could do. Be available but not the first resort.

Reduce the schedule. Organized activities have real value. But the balance most children currently have — heavily scheduled with structured activities from after school through evening — leaves almost no time for the self-directed play that Gray identifies as essential.

The Books Worth Reading

Free to Learn by Peter Gray — The essential text. Gray’s full argument was written for a general audience. Accessible, well-researched, and genuinely challenging to conventional assumptions about schooling and child development. If you read one book off this list, make it this one.

Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv — An earlier and influential book on what Louv calls “nature-deficit disorder” — the developmental consequences of children spending less time in unstructured outdoor environments. Published in 2005, it was ahead of its time and holds up well.

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt — I’d recommend reading this one critically rather than taking it as a settled truth. Haidt’s data on smartphones and social media is real and worth engaging with, but his causal claims are contested, and the deeper structural issues that Gray identifies predate the technology Haidt focuses on. Read it, but read it alongside Gray, not instead of him.

How Children Learn by John Holt — A classic, first published in 1967, that still challenges almost everything about how we structure formal education. Holt observed children learning and drew conclusions that the education system has largely ignored ever since. Gray cites him approvingly, and for good reason.

The Honest Reckoning

I’m writing this as someone who works in a system — public K-12 education — that is structurally oriented toward exactly the kind of adult-oversight-heavy, risk-managed, achievement-focused environment that Gray’s research implicates. I’m not exempt from this critique. Nobody in education is.

The honest reckoning is that we’ve built schools that optimize for the things adults can measure and control, and in doing so we’ve progressively eliminated the developmental experiences that children need most and that are hardest to schedule, supervise, or assess.

The children are trying to tell us something. The data is trying to tell us something. The question is whether we’re willing to hear it.

Related on this site: Why aren’t people reading books anymore? — a parallel argument about what we lose when children’s time becomes entirely structured and output-focused.

Tag: anxious generation