Invitation to a Zoom Call With Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch, for Founding Members

Dear founding members of the After Babel Substack:

When The Anxious Generation was published in March 2024, we hoped it would spark a global conversation about what kind of relationship we (adults and children) want to have with digital technology in an era of exponential technological change. But we did not anticipate the scale or speed of what followed, or the way parents — especially mothers — around the world would step forward and say, clearly and forcefully, that childhood does not belong to smartphones, social media, and addictive digital products.

In just a few short years, we’ve watched parents organize into new nonprofits; educators and administrators reclaim phone-free schools; and legislators across dozens of states and countries pass or propose laws that would have seemed politically impossible not long ago. We’ve seen entire nations (Bravo, Australia) move toward setting 16 as the minimum age for social media. Most importantly, we’ve seen children gain more freedom in the …