After Babel | Jon Haidt | Substack

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Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest

Mar 9, 2023 • Jon Haidt

Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence.

Feb 22, 2023 • Jon Haidt

Your Boyfriend Isn't Your Camera Man

May 29 • Freya India

A Time We Never Knew

Apr 22 • Freya India

Aren’t You Lonely?

Jul 5 • Freya India

The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

Nov 12 • Jared Cooney Horvath

The International Mental Health Crisis

The Global Loss of the U-Shaped Curve of Happiness

Happiness used to be U-shaped by age, with middle age the least happy. Not anymore. Young people are now the least happy.

May 27 •

David Blanchflower

and

The Girls Are Not Alright: Responses to Three Claims that the Youth Mental Health Crisis Is Exaggerated

Why changes in stigma and self-reporting procedures cannot explain the international decline of adolescent girls’ mental health.

Apr 11 •

The Youth Mental Health Crisis is International Part 4: Europe

Why girls from wealthy, secular, and individualistic nations were hit hardest.

Jan 30 •

,

Thomas Potrebny

, and

The Youth Mental Health Crisis is International, Unless You Rely on a Flawed International Dataset (The GBD)

Researchers need to stop using the Global Burden of Disease study when analyzing mental health trends

Jan 3 •

Suicide Rates Are up for Gen Z Across the Anglosphere, Especially for Girls

It’s not just anxiety, depression, and self-harm.

Oct 30, 2023 •

and

The Case Against The Phone-Based Childhood

Social Media is Disproportionately Hurting Girls

Parents Need to Have These Conversations with Their Daughters

Dec 4 •

Kara Alaimo, PhD

Big News: KOSA is Being Marked Up Today While Meta Tries to Show (Too Late) That It Can Self-Regulate

An extraordinary month is unfolding in the international movement to roll back the phone-based childhood.

Sep 18 •

and

The Worst Argument That Social-Media Companies Use to Defend Themselves

Why are tech leaders so adamant about pushing their creations on other people’s kids, while protecting their own?

Sep 16 •

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, and

The Fundamental Flaws of The Only Meta-Analysis of Social Media Reduction Experiments (And Why It Matters), Part 1

A recent meta-analysis contains yet overlooks evidence that multi-week social media reduction experiments consistently improve mental health

Aug 29 •

and

Journalist Sends Kids off on a Smartphone-Free Camping Trip – Unsupervised. Adults Quake. Kids Flourish.

The Sunday Times (UK) just ran a major story illustrating the twin prescriptions in The Anxious Generation

Aug 12 •

and

The Case for Independence, Free Play, and Responsibility in the Real World

The Joy of Missing Out: Lessons from a Church-Wide Digital Detox

How Churches can help roll back the phone-based life

Oct 23 •

Darren Whitehead

Four Lessons for Raising Resilient Children in the Digital Age

What secular families can learn from faith-based communities

Oct 14 •

and

Journalist Sends Kids off on a Smartphone-Free Camping Trip – Unsupervised. Adults Quake. Kids Flourish.

The Sunday Times (UK) just ran a major story illustrating the twin prescriptions in The Anxious Generation

Aug 12 •

and

The Upstream Cause of the Youth Mental Health Crisis is the Loss of Community

We've forgotten what community really means.

Aug 2 •

How Phones Are Making Parents the Anxious Generation

Smartphones are trust blockers for parents

Jul 24 •

Voices of Gen Z

We Live In Imaginary Worlds

This is all one big hallucination

Oct 21 •

No, I’m Not Always Available

Don’t apologize for disconnecting

Sep 19 •

What Happened to FOMO?

We now fear taking part more than we fear missing out

Aug 8 •

Aren’t You Lonely?

Friendship has become another joyless thing to do on a screen

Jul 5 •

A Gen Z Perspective on Why We Must Pass the Kids Online Safety Act

Social media holds immense promise to connect us. But to reap the benefits, we need to regulate it first.

Jul 1 •

What Parents Can Do Now

Social Media is Disproportionately Hurting Girls

Parents Need to Have These Conversations with Their Daughters

Dec 4 •

Kara Alaimo, PhD

How Parents Can Fight Back Against the Digital Deluge of Life

Seven tips for parents to disconnect in the digital age.

Nov 20 •

Katherine Johnson Martinko

67 Screen-Free Activities for Kids

What to do with kids when it's dark and cold this winter

Nov 14 •

Jacqueline Nesi, PhD

Research-Backed Advice on Screen Policies for Young Kids

Jacqueline Nesi and Cara Goodwin interpret a recent meta-analysis.

Sep 24 •

Jacqueline Nesi, PhD

and

Dr. Cara Goodwin, PhD

One of the Best Documentaries on the Loss and Recovery Of Childhood Independence

“Chasing Childhood” contrasts the play-based childhood of the 1980s with the over-supervised and fearful childhoods of today. It’s great for inspiring…

Aug 7 •

Margaret Munzer Loeb

and

What Schools and Educators Can Do Now

The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

The Case Against Student Use of Computers, Tablets, and Smartphones in the Classroom

Nov 12 •

Jared Cooney Horvath

The False Promise of Device-Based Education

A reevaluation of screens in schools

Oct 17 •

Amy Tyson, MSW, LISW-S

A Cure for Child Anxiety Hiding (and Seeking) in Plain Sight

Don’t just go phone free: Start a Play Club at your school too.

Aug 27 •

Kevin Stinehart

Should Schools Ban Phones?

Jacqueline Nesi evaluates the evidence related to phone-free schools

Aug 21 •

Jacqueline Nesi, PhD

Transform Your School: The Complete Guide to Going Phone-Free

A newly released resource from The Phone-Free Schools Movement and Fairplay

Aug 19 •

What Governments and Tech Companies Can Do

The Tech Industry’s Playbook To Prevent Regulation

The Tech Industry is using an old trick – shifting the responsibility entirely to us

20 hrs ago •

Scott Galloway Explains Why Age Gating Social Media Is Both Necessary and Doable

The companies can do it, but they're incentivized to fight it

Dec 2 •

Why Australia is Setting a Minimum Age of 16 for Creating a Social Media Account

A member of the Australian Parliament lays it out for us

Nov 26 •

A Mission for Businesses and Entrepreneurs: Help Bring Back Childhood

Market forces got us into this mess, and market forces can help us escape

Oct 30 •

The Surgeon General Has New Social Media Guidelines. Minnesota Already Made Some of Them Into Law.

As Minnesota’s policies gain national attention, their recent social media law is an example worth following.

Aug 14 •

Responses to Skeptics

The Fundamental Flaws of The Only Meta-Analysis of Social Media Reduction Experiments (And Why It Matters), Part 3

The recent meta-analysis of social media experiments achieved a statistically insignificant result only due to a string of errors.

Oct 4 •

The Worst Argument That Social-Media Companies Use to Defend Themselves

Why are tech leaders so adamant about pushing their creations on other people’s kids, while protecting their own?

Sep 16 •

,

, and

The Fundamental Flaws of The Only Meta-Analysis of Social Media Reduction Experiments (And Why It Matters), Part 2

Fives types of errors in a recent meta-analysis bias the analysis in the same direction: that there is no effect of social media use on mental health

Sep 10 •

and

The Fundamental Flaws of The Only Meta-Analysis of Social Media Reduction Experiments (And Why It Matters), Part 1

A recent meta-analysis contains yet overlooks evidence that multi-week social media reduction experiments consistently improve mental health

Aug 29 •

and

How has mental health changed across demographic groups since 2010?

If social media is uniquely beneficial to adolescents in marginalized communities, we might expect to see their rates of anxiety and depression increase…

Jun 20 •