A year and a half ago, we teamed up with Lennon Torres, senior campaign manager at The Heat Initiative and LGBTQ+ advocate, to write an article for The Atlantic, “Social-Media Companies’ Worst Argument” (reposted here with no paywall). Together, we refuted the social media companies’ claims that using these platforms is net-positive for teens in historically disadvantaged communities and that regulation would do more harm than good for adolescents in these groups.

Since then, however, these claims have continued to surface as an argument against regulation. In the below piece, originally published by The Hill, Lennon draws on her own experience as a trans woman who grew up sharing her life on social media. She argues that the social media companies use LGBTQ+ kids as an excuse to avoid accountability and reminds the public that despite what the companies claim, “queer people are the ones these platforms fail first and protect last.”

Thank you to Lennon and The Hill for allowing us to share this piece directly with After Babel’s readers. We hope you’ll read it and share it widely.

– Jon & Zach

Don’t Let Big Tech Hide Behind a Rainbow Flag

With Big Tech companies recently losing two key lawsuits over the harm they do to youth — both in rulings they have promised to appeal — a false narrative has begun to re-circulate. The claim is that requirements making digital communities safer for young people will somehow undermine queer expression.

Here is my message, coming from a transgender woman who grew up with and was badly harmed by exploitative social media: Do not let Big Tech hide itself behind a rainbow flag. The truth is, queer people are the ones these platforms fail first and protect last.

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Many gay, transgender and queer kids lack supportive families and affirming schools. To them, digital spaces may seem like a lifeline — a place where they can be themselves. Unfortunately, those digital spaces are often built on the same logic that once targeted kids with cigarettes: Maximize use, minimize accountability and monetize vulnerability. These platforms were designed not to empower us but to get and keep us hooked.

In the social media addiction trial that recently wrapped up in Los Angeles, plaintiff attorney Mark Lanier asked Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar how Facebook’s leadership dealt with the issue of “addiction.” Béjar replied: “They changed the name of it” — specifically, they stopped calling it “addiction” and called it “problematic use” instead. He added, “You couldn’t talk about it.”

I joined social media at age 13, just as the iPhone became the center of adolescent life. I was attending a performing arts school after five years at a public school where I was teased for being too feminine. I turned to Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube — platforms that gave me access to a community I had never had. But this came with life‑threatening side effects I couldn’t yet see clearly.

Online, I found attention — first from classmates, then from strangers. When I started working professionally as a dancer, hundreds of thousands of followers watched my every move. What felt at first like affirmation quickly became the only place I thought I had value. I got so consumed with how I was being perceived that authenticity didn’t stand a chance.

At some point, it stopped mattering whether the comments were praise or cruelty — what mattered was the hit. I began refreshing comments in bathroom stalls between classes and rehearsals, scrolling before bed and learning how to curate myself for algorithms I didn’t understand. The behavior was compulsive. I didn’t know to call it “addictive design” — I just knew I couldn’t stop scrolling.

Chasing the algorithm for validation wasn’t the only risk. The real danger often arrived in my private messages. Adults I didn’t know approached me with explicit messages and nude images. I was only 13, and I did not yet understand what grooming was. I did not have the language for it — I only knew that the attention I could not find offline seemed to appear online.

I know now that the platforms and their algorithms were delivering me up to these predatory strangers, serving them my profile as engagement bait.

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The Los Angeles lawsuit pointed to Internal Meta documents showing that Instagram’s “Accounts You May Follow” feature1 actively connects predatory adults to minors: “In 2023, this tool recommended to adult groomers ‘nearly 2 million minors in the last 3 months’ — and ‘22 percent of those recommendations resulted in a follow request.’”

Employees warned leadership. Leadership rejected fixing the system, maintaining a 17-strike policy for predators — including sex-traffickers — before suspending the offenders’ accounts.

The architecture of these platforms placed me in the path of adults who saw opportunity in a lonely queer kid. Because queer kids come to online spaces for identity and survival, we are the ideal product: highly engaged, highly vulnerable and highly profitable.

Big Tech claims to defend queer kids’ rights by opposing regulations like requiring age-appropriate design and limits on addictive features. In reality, they are using us as a shield to avoid accountability. They weaponize our dependence on online connection to argue that any safety guardrail is “anti‑LGBTQ.” They warn lawmakers that protecting kids will erase queer expression. This is a lie, and a strategic one.

In reality, features that harm young people — endless scroll, autoplay, compulsive engagement loops, recommendation pipelines driven by surveillance data, settings that expose kids to ill-intentioned adult strangers — do not create queer communities. They create dependency. They bury our identity in algorithms optimized for outrage, objectification and profit.

Queer kids do not need online platforms that claim to celebrate us in Pride campaigns while exploiting and exposing us to harassment at disproportionate rates. We need them to prioritize our safety and mental health.

I know this because I lived it. Only after a decade of anxiety, addictive patterns, algorithmic harm, grooming, and harassment could I finally withdraw from exploitative social media. Even then, the choice felt impossible. Most of my childhood had unfolded online. The most intimate parts of my life — my gender transition, top surgery, and coming out — became content opportunities to me. That is the cruelty of these platforms: They teach you to equate visibility with safety, engagement with belonging, and exploitation with connection.

Regulation is not a threat to queer expression but a prerequisite for queer safety. It won’t solve every problem, but it will do the first and most important thing: force the companies profiting from our attention to finally take responsibility for the harm they have caused.

Reprinted with permission from The Hill.

Two weeks ago, on March 25, a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and Google liable in a landmark case. The jurors determined that the parent companies of Instagram and YouTube had acted with “malice, oppression, or fraud,” addicting and harming the young plaintiff, known as KGM.

Just one day prior, a jury in New Mexico found Meta liable for “misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and endangering children.”

Many kinds of evidence were presented to the juries, from internal documents and research done by the companies themselves to testimony from experts and former employees. The evidence revealed that the companies had intentionally designed their products in ways they knew would harm children.

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The companies used a two-pronged defense strategy. First, they blamed others: It was KGM’s fault for opening accounts before she was 13. It was her parents’ fault that she got addicted and depressed. Whatever harm happened, we’re just a neutral platform! The jury did not respond well to this strategy.

Second, they claimed that there is no scientific evidence that their platforms cause harm to adolescent mental health. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly asserted that the academic evidence is merely correlational. He grants that heavy users are more depressed, but notes that correlational evidence cannot prove that social media caused their depression.

There are thousands of similar cases coming, and we can be confident that the companies will lean hard into this strategy: denying any scientific evidence of causation. When making such claims, defenders of social media usually refer to an essay in Nature that made similar assertions. But as we showed in The Anxious Generation, and in our academic articles and many posts here on After Babel, there is abundant scientific evidence of causation. We are writing this post to make it easier for everyone to learn about that evidence.

The editors of The World Happiness Report (WHR) recently asked us to put all of the evidence together. The annual report shows how countries vary on measures of well-being. Each year there is a special topic or focus, and for the 2026 report, the focus was on social media’s effects on well-being. We wrote the target essay laying out the case for harm, and other authors brought a variety of perspectives.

Knowing that thousands of jury trials were on the horizon, we laid out our argument like a hypothetical civil trial, asking our imagined jury this question: Are social media platforms dangerous consumer products whose design has led to a variety of harms to young people? We call this the Product Safety Question. We present seven lines of converging evidence showing that these platforms are causing harm.

At the end of our chapter, we show that the levels of harm uncovered while answering the Product Safety Question are so high that we can also answer a different but related question: Are social media platforms causing harm to entire populations? We call this the Population Harm Question, and it’s at the center of some states’ and school districts’ cases.

Taking the Companies to Trial

In our hypothetical case against the companies — particularly Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat — we begin with the apparent victims, the people who allege harm: Gen Z, the cohort born roughly between 1996 and 2011. They were the first generation to go through puberty with social media in their pockets, accessible at all times through smartphones beginning in the early 2010s. They have the clearest view of what happened to them and their peers.

We then turn to those who spend the most time with young people — parents, educators, and clinicians. They also witnessed the effects of social media across many young people, over many years.

If we could call all of these groups to the stand, what would they say? We offer a brief synopsis of each line of evidence below. You will find far more detail in our WHR chapter.

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Line 1: What the Victims Say

Across surveys in multiple countries, many young people report that social media has harmed them directly and indirectly. They describe widespread experiences of cyberbullying, sexual exploitation, sleep disruption, lower confidence, and worse mental health. They also express strikingly high levels of regret toward the major platforms they have used for years. In a Harris Poll survey of members of Gen Z, nearly half reported that they wish that TikTok, X (Twitter), and Snapchat were never invented — despite using those platforms for several hours a day.

Internal surveys conducted by Meta found similar results. In their own research, they found that “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens.” One in three teen girls said Instagram made their body-image issues worse (20% said it made it better); and 13% of adolescents reported unwanted sexual advances on Instagram in the previous seven days.

In a courtroom, it is powerful when a victim points to the defendant and says “he did it.” In survey after survey, and in open-ended interviews, Gen Z points to social media platforms as the culprit.

Of course, the victims in a court case could be mistaken or could be lying, so direct positive identification is strengthened when corroborated by eyewitness testimony. The same logic applies here, so let’s move to our second line of evidence and call a variety of witnesses to the stand.

Line 2: What the Eyewitnesses Say

We next turn to the adults who spend the most time with young people. Parents describe changes in their children’s mood, sleep, self-esteem, and friendships; teachers report worsening distraction, attention, and academic performance; and clinicians say social media is exacerbating anxiety, depression, and addiction-like behavior in their young clients.

A 2025 Pew survey of U.S. teens and their parents found that 44% of parents identified social media as the single most negative influence on teen mental health, ahead of “technology generally.” Similarly, the 2025 UK survey by More in Common asked parents to identify what most negatively affects their own children’s mental health. The top response was “social media use/excessive screen time,” followed by concerns closely linked to digital technology, including exposure to harmful online content, bullying, low self-esteem, and lack of sleep.

In our own Harris Poll survey, majorities of parents said that, when thinking about their own children, they wished the major social media platforms had never been invented. And according to findings disclosed in litigation, Meta’s own research found that large majorities of clinicians believed social media worsens anxiety and depression in adolescents.

Line 3. What Company Insiders Say

The attorney for the plaintiff might then call the defendant to the stand and turn to the direct evidence. Suppose, for example, that the attorney had obtained, through pre-trial discovery, a series of text messages from the defendant describing what he was planning on doing, and then, afterward, talking about what he had done.

In our case against the social media companies, we have the equivalent of hundreds of such text messages in the form of internal company emails, messages, memos, documents, presentations, and more.

Here are just a few of the quotations from internal documents revealing what company insiders — employees as well as external consultants hired to offer advice — believed.

These quotes barely scratch the surface of what the internal documents reveal, and we cover more from this line of evidence in our WHR chapter. You can also find a large selection of disturbing quotations at TechOversight.org, and you can find our compilation of 35 studies carried out by Meta at MetasInternalResearch.org.

The evidence is clear: The companies and their leaders knew from their own research that they were harming millions of children and adolescents. As former Facebook president Sean Parker said, they knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway.

These three lines of evidence taken together, we believe, answer the Product Safety Question and demonstrate that these products are not safe for minors. Few parents who knew about the above evidence would want their children to continue using these products. That may be why many tech executives do not let their children use their own products: they know. But there’s no need to stop here; the forensic evidence further strengthens our case.

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The Forensic Evidence

In Lines 4 through 7 of the evidence, we focus on the heart of the academic debate over social media’s effects: whether heavy social media use (~5 or more hours per day) is causing internalizing disorders (such as anxiety and depression) among adolescents (especially girls).1 There is wide agreement among academic researchers that heavy users of social media are more likely to be depressed and anxious than light users, but does that mean that social media causes those outcomes, or is it merely correlated with them? The claim that it is mere correlation is at the heart of the social media companies’ legal defense strategy.

To address that question, we examine the four major bodies of academic research in turn: cross-sectional studies, longitudinal studies, randomized controlled trials of social media time reduction, and natural experiments.

At this point in our case, we are calling on the forensic experts to give their scientific analysis and opinions of the evidence, which can help connect the defendant to the alleged harm. In a criminal trial, this might be a ballistics or DNA expert; in our case, we’re calling the academic researchers to the stand. They’ve studied social media and internalizing disorders in teens for more than a decade, and though their access to data is more limited than that of the companies, their expert analysis consistently links the defendants to the alleged harm.

Line 4. Cross-sectional Studies

The largest body of academic evidence is cross-sectional, which means that data is collected at a single time (as with a survey), with no experimental manipulation. While these studies cannot establish causation on their own, they are an important starting point: they ask whether heavy users of social media are in worse mental health than light users or non-users. Across hundreds of studies, the answer is generally yes. The main point of contention, however, is not whether an association exists, but how seriously to take it.

In one of the most informative studies, Kelly et al. (2019) analyzed data from 10,904 14-year-olds in the UK Millennium Cohort Study and found that adolescents who spent five or more hours a day on social media were about twice as likely to meet criteria for depression as those who used it for less than one hour a day. Among girls, the relative risk was even higher at 2.65 — comparable to sleep deprivation and online harassment, and larger than the risk elevation associated with poverty.

Additional studies reinforce this conclusion. These elevated risk findings were central to the U.S. Surgeon General’s warnings in 2023 and 2024.

Even the studies that our critics cite as finding “no association” between social media use and internalizing disorders in teens look much more concerning when the data is analyzed more carefully, as we show in Exhibit J of our WHR essay. In many cases, researchers blend together variables — for example, different technologies (e.g., email and social media), different outcomes (e.g., general feelings of wellbeing and anxiety), or different populations (e.g., adults 18+ and teen girls) — in ways that dilute the relationship at the center of the debate: heavy social media use associated with internalizing disorders, especially among adolescent girls. Analyses that unblend these categories almost always reveal that heavy teen social media users — and especially girls — are at substantially elevated risk for depression and anxiety. (See Haidt & Rausch, preprint for a deeper examination of blending).

Cross-sectional studies consistently show that heavy adolescent social media users are at substantially elevated risk for depression and anxiety. Next, we turn to the longitudinal studies, which help address the question of temporal order.

Line 5. Longitudinal Studies

The longitudinal literature on social media and mental health allows researchers to follow individuals over time and can help clarify whether social media use predicts subsequent changes in mental health, whether poor mental health predicts subsequent social media use, or some combination of the two. The available longitudinal studies present clear and consistent evidence that social media use predicts later depression.

The strongest evidence comes from recent large-scale studies. An analysis of a sample of 6,595 U.S. adolescents, ages 12–15, found that heavy social media use predicted later increases in internalizing symptoms. Another study, using the longitudinal Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) dataset, showed that increases in social media use predicted subsequent increases in depression. Meanwhile, other researchers using the ABCD dataset showed that earlier internalizing disorders failed to predict subsequent social media use.

Some studies also find bidirectional relationships (i.e., higher social media use today predicts worse mental health a year from now, and worse mental health today predicts higher social media use a year from now), and within those studies, the forward relationship from social media use to later depression remains robust.2

In other words, this second line of forensic evidence shows that not only are heavy users of social media doing worse, at any given time (that’s the cross-sectional finding); it’s also the case that those who use more social media at one point in time are generally found to be worse off at later times.

Line 6. Randomized Control Trials of Time Reduction

The most powerful tool for measuring causation directly is an experiment that randomly assigns participants to either an intervention or to a control condition and then compares the outcomes. While researchers do not, for ethical reasons, ask one group of kids to start using social media at age 10 and another to stay off it until age 16, there are numerous experiments where young adult participants have been asked to either reduce their social media use (intervention) or continue their use as usual (control condition).

A recent meta-analysis by Burnell et al. (2025) of 32 such experiments has shown that reductions of social media use caused substantial declines in symptoms of internalizing disorders like depression and anxiety — even though most of these studies lasted only a week or two.3

The experimental results are all the more remarkable given that these studies are not designed to measure impacts that could be produced by entire communities reducing their use of social media. For example, if all students in a given school district ceased to use social media, that would leave more overall time for in-person interactions with peers and therefore the beneficial impacts on mental health could be even stronger, including for students with low levels of social media use. Furthermore, kids who do not use social media would cease to be penalized for their inability to socialize with their peers on these platforms, which in turn might help improve their mental health.

Even Meta’s own internal research confirmed evidence of benefits caused by social media reductions. In a 2020 Facebook deactivation experiment, code-named Project Mercury, Meta found that users who stopped using Facebook or Instagram for just one week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison. One internal researcher warned that keeping such findings secret would resemble the refusal by tobacco companies to admit that their own research revealed severe harms of cigarette consumption.

This sixth line of evidence is arguably the most damning: experiments using random assignment provide consistent causal evidence that when users reduce the amount of time they spend on social media, their mental health improves. The defendants themselves found this in their own internal experiments, and they tried to bury it.

Line 7. Natural Experiments

Our final line of evidence comes from natural experiments. Because high-speed internet made social media much more appealing (photos and videos would load faster), if some regions of a country got broadband connections a year or two before other areas, researchers can compare: did the mental health of young people in those early adopter regions change before those of the later regions? These studies are especially valuable because they offer population-level evidence that is not available from short-term laboratory experiments.

Across the major natural experiments we reviewed — in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United States — the evidence indicates that the spread of high-speed internet worsened mental health, with the harms falling most heavily on young people, especially women and adolescent girls. Documented effects include declines in self-reported mental health, increases in hospital-diagnosed mental disorders, and rising suicide rates. Additional natural experiments point in the same direction.4

This final line of forensic evidence may be the most policy-relevant of all, because it allows us to examine what happened as these technologies actually spread through entire populations. It comes closest to the ideal experiment of having one group of adolescents gain access to always-available social media while another does not. And the results are again clear: as high-speed internet spread — and with it, ever-present social media — mental health outcomes worsened, especially for young people and especially for girls.'

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Harm to Millions is Harm at the Population Level

Our seven lines of evidence make it clear: the answer to the Product Safety Question is No, social media platforms are not safe for young people. These consumer products were designed — intentionally — to maximize the number of children and adolescents who would be drawn to them and the amount of time that each would spend on them. The leaders and researchers at these companies know that heavy users of social media suffer many indirect harms (mental health problems, body image issues, addiction), and that even light users are often exposed to dangerous direct harms (such as sextortion, or death from purchasing fentanyl-laced drugs, or performing a dangerous challenge).

The Population Harm Question is a different one. It is quite possible for a consumer product to be extremely dangerous and yet have no effect on the aggregate statistics of a nation. That would be the case for any product that is used by only a tiny portion of the population. But social media platforms are arguably the most widely used products among young people in the developed world, used regularly by a large majority of adolescents in the United States. In fact, a third of American adolescents say that they are on one of the major platforms “almost constantly.” So if several of the product safety concerns we have documented are affecting more than 20% of all users (as with self reports of sleep deprivation and mental health damage), that quickly adds up to a population-level effect.

When the documented direct and indirect harms are scaled to the number of young people actually using these products, the number of adolescents harmed each year likely reaches into the millions in the U.S. alone. Arturo Béjar’s internal Instagram research found that 13% of users ages 13–15 reported receiving unwanted sexual advances in the previous week — which, if the U.S. is similar to the global average, would imply that about 5.7 million adolescents experience this in any given week. This same research also found that 10.8% of Instagram users ages 13–15 reported being cyber-bullied in the previous week. The number of adolescents experiencing direct harms from social media likely exceeds 10 million each year in the United States alone. (See the subsections in our WHR chapter “Direct harm to millions” and “Indirect harm to millions” for more extensive examples and estimates).5

In other words: the answer to the Population Harm Question is very likely to be “yes.”

The evidence we have presented does not prove that any particular plaintiff is correct, and it does not mean that evidence does not exist on the other side. We have been engaged in a debate with other researchers for seven years now, and you should read their arguments to hear the other side. Scientific debates are never closed; there is always the possibility of new evidence, or of discovering new complications and interactions.

But the next time you hear Mark Zuckerberg or anyone else say that there is “no evidence” of harm, or that the evidence is merely “correlational,” send them a link to this essay, or to our full WHR chapter. There is now a great deal of evidence, from many sources (including Meta’s internal research), using many methods.

Social media companies have been harming millions of children and adolescents for many years now. Until very recently, they faced no liability for these harms, and they never faced a jury. But now the courtroom doors are finally open and the evidence is being seen — by juries and the world. As the punitive damages increase, there will be design changes to the platforms. And there will be justice.

After two watershed verdicts in the social media trials in New Mexico and LA this week, we’ve entered a new era in the fight to protect children from online harms. Momentum is growing internationally, and we’re excited to see Indonesia’s groundbreaking new regulation take effect this weekend. The country has mandated a minimum age of 16 for account creation on any online platform that uses features that expose children to documented categories of risk — meaning the regulation applies not only to social media platforms, but also to AI chatbots, gaming apps, and beyond. By addressing harmful features like autoplay, engagement-based algorithms, and ephemeral content, Indonesia’s approach protects kids while preserving their ability to access information, and holds the platforms accountable while incentivizing safer tech design. The regulation will solve the collective action trap for Indonesian families and serve as a model that other nations can build upon.

In this post, Anindito Aditomo, senior researcher for Indonesia’s Center for Education and Policy Studies — a key advisor in the design of the regulation — and his co-authors offer an inside look at how the regulation was built and what makes it unlike anything attempted before.

Bravo, Indonesia!

–Jon and Ravi

Indonesia is home to more than 80 million children, and roughly 8 in 10 of them are already online. That’s 64 million young people (a population larger than Italy) navigating an online world with very few guardrails. According to survey data from UNICEF, 48% of Indonesian children ages 8–18 have experienced cyberbullying, more than 50% have been exposed to sexually explicit content online, and 2% have been threatened with or experienced sexual violence. So, in early 2025, Indonesia joined a pioneering group of countries regulating digital platforms that pose risks of harm to children. Championed by the Minister of Communication and Digital Affairs, Meutya Hafid, Indonesia’s new regulation will restrict access to high-risk online platforms for users under 16.

Though much of the initial media coverage has called this a “social media ban,” Indonesia’s approach applies to all digital platforms that children access, including AI chatbots, social media, and online games. Instead of imposing a blanket ban on platform categories, its design-based risk assessment approach treats each platform differently based on the level of risk its features pose to children. This design-focused regulation is the first of its kind internationally — differing from Australia’s law, which designates an minimum age for account creation on specific social media platforms. When it goes into effect on March 28, it will both shield kids from harm and create real incentives for the tech industry to build their products more responsibly.

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What the Regulation Requires

The digital design features that lead to harm are well established. These include engagement-based algorithms, which can lead to compulsive use and exposure to unwanted or harmful content, the autoplay, which removes opportunities to reconsider how long one is using a platform, and the quantification of engagement (e.g., displaying how many likes a post or photo has), which can result in negative social comparison.

Indonesia’s new regulation requires digital platforms used by under-16s to conduct a self-assessment that evaluates whether the platform’s features expose kids to various categories of risk, including interaction with strangers; exposure to harmful or inappropriate content; misuse or exploitation of personal data; exploitative consumer practices; risks of addiction; and other mental and physical harm.

Digital platforms must submit the results of their self-assessment to the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs — the body tasked with implementing the law — along with supporting evidence. The Ministry will then evaluate the submission and determine the platform’s risk level. Platforms certified as sufficiently low-risk can continue to provide services to children, while platforms deemed high-risk must implement risk mitigation measures to continue serving under-16s. Required mitigation measures may include disabling features linked to addiction risk (e.g., infinite scrolling, “like” counts, and content recommendations based on user data); protecting minors’ accounts from discovery by strangers, including via search engines; and preventing underage users from being exposed to violent and sexually explicit materials.

If the platform’s mitigation measures are insufficient, the Ministry will require the company to implement age verification, revoke accounts for current users under the age of 16, and prevent under-16s from creating new accounts. A specialized Ministry team will audit the high-risk platforms to ensure compliance.

Because this regulation is fundamentally an age minimum for account creation, it protects children from the most harmful design features without infringing on their right to information, as Jonathan Haidt and Ravi Iyer explain:

[I]f they do not have an account and have not signed a contract with the company, then they cannot compare the popularity of pictures of themselves, receive tailored late night notifications, be served more and more extreme content, or be contacted by strangers via messaging. Without this inappropriate business relationship and access to the extensive data they currently collect from kids, companies will find it much harder to train algorithms and use design features to manipulate and exploit kids.

The law also imposes other accountability metrics that platforms need to fulfill, including the allocation of resources for public education (e.g., parental guidance workshops at schools), and regular reporting and analysis that supports continuous improvements.

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The Advantages of a Design-Based Risk Approach

Indonesia’s unique, design-based risk approach to protecting kids online recognizes that platforms within the same broad category can pose very different levels of risk. Not all online games or chat applications are equally risky, just as not all apps marketed as “educational” are necessarily safe for children. A risk-based approach allows children to continue using platforms where the benefits plausibly outweigh the risks, while restricting access to platforms where the risks are unacceptably high.

The focus on design over platform type also incentivizes the innovation of safer tech. Companies will have a clear opportunity: create safer technology for kids and attract the users displaced from high-risk platforms. New platforms can build safer spaces that meet the regulation’s design standards without fear of being out-competed by companies that are willing to compromise children’s safety for growth. Families will also benefit from the transparent risk framework the regulation establishes, which will allow them to compare platforms more easily and choose the right ones for their kids.

In addition, honing in on risks rather than specific technologies helps future-proof the regulation by anticipating categories of technology that do not exist yet. New platforms, formats, or business models can be assessed within the same framework without the need to constantly rewrite the law. Our evolving understanding of harmful design can also be incorporated into the regulation’s risk assessments, just as improved knowledge of fire or earthquake safety continues to inform new building codes.

Much like the platform-based age-minimum approach used by Australia, Indonesia’s regulation places responsibility on the platform providers, reflecting a shift in the nation’s regulatory thinking from “policing bad outcomes” to “preventing predictable risks.” The burden is on the platforms to understand and mitigate the risks their products create; the tech companies themselves will be held accountable for violations (not the parents or children). The framework also creates a shared language that is conducive to better dialogue between regulators and platforms.

The design-based risk framework will also support productive public discussion about online safety in Indonesia. The risk-assessment criteria will broaden and enrich public understanding of digital harms, which is often narrowly focused on ill-intentioned users who post harmful content or who attempt to contact children, rather than the platform designs that enable and incentivize such behavior. This approach also draws attention to less visible but equally serious risks, such as data exploitation, exploitative monetization practices, addiction, and longer-term mental and physical health effects.

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Determining Risk Levels

At the heart of implementation is a deceptively simple question: What makes a platform risky for children? A rigorous, evidence-based assessment that answers this question is essential to the regulation’s success. The Indonesian government has taken this task seriously, using empirical data and scientific expertise to inform the assessment design.

To gather critical information about the types and degree of online harms that Indonesian children experience — and therefore what the assessment should evaluate — the Ministry examined user data from the major platforms1 as well as simulations of children’s digital platform usage. From the data as well as advice from experts, they identified seven categories of risk that the assessment would evaluate: content, contact, consumer (i.e., extracting payment from underage users via targeted ads or gambling-like features), data privacy, addiction, mental health, and physical health. They then leveraged existing research, including the companies’ own randomized control trials, studies, and experiments,2 as well as academic studies on features like autoplay,3 to identify key risk indicators and determine the best way to measure risk. Across categories, they devised a scoring method and determined at what threshold a platform qualifies as high-risk.

After building the risk assessment instrument, the Ministry convened a panel of experts for a Delphi study that examined the proposed risk indicators and evaluated the validity of the assessment. To ensure consistency and reliability, they also asked dozens of raters to independently apply the assessment on a set of platforms and compared the resulting scores. These third-party raters consistently identified platforms known to cause harm, suggesting that the assessment is both credible and rigorous.

Potential Implementation Challenges

1. The Self-Assessment

The decision to have companies complete a self-assessment as an initial step makes the regulation scalable across a large number of platforms, including future services that don’t yet exist. Testing from third-party raters indicates that the assessment’s specificity regarding design requirements should produce objective, consistent results, even when applied by the companies themselves. This is in contrast to general risk-assessment frameworks, which are broader and have not meaningfully addressed platform design because they allow companies to focus on content risks instead of design choices (e.g., in the EU).

Still, the self-assessment creates the very real possibility that providers will take a liberal interpretation of the risk indicators to claim that their platforms pose little risk to users.

Independent review of the companies’ self-assessments is therefore critical. The Ministry will need to equip itself with the resources and technical capabilities necessary to identify and refute unfounded claims. Fortunately, this challenge is not unique to Indonesia, and the Ministry has already taken steps to coordinate such capabilities with like-minded regulators.

2. Age Verification and Enforcement

Another key technical challenge revolves around age verification. The regulation will require high-risk platforms to both prevent under-16s from creating accounts and delete existing under-16 accounts. As part of enforcement, the Ministry will need to monitor whether high-risk platforms have implemented accurate age verification and barred underage users from creating accounts. This will require the Ministry to rapidly build technical expertise and gather additional resources.

Some tech industry stakeholders have pushed back against age verification, citing technical limitations; others have raised privacy concerns. These are valid, but given worldwide momentum toward protecting children, providers are already improving age verification technology and addressing the need for user privacy. The latest version of iOS, for example, allows users in select jurisdictions to validate their age without sharing any identity information with the third-party applications. As more countries demand it, such innovations will only get better.

Another common refrain is that teens will find ways to circumvent age verification measures (e.g., through VPNs). While this may be true for some, even partial success will protect a great number of children. Compare this thinking to other regulations that protect kids: The fact that some drivers still speed does not eliminate the utility of speed limits, and we don’t encounter underage drinking and decide to get rid of the minimum drinking age.

3. Balancing Safety with Children’s Rights

Some critics of the regulation have also raised concerns about its effect on children’s rights to information and freedom of expression. While there is some validity here, we believe the concerns are overstated. Indonesia’s age minimum applies specifically to account creation on high-risk platforms; it doesn’t prevent children from accessing the vast majority of information available online. YouTube content, for example, is fully accessible without an account (and other platforms could follow suit if they choose). Still, this is an area the Ministry will continue to monitor and address

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Empowering Collective Action

If implemented well, Indonesia’s age minimum for high-risk platforms has the potential to solve a persistent collective-action problem. As parents and educators, we are locked in a losing battle against online addiction, forced to act as individual “digital police” for our kids. Because the large majority of adolescents are currently on these platforms, keeping your child off of them can feel like a sentence of social isolation. This regulation fundamentally changes that calculus. By addressing addiction at the architectural level of the platform, Indonesia’s approach empowers parents to stop being enforcers and start being mentors.

For educators, this is equally transformative. Schools have long struggled to manage the behavioral and cognitive effects on kids who spend too much time online (the majority), from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation. Because this regulation focuses on limiting the most predatory, “sticky” features of digital platforms, children will be more able to disengage. With the collective-action problem solved and kids freed from mechanisms designed to addict them, schools and communities will have the chance to reclaim the “unmediated” spaces — playgrounds, sports fields, and face-to-face social circles — where crucial social-emotional skills are forged.

With this groundbreaking regulation, Indonesia is stepping up to protect its 80 million children and is showing the world that this is no longer a private uphill battle for parents to wage against the platforms; it’s a public concern that demands a bold government response. Ultimately, the true measure of Indonesia’s risk-based approach will be found not only in the absence of digital harm, but also in the presence of a flourishing analog life.

The first evidence we had for the impact of smartphones and social media was for teens’ lives outside of school. Teens were spending less time hanging out with their friends, less time sleeping, and more time on screens, often holed up alone in their bedrooms. That’s not a good formula for mental health, and sure enough, teen depression doubled as smartphones and social media took over after 2012.

But what about during school, where teens spend more than 30 hours a week? Those hours, too, are filled with technology. Sometimes that’s for truly educational purposes — they’re working on an essay for English class, reading a science textbook in an online library, or taking notes in class.

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But not always. Even school-issued laptops often allow access to YouTube and streaming (like Netflix, Disney+, and Peacock), allowing students to sit in the back of class and watch endless hours of entertainment. Others play games. Personal smartphones are also a huge distraction: A recent analysis found that American teens spend more than an hour using their phones during the school day, and almost none of that time is spent on educational activities. Instead, teens scroll through social media, watch videos, and play games. Some take videos of their peers without permission, or sneak off to the bathroom to watch TikToks.

Thus, teens are spending about 20% of their time at school not focusing on schoolwork or talking to their peers. That may be one reason why standardized test scores in math, reading, and science have declined since 2012 and why students have increasingly reported feeling lonely at school. Electronic devices are both distracting in the classroom and isolating in the lunchroom. What impact does that have on teens’ learning and on their mental health?

In a recent paper, my students and I looked into these issues in the PISA dataset of 15- and 16-year-olds around the world. In 36 countries, students consistently took standardized tests in math, reading, and science between 2006 and 2022. In 2022, they were asked how much time they spent using electronic devices (like phones, tablets, and laptops) for leisure purposes (like social media or entertainment) during the school day. This varied quite a bit across countries, with students in some countries spending hardly any time on devices for leisure during the school day, and others spending an average of more than two hours.

In countries where students spent a lot of time using devices for leisure during the school day, test scores plummeted between 2012 and 2022. In countries where they spent less time, test scores merely slid. Thus there was a significantly larger decline in scores in the countries where students spent more time using devices for fun during school hours (see Figure 1).

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The consequences of device use aren’t just academic; they are also social and emotional because device use has displaced students talking to each other during lunch and breaks. In countries where students spend more time using devices for leisure during the school day, the percentage of students who agreed “I often feel lonely at school” rose steeply, with the increase much less pronounced in countries with less leisure device use during school (see Figure 2).

These results show the twin impacts of the leisure use of devices during the school day: declines in test scores and increases in feelings of loneliness at school. They are another piece of evidence suggesting that schools should restrict students’ use of smartphones from bell to bell — not just during class, but also during lunch, breaks, and passing periods. A school where students are talking to each other is less lonely. I recently visited a Milwaukee school with a bell-to-bell no phones policy, and students are now talking, playing cards, and “bedazzling” (had to look that up!) with each other instead of being endlessly absorbed in their phones.

Of course, phones are only part of the problem. The next step is to lock down laptops and tablets so they, too, aren’t being used for social media and entertainment during the school day. Or, especially for younger students, it may be time to go back to paper and pencil — old-school, yes, but with the bonus of no binge-watching YouTube videos during chemistry class. Some states are considering bills outlawing or restricting the use of devices for elementary school students — a welcome step.

Sticking with the status quo means lower test scores and more lonely students — not the outcome any of us want.

P.S. I worked with some truly wonderful undergraduates on the PISA project, which at times seemed endless due to the complexity of the tables (data collected over 22 years across 36 countries). My heartfelt thanks to Spencer Deines, Ellah Fessenden, Lauren Gramse, Julia Lima, Elisa Ruiz, Siri Sommer, and M’Lise Venable.

– Jon and Zach

It’s 10:17 p.m and the house is finally still.

One partner is already in bed, body angled in that small, wordless way that signals come here. It isn’t necessarily sexual; it’s the end-of-the-day bid for contact after you’ve been “adulting” all day for everyone else.

The other partner slides in beside them and, without a second thought… phone out, face lit, thumb moving. A last email check. A news scan. A “real quick” look at Instagram that turns into ten minutes because the feed is designed to feel like it might deliver something important if you keep going.

Nothing dramatic happens; no yelling, slamming doors, or single, cinematic rejection that would justify a fight. But the body registers it anyway.

The partner who “turned toward” feels something so small and familiar, it’s almost embarrassing to name. A faint drop in the chest, a tightening behind the ribs. A private recalibration: I guess we’re not doing that tonight.

They might not say anything because it will sound petty and they’re exhausted. I don’t have the energy to start an argument this late, they might think. And what does it say about me that I “need attention” at 10:17 p.m. when everyone is fried, and life is relentless, and, honestly, it’s just a phone? So they swallow it, start their own numbing scroll, roll over, or ask a logistical question so the emotional request stays hidden inside something respectable.

The partner on the phone doesn’t think they are abandoning anyone. They experience themselves as decompressing; just checking one last thing, turning their brain off, and finding relief after a day of meetings, parenting, vigilance.

Two understandable experiences. One tiny injury.

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Now imagine you meet a couple, and they tell you, casually, that every night a third person joins them in bed. Someone who interrupts eye contact, pulls attention away when you’re in the middle of talking, rewards withdrawal with novelty, and trains you to leave whenever intimacy starts to feel demanding. Would we call that “decompression”?

There’s no affair or secret texting. The third is social media, Slack, sports alerts, group chats, online outrage. Other people’s lives, bodies, jokes, takes — an infinite social room you can enter without the friction of an actual relationship.

As a couples practitioner, I see what smartphones are doing to relationships in my practice every day. A relationship rarely dies from one catastrophic betrayal, and most of the couples I see aren’t destroyed by a single event. They erode through tiny departures that are too frequent to ignore, in which one partner’s attention leaves the room while their body is still there. The phone is unusually good at producing this kind of erosion. It hides inside the banal, outwardly mimicking togetherness while, in reality, creating distance. In an intimate relationship, this subtle, reflexive pattern of divided attention creates thousands of small injuries that accumulate over time, eroding trust and collapsing erotic potential and emotional safety.

Attention has become a scarce resource. Where it goes, how reliably it returns, and whether your partner can find you in the fleeting yet important micro-moments that add up to connection can determine whether your relationship thrives long term.

Attention Begets (and Betrays) Intimacy

As Jonathan Haidt, Johann Hari, and Kaitlyn Regehr have argued, smartphones are reshaping our attention. This shows up in the most intimate places of ordinary life, affecting our closest relationships with our partners, kids, friends, and family members.

Intimacy researchers have agreed since the late 1980s that the core of closeness is perceived partner responsiveness; the feeling that your partner sees and understands you, and cares about what you’re going through. This intimacy is built during the mundane, forgettable moments around the house, in the car, and between meals. Decades of subsequent research have confirmed that perceived responsiveness reliably predicts relationship satisfaction, emotional intimacy, and even physical affection.

In a longitudinal study published by relationship psychologist John Gottman, couples who stayed together over the six years of the study responded to each other’s “bids for connection” (small, everyday attempts to engage) about 86% of the time. Couples who divorced responded only about 33% of the time. The researchers concluded that “The mundane and often fleeting moments that a couple experiences in their everyday lives may contribute to the health or deterioration of a relationship by serving as a foundation to major couple events such as conflict discussions and caring days.” In other words, couples’ daily investment of attention in the ordinary moments can make the difference between lasting love and its collapse.

But modern life has made sustained attention difficult to produce. The cognitive load on adults — particularly partnered adults with children — is historically unusual. Dual-income households, information saturation, decision fatigue, and the ambient hum of perpetual availability create a chronic mental overload on a scale that previous generations didn’t face. On top of the cognitive weight, there’s the emotional labor of managing children’s feelings, maintaining competence at work, navigating extended family dynamics, and tracking the logistics of a shared life. By the time both partners land in bed at 10 p.m., their attentional budget is depleted.

Then there’s proximity. Many of us carry our phones into the places where intimacy used to live — the first minutes after waking, the walk from the car to the front door, the last stretch before sleep. A 2025 YouGov survey found that most Americans keep their phone on the bed or directly beside it at night, with younger adults more likely to sleep with the device on the mattress itself. The phone co-opts the space between partners, at the precise moments when connection used to have the best chance of happening.

All of this adds up to what we might call “phone-based adulthood,” a structural problem where cognitive saturation meets the most frictionless, ever-present relief valve ever engineered. Most people aren’t ignoring their partners out of cruelty or indifference; they’re doing it inadvertently, almost subconsciously. The phone offers stimulation, relief, and the feeling of being somewhere else. For an exhausted adult, that’s a compelling proposition. But it slowly and quietly eats away at their relationship.

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The Phone-Based Adulthood

Recently, a friend of mine was sitting with his eight-year-old son, Ari, and Ari’s step-mom. She was talking to Ari, and he was half paying attention, half reading a book. My friend said, “Ari, pay attention when she’s talking.” Ari put the book down. Then my friend asked, “Was that kind?” Ari said, “No.” My friend invited him to apologize, and he did.

Something about the interaction sat wrong with my friend — it left him feeling hypocritical. The next day, he apologized to his son too, because he knows his attention is in more than one place sometimes. Then he asked Ari, “Do you ever feel like I’m distracted when we’re hanging out?” Ari nonchalantly said, “Yeah, you’re always on your phone, and it makes me feel like you don’t want to talk to me.”

My friend recoiled at the truth of this. His kid just named his hurt in a single sentence, and did it without resentment.

Adults rarely speak like this. The person who feels their partner’s attention drift to the phone doesn’t usually say, It makes me feel like you don’t want to talk to me. They often say nothing, start a fight about something else, or pick up their own phone and match the distance, but the pain is the same. The phone has trained and normalized attention-splitting, and the people closest to us — children and partners alike — are left vying for the attention of someone who is right there and somehow not.

Availability is not a grand romantic stance, but a repeated micro-behavior. It’s bringing your eyes up when your partner starts talking; the split-second pause before you reach for your phone; the choice to stay in the room after an awkward interaction instead of going away (literally or figuratively). But the phone-based adulthood makes this harder in two key ways:

First, it normalizes chronic partial presence. Many people now live in an “open tab” state of continuous partial attention, a term coined by sociologist Linda Stone. With a smartphone always in reach, one’s attention is constantly split between the room they’re in and the world inside the device.

Second, it creates an always-available exit from normal interpersonal friction. In relationships, friction is a necessary ingredient that allows you the opportunity to either deepen your connection or detach. Smartphones make detachment easy and instant, undercutting one of the main growth mechanisms for the relationship.

These two habitual patterns are behind more relationship strain than most couples recognize. A partner who is physically beside you but mentally gone, over and over, in the moments that used to be yours together — those small departures accumulate and create distance.

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What I See Clinically

In my private practice, relationship problems that stem from phone-based adulthood show up in a few specific, recognizable ways, couple after couple.

Attention is the New Fidelity

Traditional infidelity is obvious. Someone invests secrecy, time, erotic energy, and emotional intimacy outside the partnership.

Attention infidelity is harder to identify because it’s socially sanctioned and functionally invisible. It doesn’t look like “choosing someone else”; it’s “checking something,” “unwinding,” “being informed,” “responding quickly for work.” It looks like “I’m listening, keep talking.” But what many partners experience is I cannot access you, or you don’t care.

Studies consistently link partner phone use during interactions, or “phubbing” (phone + snubbing), with lower relationship satisfaction, in part through feeling excluded and less responded to.

What intimate relationships actually need (and healthy relationships have) is not constant togetherness, but reliable access. Couples can weather enormous stress, distance, and conflict, as long as both people trust that the other is fundamentally reachable. The phone disrupts precisely this.

In a healthy relationship, the hard parts of the day get processed together, not side-by-side in silence. When the phone becomes the regulator for both nervous systems, the relationship becomes the place you rest from, not the place you recover in.

Micro-Withdrawal Replaces Overt Withdrawal

What keeps couples connected through the normal friction of life is their confidence that their bids for connection will be received. When one partner consistently withdraws by, for instance, leaving the room and refusing to engage, it undermines this essential faith.

Phone withdrawal is micro-withdrawal. Because it’s socially acceptable, some people might not even see it as impolite. It’s the downward glance your partner makes in the middle of your sentence, the half ”mmhmm” while reading, or the reflexive reach for the phone after a question that’s just a little too vulnerable.

Because it’s ambiguous (as opposed to, say, leaving a room and slamming the door), partners second-guess themselves. Am I overly sensitive? Am I controlling? Should I let them decompress? It’s been a hard day; they should be able to decompress. So they don’t bring it up.

Over time, micro-withdrawal trains both partners: The one who turns toward the other learns to stop turning, and the one who turns away learns that withdrawal is painless, unchallenged, and easy. Then couples show up in therapy saying, “We’re just not as close as we used to be.” They didn’t consciously choose distance, but it accumulated through tiny, seemingly inconsequential moments of half-presence that became a regular state.

Conflict Avoidance, Optimized

Sometimes after a tense exchange, one partner picks up their phone to “calm down.” The other experiences abandonment and escalates. The scroller feels criticized and doubles down on the frictionless exit. This is called the pursuer-distancer cycle — one of the most common dynamics in couples therapy. (Phones don’t create this cycle, but they accelerate it.)

In my office, it often looks like this:

A couple had a tiny argument about coming home late, say. One partner says, “Can we talk about what just happened?” The other says, “I can’t do this right now,” and reaches for the phone out of instinct. One thumb flick: a news headline, a reel, an endless feed.

The partner who wanted to talk starts to put two and two together. You have energy for strangers and scrolling, but you don’t have energy for me.

“Are you seriously doing this?” comes out sharper than intended. Now the scroller feels attacked, and within minutes, they’re arguing about the phone itself but the real pain happened when one person made a bid (“can we talk about this”) and the other shut down.

In relationships that handle conflict well, tension happens, people misunderstand each other, and by grappling with nervous system regulation, wounds, and internal dramas together, the couple finds their way through. The repair doesn’t have to be graceful; it just has to happen.

The phone short-circuits that repair rhythm by giving the distancer on-demand relief and the pursuer fuel to monitor and escalate. Because the device is always within arm’s reach, conflict doesn’t get the natural cooldown it used to when there was less stimulus available.

Erotic Friction

The mechanics of desire depend on presence. Erotic connection requires attention bandwidth and the sense that your partner is there with their attention turned toward you.

When one or both partners are habitually half absent, scrolling before bed or checking notifications when something could start to build between you, initiation can feel riskier than the ordinary vulnerability of wanting someone. So you hesitate or try, and it may not land because your partner isn’t present enough to register the bid. Over time, rejection becomes more likely, and rejection in long-term love rarely stays confined to sex — it spills into identity. Am I wanted? Am I chosen? Am I still compelling to you?

Then couples do what people always do when a topic carries shame: they stop talking about it and avoid initiating. They protect themselves. The bedroom becomes less a place for intimacy and more a reminder of the distance: two people side-by-side, absorbed in their screens while the physical closeness makes the emotional gap feel worse.

What Actually Helps: Attention Agreements

When couples try to solve the phone/attention problem with declarations (e.g. we should be more present), it often doesn’t work. Without clear agreements, “being present” becomes a vague standard that either partner can hold over the other. Moral pressure activates defensiveness, and defensiveness kills intimacy.

Instead, it helps to treat attention as a shared resource with rules, boundaries, and repair mechanisms, similar to how couples often treat money. Households have a better chance at functioning well when partners have clear agreements around how they make, save, and spend money. Attention requires the same intentional approach.

Here are three simple things you and your partner can do to create containment with phone usage and preserve (or restore) your connection to each other.1

1) Build Predictable Availability (Instead of Chasing “Device-Free” Purity)

You don’t have to ban phones; you just need to focus attention during key windows.

Sit down with your partner and pick a few zones/periods of concerted, distraction-free time and make them reliable. For most couples, the highest-leverage ones are the first stretch after reunions (e.g., waking up and coming home from work) and the last stretch before sleep. If your relationship currently includes “parallel scrolling in bed,” start there. Talk to your partner about which area would make the biggest difference, and start with one. For instance, “After we come home from work, let’s take 30 minutes to do our own thing and decompress, and then spend the next hour together with our phones in another room.”

2) Tell Your Partner When You’re Leaving and When You’ll be Back

Sometimes people get overloaded and someone will check out — either intentionally or unintentionally — by picking up their phone. That’s expected and normal. Relationships survive better if withdrawal has a predictable return.

When you’re each regulated, and before you’re in the heat of the moment, make an agreement that when one of you needs to check out, you’ll name it and put a time limit on it. That’s it. The simple ritual of telling your partner you’re going and when you’ll be back makes all the difference, instead of leaving them wondering where you went while you scroll.

A return practice can be short: “I’m going to look at my phone for ten minutes to reset. Then I’m back, and I’d love to connect with you.” Then keep your commitment and actually come back within the time you identified.

3) Treat the Phone as a Symptom Before You Treat it as the Villain

If your partner is scrolling compulsively at night, the instinct is to make the phone the problem. Couples who only fight about the phone miss the pain underneath. Couples who address the pain often see the phone use drop because they’re able to solve the actual issue.

This can sound like, “I’ve noticed that when we’re both on our phones at night, I feel more alone than I want to. Can we talk about that?” Lead with your own experience, not your theory about theirs.

If you don’t decide where your attention goes, Meta, Apple, and OpenAI will decide for you. The attention economy doesn’t need your relationship to fail; it just needs your partner to be unavailable, a hundred times a day, forever.

If your relationship feels harder than it should, if you feel lonely next to someone you love, or if you keep having the same fight about attention that starts from almost nothing, the explanation might be more structural than personal. Your relationship has a third.

Rather than panic, the solution is for you and your partner to acknowledge what we’re all up against, and to establish some attention agreements. In my practice, couples who do this are often surprised at how quickly things shift. You can defend access to each other and reclaim the little moments of connection. It’s just about being intentional when it comes to your relationship’s most precious resource — your attention.

Powerful generative AI tools are suddenly everywhere, embedded in many of the learning platforms students use daily. For students, they offer an irresistible shortcut: why write the essay, solve the complex math problem, or read the chapter when a chatbot can do it for you in seconds? Schools across the U.S. are scrambling to adapt. Blue books are back. So too are in-class exams and No. 2 pencils. Running student work through anti-AI checkers is standard practice. These are all pragmatic strategies by harried educators who, along with families, are on the front lines, mediating the next tidal wave of technological innovation for their students.

But these practical solutions miss a major underlying issue. The majority of American students are disengaged at school — a trend that began long before generative AI arrived. According to the U.S. census, only one in three students are highly engaged in school, a number that has been stubbornly consistent over the last decade. And while 65% of parents believe their 10th graders love school, only 26% of students actually say they do.

AI didn’t create this crisis, but it raises the stakes considerably. AI chatbots promise to reduce the “friction” of learning by teaming up with the student 24/7. But this friction isn’t a flaw that needs to be engineered away, it’s the whole point. The effort of working something out, of sitting with a challenge and finding a way through, is an essential part of the learning process. It’s what keeps students engaged, and engagement is both a prerequisite for real learning and a predictor of outcomes that reach far beyond the classroom, including higher graduation rates and life aspirations, and lower rates of depression and substance use disorder. In a world saturated with AI, the capacity to learn — to cultivate genuine curiosity, push through difficulty, and develop independent thinking — is the essential human skill. And it’s one we can still help students build.

The good news is that student engagement isn’t a mystery, and parents and teachers have more influence over it than they realize. When students have the agency and freedom to follow their own curiosity, engagement follows naturally. The key is knowing how to help kids get there.

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The Four Modes of Student Engagement

Academics agree that a combination of several elements shape student engagement:

• What students do (e.g., showing up, turning in homework)

• What students think (e.g., making connections between classroom learning and experiences out of school)

• What students feel (e.g., showing interest in what they are learning and enjoying school)

• Whether students take initiative (e.g., proactively finding ways to make learning more interesting, such as asking to write a paper on a topic they love versus the one that is assigned. This, in particular, is an essential skill in an AI-infused world.)

Because much of this is internal, it can be hard to see. So teachers and parents often rely on external behavior and outcomes as their gauges. But grades and attendance only tell part of the story — and they lead well-meaning parents to encourage compliance rather than real engagement.

That’s where a clearer framework helps. In our research for our recent book, The Disengaged Teen, we identified four distinct modes of student engagement and disengagement in school: Passenger, Achiever, Resister, and Explorer. These modes give teachers and parents language and a deeper understanding of where their students get stuck, and offer practical tools to help reignite their motivation.

• In Passenger mode, students are coasting — doing the bare minimum. Parents of kids in Passenger mode often get a one-word response from their kids when they ask about school: “boring.” Students in Passenger mode may rush through homework and barely study for exams, yet some still get straight As. For these students, school can feel too easy, offering little challenge or excitement. Their coping strategy is to check out and focus on friends, gaming, sports — anything more interesting. For students stuck here, AI is an easy shortcut to finish homework faster and get back to hanging out.

• Students in Achiever mode are trying to get a gold star on everything — academics, extracurriculars, service, you name it. They are driven and impressive but often exhausted. Fear of failure haunts these students, and many wilt when their performance dips even slightly. A common frustration among students in Achiever mode is, “My teacher didn’t tell me exactly what to do to get an A.” A B+ can trigger alarm, extra studying, late nights, and lost sleep. Achievers are focused on the end goal — the grade — not the learning process, and for many, cheating was already common before AI came along. Now, chatbots make it even easier to power through their pile of work.

• Students in Resister mode use whatever influence they have to signal — to both teachers and families — that school isn’t working for them. Some actively avoid learning. Others disrupt their learning by derailing lessons and acting out, becoming the “problem child.” But they have something going for them that students in Passenger mode do not: agency. They aren’t taking their lot lying down, they are influencing the flow of instruction, though in a negative way. If given the chance, we found that those in Resister mode can move to Explorer mode — the final and most engaged mode — more quickly than students stuck in Passenger or Achiever mode.

• The peak of the engagement mountain is Explorer mode, where students develop the willingness and desire to learn new things. Here students’ agency meets their drive. Their involvement runs deep and they find meaning in the effort required to learn. Explorer mode includes the active curiosity Jonathan Haidt calls “Discover Mode.” Students in Explorer mode feel confident enough to take creative risks, generate their own ideas, and solve problems in the classroom. When a student in Explorer mode is asked “How was school?,” their answer is not a monosyllabic “fine” but an excited breakdown of how tornados work or how they calculated Taylor Swift’s net worth using newly acquired math skills.

A key way to build engagement is to give students some autonomy in the classroom. Across 35 randomized controlled trials in the U.S. and 17 other countries over three decades, when teachers give students opportunities to engage by having a small say in the flow of instruction — such as choosing among homework options, providing feedback at the end of a lesson, or asking questions about their curiosities — learning, achievement, positive self-concept, prosocial behavior, and numerous other benefits increase. To develop initiative, which builds agency, kids need to practice it. For that they need to get into Explorer Mode.

In academic terms, this is agentic engagement — the ability and desire to initiate learning, express preferences, investigate interests, solve problems, and persist in the face of challenges. It is the foundation of a meaningful life and the life skills required to navigate an AI-saturated world.

The modes of engagement are dynamic: students move around them all the time based on their environments, their “efficacy” — i.e., how successful they think they can be — and their emotions. When students are given the freedom to explore, they often take it, and with it they can develop agency. Parents and educators also play a massive role influencing what mode kids show up in, often without knowing it.

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The Case of Kia

Kia, one of the students we interviewed for our book, is a classic example of how agency can pull a student back from the disengagement brink. In elementary school, she was vibrant, reading incessantly and debating Percy Jackson plot points with her dad. But by middle school, she was bored, stifled, and completely checked out — stuck squarely in Passenger mode.

Worried about her profound disengagement, a creative teacher tried an unusual strategy: he invited her to join a learner advisory panel to tell the school board what it really felt like to sit at a desk all day. As Kia put it, her brain flipped from “This is useless, and I hate everything,” to “Hold on, maybe I have a say.”

At home, her father — who had gone straight to work after high school — refused to let her intellect become dormant. He treated her questions as worthy, whether she was asking why water towers are round or for a definition of “pedagogy.” He treated her like a thinker even when school made her feel like a failure.

When her school eventually introduced “studios,” where students design their own projects, Kia leaned into her love of storytelling, creating a podcast on mythology and an escape room about presidential assassinations. That agency rewired her, allowing her to fully enter Explorer mode. Even when she later landed in dry, lecture-heavy college classes, she still thrived. “I learned that you can learn anything. You just have to know how you work and how to teach yourself.”

This shift from compliance to choice, from helplessness to agency, supported by her dad and her teachers, took Kia from Passenger mode to Explorer mode and helped her rediscover the curiosity and drive she had in elementary school.

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The Exploration Gap

Our Brookings–Transcend study found that fewer than 4% of students in middle and high school regularly had in-school experiences that supported Explorer mode.

The shift in student engagement during the transition from 5th to 6th grade — when most students in the U.S. enter middle school — is striking. More coasting, less achieving, more resisting, and less exploring all characterize the move from elementary to middle school.

Why does this happen? One key factor is lack of agency and a school system that, for most learners, undermines Explorer mode. At a moment of peak brain development, when young people seek meaning about themselves and the world, many are shuffled through classes like factory workers, pounded with content that feels standardized and irrelevant, and pressured to win a race they don’t want to run. Despite all the energy they expend, they increasingly feel like they have little say in how they spend their days.

Some have proposed that generative AI could unlock students’ motivations and interests. But recent global Brookings Institution research examining the benefits and risks of AI on student learning found that current use — especially open-ended discussion with AI chatbots and AI “friends”— undermines students’ cognitive development, motivation to learn, and, ultimately, engagement with the material.

The solution is not a better algorithm. It’s centering human connection, creativity, and student agency, which parents and teachers are uniquely positioned to do.

Six Actions to Get Kids into Explorer Mode

When kids are in Explorer mode they are motivated to learn, and motivation is crucial. “Biology doesn’t waste energy,” says Mary Helen Immordino Yang, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California. “We don’t think about things that don’t matter.” Students are motivated by having authentic opportunities to contribute and learn meaningful things.

Families and schools can work together here. When adults at home and educators in school work collaboratively, kids’ outcomes routinely improve. Schools are ten times more likely to improve when this strong collaboration exists. Today, there are six actions families and schools can take to help our children have more Explorer moments.

1. Model the thrill of learning.

“Curiosity is contagious,” writes author Ian Leslie. “So is incuriosity.” It may sound simple, but one of the most powerful ways parents at home can support student engagement is by letting their kids see them having Explorer moments of their own.

John Hattie, a professor from the University of Melbourne, calls this being your child’s “first learner,” namely modeling the thrill of learning in everyday activities. This, much more than parents’ well-intentioned hovering around homework completion, helps students engage and do well in school. When Hattie examined the effects of parental involvement on student achievement across almost two thousand studies covering over two million students around the globe, he found “[w]hen parents see their role as surveillance, such as commanding that homework be completed, the effect size is negative.” In other words, parental nagging and controlling makes things worse, not better.

2. Know your child, know their mode.

Parents and educators will have more success getting their kids and students into Explorer mode if they truly know the child they have in front of them, and tailor their support accordingly. The modes are dynamic, and kids move between them, but when kids get stuck in one mode it can become an identity. The kid in Passenger-mode becomes the “lazy kid,” the kid in Achiever-mode the “smart kid,” the kid in Resister-mode the “problem kid.”

Kids don’t need a label, they each need a slightly different nudge to help move them into Explorer mode. The Engagement Toolkit in our book provides a host of practical strategies unique to each mode. For example, the kid who frequently procrastinates because they’re stuck in Passenger mode may need help developing study and planning skills. The student deep in Achiever mode may need help learning that failure is not the end of the world, something they can develop by taking small risks. Kids in Resister mode often need help developing a pathway out of the rut they are in — what Daphna Oyserman calls a vision of a “future possible self” — as well as a plan to get there.

3. Support ways for young people to make authentic contributions.

Adolescence is a period of profound opportunity as well as vulnerability. Teens ask important questions like “Who am I in the world? What matters to me? Do I matter? What kind of future can I build?” They need actual experiences to get data on the answers and build the muscles of being a respected contributor to a community. Cultural anthropologists call the process of gaining that status “earned prestige.” Too often young people default to social media to seek this status. Families and schools can both counteract that by giving kids opportunities for real-life contributions. When families rely on students to help get dinner made, bedrooms cleaned, the dog walked, or a meal delivered to an elderly neighbor, it helps young people know they matter for more than their latest test grade.

At school, when kids engage in experiential projects like “What happened in that abandoned factory?” or “Who lies beneath a headstone marked with only a single letter?” — as they did in Amenia, New York — they do work that matters in their communities. Connecting learning experiences to real life, from asking questions about how their local economy works to their community’s cultural norms, gives students opportunities to make meaning of their assignments while learning about themselves and their place in the world.

4. Never take away extracurriculars because of poor academic performance.

Too often, schools make participation in extracurricular activities contingent on good grades. A nationally representative survey found that nearly 60 percent of students earning all As participate in arts-related extracurriculars, compared to just over 30 percent of students with Cs and Ds. A similar divide exists in sports. The logic may seem sound — a child struggling with algebra doesn’t need more time on the basketball court. But this approach is misguided.

Struggling students need something to be excited about: a place to explore, connect, and shine. When students discover their “spark,” as the late youth advocate Peter Benson called it, that passion can sustain them through life’s ups and downs and boost engagement in school. If that spark is athletics or theater or music and that gets taken away because of academic performance, most kids in Passenger or Resister mode will not suddenly shift to Explorer mode so they can participate again — they’ll become even more disengaged. To foster more Explorer moments, schools should make extracurricular participation contingent on attendance and positive behavior — not grades.

5. Help students manage technology.

Another key is helping students escape the seductive power of tech distractions. Parents can set limits for children’s technology use at home, which can help ensure they are well rested enough to tap into their curiosity and creativity. They can advocate that their students’ school and community limit cell phone and social media use, as Jonathan Haidt recommends in The Anxious Generation. Parents can also check their own tech use at home. Children learn from what we do, more than what we say.

6. Hold a workshop or book group on the four modes of engagement.

You can’t fix what you can’t see. Only a third of 10th graders report having opportunities to develop their own ideas, compared to 69% of parents who think they do. A key aim of our book is to make the invisible — learning and engagement — visible, so we can develop strategies to improve it.

According to our research, teachers and parents want language and tools to talk about learning without creating friction. The four modes can unlock the conversations we need to have with our children and students. Parents can suggest this as a topic for a parents’ evening, a school discussion with educators, or a topic for back-to-school night. So, whether it’s a book club (we have a free study guide) or a webinar, workshop, keynote, or focus group, sparking dialogue about student engagement is a great first step to boosting it.

Conclusion

Despite its powerful role in learning, student engagement is rarely at the center of education discussions. Instead, grades and attendance dominate the conversation. Our hyper-focus on outcomes over inputs is a mistake. Instead of fixating on the leaves of the tree — test scores and grades — we need to tend to the roots, the invisible network of curiosity and motivation that will keep the tree growing.

In an increasingly AI-saturated world, Passenger mode is a seductive trap — a path where thinking is outsourced and agency atrophies. More than ever, we must prioritize student engagement and treat Explorer mode not as a nice-to-have, but as an essential life skill. That means giving kids the agency to follow their genuine curiosity, take creative risks, and find meaning in their own learning. Every student is capable of Explorer mode, we just have to help them get there.

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg — founder and CEO of Meta — took the stand under oath for the first time in a criminal trial.

At one point, Zuckerberg was questioned about Meta’s use of beauty filters: digital effects that make users, including children, appear younger, fitter, and more conventionally attractive in photos and videos.

The prosecution referenced Meta’s own internal review, Project MYST. According to reports, 18 out of 18 wellbeing experts who evaluated the psychological impact of these filters raised serious concerns about potential harm to young users’ mental health.

Despite those warnings, the filters remained available.

Zuckerberg’s defense rested on a familiar line of reasoning: there was no peer-reviewed, causal evidence demonstrating this specific product directly harmed children. Absent validated proof of causation, harm could not be established.

“There is no evidence of harm.”

This is the same argument now being deployed by EdTech lobbyists at statehouses across the country as lawmakers attempt to regulate classroom technology.

No Evidence of Causative Harm

This year, more than a dozen bills aimed at regulating EdTech have been introduced across at least nine states. Utah’s SAFE and BALANCE acts led the way, followed closely by Vermont’s effort to formalize parental opt-out rights and Tennessee’s proposal to remove digital devices from primary classrooms.

These efforts are informed by decades of research showing that, on average, classroom technologies do not outperform – and often underperform - well-implemented analog instruction.

Despite strong bipartisan support in most states, pro-tech lobbyists are pushing back with a familiar refrain: “There is no evidence of harm for emerging EdTech products.”

Strictly speaking, that statement is often true.

Educational technology evolves so rapidly that by the time researchers evaluate one platform, it has already been patched, rebranded, or replaced. Product-specific causal evidence is perpetually just out of reach.

But this is not a scientific defense. It is a misleading procedural maneuver.

When Causation Becomes Dangerous

Demanding product-specific, long-term, high-risk causative trials in children sets an unrealistic and ethically impossible standard.

Returning to beauty filters, no ethics board would approve a study deliberately exposing children to a tool that 18 experts consider risky simply to “prove” harm. That is why no randomized control trial has tested whether these filters damage young users’ mental health — the likely harms of such a study outweigh any possible benefits.

Luckily, we don’t live in a vacuum.

A substantial body of correlational research links image manipulation and filter use to body dissatisfaction, self-objectification, weight concerns, and reduced wellbeing. The experts reviewing Meta’s policies were not guessing — they were applying decades of psychological research to a new technological wrapper.

Software changes. Human biology does not.

The same logic governs learning.

Returning to Utah

Utah’s digital inflection year occurred in 2014, corresponding with the statewide launch of SAGE — a fully computerized adaptive assessment system. Before this, digital tools were largely peripheral in Utah classrooms. After this, they became structurally embedded.

Before widespread digital adoption, Utah NAEP scores rose consistently from 1992 through 2013. Pooled by subject and indexed to 2013:

• Math scores increased +0.76 points per year

• Reading scores increased +0.14 points per year.

After 2014, the slopes reversed:

• Math scores declined -0.39 points per year

• Reading scores declined -0.88 points per year.

This represents a structural swing of -1.15 points per year in math, and -1.02 points per year in reading. Importantly, excluding 2022 — the year most impacted by COVID-related closures — leaves these swings essentially unchanged: -1.05 points per year in math and -1.07 points per year in reading. In other words, this pattern is not a lockdown artifact — it’s a structural break beginning in 2015.

These are correlational patterns, but so were the early signals about smoking, lead exposure, and beauty filters.

When consistent patterns appear across nearly all 50 states’ NAEP data and across dozens of countries’ PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS results — and when those patterns align with established cognitive mechanisms — we are no longer looking at coincidence. We are looking at converging evidence.

And what we cannot ethically do (just as with beauty filters) is deliberately expose children to systems we have strong reason to believe may undermine learning simply to satisfy an unrealistic evidentiary demand.

Demanding perfect causation before action doesn’t protect children; it protects developers.

A Generous Interpretation

Even if we assume the decline argument is overstated — that Utah’s NAEP data has merely “plateaued” since 2014 — the harm does not disappear.

Between 2015 and 2025, Utah invested roughly $500 million in K-12 educational technology. If half a billion dollars produces stagnation, that’s not neutral.

Every dollar committed to devices and platforms is a dollar not spent on interventions we know improve learning: teacher development, structured literacy programs, small-group instruction, targeted support for struggling students.

Even under the most generous interpretation of the data, the opportunity cost alone is staggering.

So Now Then…

Demanding definitive causative proof of harm before acting to protect children sets an unrealistic and dangerous standard. If we wait for perfect causation, we will always act too late.

Our society does not demand product-specific randomized trials before regulating food additives, vehicle safety standards, or consumer protections. We act when converging evidence suggests that risk outweighs benefit.

Education should be no different.

When billions of dollars and millions of children are involved, the burden of proof should rest on demonstrating clear, durable, replicable benefit — not on proving harm after the fact.

Caution is not fear, and restraint is not regression. They are marks of a society that prioritizes children over products.

For more on EdTech, check out Jared’s previous After Babel piece, The EdTech Revolution Has Failed.

While it is well documented that social media poses significant risks to youth mental health, the long-term cultural trends that inflated its influence have received much less attention. I argue that a decades-long shift to permissive parenting created a governance vacuum — an absence of necessary rules and expectations — that left Gen Z uniquely vulnerable, providing the ideal environment for a screen-based childhood to take hold and compound the prevailing mental health challenges of adolescents.

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As Gallup’s Principal Economist, I regularly field and analyze surveys on well-being and mental health. As a parent of four, I became particularly alarmed by the troubling signs of adolescent discontent documented by Jonathan Haidt and many others. Having worked in clinical psychology as a young man — at residential care facilities and other settings, I have long known that family context matters greatly for youth mental health, providing either resilience or vulnerability depending on the strength of parent-child relationships.

With this in mind, in 2023 and 2025, my colleagues and I fielded representative surveys of U.S. parents and their adolescent children (ages 13–19) exploring mental health, parenting practices, and how adolescents are spending their time with screens and other activities.

I wanted to know how best-practice parenting relates to adolescent mental health. Psychologists hold many perspectives on parenting, but a widely accepted view is that the most effective parents both respond to the needs of the child (e.g., provide warmth, affection, sympathy, and security) and demand appropriate behavior.

This model can be illustrated as a two-dimension classification scheme, based on a diagram adapted from psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin in their influential overview of the literature.1

At the bottom left of the model are parents who are neither responsive nor demanding. According to the theory, they ask little of their children and provide little in attention or affection, a pattern thought to be harmful to development. The upper-left and bottom-right patterns are also associated with relatively poor outcomes because they are strong in only one dimension. Parents who are demanding but not responsive tend to score lower on measures of parent-child relationship quality and risk undermining the legitimacy of parental authority. Meanwhile, parents who are responsive but not demanding may fail to foster the self-efficacy and moral character of their child.

Parents who combine both elements were described as authoritative by parenting theorist Diana Baumrind. This combination is important to youth mental health because a large body of research finds that authoritative parenting has meaningfully large and beneficial associations with youth mental health. My own work reaches similar conclusions: parents who are both responsive and demanding tend to have children with the best mental health and highest quality relationships with their parents.

If authoritative parenting is most strongly associated with positive youth outcomes, an important question is whether parenting practices have shifted toward or away from this model over time.

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What We Know About How Parenting Has Changed

Measuring parenting is difficult, and tracking changes in parenting over time is even more challenging. Parents do many things for and with their children and adapt their priorities based on what they believe their child needs. With these limitations in mind, there are a few things we know.

As the 20th century unfolded, parents increasingly came to value autonomy over obedience in their children. This shift appears across several decades of surveys asking parents to rate the importance of various qualities that they think children should learn. Data from the General Social Survey show that the percentage of U.S. parents selecting “to obey” as one of the two most important things for children to learn fell from 40% in 1986 to 18% in 2024.

Similar trends have been observed globally, according to data collected on the World Values Survey. Among countries with data going back to 2000 or earlier, most saw a decrease in the share of parental valuation of obedience, with large decreases in countries such as the United Kingdom, Chile, Taiwan, Canada, and Spain. Parents continued to value authority at high rates in countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and Estonia. In general, parents tend to give less importance to obedience if living in a high-income country.

Other evidence is consistent with this pattern. Parental strictness declined and tolerance of children expressing anger toward parents increased between the mid-20th and early 21st centuries. Parents also seem less inclined to have their children undertake paid work. For example, summer employment rates among U.S. teenagers fell from 57% in 1976 to 38% in 2024, according to data from the Current Population Survey. In short, parents appear to have become less demanding and more permissive (as has also been argued by Dr. Leonard Sax in his book, The Collapse of Parenting).

Although the term “obedience” can carry negative connotations in modern discourse, most people would likely agree that obedience to laws and to basic social norms of decency and mutual respect remain important. Parents generally want children to listen to instructions and follow rules.2

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New Evidence on Parenting Changes by Generation

To further understand how parenting practices may have changed over time, my colleagues and I at Gallup fielded a survey of parenting in July 2024. We asked a representative sample of U.S. adults to answer questions about how they were parented as children, using 12 years of age as a reference point. By comparing the answers given by various birth cohorts, we can observe (imperfectly, to be sure) whether retrospective perceptions of parents have changed over time. Respondents reported separately about their mother (or maternal figure) and father (or paternal figure), depending on whom they lived with at the time.

We found little to no difference in parents’ warmth, affection, or responsiveness. For example, 44% of adults born between 1930 and 1949 agreed with the statement their father “was very warm and affectionate toward you.” For those born between 1995 and 2006, 41% agreed.

There were, however, much larger differences in the demanding aspects of parenting. The two items showing the largest changes were:

• “You knew he would punish you or take away a privilege if you did something that was wrong” and

• “He set reasonable rules for your behavior and always enforced them fairly”

Similar items asking about the mother also showed large changes. In both cases, respondents from more recent birth cohorts were significantly less likely than those from older birth cohorts to agree, consistent with the decline in demandingness described in the literature.

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Regulating Smartphones at Home

The measured fall in demanding parenting comes at a time when adolescents are confronted with new technological temptations that require parental guidance. Thus, the partial relinquishing of parental governance increases vulnerability to the harms of social media, video games, and other habit-forming products.

As has been widely discussed on this Substack, adolescents spend alarming amounts of time using social media. In a 2023 Gallup survey, we found that the average U.S. teenager reports spending nearly five hours per day on social media. Research on young adults suggests that a meaningful portion of this use exceeds what users themselves say they would prefer. Many parents likewise report wishing their children spent more time on schoolwork, hobbies, or offline activities.

Yet, as part of the same survey, less than half of parents of children ages three and older agreed with the statement, “I restrict screen time (such as TV, tablet or phone) to certain times of the day.” Limitations were even less common among parents of adolescent children, with only 30% agreeing they restrict screen time.

Consistent with the broader argument, parents who do restrict screen time tend to have children who report less time using social media. On average, teens whose parents set limits report about 1.4 fewer hours per day on social media. They also report less time spent on video games, less time alone, and more time devoted to homework, chores, hobbies, and practicing sports or arts — patterns that are generally associated with better mental health outcomes.

Not surprisingly, parents who score high on demandingness are more likely to restrict screen time. For example, 36% of parents of adolescents who strongly disagreed with the statement “I have a hard time saying no to my child” reported restricting screen time, compared with 13% of those who strongly agreed. Parents who identify with a religious tradition are also more likely to restrict screens than parents who identify as atheist or agnostic.

Overall, these data show a strong association between adolescent mental health and being raised by a demanding parent who also restricts screens. Among parents who were high in demandingness and restricted screens, 14% reported that their child had been at least sometimes depressed in the past year, and only 20% reported that their teen spent five or more hours per day on social media. By contrast, among parents who were permissive and did not restrict screens, 38% reported that their child had been at least sometimes depressed, and 50% reported five or more hours of daily social-media use. Results were similar when using a broader index combining multiple emotional and well-being measures.

My Advice: Respect Your Authority

My interpretation of these data and decades of related research leads me to believe that children need guidance and structure in order to thrive. They benefit from clear rules and boundaries that are appropriately enforced. The evidence suggests that the mental health challenges facing today’s youth are unlikely to stem from a decline in parental warmth or affection. By most accounts, contemporary parents are at least as responsive as those of earlier generations. The more notable shift appears to be a reduction in the demands that parents place on their children.

I believe this perspective is relevant to parents, grandparents, step-parents, or anyone else who has responsibility for the welfare of a child. It’s perfectly appropriate to set boundaries and enforce rules generally and with respect to screens. A “no social media” policy strikes me as the best default. Whether your child can otherwise handle a smartphone responsibly will likely depend on the child, but it seems to me that there are plenty of less distracting options available, such as smartwatches. Calling and texting friends and family is unlikely to be harmful. Risks from social media often stem from viewing content posted by and interacting with strangers.

None of this is to say that restricting screens is easy. Digital platforms are deliberately designed to capture attention, and some children will be more resistant than others to parental limits. Parents may need to adjust their approach over time, including monitoring usage or setting graduated rules. Strong and consistent boundaries are helpful, but each family must determine what works within its own circumstances.

The challenge is compounded by the pace of technological change, which often leaves adults themselves uncertain about what constitutes responsible use of social media and AI. Many digital tools offer genuine benefits. In my own family, educational apps have reinforced early reading and math skills, online instructional videos have supported exercise and skill-building, and games have helped pass time during travel or bad weather. AI tools have also helped me identify age-appropriate books and family-friendly films.

Parents therefore face a balancing act: how to preserve these benefits while minimizing exposure to documented risks. Companies could help parents by increasing their efforts to restrict access to potentially harmful content. Ultimately, even without the cooperation of tech companies, decisions about whether and how a child uses digital technology belong to parents. Pleasing children in the short term is not as important as ensuring their long-term well-being.

I just returned from 12 days in Davos, London, and Brussels, where my goal was to encourage political leaders to raise the minimum age to 16 for opening or having social media accounts in their countries. This is the second of my four norms for a healthier childhood, laid out in my book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. I met with leaders from Indonesia, France, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Some have already acted decisively (Indonesia and France); the others are likely to do so. And just as I arrived home, Spain and the Netherlands announced that they would raise the age, too.

All of this happened less than two months after Australia enacted the world’s first nationwide age limit, which requires users to be 16 for opening or maintaining social-media accounts, and which puts the responsibility for enforcing the age limit on the platforms themselves.

The tide is turning, but I have been shocked by how quickly it is happening. Social media has been dominating kids’ attention for decades. Now, in the span of just a few weeks, the landscape has been transformed. What happened?

The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker can help explain it. His most recent book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, explores the massive social change that can occur when widespread private knowledge suddenly becomes public knowledge. For example: Many people may privately know that a dictator is brutal, or that an ideology is bankrupt, yet nothing changes for many years until something happens that lets everyone know that everyone else knows it too, and that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows. Once that threshold is crossed, new forms of coordination become possible. Social movements ignite. Regimes and walls fall. Norms can change almost overnight.

Hans Christian Andersen captured the same dynamic in his famous story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: The emperor was naked and everyone could see it, but no one knew if others saw it, too—because the swindlers had spread the idea that only the wise could see the cloth. It took a child’s cry—“The emperor has no clothes!”—to convert private knowledge into public knowledge. What the child said was “whispered from one to another,” until the crowd finally cried out together.

This is what happened among leaders around the world in the month after Australia’s age limit went into effect.

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When The Anxious Generation was published in 2024, many legislators saw a need for action to protect children, but there was a general reluctance to get too far ahead of the public. Restricting something widely used—and thought to be widely loved—seemed politically dangerous. Furthermore, critics declared that a social media age limit of 16 was impossible to implement and was sure to ultimately harm children.

But in Australia, leaders said damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. The first was Peter Malinauskas (premier of South Australia), who commissioned a report on how such a law could be drafted. He was soon joined by Chris Minns (premier of New South Wales), and then by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. All three were from the Labor Party, yet the law was passed with strong support from the right-leaning Liberal–National Coalition. The federal law was signed in November 2024 and it took effect December 10, 2025.

Just two days later, journalist Casey Newton offered his tech predictions for 2026 on the New York Times podcast Hard Fork. His highest-confidence prediction was that at least five democracies would follow Australia’s lead by the end of 2026. He recognized that we were about to see a rapid transformation of private knowledge into public knowledge.

Over the weeks that followed, the world learned two important lessons.

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First, action is possible. Phase one of Australia’s rollout went smoothly. The companies complied. They closed down 4.7 million accounts that were held by 2.5 million Australian children between the ages of 8 and 15, and few adults were incorrectly shut out of their accounts. The sky did not fall. Of course, some kids will find ways around the law in the first year, but the burden is on the companies to enforce the age limit, and they will get better at doing so as technology companies develop ever more effective and privacy-preserving methods, and as norms change in Australian society.

Second, action is popular. As coverage of Australia’s law spread globally, it was met with an extraordinary amount of public support—from parents, journalists, and politicians on the left, the right, and the center. Other countries asked: Why can’t we do that, too? Many teens supported Australia’s law as well. As research shows, young people see the harms of social media. They feel trapped by it, and nearly half wish it had never been invented.

The whispering turned into a chorus.

In January, a few weeks after the Australian law went into effect, people discovered that they could use Elon Musk’s Grok to strip any woman or girl down to a pornified string bikini. To give just one disturbing example: Someone used Grok to show Renee Good in a bikini within hours of her being shot in the head by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis. The savagery of offering frictionless, free, nonconsensual deepfake porn triggered a global wave of revulsion in early January. These widespread expressions of disgust were further evidence that humanity now had common knowledge about the dangers of social media.

By the middle of January, everyone knew that everyone knew that governments can and should set minimum age rules for social media, and that doing so was an electoral winner.

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So, when I arrived in Davos, Switzerland, last month, political leaders around the world had already realized that enacting an age-limit law would not put them out ahead of public opinion. In fact, public opinion was now far ahead of legislation. Polling confirmed what leaders already sensed intuitively: Parents around the world are begging for help. They feel overwhelmed by the digital tide. For years, they’ve watched social media hurt children. Many felt powerless to protect their own kids.

There is no magical age when comparing how many likes your photos get, or scrolling an endless stream of short videos when you should be sleeping, becomes good for you. Like any addictive consumer product that routinely exposes users to graphic sex, extreme violence, and anonymous sexual predators, social media in its current form causes a variety of harms to people of all ages. But we allow adults (often defined as age 18) to make decisions that are bad for them.

In The Anxious Generation, I proposed 16 as a pragmatic compromise—one aimed at shifting global norms quickly. I knew that advocating for 18 would likely take many years and risk total failure. Sixteen is also roughly the age by which a majority of adolescents have completed puberty: a sensitive period of neural reorganization during which it is extremely important to protect the brain.

France will impose its age limit at 15, and in my two conversations with President Emmanuel Macron, I came to understand why 15 is a culturally salient age in France. I support his decision to act decisively this year. Still, I urge countries that can enact 16 to do so. Each year of delay is a year of additional maturity and protection.

I cannot support any law that includes a “parental consent” exception—it defeats the central purpose of the law by dropping parents and children straight back into the same collective-action trap: “Please, Mom! All of my friends’ parents said yes!” I would rather see countries pass no law this year than a weak one with parental consent exemptions.

But I am confident that leaders understand this, and that they will move much more quickly and confidently in 2026 to pass minimum-age laws and other policies to protect children online.

So, bravo, Australia, France, Indonesia, Spain, and the Netherlands. And bravo to leaders in both major parties in the UK, and to leaders across the EU, who are likely to follow their lead.

The successes of the past few weeks are testaments to rapidly changing public knowledge and public sentiment. By this time next year this sentiment will be even stronger, and laws offering additional protections will be common. After all, now everyone knows that everyone knows that we can do this—and that we must.

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Note: If you’re an educator, school administrator, or a policymaker interested in phone-free school policies, this post is for you! If you’re a parent or other stakeholder who is interested in helping your school implement and/or measure a new phone policy, we invite you to share this post and the Toolkit for Assessing Phones in Schools website with your school’s leaders.

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Over the past few years, momentum to restrict smartphone use in schools has grown rapidly. Notably, 40 U.S. states and around one quarter of countries in the world have now adopted or proposed policies aimed at reducing phone use during the school day. With growing public and institutional interest in phone policies, schools, school districts, and governments need an easy, research-validated way to help assess their effectiveness and impact.

That’s why, last fall, we launched the Toolkit for Assessing Phones in Schools (TAPS), a free, ready-to-use, research-informed toolkit that helps stakeholders measure the effects of a new or modified school phone policy. The TAPS includes four core surveys for students, teachers, administrators, and parents that are available in two user-friendly formats (Google Forms and printable PDF files), accompanying methodologies, and a detailed User Guide. The TAPS empowers you, as an educator, administrator, or school leader, to assess how your school’s phone policy affects your students directly.

And now, we added some new resources to the TAPS that make it even easier to measure changes in your school’s phone policy, including:

• A new manual scoring guide that walks you step-by-step through how to analyze the responses for each survey based on question type, as well as how to create easy-to-understand visuals of the data.

• An add-to-cart survey design experience that allows you to choose “a la carte” from our library of measures, for researchers who want to customize their own surveys.

• Coming Soon: A new Data Dashboard, an automated scoring app that does the analysis work for you, immediately transforming Google Form results into graphs, averages, and other useful statistics. (Sign up on our website to get updates on the Dashboard release.)

We’re also offering an exciting opportunity for schools or legislators to partner with the Stanford Social Media Lab on your survey implementation and measurement. If you choose to partner with the Stanford Lab, the team will help you design your policy study, implement your pre- and post-policy surveys via the Qualtrics platform, and conduct a comprehensive statistical analysis. If you’re interested in partnering, please fill out our contact form.

Even if you don’t partner directly with the Stanford Lab, you can share your findings with us after implementing the TAPS. In either case, you will be contributing to a large body of research on the efficacy of phone policies.

Together, these TAPS enhancements are designed to lower barriers to evaluation and produce consistent, policy-relevant evidence on what happens when schools go phone-free. As more and more schools adopt the TAPS, we will be able to draw stronger, evidence-backed conclusions about phone policies, ultimately helping leaders and educators make decisions that prioritize student well-being, attention, and learning.

You can learn more about the new features below, jump right into the TAPS website, or fill out our contact form if you’re interested in partnering with us!

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Our latest release of the TAPS introduces new tools designed to support two primary use cases.

The first: states, research organizations, and large districts seeking to conduct rigorous, multi-school evaluations — with the option of collaborating with the Stanford Social Media Lab. These efforts typically involve tracking outcomes across many schools and, in some cases, over multiple years.

The second: individual schools that want to better understand the efficacy of their phone policies internally, without launching a full-scale research study.

Deep Dive on the New TAPS Features

1. Qualtrics-Ready Surveys

Best for: Organizations interested in partnering with the Stanford Social Media lab to design and execute robust studies, evaluate phone policies across multiple schools, and conduct advanced statistical analyses will benefit from these expanded components of the TAPS.

The Student, Teacher, Administrator, and Parent surveys are now available in Qualtrics format. Qualtrics is a secure, widely used survey platform that supports advanced data collection, branching logic, and statistical analysis. The Qualtrics versions are better suited for large-scale studies and longitudinal data collection (versus the more basic Google Forms versions).

Image 1. Online and mobile versions of the Teacher Survey using the Qualtrics interface

2. Expanded Research Collaboration Opportunities

Best for: Organizations interested in partnering with the Stanford Social Media lab to design and execute robust studies, evaluate phone policies across multiple schools, and conduct advanced statistical analyses will benefit from these expanded components of the TAPS.

Organizations that partner with the Stanford Social Media Lab can design more comprehensive evaluation strategies, including longitudinal tracking, careful measurement of confounding variables, and tailored survey configurations. Additionally, researchers interested in executing their own study can request access to the Qualtrics survey. These collaborations make it possible to move beyond descriptive reporting toward stronger causal inference about the effects of school phone policies.

If your school district or organization is interested in collaborating with the Stanford Lab, please fill out our contact form on the TAPS website and indicate “Research Collaboration” in the “Subject” field.

3. Clear Scoring and Interpretation Guidance

Best for: Individual schools, school leaders, and school districts that want to conduct their own analysis.

To support practical decision-making, TAPS now includes a manual scoring guide that helps schools interpret results without advanced statistical training. In addition, we have developed an automated Data Dashboard that will make this process even easier (coming out soon).

• The manual scoring guide provides clear instructions for individuals who want to conduct the data analysis themselves.

• The TAPS Data Dashboard (coming soon) is a tool that automatically generates statistics, plots, and a compilation of feedback from respondent data. To use it, simply download a CSV file of data collected through the TAPS Google Forms surveys and upload the data to the Dashboard. The Dashboard can support both an analysis of data from a single timepoint and a longitudinal analysis of data from two timepoints (e.g., before and after a new phone policy was implemented).

These guides are designed to answer common, applied questions: Are students reporting fewer distractions? Do teachers perceive changes in classroom management? Are there differences across grade levels?

4. Customizable Shopping Cart Survey Builder

Best for: Individual schools, school districts, states, and research organizations who want to fully customize their phone policy surveys.

The Custom Shopping Cart survey option gives researchers the flexibility to individualize the TAPS surveys to their own interests, and work with schools to develop a relevant and sound study of their phone policies. Within the Measures Library, users can explore over 80 validated measures covering a large diversity of school outcomes, some of which are included in the six core TAPS surveys and some which are not. Then users can bookmark the measures most relevant to their goals and automatically generate a PDF file of all selected measures and questions. This document can then be used to adapt the existing TAPS surveys or create a new survey altogether.

Cautions and Caveats

While TAPS is a valuable tool for assessing and tracking changes in school environments, it is not designed to definitively establish causality with high confidence. Like most observational tools, the TAPS cannot fully control for all confounding variables without a randomized control trial.

That said, the TAPS makes it easy for individual schools to track changes within their school, and for larger entities such multi-school districts or states, as well as research teams, to conduct studies in which they can compare the change scores, over time, between schools that changed their phone policy and schools that did not. Such studies can offer meaningful evidence to help schools decide whether to continue, adjust, or discontinue a policy based on observed outcomes and stakeholder feedback.

For guidance on interpreting results and understanding the limits of causal claims, see the TAPS: User Guide.

Try It Out

We care about phones in schools because we care about the education of our students. We developed these additions and features in direct response to your feedback after our initial launch of the TAPS. If you’re introducing a new phone policy in your school, district, or state — or if you want to evaluate an already established policy — the TAPS will make it easy for you to measure the changes. Take a look!

If you’re interested in collaborating with the Stanford Lab, please fill out our contact form.

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If I’m honest I’ve been feeling hopeless lately. Sometimes I feel like giving up. What’s the point of writing when AI will soon automate the book I just spent years on, and generate my blog posts faster than I ever could? What’s the point of improving at anything? There is nothing impressive left to do or to learn. This is all there is, staring down the barrel of a life spent inputting and prompting. It feels like the worst time to try.

Then I started thinking about the next generation, and how bad that feeling must be. Why learn to drive when self-driving cars are coming. Why bother to code or start a company. Why learn to draw, why practice guitar, why study photography, why struggle through academic research. But as I thought about this happening in every direction, all at once, it began to look like an opportunity. When so few seem interested in being a person, isn’t that the best time to be one? Maybe this is a moment for optimism. You just have to be human.

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You have to speak like a human, for a start. When everyone else is grinding out birthday messages and apologies and love letters with AI, use your voice. Stumble over your words, get them jumbled. Write a wedding speech or a birthday toast that rambles and goes off track and makes people laugh and frown and remember. Put words together that don’t fit or perfectly flow, get your metaphors tangled and grammar confused. As everyone generates the same college essays and job applications, say something real, put something on the line. In an automated world where everything is so bland and boring, your messages and vows and condolences and eulogies will glimmer, will glow with their humanity. There’s never been a better time to touch the hearts of people, you just have to be human.

Think like a human, too. Have your own opinions, convictions, beliefs you are brave enough to defend. Because along with this robotic voice, it feels as if everyone has this agreeableness now too, this neutered way of seeing the world. Nobody wants to be distinctive, nobody wants to risk disapproval. So when everyone is getting these fawning, flattering responses from AI bots, be sincere. Be skeptical, critical, have preferences and judgements. Stand up for good art and good ideas and good choices. I am so bored of hearing that’s valid! and you do you! not just from AI bots but from people, human beings, those who have blunted themselves and their beliefs. It’s so dull, this refusal to say anything; I’m desperate for human judgement, starving for taste and conviction. Develop your own opinions, especially if you’re young; don’t outsource your thinking before you’ve even lived, don’t try to win approval at the expense of being human. You won’t be liked by everyone but that’s the point, no human ever has been. Not everyone will get you, you won’t be for everyone, but you will be someone.

Act like a human too! To have your own voice you need to venture out into the world. You need to take risks and try things, you need experiences and adventures. AI has to churn out the observations and opinions of other people, of a world it has never touched or experienced. You don’t have to do the same. So go outside, say yes to things, be scared and excited and uncomfortable. Feel your hands shake before you speak, your legs ache after a long day, your face flush when asking her out. Experience it all, the real world with all your senses, the fear of getting lost, the relief of finding your way, the hands of another person. Look people in the eye and learn about the world from living in it.

This is very important for the next generation, because mine was taught to do the opposite. We became automated ourselves. We learned to speak like robots, think like robots, act like robots. We hid our opinions, for fear of upsetting anyone. We affected the agreeable robot voice, to accommodate everyone. We stayed inside more than any generation before us, to avoid risking anything. We were warned that strong convictions were dangerous, that anything we said or did could be held against us. We grew up in a culture that was both validating and vicious: sycophantic and yet willing to slice us apart in a second for having the wrong opinion or making a mistake, to never let us forget. So we played it safe, convinced we could not step out of line, could not have our own thoughts, could not feel too much.

We became less human. We became anxious and insecure, afraid to say or do the wrong thing, unable to live. Constantly monitoring and managing ourselves, protecting our personal brands, making sure we were never too contradictory or confusing. And we never realized there was something more at stake, more than the risk of offending, more than the risk of getting things wrong, a danger of becoming like bots, automated and standardized. Now here we are, many of us functioning like autocomplete, capable of thinking and saying only the most acceptable and predictable things.

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Now it feels unfair—now that we are rapidly approaching times when it is necessary to know how to be human. Times when the most ordinary human things will seem extraordinary. After years of being trained out of our humanity, these are times when it will be the most valuable thing about us again, the rarest and most prized possession, if you managed to maintain it. And now we need to be human if we want to compete. Nobody is remembered for being robotic and predictable, for thinking and sounding the same as everyone else. Sure you can prompt and generate your words and beliefs but you will do nothing lasting, build nothing of consequence. And I refuse to believe that relying on AI is an advantage; they keep saying we will be left behind if we stay human, but maybe I want to be left behind from a life spent delegating my thoughts and feelings and decisions to machines.

So write, think, live. Get hurt and rejected and feel it in your gut and sort of like that horrible feeling because at least you’re alive, you’re here. I realize now that I want to be real. I don’t want to be harmless, I want to be human, I want to say things that bother people and move people and confuse people; I want to start sentences that can’t be autocompleted because even I don’t know where they’re going. I want to learn and offend and regret and grow. I want to be interesting, irritating, irreplaceable. I want to get things wrong and apologize and sometimes I want my opinions to be contradictory and incomplete because I am feeling my way through this world and I am not a machine with all the answers. I want to try and be seen trying, to be a person you can’t perfectly map out and make sense of, what good am I otherwise, what am I otherwise.

So to the next generation: This is your opportunity. The best defense you have is being human. Write in a way AI can’t imitate. Come up with ideas it couldn’t generate. Believe in something when bots can’t believe in anything. Speak from the heart because you have one and AI doesn’t. Don’t live on screens because it’s the one thing AI has to do that you don’t. Venture into the real world, as much as you possibly can, because it’s your advantage, a place you have actually felt and touched. Do things that make your heart pound. Feel and love and risk. The future belongs to those who can.

Who knows what’s going to happen to writing, to my craft. But what I do know, what we all know, is how to be a person. You can try, you can create, you can impress, you can achieve. You only have to be human.

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The Anxious Generation is best understood as a three-act tragedy. Act I begins in the mid-20th century, when new social and entertainment technologies (e.g., air conditioning and television) set in motion a long, gradual collapse of local community. Act II begins in the 1980s, as the loss of local community weakened social trust and helped erode the play-based childhood. Act III begins in the early 2010s, with the arrival of the phone-based childhood that filled the vacuum left behind.

This post, written by Andrew Trousdale and Erik Larson, goes deep into Act I. Andrew is a psychology researcher and human-computer interaction designer who is co-running a project on the psychological tradeoffs of progress. Erik is the author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, writes the Substack Colligo, and is completing the MIT Press book Augmented Human Intelligence: Being Human in an Age of AI, due in 2026. Together, they show how the isolation we experience today did not begin with smartphones but began decades earlier, as Americans, often for good and understandable reasons, traded connection for convenience, and place-based relationships for privacy and control.

Tracing these trade-offs across the twentieth century, Andrew and Erik help explain the problem of loneliness we face today, and offer some guidance for how we can turn it around and reconnect with our neighbors. Robert Putnam, who read a recent draft, described it as “easily the best, most comprehensive, and most persuasive piece on the contemporary social capital conundrum I’ve yet read.”

— Zach

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Scrolling Alone

By Andrew Trousdale and Erik Larson

Americans today accumulate hundreds, even thousands, of Facebook “friends” and Instagram followers. Yet 35% report having less than three close friends and 17% report having none. A quarter of Americans lack social and emotional support. We’re supposedly more connected than ever, but according to the Surgeon General we are facing an epidemic of loneliness and isolation.

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It’s tempting to believe that smartphones and social media were introduced to an ideal society and ruined everything. But the social problems we face today — while linked to contemporary digital technologies — are deeper and more nuanced than that. They originated from 20th century technological and cultural forces that also brought extraordinary benefits. It is only by looking back at these benefits that we can see today’s social problems clearly: as the result of trade-offs we have, for decades, been willing to make.

The post-war period in America was a time of enormous economic progress. Between 1947 and 1970, median family income doubled and home ownership soared. This expansion of the middle class brought with it a growing orientation toward mass comfort and convenience as the measure of everyday progress. The dream of labor-saving technology wasn’t new, but the postwar boom made it newly attainable for millions. Innovations like dishwashers, TVs, air conditioning, and remote controls flooded American homes. The Jetsons — with its push-button meals and moving sidewalks — captured an emerging vision for how technology would make life better.

These technologies did free up time, save money, reduce drudgery, and give us more control over our environments. But, as Robert Putnam first posited in his groundbreaking book Bowling Alone, they also disentangled us from one another — eliminating norms and shared experiences that, however effortful, also provided connection. As we grew accustomed to privacy, efficiency, and ease, maintaining our social lives and communities increasingly became a hassle. Independence replaced interdependence. After more than 70 years of making this trade-off, this is the culture we inherited and participate in daily.

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The Convenience vs Connection Trade-off

In 1997, John Lambert received a kidney from Andy Boschma, a fellow bowler from his Tuesday night league in Kalamazoo, Michigan. They weren’t relatives. They weren’t even close friends. They just bowled together once a week and that was enough. Putnam opens Bowling Alone with this story because it captures what we’ve been losing: the kind of trust where casual friends would give you a kidney.

Stories like Lambert and Boschma’s emerged from a world of regular, low-stakes, in-person interaction. In 1964, 55% of Americans believed “most people can be trusted.” As Putnam recounts, the average adult belonged to about two organizations. Family dinners were nightly rituals for half of Americans. Dropping by a neighbor’s house unannounced was normal. This was, by Putnam’s measures, the high-water mark of American civic life.

By 2000, when Putnam published Bowling Alone, that world was already disappearing. Trust had fallen to around 30%. Organizational membership fell sharply. He shows that by the 1990s, Americans were joining organizations at just one-quarter the rate they had in the 1960s, and community meeting attendance had dropped by a third. Hosting friends at home fell by 35%.

Four Decades of Dwindling Trust, 1960-1999

What happened? Starting in the 1950s, America underwent a wave of changes that looked like unalloyed progress. The 1956 Federal Highway Act funded 41,000 miles of interstate, opening up a suburban frontier where families could afford their own homes with yards, driveways, and privacy. Women entered the workforce en masse, expanding freedom and equality and adding to household incomes. The television — which provided cheap, effortless entertainment — was adopted faster than any technology in history, from 10% of homes in 1950 to 90% by 1959, according to Putnam. Air conditioning made homes comfortable year-round. Shopping migrated from Main Street to climate-controlled malls with better prices and wider selection.

These changes were widely embraced because they made life better for millions of people in countless ways. But as Putnam documents, they quietly eroded community, shifting American life toward comfort, privacy, and control, and away from the places and habits that had held communities together.

Suburbs scattered neighbors across cul-de-sacs designed for privacy over casual interaction. The front porch — where you might wave to a neighbor and end up talking for an hour — gave way to the private backyard deck and the two-car garage. Television privatized entertainment, moving what once happened in theaters, dance halls, and community centers into living rooms where, by the 1990s, the average American adult was watching almost four hours a day, and, Putnam tells us, half of adults usually watched alone. Dual incomes often meant neither parent had time for the PTA meeting or volunteer shift. Local shops on main street closed because they couldn’t compete with the mall.

Generation by generation, the habits of connection weakened while the scope of everyday comfort, privacy, and control grew. Then came the digital revolution — with the internet and smartphones — and these isolating forces accelerated.

Digital technology extends the logic of suburban sprawl: it allows us to live not just physically apart, but entirely in parallel. In the past decade, e-commerce jumped from 7% to 16% of retail while physical stores shuttered. Online grocery sales are growing 28% year over year. Home exercise has surged in popularity. Twenty-eight percent of Americans work from home, up from just 8% in 2019. Across every sphere — shopping, working, exercising, socializing — we’re choosing staying in over going out because we enjoy the privacy and convenience.

Meanwhile productivity technologies are dissolving the boundaries between work and personal life. While work used to have clear boundaries, today, for knowledge workers in particular, a laptop and Wi-Fi mean the office never closes. Work bleeds into every hour, every room. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index reports that “the average employee now sends or receives more than 50 messages outside of core business hours, and by 10 p.m., nearly a third (29%) of active workers dive back into their inboxes.” More than a third of U.S. workers now do gig work, which offers the freedom to work whenever you want. But when you can always be earning, social commitments become harder to justify. Giurge, Whillans, and West argue that “time poverty” — the chronic feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it — is increasing and hits affluent knowledge workers hardest. They use time-saving tools not to free up social or leisure time, but to take on more work commitments. These innovations in how we work make us more productive and create earning opportunities. But they also place a round-the-clock demand on our time. And when we optimize for individual productivity, we sacrifice the shared time — after-hours and weekends — that enables community life.

Workplace innovations are consuming social time and bandwidth, and so are the televisions in our pocket. Putnam found that most of the leisure gains since 1965 have gone to screen-based activities rather than face-to-face social ones. He called television “the only leisure activity that seems to inhibit participation outside the home.” And he argued TV didn’t just consume time, it also rewired leisure from shared experience toward solitary consumption.

Whereas television stays in one room, smartphones are with us everywhere — at bus stops, in waiting rooms, at restaurants, and while “watching” our kids at the playground. Americans still watch 3.5 hours of TV daily in addition to 4.7 hours on smartphones. The internet and smartphones didn’t replace television; they stacked on top, crowding out a mix of other activities. Scott Wallsten found that “a cost of online activity is less time spent with other people.”And when Hunt Allcott randomly deactivated people’s Facebook accounts, they got back an average of 60 minutes per day and spent more of it with people in person. As Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings put it, “we compete with sleep.”

When we spoke with Putnam recently, he said "things are way worse than I thought." Today, only 30% of Americans socialize on any given day. As of 2023, young people spend 45% more time alone than 15 years earlier. Two-thirds of Americans under 30 believe most people can't be trusted. According to Sherry Turkle, even time together with others is compromised by our connected devices, which make us less present to those around us.

There’s a reason these tools have saturated our lives. They save us time, make us more productive, free us from drudgery, engage us when we’re bored, connect us when we’re otherwise alone. But for all that technology can do, it is rarely an adequate substitute for physical presence, shared vulnerability, or the willingness to be inconvenienced for the sake of others.

For better and for worse, we built a world where you can work, shop, eat, exercise, learn, and socialize without ever leaving your home, where work and leisure are increasingly things we do alone in front of screens. In other words, we’ve allowed social interaction to become more optional than ever.

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The Path Forward

When we asked Robert Putnam what gives him hope, he pointed to history. In The Upswing, he reminds us that Americans faced a similar crisis before. The Gilded Age brought economic inequality, industrialization, and the rise of anonymous urban life. Small-town bonds gave way to tenements and factory floors. Trust collapsed. By the 1890s, social capital had reached historic lows — roughly where it stands today.

The Progressive reformers found this new world unacceptable, but they didn’t try to turn back the clock. Cities and factories were here to stay. Instead, they adapted, creating new forms of connection suited to their changed reality, from settlement houses for anonymous neighborhoods to women’s clubs that built networks of mutual aid. They didn’t reject modernity; they metabolized it, showing up day after day to create new institutions and communities suited to the industrialized world.

Decades ago Neil Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death that we haven’t been conquered by technology — we’ve surrendered to it because we like the stimulation and cheap amusement. More recently, Nicholas Carr concludes in Superbloom that we’re complicit in our loneliness because we embrace these superficial, mediated forms of connection. Like Postman and Carr, the Progressive Era reformers understood where they had agency when technology upended their world. It isn’t in demanding that others fix systems we willingly participate in, nor is it in outright rejecting technologies that deliver real benefits — it’s in changing how we ourselves live with and make use of the tools that surround us.

There are already signs that people are willing to do this. In a small, three-day survey, Talker Research found that 63% of Gen Z now intentionally unplug — the highest rate of any generation — and that half of Americans are spending less time on screens for their well-being, and their top alternative activity is time with friends and family. And they found that two-thirds of Americans are embracing “slow living,” with 84% adopting analog lifestyle choices like wristwatches and paper notebooks that help them unplug. Meanwhile in Eventbrite’s “Reset to Real” survey, 74% of young adults say in-person experiences matter more than digital ones. New devices like the Light Phone, Brick, Meadow, and Daylight Computer signal a growing demand for utility without distraction.

Unplugging isn’t enough on its own. The time and energy we reclaim has to go toward building social connections: hosting the dinner party despite the hassle, staying for coffee after church when you’d rather go home, sitting through the awkward silence, offering or asking for help.

Ultimately, we can’t expect deep social connection in a culture that prioritizes individual ease and convenience. Nor is community something technology can deliver for us. What’s required is a change of culture, grounded in a basic fact of human nature: that authentic connection requires action and effort, and that this action and effort is part of what makes connection fulfilling in the first place.

We can form new rituals and institutions that allow us to adapt to technology, ultimately changing it to our liking. But it starts with the tools we use and the choices we make each day. If we all prioritize the individual comforts and conveniences we’ve grown accustomed to, no one else will restore the community we say we miss. No one else can. If we want deeper relationships and better communities than we have, we’re going to have to put more of our time, effort, and attention into the people around us.

History shows that we can adapt, building communities suited to changing times. The question is: Will we stay in and scroll? Or will we go out and choose one another?

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In March 1770, as Boston boiled with outrage over the killing of five colonists by British soldiers, John Adams did something few could comprehend: he volunteered to defend the enemy. Adams believed that the very idea of liberty depended on ensuring that even the reviled had counsel; that a free country could not exist without an independent and impartial bar willing to defend the despised.

But Adams did not believe that his charge in defending his client was to win at all costs. “Every lawyer,” he reflected in his autobiography, “must hold himself responsible not only to his Country, but to the highest and most infallible of all Tribunals for the part he should act.” The moral map Adams established in this case became a foundation for the practice of law in America. Indeed, today’s legal ethics codes still speak of lawyers’ threefold duty: to the client, to the court, and to the country.

Imagine if Adams had decided that defending his clients meant winning at all costs. Can you imagine Bostonians’ outrage if Adams had, say, withheld evidence that the British soldiers did have murderous intent? What would Adams’s legal legacy be if he’d tried not to discover the truth of what happened outside the Custom House, but to sow doubt and uncertainty among the people of Boston? How different would our legal system be if the British soldiers were acquitted not because they were innocent, but because they had a lawyer who was willing to hide the truth?

Such a hypothetical has become our reality two and a half centuries later, only the victims are children, and its ethical corruption and harm operate at an industrial scale. What has emerged from inside Meta over recent months reveals how vacuous the characterization of the lawyer’s ethical obligations have become: Meta lawyers ordering evidence of child exploitation destroyed and research findings buried, while they hid behind attorney-client privilege. Meta’s lawyers do not follow Adams’ precedent, but, rather, the example set by Big Tobacco lawyers in the 1970s and ’80s. These lawyers collapsed Adams’ threefold duty into one — serve the client alone, whatever the cost to the courts and the country.

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Tobacco Road to Menlo Park

The story of this ethical erosion begins not in Menlo Park but in the tobacco boardrooms of two generations ago, when Big Tobacco attorney Ernest Pepples outlined what he called the “honesty option”: admitting that smoking killed people. He conceded this would expose tobacco companies to catastrophic liability, and the companies ultimately rejected honesty in favor of profit. In the decades that followed, tobacco lawyers counseled document destruction, abused attorney-client privilege to suppress research, and intimidated scientists whose findings threatened litigation defenses. Big Tobacco’s attorneys perfected hiding the truth from the American people, abandoning their duties to the court and to the country. The cost of that abandonment can be measured in millions of lives and billions of dollars. The cost to the public trust is incalculable.

Fast forward 30 years to Meta headquarters where the multi-trillion dollar company’s attorneys are following Big Tobacco’s playbook, aiding and abetting the company’s disregard for public welfare and children’s safety. Meta’s leadership and legal team have hidden “mountains of evidence,” as Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch put it, of direct and indirect harms to kids and teens.

The latest revelations about Meta’s malfeasance come from newly unsealed court documents. In 2020, the company discovered through its own experimental research — an initiative known as Project Mercury — that when users reduced the amount of time they spent on Facebook, their levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness decreased. Meta’s lawyers buried the findings.

But Project Mercury, and Meta’s suppression of its damning research on the mental health effects of Instagram, is only the beginning. Deeper revelations come from whistleblowers Jason Sattizahn and Cayce Savage and their testimony before the U.S. Senate this past September. Sattizahn and Savage had been researching child exploitation in Meta’s VR ecosystem, where they discovered coordinated pedophile rings operating inside games like Roblox. Sattizahn and Savage described an immersive experience where children regularly encounter what Sattizahn called “the transmission of the motion and the audio of sex acts” from adult users — not just sexual words or adult “content,” but the physical experience of “adults sexually gratifying themselves” while “surrounding and hounding minors,” complete with immersive audio.

Sattizahn also testified how, after his research on Meta’s VR platform uncovered children under the age of 10 in Germany being propositioned for “sex acts, nude photos, and other acts that no child should ever be exposed to,” Meta’s in-house lawyers demanded the erasure of any and all evidence of this finding. When asked by Senator Josh Hawley how often she’d witnessed an underage user being exposed to inappropriate sexual content on Meta VR, Savage replied, “every time I use the headset.” The permissiveness by the company that Savage and Sattizahn testified to is mirrored by the more recently unsealed court documents, which included that Meta maintained a 17-strike policy for sex trafficking accounts — removing predators only after they were caught attempting to traffic people 17 separate times. Meta’s own internal documents called this threshold “very, very, very high.”

According to Sattizahn, Meta’s legal department created what he called a “funnel of manipulation” in response to these identified risks to children, a comprehensive system for controlling every aspect of safety research. Legal representatives embedded in research teams demanded destruction of findings deemed too sensitive. Researchers were forbidden to use words like “illegal” or “non-compliant” even when plainly applicable. Sattizahn and Savage’s testimony is complemented by internal communications, now public, showing that Meta employees worried they were behaving like tobacco executives “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”

On October 23, 2025, a judge in a separate case validated what the whistleblowers and court documents had described. Invoking the rarely used crime-fraud exception to pierce Meta’s attorney-client privilege, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Yvonne Williams found Meta’s lawyers had coached researchers to hide, block, and sanitize studies on teen mental-health harm in order to shield the company from liability. Judge Williams determined there was probable cause that these communications were “fundamentally inconsistent with the basic premises of the adversary system.”

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Cracking Open the Cover-Up Machine

Attorney-client privilege was originally meant to protect candor in service of truth, but in Meta’s hands it has become a means of hiding the truth — a transformation that marks how far the legal profession has drifted. John Adams believed that truth was the lawyer’s surest refuge, the one place where all three duties could coexist. He wrote in his autobiography that his British client “must therefore expect from me no Art or Address, No Sophistry or Prevarication in such a Cause; nor any thing more than Fact, Evidence and Law would justify.” When lawyers abandon fact, evidence, and law, and turn their craft toward suppression instead, they corrode the foundation of public trust on which the entire legal system depends. Judge Williams’ ruling is thus more than a procedural rebuke; it is a reminder that the law’s legitimacy survives only so long as truth remains discoverable.

Yet Judge Williams’ ruling alone cannot stop Meta’s institutional misdeeds. Meta has thrived in an environment of passivity, thanks to lawyers who refuse to report ethical misconduct, bar associations that decline to investigate despite court findings of probable cause and reams of evidence in the public domain, legislators who prefer theater to legislation, and influential business leaders from other sectors who remain silent bystanders as tech lawyers remake the legal system into one that rewards grift and exploitation rather than enterprise and innovation.

Impunity is not inevitable. State bar associations should open investigations tomorrow and revoke reciprocity to Meta attorneys licensed in other jurisdictions. The evidence is public: testimony under oath, a judge’s finding of probable cause, court documents that speak for themselves. Investigations for potential disbarment should begin with senior leaders like Jennifer Newstead and Joel Kaplan, Meta’s respective heads of legal and public policy who bear responsibility under ethics rules for attorneys working under them.

Junior lawyers at the company who may have witnessed this systematic obstruction and failed to report it should also be scrutinized, as the rules of professional responsibility generally require lawyers to report professional misconduct by another lawyer “that raises a substantial question as to that lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness or fitness.” That none reported what they witnessed demands investigation at the very least. A stint in Meta’s legal department on a lawyer’s resume should be considered disqualifying by law firms and other future employers, making that lawyer unhireable if they cannot show that they spoke up about, or were otherwise unaware of, the suppression of evidence or harm. The fear of real consequences for playing a role in perpetrating such massive harm to American children should force Meta’s attorneys to either leave the company or to begin to stand up for what’s right.

Congress and state legislatures should also examine whether legal ethics rules require reform: whether attorney-client privilege has been extended too far when it shields corporations’ most questionable activities, and whether benefits of encouraging candid consultations with clients justify costs of facilitating cover-ups. Meta is not the only bad actor here, but it did get caught in the most egregious behavior. The unsealed court filings demonstrate similar behavior by Snap and by Google. OpenAI’s lawyers “accidentally” erased evidence compiled by The New York Times’s attorneys in its copyright lawsuit against the company. Judges have caught attorneys from Google and Apple withholding or destroying documents relevant to anti-trust trials. As Stuart Taylor in The Atlantic wrote of the tobacco lawyers two decades ago, we should invite the profession’s leaders to “explain why lawyers should remain free to hide evidence of corporate wrongdoing, mislead courts, and mangle the truth.”

The machinery for accountability exists. State bars can act tomorrow to investigate and suspend Meta’s attorneys. Judges can continue piercing false privilege claims and issue sanctions against bad-faith advocates. Legislators can demand bar associations justify their continued self-regulation and reform the rules of attorney-client privilege for corporations. Law firms can fire clients that ask them to violate their broader duties to the country and its courts. Importantly, holding corrupt, unethical lawyers accountable for enabling harms to children does not mean that we sacrifice the foundational tenet of the American legal system that John Adams championed: that even those we may despise — the redcoat soldier then, the billionaire and his exploitative empires now — will remain entitled to counsel who will zealously defend them, provided they follow the rules that the rest of us do.

Meta’s attorneys have forgotten that the law’s legitimacy derives from the integrity of those who practice it. For that reason, accountability for failing to follow the rules of professional ethics cannot be left in the hands of those who would pervert the principles at the heart of their profession so casually. Instead, it’s up to the rest of us — those who still believe law should serve justice — to ensure Meta’s attorneys are reminded of their obligations through real, material, swift, individual consequences. They are the architects of a system that harms children at an industrial scale, and every Meta lawyer who participated or stood by silently shares the moral stain of what the company has perpetrated.

Holding Meta accountable includes holding its lawyers accountable; the harm the company inflicts on young people could not exist without lawyers willing to enable it. Defrocking those lawyers could be what ends the impunity for Mark Zuckerberg, his lieutenants, and his empire.

The truth will out for Meta’s lawyers — eventually — as happened with Big Tobacco’s, but the stakes reach beyond any single company’s malfeasance or any one attorney’s lack of conscience. Just as tobacco lawyers’ corruption poisoned public trust, Meta’s attorneys threaten to complete the transformation of law into a service available only to those wealthy enough to corrupt it and shameless enough to ignore the wreckage. Whether courts can function, whether Americans believe law serves justice rather than a system many believe to be rigged, depends on whether those in power repudiate this conduct decisively, or whether they continue, through their inaction, to tacitly endorse it.

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The historical trends question: Was the spread of social media in the early 2010s (as smartphones were widely adopted) a major contributing cause of the big increases in adolescent depression, anxiety, and self-harm that began in the U.S. and many other Western countries soon afterward?

The product safety question: Is social media safe today for children and adolescents? When used in the ordinary way (which is now five hours a day), does this consumer product expose young people to unreasonable levels of risk and harm?

Social scientists are actively debating the historical trends question — we raised it in Chapter 1 of The Anxious Generation — but that’s not the one that matters to parents and legislators. They face decisions today and they need an answer to the product safety question. They want to know if social media is a reasonably safe consumer product, or if they should keep their kids (or all kids) away from it until they reach a certain age (as Australia is doing).

Social scientists have been debating this question intensively since 2017. That’s when Jean Twenge suggested an answer to both questions in her provocative article in The Atlantic: “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” In it, she showed a historical correlation: adolescent behavior changed and their mental health collapsed just at the point in time when they traded in their flip phones for smartphones with always-available social media. She also showed a correlation relevant to the product safety question: The kids who spend the most time on screens (especially for social media) are the ones with the worst mental health. She concluded that “it’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen [Gen Z] as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”

Twenge’s work was met with strong criticism from some social scientists whose main objection was that correlation does not prove causation (for both the historical correlation, and the product safety correlation). The fact that heavy users of social media are more depressed than light users doesn’t prove that social media caused the depression. Perhaps depressed people are more lonely, so they rely on Instagram more for social contact? Or perhaps there’s some third variable (such as neglectful parenting) that causes both?

Since 2017, that argument has been made by nearly all researchers who are dismissive about the harms of social media. Mark Zuckerberg used the argument himself in his 2024 testimony before the U.S. Senate. Under questioning by Senator Jon Osoff, he granted that the use of social media correlates with poor mental health but asserted that “there’s a difference between correlation and causation.”

In the last few years, however, a flood of new research has altered the landscape of the debate, in two ways. First, there is now a lot more work revealing a wide range of direct harms caused by social media that extends beyond mental health (e.g., cyberbullying, sextortion, and exposure to algorithmically amplified content promoting suicide, eating-disorders, and self-harm). These direct harms are not correlations; they are harms reported by millions of young people each year. Second, recent research — including experiments conducted by Meta itself — provides increasingly strong causal evidence linking heavy social media use to depression, anxiety, and other internalizing disorders. (We refer to these as indirect harms because they appear over time rather than right away).

Together, these findings allow us to answer the product safety question clearly: No, social media is not safe for children and adolescents. The evidence is abundant, varied, and damning. We have gathered it and organized it in two related projects which we invite you to read:

• A review paper, in press as part of the World Happiness Report 2026, in which we treat the product safety question as a mock civil-court case and organize the available research into seven lines of evidence. The first three lines reveal widespread direct harm to adolescents around the world. Lines four through seven reveal compelling evidence that social media substantially increases the risk of anxiety and depression, and that reducing social media use leads to improvements in mental health. Taken together, these lines of evidence provide a firm answer to the product safety question.

• MetasInternalResearch.org, a new website that catalogues 31 internal studies carried out by Meta Inc. The studies were leaked by whistleblowers or made public through litigation — despite Meta’s intentions to keep them hidden. The most incriminating among them: an experiment designed to establish causality, where Meta’s researchers concluded that social media causes harm to mental health.

In the rest of this post we present the Tables of Contents from these two projects, so that you can jump into the projects wherever you like and see for yourself the many kinds of research demonstrating harm to adolescents. After that, we return to the historical trends question to suggest an answer. We show that the scale of harm we found while answering the product safety question is so vast, affecting tens of millions of adolescents across many Western nations, that it suggests (though does not prove) that the global spread of social media in the early 2010s probably was a major contributor to the international decline of youth mental health in the following years. We suggested this in Chapter 1 of The Anxious Generation. The two mountains of evidence we present here make that suggestion even more plausible today.

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The Review Paper: Seven Lines of Evidence

The World Happiness Report (WHR) is a UN-backed annual ranking that has become the global reference point for national well-being research. It draws on Gallup World Poll data from more than 150 countries. We were invited to write a chapter for the upcoming WHR on the 2026 theme: the association between social media and well-being. Following their 2024 report, which documented a widespread decline of well being among young people, this year they ask whether social media’s global spread in the 2010s was a major contributor to that decline. Our chapter, “Social Media is Harming Young People at a Scale Large Enough to Cause Changes at the Population Level,” offers an answer to the product safety question — no — and to the historical trends question — yes.

The editors graciously allowed us to post our peer-reviewed chapter online before the March 19 publication date so that discussion and debate on this topic can begin immediately.

We structured the chapter as if we were filing a legal brief offering 15 exhibits organized into seven separate lines of evidence. The first three lines are the equivalent of testimony from witnesses in a trial. If the people who had the clearest view of an event say that Person A punched Person B, that would count as evidence of Person A’s guilt. The evidence is not definitive — the witnesses could be mistaken or lying — but it is legitimate and relevant evidence. Here’s the structure of that part of the chapter:

After establishing that the most knowledgeable witnesses perceive harm from social media, we move on to the four major lines of academic research. While most researchers agree that correlational studies find statistically significant associations between social media use and measures of anxiety and depression, and that social media reduction experiments find some benefits for mental health, the debate centers on whether the effects are large enough to matter.2 We show that the experimental effects and risk elevations are larger than is often implied — in fact, they are as large as many public health effects that our society takes very seriously (such as the impact of child maltreatment on the prospective risk of depression.)3

Furthermore, we take a magnifying glass to some widely cited studies that claim to show only trivial associations or effects between social media use and harm to adolescents (e.g., Hancock et al. (2022) and Ferguson (2024). We show that these studies actually reveal much larger associations when the most theoretically central relationships are examined — for example, when you focus the analysis on heavy social media use (rather than blending together all digital tech) linked specifically to depression or anxiety (rather than blending together all well-being outcomes) for adolescent girls (rather than blending in boys and adults).

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Meta’s Internal Research: Seven More Lines of Evidence

Throughout 2025, a variety of lawsuits against social media companies were progressing through the courts. In the briefs posted online by various state Attorneys General, we found references to dozens of studies that Meta had conducted. Some of this information had been available to the general public since 2021, when whistleblower Frances Haugen brought out thousands of screenshots of presentations and emails from her time working at Meta. Others were newly found by litigators in the process of discovery.4

The descriptions of these studies are scattered across multiple legal briefs, most of which are hundreds of pages long, so it has been difficult to keep track of them — until now. We have collected all publicly available information about the studies in one central repository, MetasInternalResearch.org. Indexed in this way, the scattered reports form a mountain of evidence that social media is not safe for children. The evidence was collected and hidden by Meta itself.

We found information on 31 studies related to the product safety question that Meta conducted between 2018 and 2024. Meta has long hired PhD researchers, particularly psychologists, to conduct internal research projects. (In January 2020, Jon met with members of this team and shared his concerns about what Instagram was doing to girls.) Meta’s researchers have access to vast troves of data on billions of users, including what exactly users saw and what emotions or behaviors they showed afterward. (This is known as “user-behavioral log data.”) Academic researchers never get access to rich data like this; they must devise their own surveys, which obtain a few crude proxy variables (such as “how many hours a day do you spend on social media?” and “How anxious were you yesterday?”). So we should pay attention to what Meta’s researchers found and how they interpreted their findings.

In one example, recently unsealed court documents from lawsuits brought by U.S. school districts against Meta and other platforms reveal that Meta conducted its own randomized control trial (considered to be the best way to study causal impact) in 2019 with the marketing research firm Nielsen. The project — code-named Project Mercury — asked a group of users to deactivate their Facebook and Instagram accounts for one month. According to the filings, Meta described the design of their study as being “of much higher quality” than the existing literature and that this study was “one of our first causal approaches to understand the impact that Facebook has on people’s lives… Everyone involved in the project has a PhD.” In pilot tests of the study, researchers found that “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison.” One Meta researcher also stated that “the Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison.”

In other words, Meta’s own research on the effects of social media reduction confirms those from academic researchers that we report in Line 6 of our review paper. Both sets of researchers find evidence of causation, not mere correlation.

We were impressed by the great variety of methods that Meta’s researchers used. In fact, the 31 studies we located fit neatly into seven lines that are similar to the seven lines we used in our review paper. The findings from Meta researchers are highly consistent with the findings from academic researchers, which gives us even more confidence in our conclusions about the product safety question.

Here’s the Table of Contents. Once again, after the introductory material, we present three lines of testimony:

We then move on to lines 4, 5, and 6, which correspond exactly to lines 4, 5, and 6 in the review paper: correlational, longitudinal, and experimental studies, although line 7 is unique. (It involves reviews of academic literature conducted by Meta’s researchers.)

Returning to the Historical Trends Question

The product safety question is distinct from the historical trends question. A consumer product (e.g., a toy or food) can be unsafe for children without it producing an immediate or easily detectable increase in national rates of a particular illness.5

But social media is an unusual consumer product because of its vast user base and the enormous amount of time it takes from most users. It’s as if a new candy bar, intentionally designed to be addictive, was introduced in 2012 and, within a few years, 90% of the world’s children were consuming ten of these candy bars each day, which reduced their consumption of all other foods. Might there be increases in national rates of adolescent obesity and diabetes?

In our WHR review paper, we estimate the scale of direct harms (e.g., cyberbullying, sextortion, and exposure to disturbing content) and indirect harms (e.g., elevated risks of depression, anxiety, and eating disorders). We then show that these estimates are likely underestimates because they don’t account for network effects inherent to social media, nor the heightened impact of heavy use during the sensitive developmental period of puberty. All told, the number of affected children and adolescents likely reaches into the hundreds of millions, globally.

Once we consider the vast scale at which social media operates — used by the large majority of young people, for many hours each day, over many years, and across nearly all Western nations — it becomes clear that social media companies are harming young people on an industrial scale. It becomes far more plausible that this consumer product caused national levels of adolescent depression and anxiety to rise, especially for girls.

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Conclusion: What Now?

Academic debates over media effects often take decades to resolve. We expect that this one will continue for many years. But parents and policymakers cannot wait for resolution; they must make decisions now, based on the available evidence. The evidence we have collected shows clearly that social media is not safe for adolescents.

We believe that the evidence of direct and indirect harm that we have collected in these two complementary projects is now sufficient to justify the sort of action that the Australian government took in 2025 when it raised the age for opening or maintaining a social media account to 16. Just as the recent international trend of removing smartphones from schools is beginning to produce educational benefits, the research we reviewed suggests that removing social media from childhood and early adolescence is likely to produce a great variety of benefits, including lower rates of depression and many fewer victims of direct harms such as sexual harassment and sextortion.

Countries around the world ran a giant uncontrolled experiment on their own children in the 2010s by giving them smartphones and social media accounts at young ages. The evidence is in: the experiment has harmed them. It is time to call it off.

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Bloomberg, in an article titled “TikTok, Instagram Ban for Australian Kids Heralds Global Curbs,” provides a list of countries in which legislation has been, or soon will be, introduced:

The idea is spreading, and each nation considering such a policy should ask two important questions:

1. Should the age be 16, as in Australia, or should it be 15, as might become the case in France?

2. Should there be an option for parents to give consent for adolescents below that age?

The correct answers: 16, and no.

Here’s why:

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We must protect puberty, and 15 is still puberty

I devoted an entire chapter of The Anxious Generation to puberty because it is such a crucial period of brain re-wiring and identity formation. Developmental psychologists see puberty as a “sensitive period” in which the brain is especially “plastic” or malleable based on incoming experience. The brain is changing over from the child form to the adult form, and those changes are guided by whatever a child does repeatedly. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.

The average adolescent in the U.S. now spends around five hours a day using social media. Their brains will enhance whichever neurons and circuits are activated repeatedly, at the expense of neurons and circuits that are underused. This brain sculpting happens throughout childhood, and continues on in the pre-frontal cortex until around age 25. But in the earlier part of adolescence — specifically puberty — the sculpting is more intense, and the changes are more likely to be permanent.

The age range of puberty varies across cultures and historical eras, but in modern developed nations it generally begins between ages 8–13 for girls and a year or two later for boys. By almost any measure, the median boy and the median girl are still in puberty on their 15th birthday. Most are still getting taller. Their secondary sex characteristics are still changing. Large population studies of American and European teens show that the median girl reaches Tanner stage 5 (the last stage of genital development) between 15 and 16, while the median boy reaches stage 5 around 16 or 17. There is wide variation for both sexes. The ability to self-regulate improves steadily throughout adolescence, only reaching a plateau in the mid 20s.

In other words: Half or more of all girls are still in puberty on their 15th birthday, and half or more of all boys are still in puberty on their 16th birthday. This is a major reason why 16 is a much better choice for a minimum age than 15. (Of course, 18 would be even better than 16, but we nominated 16 as the norm in The Anxious Generation because our goal was to pick the highest age that we thought could actually get enacted across many jurisdictions.)

Puberty is the period when parents should be most careful about how their children spend their time and who (or what) is influencing their developing brains and identities. Traditionally, human societies helped children make the jump from child to adult during this crucial period, with rites of passage in which trusted, non-parental adults guided them through challenges, hardships, and lessons.

But what do we do in Western nations? We generally mark the beginning of puberty by giving kids smartphones (average age in the U.S. is around 11 or 12). We then outsource their social and neural development to Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. The results have been catastrophic for their mental health, social relationships, education, and ability to focus for more than a few minutes.

So does it matter whether the age cutoff is 15, rather than 16? Yes. Puberty is the time when social media is likely to do the most damage, and most adolescents, including the large majority of boys, are still in puberty at 15. A 2022 paper by Orben and her colleagues even found that there was a peak “developmental window of sensitivity to social media,” such that heavy use by boys at ages 14 and 15 most strongly predicted decreased life satisfaction a year later. (For girls the peak sensitivity was ages 11 through 13).

Sixteen may feel like a more obvious or natural choice for the age of “digital adulthood” in the U.S. because the minimum age for a driver’s license is 16 in most states, (though it is higher in most other countries). Similarly, people in some European countries may see 15 as an obvious or natural choice because that is the age of consent in some countries, the age at which adolescents can legally engage in sexual activity.

But the fact remains: Any nation that sets 15 as the minimum age rather than 16 will condemn its children to an extra year of brain-sculpting by social media at a time when their brains are still highly sculptable. It will also greatly increase the risk of exposure to pornography, sextortion, online cruelty, and other risky interactions with anonymous strangers at an age when teens have less ability to self-regulate or know what is safe.

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Parental-consent exceptions put parents right back into the trap

Parents everywhere have heard their children invoke the mantra “but everyone else has one! I’m being left out!” in their daily struggles over smartphones, tablets, social media, video games, and other screen-based activities. And the kids are largely correct. Now that almost everyone else has one, everyone feels that they, too, have to have one. That’s a perfect example of what economists call a collective action trap, where everyone ends up doing something sub-optimal because if they were the only one to choose the better action, they’d actually end up even worse off.

The way to escape from a collective action trap is collectively. If most families only give basic phones before age 14, then no 13-year-old can say “but I’m the only one who doesn’t have an iPhone!” If most families wait until 16 before allowing their kids to open social media accounts, that would also reduce the pressure on everyone younger than that to open a social media account.

But while parents can choose the age at which their child gets a phone, no parent has full control over when their child opens social media accounts. If the child can get to the internet anywhere, including at school, she can open as many accounts as she likes as long as she’s old enough to say she’s 13.

This is why parents need help from their governments, and from the platforms (which have shown repeatedly that they will not protect children unless forced to by law). This is why the Australian law is so important: It delays the struggle over social media until the age of 16.

Any country that adds in a provision for parental consent at younger ages plunges everyone back into the collective action trap. We’re right back to “But all of my friends’ parents gave them permission!”1

Simple uniform laws are more effective than a variety of complicated ones

A third consideration is that simple rules are generally best for a complex world, as legal scholars Richard Epstein and Philip Howard have long argued. People understand and remember them. They are easier to enforce. And for social media — by its nature international and placeless — a patchwork quilt of different age and parental-permission rules means that underage kids could (and many will) use a VPN to find a country in which they can easily open a social media account.

As a bonus, a simple and widespread age limit of 16 would be much easier for social media platforms to enforce effectively. They don’t want different rules across different countries. If we make things easy for them, they’ll be more effective at enforcing the law.

As an additional bonus, large majorities of parents, and adults more broadly, say in surveys that they support laws that set an age limit for opening social media accounts. See findings from the U.S., from Australia, from the UK, France, and Germany (twice). Any politician who gets out in front of this issue will find voters from right, left, and center standing up and applauding.

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At the beginning of 2025, we worked with partners to establish five principles for effective phone-free school legislation. We have been thrilled to see many countries and U.S. states adopt policies that follow these recommendations. The model provided clarity about the choices to be made. Phone-free school policies have been widely successful across many jurisdictions.

So, as countries and states consider following Australia’s lead in 2026, we want to offer a similar set of features for an ideal social media age-limit policy.

Four Recommended Features of Age Limit Policies

Feature 1: Set the minimum age at 16 or higher

As discussed previously, protecting children during puberty is essential. Social media is wildly inappropriate for children and younger adolescents. One internal Instagram study found that 11% of 13-15 year olds reported being a target of bullying, 13% reported receiving an unwanted sexual advance, 19% reported seeing unwanted sexually explicit content, and 21% reported seeing posts that made them feel worse about themselves every seven days. In a recent Pew poll, 45% of teens reported that they themselves felt they used social media too much with many suggesting that it affects their sleep and their grades. Fifteen is too young. It also undercuts the power of the norm in countries that set it to 16.

Feature 2: Do not make exceptions for parental consent

Don’t make parents’ jobs even harder by giving their kids one more thing to beg for. Setting a single, clear age minimum with no loopholes does parents a favor. Imagine if every child could plead with their parents to get a drivers license at any age. Governments routinely set minimum ages for products and activities that could harm or exploit children, such as driving a car, signing up for a credit card, or drinking alcohol — social media is no different. Keep the policy simple and uniform for everyone and make parenting a little bit easier for us all.

Feature 3: Focus on account creation, not access to content

Setting age-limit policies based on content (what kinds of things kids see) prompts never-ending debates about what content is inappropriate for children (e.g., what counts as too sexually explicit, how violent is too violent?, etc.). It can also lead to charges of content-based or viewpoint-based censorship. This is why we recommend orienting the law not around content but around the age at which minors can sign contracts with companies in which they agree to give away personal data and expose themselves fully to the company’s addictive algorithms, without their parents’ knowledge or consent. We think it is important to allow logged-off access to content, as Australia’s policy does. Children under 16 can still search sites such as YouTube for whatever content they want. They can easily view any video that a teacher assigns or a friend recommends. But if they do not have an account and have not signed a contract with the company, then they cannot compare the popularity of pictures of themselves, receive tailored late night notifications, be served more and more extreme content, or be contacted by strangers via messaging. Without this inappropriate business relationship and access to the extensive data they currently collect from kids, companies will find it much harder to train algorithms and use design features to manipulate and exploit kids.

Feature 4: Define “social media” in terms of design features

While several platforms are currently the obvious targets of legislation because of the outsized role they play in kids’ lives, any definition of “social media” will inevitably invite challenges by companies who host different activities and have varied feature sets. By focusing on the design features that cause harm, we can capture video-game platforms that facilitate adult/minor solicitation and video-hosting platforms that maximize engagement through algorithms. Platforms that do not need these potentially harmful features will want to avoid the increased regulation and risk, and will therefore have an incentive to keep them out.

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Conclusion

We would love to take credit for the success of phone-free school policies, and for the growing international interest in social media age-limit policies. The reality is, though, that these policies and ideas succeed because they address something that most parents, teachers, and children experience every day: the technology-facilitated manipulation of one of our most precious resources — the time and attention of our kids. Policymakers, parents, and kids themselves are fighting back. In fact, on the New York Times tech podcast Hard Fork, co-host Casey Newton offered his number-one prediction for a 2026 tech trend:

Sixteen plus becomes the new norm for social media accounts worldwide… by the end of 2026 we’ve seen at least five other democracies introduce similar rules.

Bravo to Australia, and bravo to the five (or more) countries that will turn Australia’s bold move into a new international standard. Let’s make 16+ the standard around the globe.

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When The Anxious Generation came out in March 2024, we expected that many parents would read it, but we had no idea how quickly the world was going to change. By the end of 2025, institutions, governments, and communities around the world began to respond to alarms parents had been raising for years.

As Jon wrote in a recent New York Times article, 2025 is a turning point for the movement to reclaim childhood. If you’re an After Babel subscriber, we know you share our concern about how technology is affecting kids. You may have children or grandchildren yourself — and you may sometimes feel like you’re in an uphill battle against the tech companies, devices, and screentime. But the tide is turning, and we are filled with hope as we look back at some of the incredible progress the world has made toward rolling back the phone-based childhood this year. To name just a few of those wins:

• We witnessed spectacular steps forward in policy-change: Across the United States, 40 states have now enacted or advanced phone-free school legislation; in Brazil, all schools went phone-free nationwide. Everyday now, teachers share with us anecdotes about kids laughing in the hallways, playing games at the lunch table, being more attentive in class, and reading more books.

• On Dec. 10, Australia turned one of the four norms from The Anxious Generation into a landmark law: They set an age minimum that prevents anyone under the age of 16 from entering into contracts with tech platforms that can exploit or harm them. Similar proposals are now being advanced in Brazil, Denmark, and Malaysia.

• Cultural change is moving just as quickly to restore the play-based childhood. Families around the globe are giving their children more freedom to roam in the real world and setting up landline pods. Many Gen Z’ers themselves are speaking out and pushing back.

As this work has scaled, so has the need for connective leadership across research, culture, and policy-change efforts. Alexa Arnold joined us right after the book debuted to build our social impact approach, focused on driving policy, culture and behavior change across the globe. Behind the scenes, we are meeting this moment through our three interconnected entities: The Anxious Generation Movement (social impact), the Tech & Society Lab at NYU Stern (research), and this publication, After Babel. Together, and working closely with our partners, our team of researchers, strategists, communicators, and policy experts have expanded on the insights and solutions of The Anxious Generation and translated them into real-world change, always grounded in rigorous science. Beyond contributing to the wins above, we’ve been working tirelessly to add fuel to the rapidly spreading movement:

• The Anxious Generation hit more than 85 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, becoming a cultural and political touchstone and mobilizing tens of thousands of parents, teachers, and young people.

• Just yesterday, we released The Amazing Generation — the new companion book for kids — putting practical, empowering tools directly into families’ hands and helping children choose life IRL over life online.

• We formally established the Tech and Society Lab at NYU Stern, dedicated to understanding how digital technologies reshape childhood and adolescence. The lab published several working papers and essays engaging directly with debates over social media and youth mental health, while also expanding its scope well beyond that question.

• We published extensively on After Babel and in the popular press, examining a wide range of topics, including online gambling, video games, and the rapid spread of AI chatbots.

• We laid the groundwork for several major releases coming in 2026, including a feature article for The World Happiness Report that addresses social media’s causal impact on youth mental health, and a new public resource compiling and analyzing dozens of internal studies conducted inside Meta, many of which have garnered little prior media attention.

Here on After Babel, we published 67 articles by 66 distinct authors (several essays were co-authored), reaching hundreds of thousands of readers around the globe. Below we’ve included our top 10 most-read essays from 2025 — we hope you’ll revisit and share them.

Before we close out this remarkable year, we want to thank all 172,000+ of you for reading After Babel, for supporting this movement, and for being part of a growing global effort to understand and shape the future of childhood in the digital age.

Our operation, including After Babel, is completely powered by philanthropy. If you’re excited about what we’ve done and where we’re headed and would like to make a year-end gift, we invite you to do so at anxiousgeneration.com/donate.

We wish you all a happy new year!

– Jon, Zach, and Alexa

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Top Ten Most Read After Babel Posts of 2025

#10. Time To Refuse

by Freya India
(October 5, 2025, 177k reads)

In this manifesto, a group of Gen Z writers reflect on what it meant to grow up online and issue a call for young adults to reclaim their lives, attention, and humanity from tech.

Excerpt: “For our generation, we need to acknowledge what we’ve lost. To grieve a time we never knew. We are the first to try and handle adolescence while performing and marketing ourselves at the same time. The first to never know friendship before it became keeping up SnapStreaks, community before it became Instagram and Reddit forums, or finding love before it became swiping and subscription models. The next generation has a chance, but for us, there’s no getting our adolescence back. This is where we are.

…We have a choice here: become someone rare, live a life that’s real and different and means something, or continue handing over our lives, our creativity, our humility, our privacy, our dignity, and allow companies to rob us not only of our childhood but the rest of our lives too. We are not vulnerable children anymore—we are adults with agency. And the choice before us is between being a product or a person. Between imaginary worlds and reality. Between a life well lived and a life half-lived. Between reaching our full potential or forever battling for our own focus. This is a fight for our peace of mind, for our relationships, for our humanity.”

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#9. The Most Compelling Argument Against Tech in Schools

by Jon Haidt and Sophie Winkleman
(February 27, 2025, 185k reads)

Sophie Winkleman reflects on what screens and educational technology are doing to childhood, learning, and human connection.

Excerpt: “Children who have their eyes on the teacher at the front of the classroom learn better than they do from a screen. Why is the rush to remove human beings from the learning experience so lauded? Why is it considered progress to render ourselves obsolete?”

#8. It Was the Damn Phones

by Kori Janes
(June 12, 2025, 180k reads)

A powerful poem from Gen Z poet Kori Janes.

Excerpt: “We used to be scared of robots gaining consciousness, a lie by the media companies.

To keep us distracted enough, so not to become conscious of the mess they created.

We are the robots. We are the product. And so I sit and I scroll and I rot on repeat.

Sit and scroll and rot.

Until my thoughts are what is being fed to me on TV,

until my feelings are wrapped up in celebrities,

until my body is a tool of my political identity.

I sit and I scroll and I rot.

And I post on the internet how the internet has failed us

so that I may not fail my internet presence. I think our parents were right.

It was the damn phones.”

#7. TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale

by Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch
(Jan 9, 2025, 181k reads)

A dive into the internal research conducted and conversations TikTok executives and employees had about adolescent health.

Excerpt: “We show that company insiders were aware of multiple widespread and serious harms, and that they were often acting under the orders of company leadership to maximize engagement regardless of the harm to children. As one internal report put it:

“Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” in addition to “interfer[ing] with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.”1

Although these harms are known, the company often chooses not to act. For example, one TikTok employee explained,

“[w]hen we make changes, we make sure core metrics aren’t affected.” This is because “[l]eaders don’t buy into problems” with unhealthy and compulsive usage, and work to address it is “not a priority for any other team.”

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#6. Snapchat is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale

by Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch
(April 16, 2025, 192k reads)

A dive into the internal research conducted and conversations Snap executives and employees had about adolescent health.

Excerpt: “Similar to TikTok, we show that company insiders were aware of multiple widespread and serious harms, and in many cases did not act promptly or make substantial changes. As Snap’s director of security engineering said regarding Android users who are selling drugs or child sexual abuse material on Snap:

“That’s fine it’s been broken for ten years we can tolerate tonight.”

With regard to sextortion on the platform [Snap receives ~10,000 cases of sextortion each month], one employee had complained in a private channel:

“God I’m so pissed that were over-run by this sextortion shit right now. We’ve twiddled our thumbs and wrung our hands all f…ing year.”

The briefs allege that the company is also aware of rampant underage use, and of the ineffectiveness of their age gating process. Snap executives have admitted that Snapchat’s age verification system

“Is effectively useless in stopping underage users from signing up to the Snapchat app.”

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#5. We Are The Slop

By Freya India
(September 29, 2025, 201k reads)

Freya India argues that we are not just consuming millions of hours of mindless entertainment — but that we are turning our own lives into it.

Excerpt: “That after offering everything up, every inch of their lives, every finite moment on this Earth, it does not matter how much they stage, how much they rehearse, how much they trade, how long they leave the cameras rolling, we will always wonder, eventually, what else is on?”

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#4. It’s Not Just a Game Anymore

By Bennett Sippel and Zach Rausch
(July 21, 2025, 219k reads)

Bennett Sippel and Zach Rausch show how new monetization models changed online gaming, and offer advice to parents.

Excerpt: “Game companies know about these problems, yet they try to push their users to whatever will make them the most profit regardless of the risks to the users. For example, EA’s FIFA game monetizes users with FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) mode which incentivizes users to spend on FUT packs to build the best soccer team. In a leaked internal presentation 2021 from EA, owner of FIFA, it stated the following:

“Players will be actively messaged + incentivized to convert throughout the summer. FUT is the cornerstone and we are doing everything we can to drive players there.”

Many developers understand the problems too. That’s why some of them don’t let their own children play the games they help create. As one explained in a New York Times op-ed titled I Make Video Games. I Won’t Let My Daughters Play Them, the concern is real. The author said that in regards to his own children,

Thinking about my games in my daughters’ hands, I had to confront what these products really were and what they could do. Knowing all the techniques with which we tried to bring about addiction, I realized I didn’t want my children exposed to that risk.

Even employees inside major gaming companies are speaking up. In one lawsuit filed against Roblox, one Roblox employee was quoted saying:

You’re supposed to make sure that your users are safe but the downside to that, if you’re limiting user engagement, it’s hurting our metrics. It’s hurting our active users, the time spent on the platform, and in a lot of cases leadership doesn’t want that.”

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#3. The Devil’s Plan to Ruin the Next Generation

by Jon Haidt
(Dec 1, 2025, 238k reads)

An essay on how the devil would destroy the next generation, from the perspective of ChatGPT.

Excerpt: “Earlier this year, someone started a viral trend of asking ChatGPT this question: If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation, without them even knowing it?

Chat’s responses were profound and unsettling: “I wouldn’t come with violence. I’d come with convenience.” “I’d keep them busy. Always distracted.”

“I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”

As a social psychologist who has been trying since 2015 to figure out what on earth was happening to Gen Z, I was stunned. Why? Because what the AI proposed doing is pretty much what technology seems to be doing to children today. It seemed to be saying: If the devil wanted to destroy a generation, he could just give them all smartphones.”

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#2. On The Death of Daydreaming

by Christine Rosen
(May 5, 2025, 241k reads)

Christine Rosen on how a world without boredom is a world that steadily erodes our humanity.

Excerpt: “Can you remember the last time you daydreamed? Or coped with boredom without reaching for your phone? Before the era of mobile technology, most of us had no choice but to wait without stimulation, and often, that meant being bored.

But today we need never be bored. We have an indefatigable boredom-killing machine: the smartphone. No matter how brief our wait, the smartphone promises an alleviation for our suffering.”

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#1. The Mass Trauma of Porn

by Freya India
(June 4, 2025, 268k reads)

Freya India reflects on how growing up with unlimited access to online pornography has altered a generation’s understanding of intimacy and humanity.

Excerpt: “Imagine you meet a teenage girl who starts telling you about her childhood, when she mentions, somewhat casually, that she was shown porn by a strange man. He introduced her to it when she was nine, before she had even held hands with a boy, before she had gotten her first period, without her parents knowing. Week after week, he showed her more, each time something more extreme. By ten it seemed normal. By eleven, she was watching regularly on her own. She is calm about this, reassuring you that this has happened to most of her friends.

Would anyone think this was normal? Part of coming-of-age, her healthy development? Exploring her sexuality? Or would we call this abuse?

This is exactly what is happening to children today when we hand them a smartphone. But instead of one stranger introducing them to porn, it is a billion-dollar industry, profiting from their trauma.”

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For years, parents have asked us both for a book they could give to their kids to help them understand how tech affects their brains and lives.

So we teamed up, and we wrote it: The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World.We’re so excited to get it into kids’ hands.

Aimed at 9–12 year-olds — and relevant whether or not they already have smartphones or social media accounts — The Amazing Generation is a companion to The Anxious Generation, and is perfect for families to read together or for kids to read on their own.

Our goal was to inspire kids to embrace the Four Norms from The Anxious Generation for themselves.

The Four Norms:

1. No smartphones until at least 14

2. No social media until at least 16

3. Phone-free schools from bell to bell

4. More responsibility, freedom, and free play in the real world

The book provides readers with a choice: they can follow the crowd and spend their teen years scrolling, or they can join the growing rebellion of young people who are deciding to limit their own exposure to addictive devices and algorithms and put their energy toward having experiences and relationships in the real world.

The book is fun to read. It’s packed with surprising facts, interactive challenges, secrets tech leaders don’t want kids to know — and includes a graphic novel by Cynthia Yuan Cheng. It’s also full of real-life stories from young adults who regret using smartphones and social media too early and want to help the next generation make better choices.

But, ultimately, the book isn’t just about what not to do. It’s a guide to living a fun and fulfilling life. At its heart is what we call The Rebels’ Code:

Our hope is that parents and educators can use the book to spark meaningful, productive conversations about tech with their kids and students, and that young readers will finish the book feeling inspired to become rebels themselves. In other words, it’s a tool for collective action by kids, families, schools, and even whole towns. We hope that you’ll share it with your own communities and family members.

The book comes out Dec. 30, but we’re thrilled to share a sneak preview with you. It’s from a section called “Secrets of the Tech Wizards.”

Here’s to helping the next generation become amazing.

—Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, and Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone

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A Preview of The Amazing Generation

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Excerpt from The Amazing Generation: “Secrets of the Tech Wizards”

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What Kids Are Saying

Below are several thank-you notes we’ve received from real kids who have heard us talk about the book (all shared with their permission).

Talita Pruett, a California mom of three children ages 14, 13, and 5, is doing everything she can to be a present, involved parent. But one issue weighs on her more than anything else: guilt over media.

She has tried it all: screen-time limits, content filters, charging phones in her bedroom at night, and regular conversations about healthy media habits. Still, she says, guilt lingers, both about her children’s media use and her own.

At first, the family had a strict rule: no phones until age 16. But when Talita’s oldest started high school, the rule proved impossible to maintain — all of her daughter’s peers had smartphones, so she reluctantly agreed to let her have one as well. Within weeks, she noticed her daughter’s grades slipping and wondered if she had made a mistake.

With her middle child, Talita questions whether she has been too strict about screentime rules, even though he already shows some warning signs of media struggles. And then there’s her youngest. Talita says she feels the most guilt about her five-year-old, who uses far more media than her older children did at the same age.

“Sometimes I feel like a complete failure as a parent when I try to help them manage their screen use. It truly feels impossible,” Talita said. “I feel guilty that I might be doing too much. ... And then I feel guilty that I’m not doing enough. We have limits in place and are doing our best, but I still feel so guilty all the time,” she confessed.

Talita is not alone — worry and guilt over children’s media use has become an everyday part of being a parent. New data from the United States collected by one of us (Coyne) in a paper currently under review shows that about half of parents feel guilty about the amount of time their children spend on media. About half also agree with the statement, “I often worry I am not as good at parenting my child around media as I should.”

Widespread parental guilt is an underappreciated cost of the new technological landscape — another societal harm to lay at the feet of tech giants. These tech companies do not act in good faith to help parents, and they actively impede parents from raising their children in the ways they believe is best for their kids’ development.

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Guilt by Design

Tech companies’ design choices give them an unfair advantage over parents like Talita who are trying to do what’s best for their children when it comes to media use. This ultimately sets parents up for an endless cycle of guilt. Features like infinite scroll, autoplay, incessant notifications, FOMO, peer validation, and cheap dopamine hits are just a few of the ways tech companies keep kids engaged. These intentional design choices keep kids online much longer than is healthy — and far longer than many parents would prefer.

And tech companies make a lot of money doing this. A study from Harvard found that social media companies made $11 billion from advertising aimed at children in 2022. Advertisers are willing to cough up this eleven-figure sum because social media platforms extract huge amounts of time and attention from kids.

With so much effort and money directed at hacking children’s attention, it is no wonder most parents experience a wide spectrum of guilt related to their children’s media consumption. Coyne’s data showed that many parents feel guilty about being inconsistent in their parenting or disciplining around media (55%); the amount of time their children spend on media (46%); and putting their own needs regarding media above their children (67%). A majority (57%) worry that they should spend more time with their child instead of on their phone.

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Out of Control

The difficulties parents face with setting media and screentime boundaries was highlighted earlier this year in a study by the Family Online Safety Institute, which found that only around half of parents use parental control on tablets, with even fewer using parental controls on other devices. Another study asked parents what they thought about parental controls for gaming. Parents said that such controls “don’t always work as promised, offer little context about how settings affect gameplay, and force binary choices that don’t align with household rules or with children’s maturity levels.”

In short, the parental controls that do exist place a heavy burden on parents. They must learn about different controls across multiple platforms, figure out how to implement them, and monitor the controls to ensure they remain effective, while trying to balance children’s growing autonomy and need for privacy as they enter the teenage years. This would be difficult even if the tech companies wanted wholeheartedly to help parents place reasonable limits on their children’s media consumption, which they do not. Rather than building a dangerous digital highway and then expecting each overworked parent to construct their own guardrails, tech companies could instead be required to build safety features into the products so the digital environment is not so dangerous and addictive in the first place.

Conclusion

You might assume parental guilt is a generational issue, with older parents wringing their hands about new technologies that they struggle to understand. But our research found the exact opposite. Guilt increased as mother’s age decreased (an effect size of -0.10), meaning that younger mothers experienced more guilt, perhaps because they are the first generation to experience it firsthand. They know all too well the ways that new media can affect your self-esteem, concentration, social relationships, and time management, and they want to protect their children from these effects. A recent Harris poll found that clear majorities of parents wish that many social media platforms, including TikTok, X, Instagram, and Facebook were never invented.

What can parents do with their guilt? The first thing to keep in mind is that you are not alone. More than half of the other parents in your neighborhood feel like you do. Guilt is often a sign that something is off, but the fact that so many parents feel guilt over media use means that this isn’t an individual problem for individual families, it’s a problem for our society and our communities. This shared emotion points towards the need to come together to advocate changes in the way technology operates. For your own home, organizations like Children and Screens and Common Sense Media offer evidence-based guidance for how to help children have a healthy relationship with technology.

And finally, give yourself a little grace. Feeling guilty doesn’t necessarily mean you are a failure. In fact, guilt about media use probably means that you pay attention to your child’s media use and know it can be better. This makes you better prepared to support healthy media habits, while also recognizing that sometimes the guilt parents feel is really just a manifestation of the way that technology companies have taken advantage of children’s developing brains, rather than supporting them.

Parents absorb the burden of guilt while tech companies reap the profits. Parents should demand products and media content which are designed to help and support children, not siphon as much time and attention as possible.

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