A Note on a Correction from Jon and Zach
Regarding our retraction of the guest post "30 Facts About Childhood Today that Will Terrify You"
Note (March 17, 2026): After recognizing that the guest post titled “30 Facts About Childhood Today that Will Terrify You” included inaccuracies, we made the decision to remove it from our Substack.
After Babel is built on rigorous research, and we take the trust our readers place in us seriously. We believe it is important to acknowledge when we get something wrong. In this case, our editorial process didn’t meet that standard, and the post was published without sufficient vetting. We appreciate the feedback we received from attentive readers.
– Jon and Zach
So I tend to agree with this, but some of the sources seem...not to be the greatest?
The first link just goes to a blog post that cites "the current statistics", and "4–7 minutes" doesn't actually seem to be based on current rigorous studies (unless someone knows of an actual source?).
The point that students are "struggling to remember almost anything" leads to a page that, as far as I can tell, doesn't say anything of the sort.
The assertion that kids "don’t know multiplication tables" comes from a study done in India – of course, math skills in India (and anywhere) are important, but we don't know what the situation was there previously; the article only mentions that there was a (slight) dip in overall math scores since 2017. I taught in a developing country pre-smartphones and most of the kids there didn't know their times tables, so this may be about educational inequality rather than technology.
Other links go to Reddit and even TikTok...it's always been easy to find anecdotal evidence that "kids today" are so much worse than they used to be.
Some of the other links are more difficult for me to quickly assess, but it's not clear that they all come from unbiased sources or large-scale studies.
I write this as a supporter and someone who is personally convinced that the overuse of technology has been a disaster for childhood (and adulthood). And I've only heard good things about The Honest Broker. I just think we have to be careful to build our arguments on the firmest foundation possible.
I tried to follow the links back to the statements about children's inability to use a knife or have difficulties with using the bathroom. All links were paywalled, but after some sleuthing, it turns out the source appears to be a blog, Netmoms, which doesn't link to any data. I think Ted Gioia and Johnathan Haidt are intelligent, thoughtful writers. But this is sloppy work that misinforms and has no place in their work. Shameful, I expect more.