A new analysis shows 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.
The anti-social-media brigade has missed the point.
Screens are not the real problem. Social media is not the real problem. They are symptoms of a much deeper failure in how we raise and educate children. Australia’s under-16 social media law is a good example of a political class reacting before thinking, it treats the screen as the cause, when in truth the screen has rushed in to fill a vacuum we ourselves have created. Australia did pass a minimum-age law for social media, and parliamentary scrutiny later also pointed to the need for broader design and duty-of-care reforms, which is precisely the point: the issue is larger than the app.
Children are not born passive. They are born curious. They are born exploratory. They are born wanting to master the world. You see it in a baby learning to walk, falling and trying again. You see it in a toddler throwing food from a high chair, not because the child is naughty, but because the child is running an experiment. You see it in every healthy child who climbs, builds, imitates, risks, negotiates, argues, plays, fails, and returns for more. The natural condition of childhood is not avoidance. It is engagement.
What have we done? We have built a culture that removes struggle from childhood and then acts surprised when children become fragile. We smooth the path, lower the bar, over-supervise, over-explain, over-accommodate, over-diagnose, and then hand children devices to pacify the rest. We have confused comfort with development. But children do not become curious, resilient, brave, or confident by being protected from stress. They become those things by meeting manageable stress, mastering it, and discovering that they can survive it.
That is the real issue. Childhood is supposed to contain friction. Not trauma. Not chaos. Not neglect. But friction. Effort. Waiting. Boredom. Disappointment. Social risk. Physical challenge. Trial and error. The small struggles through which a child learns, “I can do hard things.” Remove that, and you do not produce a safer child. You produce a weaker one.
That is why I do not accept the lazy narrative that social media is the villain and banning it is the solution. A ban may deal with one outlet, but it does nothing to address the deeper developmental emptiness that made the outlet so seductive in the first place. If a child has not been prepared to tolerate boredom, pursue mastery, seek meaning, and enjoy real-world competence, then of course the phone wins. The phone offers stimulation without effort, novelty without risk, and reward without struggle. It is not the cause of the developmental deficit. It exploits it.
We are not preparing children for life. We are preparing them for avoidance. We are not preparing them to be adventurous in mind or character. We are preparing them to seek regulation through external stimulation because we have not helped them build regulation from within. That is why the debate about screens is too shallow. It stays at the level of technology when the real question is developmental.
The proper response is not just fewer screens. It is richer childhoods. More outdoor play. More unscripted exploration. More responsibility. More social negotiation. More mixed-age play. More real challenge. More opportunities to fail, recover, and try again. More environments that build courage instead of dependency.
The question is not whether children should have less social media. Plainly, many should.
The question is why so many children now need artificial stimulation to replace the curiosity, confidence, and resilience that a healthy childhood ought to have built in the first place.
We have not merely given children screens.
We have taken away the struggle. And that is the bigger mistake.
Totally wrong. Screens and social media are absolutely the problem. (I’m a parent of two and a teacher.) Yes, kids DO have curiosity, but screens and social media steer their “learning” to trivial, spurious, and downright destructive presentations. Kids have lost their ability in many cases to watch MOVIES, which is a very low bar for attention.
Sounds good but you missed one point: you can't have more of something without less of something else. Time is a first order constraint.
We have kids that are naturally curious also with tech, in all the good ways imaginable. Their regulation and resilience shattered when peer pressure and short form (videos, gaming, chatbot) entered their world. This can only be solved by rigorous supervision and minimising the use of devices.
You're asking a fast food chain to turn their model into providing healthy, nutritious, quality meals, alternatively that the users only order salads from now on. Its not going to happen.
We are failing our children, and the self-congratulatory certainty of the Haidt acolytes misses the point. This is a category error: they confuse the later capture of the child by social media with the earlier formation of the child. The real failure begins in the experience-expectant years, when resilience, frustration tolerance, autonomy, and real-world competence should be built. By the time social media arrives, too many children are already underprepared. The screen did not create the weakness. It exploited it.
Sorry, but this is an inaccurate assumption based on (understandable) ignorance of how the underlying technology of social media works and its potency. These products are rigorously designed to be habit-forming and addictive to young, developing brains. The so-called "weakness" you allude to includes normal vulnerabilities of any healthy yet inexperienced and developing young person --even those prepared and supported by engaged parents who "do all the right things" to build real-world competence and ensure their child's resilience. It is comparable, though not identical, to what happens with substance abuse, which can entrap even healthy, well-formed young people. And with screens and social media, young people are *required* to use them by their schools, sports team, clubs, etc.
Right on, in terms that Jon Haidt describes in the Anxious Generation. My related response here was mainly about connection, or disconnect with too much tech, in all of us, and particularly spectrum individuals. These qualities here are part of meeting the challenges in open, experiential life which are also so crucial for all children's development. Thank you.
You fundamentally misunderstand how social media technology works. As someone who worked extensively with several of today's largest social media companies (both on UI/UX design and educational partnerships) starting in the early days of social media, allow me to disabuse you of the notion that these are benign products that merely filled a void created by "soft" or "over-coddling" helicopter parents.
Social media products are designed to be habit-forming and addictive. This is a feature, not a bug or unintended consequence. Games and social media user experiences include the same interactive elements and were built by some of the *very same designers* of casino video slot machines. Algorithms and content feeds are scrupulously honed by armies of the most capable computer scientists and engineers in the world to exploit the psychological and neurological vulerabilities of developing young minds -- curiosity, inexperience, individuation and reactance, social pressure, insecurity, impulse control, boredom, surging hormones, playful transgression, distractability, etc. -- to habituate young eyeballs to hours of daily "engagement".
Parents and young people themselves can regale you about adolescents they know personally who previously *did* participate in healthy outdoor play, unstructured exploration, art, sports, exercise, dating, etc, but gave it up for virtual experiences like online gaming, chat (real and AI) and scrolling/social media posting.
Companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft *intended* to build and become the de-facto infrastructure of childhood development and learning. They treated educational institutions as Sales Channels, initially giving away "free" tech and services to resource-constrained schools as a way to embed themselves, extract invaluable behavioral data, establish product familiarity and brand loyalty, foster dependency, and secure future customers.
Today, a young person who wishes to participate in real-world activities with peers (like sports teams, school clubs, meetups), apply to summer jobs or college, receive important announcements, or even complete homework, has no choice but to join and/or use a social media platform. These, of course, are most accessible via mobile device. Unlike addictive drugs, which a young person must go find and purchase, addictive tech finds the young person via algorithm when they are alone or on their school-issued laptop --it is a protagonist and it is free.
This does not mean that social media is itself the "cause" of the problems cited in the article, any more than tobacco, cannabis or opioids "cause" comparable problems related to substance abuse. But any efforts to provide children the very laudable and desirable "richer childhoods" that you recommend must be more rigorous than just-say-no-to-coddling-kids everyone-can't-get-a-trophy tropes. We must recognize that that Social Media technology in its current form and use is fundamentally and *proactively adversarial* to the shared goal of "richer childhoods" for our children. It is a protagonist. Thus, a necessary part of the solution is regulating the use and restricting the access of minors to Social Media and related tech. It is not either/or, but both.
You begin with a category error. How social media technology works is not the point I was making. I was not claiming these platforms are benign, nor was I denying that they are deliberately engineered for engagement. My point was developmental, not technical. I was asking what kind of mind reaches adolescence in the first place, and whether some children are better prepared than others for the pressures they will later meet. The vulnerable teenage brain you describe is not the same thing as a well-prepared mind.
In fact, much of your post quietly concedes my point. You list the very features of the developing young mind that make it vulnerable: curiosity, inexperience, insecurity, distractibility, poor impulse control, social sensitivity, boredom, individuation, reactance, surging hormones. Fine. But that is simply another way of saying that the young mind is plastic, unfinished, and shaped by experience. You do not define “young,” but that omission matters, because my argument is precisely about what happens before adolescence. If those are the vulnerabilities, the obvious question is: how are children being prepared to manage them?
That is where I think your reply misses the heart of the issue. You describe adolescent vulnerability, but you do not ask where it comes from. You speak as though vulnerability simply arrives with puberty. I do not think it does. It has a developmental history. Children who are raised with resilience, critical thinking, frustration tolerance, real-world competence, and a stable sense that “I am enough” are not identical, developmentally or psychologically, to children who reach adolescence without those foundations. They may still be vulnerable, but they are not equally vulnerable.
That is why I am not advocating “more” or “less” social media use by teenagers as some abstract slogan. I am arguing for better preparation long before the teenage years. We should be asking whether young children are being formed in ways that strengthen their ability to resist external validation, tolerate discomfort, negotiate real relationships, recover from failure, and distinguish appearance from reality. Those are not peripheral niceties. They are part of the developmental equipment needed for adolescence itself.
You also say that many young people who once engaged in outdoor play, sport, art, exercise, dating, and unstructured exploration gave these up for virtual life. But that, again, partly supports my case. You seem to recognize that real-world experiences matter. What you do not ask is whether those earlier experiences are protective. Instead, you frame the matter as a simple substitution, as though it is merely a matter of one activity replacing another. But the decline in outdoor play, independence, and embodied childhood predates smartphones. So the more interesting question is not just whether screens displaced those experiences, but whether the loss of those experiences made children more susceptible when adolescent digital life intensified.
You then broaden the discussion from social media to the wider digital infrastructure of childhood, schooling, and learning. That is a separate move. One moment you are describing social media as adversarial; the next you are indicting school technology, digital learning systems, and institutional dependency on platforms. Perhaps there is an argument there, but it is no longer the same argument. It shifts from the claim that social media is harmful to the much larger claim that screen-mediated childhood as such has become developmentally corrosive. If that is your position, it needs to be argued distinctly, not smuggled in.
You also argue that participation in modern life now often requires young people to use these technologies for clubs, school, jobs, homework, and peer coordination. That may well be true. But it does not refute my point. It simply describes the environment. The fact that the environment is difficult, even compulsory, does not mean preparation is irrelevant. On the contrary, it makes preparation more important. If teenagers must enter this world, then the obvious question becomes: which children are better equipped to withstand it, and why?
At the end of your post, you reduce my argument to a familiar caricature: “just-say-no-to-coddling-kids,” “everyone-can’t-get-a-trophy,” and similar tropes. But that is not my argument. I am not making a cultural complaint about softness for its own sake. I am making a developmental claim. Childhood is not merely a waiting room for adolescence. It is the period in which the capacities needed for adolescence are built. Reclaiming childhood, as I use the term, means restoring the kinds of experiences that form resilience, self-command, critical thought, embodied confidence, and an inner life not wholly dependent on approval from peers or platforms.
So no, I am not denying that social media is engineered to exploit the vulnerabilities of teenagers. I am saying that if we want to understand the truth of teenage vulnerability, we have to go one step further back. We have to ask how those vulnerabilities were either strengthened or mitigated in childhood. The central question is not simply how social media works. It is why some adolescents are more easily captured by it than others. That is a developmental question, and that is the question I was addressing.
Yes, I understand you were making a developmental point about how parents and the broader culture raises children, not a point about technology. Your point is fundamentally lacking, however, as it does not account for the novel and fundamentally addictive nature of social media technology, the exploitative and predatory way it was/is pushed onto children, and its new ubiquity as the required infrastucture of growing-up.
Anyone who actually understands how the technology works would not treat child development as a separate issue, one "real" the other not, as you claimed.
I am not arguing *against* the idea that parents, institutions, and society broadly should work to raise children who are resilient in the ways you describe before they ever touch a screen. I'm explaining to you that the technology is more than capable of corrupting and defeating those efforts, even when they are flawlessly provided. And if you fail to grasp this, you cannot comprehend or address the challenge adequately.
The "vulnerabilities" of developing young minds that I cited are not defects or pathologies that are simply "corrected" "avoided" or "cured" by parents properly teaching children to manage them. They are a natural part of healthy child development and being human.
A typical pre-adolescent lacks the life experience, self-awareness or maturity to understand risks and consequences, set their own limits, discern boundaries, evaluate the trustworthiness of other people, etc. Trial and error is part of growing up. It is natural and normal for them to go through a period of individuation and reactance --where they discover their own identity separate from parents, make sense of themselves among peers, and overreact to constraints like school rules and curfews. And hormones? I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you're old enough to know the ways that puberty can distort a teenager's perception and judgment...
As someone who has worked behind the provervbial curtain on social media technology, I can promise you this: whatever a child's or young person's interest, whatever their desire, whatever their fear, whatever triggers their curiosity or anger, lowers their psychological defenses, or soothes their lonliness, doubts & anxieties, whatever constitutes their *natural* weak spot as a child --the algorithms will find and exploit it without concern for the consequences. The business model is collecting behavioral data, which requires habituating eyeballs to screens, clicks, and constant monitoring.
Yes, *all* children and teens don't experience the same attraction & negative effects, and raising children to be resilient is more necessary than ever. However, we now know from experience that social media is like candy and junk food: if its always within reach, too many (if not most) children will choose to consume it and suffer the negative health effects. Dismissing the damage caused by excessive screen and social media use as "not real", and demeaning parents who seek to mitigate its proven negative effects as "the anti-social media brigade" is both inaccurate and unfair. Regulating and restricting social media/screen use by children is definitely *part of* the solution.
Because the parents that I know who want phones banned and social media gone are ALSO the parents working to give their kids curiosity and resilience. They go hand in hand.
No one thinks that getting rid of the phones is a one-and-done. It’s a big step and we have more work to do. We know that. You’re willfully ignoring the bigger picture and aims of this movement.
WOW! So many category errors. First socail media bans, curiosity and resilience all dtessed up as going hand in hand and the cohort you rely on for this are parents you lknow?
You have made the second big error or what is fallacy of false equivalence. What is the work still to be done? You have not defined it. Make more money for the influencers who have sold a moral crusade under the guise of a science that simply does not stack up. History has littered us with psychologists pretending to be scientists. And our children pay the price. What we need is critical thinking in our children but first we must start with the parents.
My proposal is to reclaim science from the well-intentioned influencers who capture the narrative with elegant rhetoric. Why do parents want phones banned (I am not against that), but I want more resilient children. When you say "no one thinks" that is my point! :)
Twenge is describing the surface phenomenon with good data: more leisure technology during the school day is associated with lower test scores and greater loneliness. But in your terms, the deeper issue is not simply that phones are “distracting.” It is that they alter the child’s interostate, fragment attention, reduce opportunities for embodied co-regulation, and keep the nervous system in a state of shallow, externally driven stimulation. What is being displaced is not just academic focus. It is the micro-stress/micro-reward cycle through which children learn to regulate themselves, relate to others, and build autonomy.
A response in your voice could read like this:
Jean Twenge is right to point to the correlation between device use in school, declining test scores, and rising loneliness. But I would go further. The problem with phones in schools is not merely that they distract from lessons. It is that they interrupt the biological conditions required for learning itself.
Learning is not just the transfer of information. It is a physiological process. A child must be in the right internal state before the cognitive systems can come online properly. When a child is constantly pulled toward the rapid, low-friction rewards of a phone, they are not practising sustained attention, social reciprocity, or the toleration of manageable challenge. They are being trained into a different equilibrium.
In the lunch hall, on the playground, and in the classroom, phones displace exactly the kinds of experiences children most need: conversation, boredom, rough-and-tumble negotiation, eye contact, play, conflict resolution, waiting, and the subtle emotional calibration that comes from being with other human beings. These are not peripheral to development. They are central to it.
So yes, phones lower academic performance. But that is only part of the story. They also weaken the child’s access to autonomy, relationship, and regulation. They make the school day less human. And a less human school day is bound to become a lonelier one.
If we are serious about education, then bell-to-bell phone bans are only the beginning. We should also be asking what kind of nervous systems our schools are cultivating. Are we creating environments that promote autonomic flexibility, social connection, and deep learning? Or are we allowing an architecture of interruption to shape the developing mind?
The real question is not whether devices are convenient. It is whether they are compatible with the kind of children, and the kind of society, we want to help bring into being.
This all good and needed, but, we need to go even deeper. Children are born curious, wanting to learn, they showing this in so many ways I need not give a long list: persevering to learn to walk, throwing things off the high chair...consider how many others in their day at home or in a good preschool. We are meant to learn with our exploration drive, in fully healthy environments, outdoors, indoor open-learning like Montessori, Waldorf, and Piaget knew how our brain best learns.
Linear data intake was not encouraged until the brain was 7, as Finland honors, they testing with the best scores for this and many other good reasons, and leading as the happiest country. With tech, we are over left-brain linear, over-focused on numbers and letters, all tech adding to this. Project-based learning should be in schools, kids starting elementary school at 7.
Genius Einstein didn't even talk until 7, he lingering in experiential learning before that, later envisioning being on a light-beam for intuitive, relational thinking, which is open, right brain reception and pattern/ratio-like thinking, then shaped by linear formatting, numbers and letters, for true knowledge of both brain hemisphere cooperation, and contribution: E=mc2.
Inherited autism spectrum kids,* "different learners" are geared to right brain and deep heart (also has neurons) perceptions and abilities: gut-responses, out-of-the box thinking, intuition, deepest meanings, wanting fairness, and to help others or the world. Most great minds in history are/were oriented in this way, often kicked out of linear schooling, considered dumb, but making great contributions when on their own.
Look at our world with linear number and letter over-focus, tech not making life easier, but harder, and as number and letter based ideas, making our world more separate, rather than perceiving/honoring our oneness in our basic needs and desires for health, safety, meaning, caring, and freedom.
At most, AI should be a tool only for data gathering; learning by experience early, then taught on open-ended pathways, linear computing skills along side passions for shaping results that serve connection and well-being in our communities and world.
* Andrew Wakefield, and a line of researchers after him, found that vaccines do cause the severe autism we see out there, little ones bending over to address the pains in their gut soon after the vaccination, which led to total jumbling of their mental capacities.
Recovery resources are helping, leading them to being "spellers," using a letter board for communicating, and what said? Deep intuitive knowledge and truths, connective wisdoms, wanting to help others, for our knowledge coming to us is for right/left connection (words are ideas or knowings, then shaped by linear letters, or ideas shaped by numbers).
These open abilities connect us to the quantum field as Einstein, Bohm, knew, and as I saw in my third grade classroom, when kids were getting labeled with ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, Asperger's syndrome, and autism, in the late 90's.
ADD is not Attention Deficit Disorder, but Attention Differently Directed, unfiltered to the heart and open right brain, they overwhelmed by our over-focused number and letter teaching and tech world, they then quiet, reclusive, turning away to more connective, and nearly always wise perception, when allowed to perceive and think as they are wired.
Subbing in schools recently, I still saw these individuals not understood in most k-12 schools, accommodated for, but not understood. Off to college with more open class choices, or to a craft or passion, they discover it was not they who lacked, but how they were taught.
I've been following Jonathan for years now and see first handout the effects of technology and overparenting (helicopter parenting) as a psychologist for children, teens and young adults. It's more important than ever for our generation (Gen X) to model good social behaviors (put the phone down), set boundaries and limits (no more than 1 hour/day) and emphasize physical and social experiences.
Our school is considering Yondr pouches. I strongly support a bell to bell ban, but have not seen any evidence that Yondr pouches work any better than a policy requiring students to keep their phone in a backpack or bag. This is because the Yondr system seems trivially easy to circumvent, absent a huge investment of resources in staff to monitor numerous locking stations. Anyone aware of any evidence of backpack versus Yondr? (To be clear, the question is not Yondr versus no policy, but Yondr versus backpack policy.) My skepticism that Yondr could be effective is here: https://www.activevoice.us/p/yes-to-the-phone-ban-no-to-yondr
I was recently a middle school principal, and phones at school also allow all sorts of interpersonal drama— think filming of fights, embarrassing pictures of people, filming of teachers and then using AI to edit it, group chat drama that leads to physical altercations…. It’s exhausting! I’m all for banning them bell to bell, and reducing laptop use to a bare minimum.
I dont deny there are underlying factors to excessive screen time. But its the addictive nature of how the technology and social media works that make it dangerous for young people especially since their brains are still developing.
No one thinks that if you take away a drug only that the person will be less of a drug addict. You must also deal with what is driving the drug use. Its a BOTH/AND. That is why good recovery programs deal with the actual substance and the emotional triggers underneath.
But a good first start is to eliminate what is tapping into the dopamine. Then, you move on to what is going on underneath.
Regarding the point of addiction - I had a similar doubt for a long time, until I saw Hank Green give a different explanation for it - he compared it to snacks. We are evolutionary wired to have snacks due to the way snacks are made food being scanty a few hundred years ago - even though snacks are not fulfilling and often leave us wanting more.
Social media is the same for information. Information is a great thing to have evolutionarily. And just as a good meal keeps us satiated for long, a good dose of information (maybe books or substack?) will do the same. Very much like snacks though, the onset of satisfaction may be delayed but will be maintained for longer.
After babel is quite the interesting name for a page that appeals to the normative mother. Normative, mothers don’t believe in the tower of babel. But they believe Jonathan, the feminine cuck-voiced soothsayer of the onslaught of your tweeners.
Limiting social media to 16 years old, makes it appealing in the same way that cigarettes were appealing to me as a 13-year-old knowing that I needed another 5 years before I was ready to handle tobacco.
The proposed restrictions on social media, devoid of any concept of spiritual warfare or social engineering. Cold War, are nothing more than marketing. You went from giving your kids cell phones to participating in an anti-marketing campaign in which your grifting makes them want to use AI and whore apps even more than average.
Jean, this is such a timely and vital piece—thank you for putting hard data behind what so many of us are observing in schools. Your analysis doesn’t just highlight an educational issue; it underscores a public health challenge. The habits and neural pathways formed in childhood don’t just shape academic success—they set the stage for lifelong health, resilience, and even longevity.
The link between device use, loneliness, and declining academic performance is stark, but what resonates most is the long-term cost. Schools should be places where kids learn to connect, not just consume. Your point about bell-to-bell phone policies is spot on—imagine the difference if lunch breaks were filled with conversation instead of TikTok. These small changes today could mean fewer chronic health issues and stronger social skills for generations to come.
This isn’t just about test scores; it’s about raising a population capable of focus, empathy, and vitality. Your work here is a crucial step in making that happen. Grateful for your voice on this!
My parents & I have never understood why friendships & play are so important in childhood. School is for one thing, academics--not friends, clubs, sports, play. If kids would just do their work in & after school, their problems would greatly subside. Go, tiger parents!
This is great, thank you. One thought, as an assistant principal in a public elementary school, is that standardized test are increasingly requiring children to use a computer to assess their knowledge. So while we know the best way for children to learn is through direct (human) instruction, we require them to take nationally normed state and local assessments on a computer. Which begs the question, how accurate is the data around standardized testing scores? I continue to hear scores are decreasing and simultaneously we’re learning about the negative impacts edtech has on student engagement and achievement.
I'm grateful that our school already prohibits phones. I do worry about edtech plus as you briefly but critically mentioned the access to school issued devices during school hours.
I am fortunate that for my fairly young child, teachers so far have taken an approach with edtech of only using as much as mandated by the district, but they still all have chromebooks. I hear, at least in other grades, of use of devices for games during indoor recess and free time, pragmatic with large class sizes but not ideal.
Glad to see your article; I read iGen prior to having kids and am glad the concerns have been since popularized.
Great piece. Helped create a documentary ’I am Gen Z’ couple of years back on the topic. Wait for the pushback from social media promoters ’correlation is not causation’. Internal studies already provided them with the evidence, but like Philip Morris et al and cigarettes inconvenient evidence that impacts profit margins is PR’d out of existence.
The anti-social-media brigade has missed the point.
Screens are not the real problem. Social media is not the real problem. They are symptoms of a much deeper failure in how we raise and educate children. Australia’s under-16 social media law is a good example of a political class reacting before thinking, it treats the screen as the cause, when in truth the screen has rushed in to fill a vacuum we ourselves have created. Australia did pass a minimum-age law for social media, and parliamentary scrutiny later also pointed to the need for broader design and duty-of-care reforms, which is precisely the point: the issue is larger than the app.
Children are not born passive. They are born curious. They are born exploratory. They are born wanting to master the world. You see it in a baby learning to walk, falling and trying again. You see it in a toddler throwing food from a high chair, not because the child is naughty, but because the child is running an experiment. You see it in every healthy child who climbs, builds, imitates, risks, negotiates, argues, plays, fails, and returns for more. The natural condition of childhood is not avoidance. It is engagement.
What have we done? We have built a culture that removes struggle from childhood and then acts surprised when children become fragile. We smooth the path, lower the bar, over-supervise, over-explain, over-accommodate, over-diagnose, and then hand children devices to pacify the rest. We have confused comfort with development. But children do not become curious, resilient, brave, or confident by being protected from stress. They become those things by meeting manageable stress, mastering it, and discovering that they can survive it.
That is the real issue. Childhood is supposed to contain friction. Not trauma. Not chaos. Not neglect. But friction. Effort. Waiting. Boredom. Disappointment. Social risk. Physical challenge. Trial and error. The small struggles through which a child learns, “I can do hard things.” Remove that, and you do not produce a safer child. You produce a weaker one.
That is why I do not accept the lazy narrative that social media is the villain and banning it is the solution. A ban may deal with one outlet, but it does nothing to address the deeper developmental emptiness that made the outlet so seductive in the first place. If a child has not been prepared to tolerate boredom, pursue mastery, seek meaning, and enjoy real-world competence, then of course the phone wins. The phone offers stimulation without effort, novelty without risk, and reward without struggle. It is not the cause of the developmental deficit. It exploits it.
We are not preparing children for life. We are preparing them for avoidance. We are not preparing them to be adventurous in mind or character. We are preparing them to seek regulation through external stimulation because we have not helped them build regulation from within. That is why the debate about screens is too shallow. It stays at the level of technology when the real question is developmental.
The proper response is not just fewer screens. It is richer childhoods. More outdoor play. More unscripted exploration. More responsibility. More social negotiation. More mixed-age play. More real challenge. More opportunities to fail, recover, and try again. More environments that build courage instead of dependency.
The question is not whether children should have less social media. Plainly, many should.
The question is why so many children now need artificial stimulation to replace the curiosity, confidence, and resilience that a healthy childhood ought to have built in the first place.
We have not merely given children screens.
We have taken away the struggle. And that is the bigger mistake.
Totally wrong. Screens and social media are absolutely the problem. (I’m a parent of two and a teacher.) Yes, kids DO have curiosity, but screens and social media steer their “learning” to trivial, spurious, and downright destructive presentations. Kids have lost their ability in many cases to watch MOVIES, which is a very low bar for attention.
Sounds good but you missed one point: you can't have more of something without less of something else. Time is a first order constraint.
We have kids that are naturally curious also with tech, in all the good ways imaginable. Their regulation and resilience shattered when peer pressure and short form (videos, gaming, chatbot) entered their world. This can only be solved by rigorous supervision and minimising the use of devices.
You're asking a fast food chain to turn their model into providing healthy, nutritious, quality meals, alternatively that the users only order salads from now on. Its not going to happen.
We are failing our children, and the self-congratulatory certainty of the Haidt acolytes misses the point. This is a category error: they confuse the later capture of the child by social media with the earlier formation of the child. The real failure begins in the experience-expectant years, when resilience, frustration tolerance, autonomy, and real-world competence should be built. By the time social media arrives, too many children are already underprepared. The screen did not create the weakness. It exploited it.
Sorry, but this is an inaccurate assumption based on (understandable) ignorance of how the underlying technology of social media works and its potency. These products are rigorously designed to be habit-forming and addictive to young, developing brains. The so-called "weakness" you allude to includes normal vulnerabilities of any healthy yet inexperienced and developing young person --even those prepared and supported by engaged parents who "do all the right things" to build real-world competence and ensure their child's resilience. It is comparable, though not identical, to what happens with substance abuse, which can entrap even healthy, well-formed young people. And with screens and social media, young people are *required* to use them by their schools, sports team, clubs, etc.
Right on, in terms that Jon Haidt describes in the Anxious Generation. My related response here was mainly about connection, or disconnect with too much tech, in all of us, and particularly spectrum individuals. These qualities here are part of meeting the challenges in open, experiential life which are also so crucial for all children's development. Thank you.
Love that a post critiquing screens restrictions was clearly written by AI.
You fundamentally misunderstand how social media technology works. As someone who worked extensively with several of today's largest social media companies (both on UI/UX design and educational partnerships) starting in the early days of social media, allow me to disabuse you of the notion that these are benign products that merely filled a void created by "soft" or "over-coddling" helicopter parents.
Social media products are designed to be habit-forming and addictive. This is a feature, not a bug or unintended consequence. Games and social media user experiences include the same interactive elements and were built by some of the *very same designers* of casino video slot machines. Algorithms and content feeds are scrupulously honed by armies of the most capable computer scientists and engineers in the world to exploit the psychological and neurological vulerabilities of developing young minds -- curiosity, inexperience, individuation and reactance, social pressure, insecurity, impulse control, boredom, surging hormones, playful transgression, distractability, etc. -- to habituate young eyeballs to hours of daily "engagement".
Parents and young people themselves can regale you about adolescents they know personally who previously *did* participate in healthy outdoor play, unstructured exploration, art, sports, exercise, dating, etc, but gave it up for virtual experiences like online gaming, chat (real and AI) and scrolling/social media posting.
Companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft *intended* to build and become the de-facto infrastructure of childhood development and learning. They treated educational institutions as Sales Channels, initially giving away "free" tech and services to resource-constrained schools as a way to embed themselves, extract invaluable behavioral data, establish product familiarity and brand loyalty, foster dependency, and secure future customers.
Today, a young person who wishes to participate in real-world activities with peers (like sports teams, school clubs, meetups), apply to summer jobs or college, receive important announcements, or even complete homework, has no choice but to join and/or use a social media platform. These, of course, are most accessible via mobile device. Unlike addictive drugs, which a young person must go find and purchase, addictive tech finds the young person via algorithm when they are alone or on their school-issued laptop --it is a protagonist and it is free.
This does not mean that social media is itself the "cause" of the problems cited in the article, any more than tobacco, cannabis or opioids "cause" comparable problems related to substance abuse. But any efforts to provide children the very laudable and desirable "richer childhoods" that you recommend must be more rigorous than just-say-no-to-coddling-kids everyone-can't-get-a-trophy tropes. We must recognize that that Social Media technology in its current form and use is fundamentally and *proactively adversarial* to the shared goal of "richer childhoods" for our children. It is a protagonist. Thus, a necessary part of the solution is regulating the use and restricting the access of minors to Social Media and related tech. It is not either/or, but both.
You begin with a category error. How social media technology works is not the point I was making. I was not claiming these platforms are benign, nor was I denying that they are deliberately engineered for engagement. My point was developmental, not technical. I was asking what kind of mind reaches adolescence in the first place, and whether some children are better prepared than others for the pressures they will later meet. The vulnerable teenage brain you describe is not the same thing as a well-prepared mind.
In fact, much of your post quietly concedes my point. You list the very features of the developing young mind that make it vulnerable: curiosity, inexperience, insecurity, distractibility, poor impulse control, social sensitivity, boredom, individuation, reactance, surging hormones. Fine. But that is simply another way of saying that the young mind is plastic, unfinished, and shaped by experience. You do not define “young,” but that omission matters, because my argument is precisely about what happens before adolescence. If those are the vulnerabilities, the obvious question is: how are children being prepared to manage them?
That is where I think your reply misses the heart of the issue. You describe adolescent vulnerability, but you do not ask where it comes from. You speak as though vulnerability simply arrives with puberty. I do not think it does. It has a developmental history. Children who are raised with resilience, critical thinking, frustration tolerance, real-world competence, and a stable sense that “I am enough” are not identical, developmentally or psychologically, to children who reach adolescence without those foundations. They may still be vulnerable, but they are not equally vulnerable.
That is why I am not advocating “more” or “less” social media use by teenagers as some abstract slogan. I am arguing for better preparation long before the teenage years. We should be asking whether young children are being formed in ways that strengthen their ability to resist external validation, tolerate discomfort, negotiate real relationships, recover from failure, and distinguish appearance from reality. Those are not peripheral niceties. They are part of the developmental equipment needed for adolescence itself.
You also say that many young people who once engaged in outdoor play, sport, art, exercise, dating, and unstructured exploration gave these up for virtual life. But that, again, partly supports my case. You seem to recognize that real-world experiences matter. What you do not ask is whether those earlier experiences are protective. Instead, you frame the matter as a simple substitution, as though it is merely a matter of one activity replacing another. But the decline in outdoor play, independence, and embodied childhood predates smartphones. So the more interesting question is not just whether screens displaced those experiences, but whether the loss of those experiences made children more susceptible when adolescent digital life intensified.
You then broaden the discussion from social media to the wider digital infrastructure of childhood, schooling, and learning. That is a separate move. One moment you are describing social media as adversarial; the next you are indicting school technology, digital learning systems, and institutional dependency on platforms. Perhaps there is an argument there, but it is no longer the same argument. It shifts from the claim that social media is harmful to the much larger claim that screen-mediated childhood as such has become developmentally corrosive. If that is your position, it needs to be argued distinctly, not smuggled in.
You also argue that participation in modern life now often requires young people to use these technologies for clubs, school, jobs, homework, and peer coordination. That may well be true. But it does not refute my point. It simply describes the environment. The fact that the environment is difficult, even compulsory, does not mean preparation is irrelevant. On the contrary, it makes preparation more important. If teenagers must enter this world, then the obvious question becomes: which children are better equipped to withstand it, and why?
At the end of your post, you reduce my argument to a familiar caricature: “just-say-no-to-coddling-kids,” “everyone-can’t-get-a-trophy,” and similar tropes. But that is not my argument. I am not making a cultural complaint about softness for its own sake. I am making a developmental claim. Childhood is not merely a waiting room for adolescence. It is the period in which the capacities needed for adolescence are built. Reclaiming childhood, as I use the term, means restoring the kinds of experiences that form resilience, self-command, critical thought, embodied confidence, and an inner life not wholly dependent on approval from peers or platforms.
So no, I am not denying that social media is engineered to exploit the vulnerabilities of teenagers. I am saying that if we want to understand the truth of teenage vulnerability, we have to go one step further back. We have to ask how those vulnerabilities were either strengthened or mitigated in childhood. The central question is not simply how social media works. It is why some adolescents are more easily captured by it than others. That is a developmental question, and that is the question I was addressing.
Yes, I understand you were making a developmental point about how parents and the broader culture raises children, not a point about technology. Your point is fundamentally lacking, however, as it does not account for the novel and fundamentally addictive nature of social media technology, the exploitative and predatory way it was/is pushed onto children, and its new ubiquity as the required infrastucture of growing-up.
Anyone who actually understands how the technology works would not treat child development as a separate issue, one "real" the other not, as you claimed.
I am not arguing *against* the idea that parents, institutions, and society broadly should work to raise children who are resilient in the ways you describe before they ever touch a screen. I'm explaining to you that the technology is more than capable of corrupting and defeating those efforts, even when they are flawlessly provided. And if you fail to grasp this, you cannot comprehend or address the challenge adequately.
The "vulnerabilities" of developing young minds that I cited are not defects or pathologies that are simply "corrected" "avoided" or "cured" by parents properly teaching children to manage them. They are a natural part of healthy child development and being human.
A typical pre-adolescent lacks the life experience, self-awareness or maturity to understand risks and consequences, set their own limits, discern boundaries, evaluate the trustworthiness of other people, etc. Trial and error is part of growing up. It is natural and normal for them to go through a period of individuation and reactance --where they discover their own identity separate from parents, make sense of themselves among peers, and overreact to constraints like school rules and curfews. And hormones? I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you're old enough to know the ways that puberty can distort a teenager's perception and judgment...
As someone who has worked behind the provervbial curtain on social media technology, I can promise you this: whatever a child's or young person's interest, whatever their desire, whatever their fear, whatever triggers their curiosity or anger, lowers their psychological defenses, or soothes their lonliness, doubts & anxieties, whatever constitutes their *natural* weak spot as a child --the algorithms will find and exploit it without concern for the consequences. The business model is collecting behavioral data, which requires habituating eyeballs to screens, clicks, and constant monitoring.
Yes, *all* children and teens don't experience the same attraction & negative effects, and raising children to be resilient is more necessary than ever. However, we now know from experience that social media is like candy and junk food: if its always within reach, too many (if not most) children will choose to consume it and suffer the negative health effects. Dismissing the damage caused by excessive screen and social media use as "not real", and demeaning parents who seek to mitigate its proven negative effects as "the anti-social media brigade" is both inaccurate and unfair. Regulating and restricting social media/screen use by children is definitely *part of* the solution.
Kevin, what is your proposal?
Because the parents that I know who want phones banned and social media gone are ALSO the parents working to give their kids curiosity and resilience. They go hand in hand.
No one thinks that getting rid of the phones is a one-and-done. It’s a big step and we have more work to do. We know that. You’re willfully ignoring the bigger picture and aims of this movement.
WOW! So many category errors. First socail media bans, curiosity and resilience all dtessed up as going hand in hand and the cohort you rely on for this are parents you lknow?
You have made the second big error or what is fallacy of false equivalence. What is the work still to be done? You have not defined it. Make more money for the influencers who have sold a moral crusade under the guise of a science that simply does not stack up. History has littered us with psychologists pretending to be scientists. And our children pay the price. What we need is critical thinking in our children but first we must start with the parents.
My proposal is to reclaim science from the well-intentioned influencers who capture the narrative with elegant rhetoric. Why do parents want phones banned (I am not against that), but I want more resilient children. When you say "no one thinks" that is my point! :)
It’s both. Kids will pick the phones and digital slop over time outdoors and all these things you describe
Twenge is describing the surface phenomenon with good data: more leisure technology during the school day is associated with lower test scores and greater loneliness. But in your terms, the deeper issue is not simply that phones are “distracting.” It is that they alter the child’s interostate, fragment attention, reduce opportunities for embodied co-regulation, and keep the nervous system in a state of shallow, externally driven stimulation. What is being displaced is not just academic focus. It is the micro-stress/micro-reward cycle through which children learn to regulate themselves, relate to others, and build autonomy.
A response in your voice could read like this:
Jean Twenge is right to point to the correlation between device use in school, declining test scores, and rising loneliness. But I would go further. The problem with phones in schools is not merely that they distract from lessons. It is that they interrupt the biological conditions required for learning itself.
Learning is not just the transfer of information. It is a physiological process. A child must be in the right internal state before the cognitive systems can come online properly. When a child is constantly pulled toward the rapid, low-friction rewards of a phone, they are not practising sustained attention, social reciprocity, or the toleration of manageable challenge. They are being trained into a different equilibrium.
In the lunch hall, on the playground, and in the classroom, phones displace exactly the kinds of experiences children most need: conversation, boredom, rough-and-tumble negotiation, eye contact, play, conflict resolution, waiting, and the subtle emotional calibration that comes from being with other human beings. These are not peripheral to development. They are central to it.
So yes, phones lower academic performance. But that is only part of the story. They also weaken the child’s access to autonomy, relationship, and regulation. They make the school day less human. And a less human school day is bound to become a lonelier one.
If we are serious about education, then bell-to-bell phone bans are only the beginning. We should also be asking what kind of nervous systems our schools are cultivating. Are we creating environments that promote autonomic flexibility, social connection, and deep learning? Or are we allowing an architecture of interruption to shape the developing mind?
The real question is not whether devices are convenient. It is whether they are compatible with the kind of children, and the kind of society, we want to help bring into being.
This all good and needed, but, we need to go even deeper. Children are born curious, wanting to learn, they showing this in so many ways I need not give a long list: persevering to learn to walk, throwing things off the high chair...consider how many others in their day at home or in a good preschool. We are meant to learn with our exploration drive, in fully healthy environments, outdoors, indoor open-learning like Montessori, Waldorf, and Piaget knew how our brain best learns.
Linear data intake was not encouraged until the brain was 7, as Finland honors, they testing with the best scores for this and many other good reasons, and leading as the happiest country. With tech, we are over left-brain linear, over-focused on numbers and letters, all tech adding to this. Project-based learning should be in schools, kids starting elementary school at 7.
Genius Einstein didn't even talk until 7, he lingering in experiential learning before that, later envisioning being on a light-beam for intuitive, relational thinking, which is open, right brain reception and pattern/ratio-like thinking, then shaped by linear formatting, numbers and letters, for true knowledge of both brain hemisphere cooperation, and contribution: E=mc2.
Inherited autism spectrum kids,* "different learners" are geared to right brain and deep heart (also has neurons) perceptions and abilities: gut-responses, out-of-the box thinking, intuition, deepest meanings, wanting fairness, and to help others or the world. Most great minds in history are/were oriented in this way, often kicked out of linear schooling, considered dumb, but making great contributions when on their own.
Look at our world with linear number and letter over-focus, tech not making life easier, but harder, and as number and letter based ideas, making our world more separate, rather than perceiving/honoring our oneness in our basic needs and desires for health, safety, meaning, caring, and freedom.
At most, AI should be a tool only for data gathering; learning by experience early, then taught on open-ended pathways, linear computing skills along side passions for shaping results that serve connection and well-being in our communities and world.
* Andrew Wakefield, and a line of researchers after him, found that vaccines do cause the severe autism we see out there, little ones bending over to address the pains in their gut soon after the vaccination, which led to total jumbling of their mental capacities.
Recovery resources are helping, leading them to being "spellers," using a letter board for communicating, and what said? Deep intuitive knowledge and truths, connective wisdoms, wanting to help others, for our knowledge coming to us is for right/left connection (words are ideas or knowings, then shaped by linear letters, or ideas shaped by numbers).
These open abilities connect us to the quantum field as Einstein, Bohm, knew, and as I saw in my third grade classroom, when kids were getting labeled with ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, Asperger's syndrome, and autism, in the late 90's.
ADD is not Attention Deficit Disorder, but Attention Differently Directed, unfiltered to the heart and open right brain, they overwhelmed by our over-focused number and letter teaching and tech world, they then quiet, reclusive, turning away to more connective, and nearly always wise perception, when allowed to perceive and think as they are wired.
Subbing in schools recently, I still saw these individuals not understood in most k-12 schools, accommodated for, but not understood. Off to college with more open class choices, or to a craft or passion, they discover it was not they who lacked, but how they were taught.
www.HeartCenteredMinds.com.
YouTube talk, "Spectrum Learning Differences, Not Disorders" 1:10.
I've been following Jonathan for years now and see first handout the effects of technology and overparenting (helicopter parenting) as a psychologist for children, teens and young adults. It's more important than ever for our generation (Gen X) to model good social behaviors (put the phone down), set boundaries and limits (no more than 1 hour/day) and emphasize physical and social experiences.
Our school is considering Yondr pouches. I strongly support a bell to bell ban, but have not seen any evidence that Yondr pouches work any better than a policy requiring students to keep their phone in a backpack or bag. This is because the Yondr system seems trivially easy to circumvent, absent a huge investment of resources in staff to monitor numerous locking stations. Anyone aware of any evidence of backpack versus Yondr? (To be clear, the question is not Yondr versus no policy, but Yondr versus backpack policy.) My skepticism that Yondr could be effective is here: https://www.activevoice.us/p/yes-to-the-phone-ban-no-to-yondr
I was recently a middle school principal, and phones at school also allow all sorts of interpersonal drama— think filming of fights, embarrassing pictures of people, filming of teachers and then using AI to edit it, group chat drama that leads to physical altercations…. It’s exhausting! I’m all for banning them bell to bell, and reducing laptop use to a bare minimum.
I dont deny there are underlying factors to excessive screen time. But its the addictive nature of how the technology and social media works that make it dangerous for young people especially since their brains are still developing.
No one thinks that if you take away a drug only that the person will be less of a drug addict. You must also deal with what is driving the drug use. Its a BOTH/AND. That is why good recovery programs deal with the actual substance and the emotional triggers underneath.
But a good first start is to eliminate what is tapping into the dopamine. Then, you move on to what is going on underneath.
Regarding the point of addiction - I had a similar doubt for a long time, until I saw Hank Green give a different explanation for it - he compared it to snacks. We are evolutionary wired to have snacks due to the way snacks are made food being scanty a few hundred years ago - even though snacks are not fulfilling and often leave us wanting more.
Social media is the same for information. Information is a great thing to have evolutionarily. And just as a good meal keeps us satiated for long, a good dose of information (maybe books or substack?) will do the same. Very much like snacks though, the onset of satisfaction may be delayed but will be maintained for longer.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the same!
After babel is quite the interesting name for a page that appeals to the normative mother. Normative, mothers don’t believe in the tower of babel. But they believe Jonathan, the feminine cuck-voiced soothsayer of the onslaught of your tweeners.
Limiting social media to 16 years old, makes it appealing in the same way that cigarettes were appealing to me as a 13-year-old knowing that I needed another 5 years before I was ready to handle tobacco.
The proposed restrictions on social media, devoid of any concept of spiritual warfare or social engineering. Cold War, are nothing more than marketing. You went from giving your kids cell phones to participating in an anti-marketing campaign in which your grifting makes them want to use AI and whore apps even more than average.
Jean, this is such a timely and vital piece—thank you for putting hard data behind what so many of us are observing in schools. Your analysis doesn’t just highlight an educational issue; it underscores a public health challenge. The habits and neural pathways formed in childhood don’t just shape academic success—they set the stage for lifelong health, resilience, and even longevity.
The link between device use, loneliness, and declining academic performance is stark, but what resonates most is the long-term cost. Schools should be places where kids learn to connect, not just consume. Your point about bell-to-bell phone policies is spot on—imagine the difference if lunch breaks were filled with conversation instead of TikTok. These small changes today could mean fewer chronic health issues and stronger social skills for generations to come.
This isn’t just about test scores; it’s about raising a population capable of focus, empathy, and vitality. Your work here is a crucial step in making that happen. Grateful for your voice on this!
My parents & I have never understood why friendships & play are so important in childhood. School is for one thing, academics--not friends, clubs, sports, play. If kids would just do their work in & after school, their problems would greatly subside. Go, tiger parents!
This is great, thank you. One thought, as an assistant principal in a public elementary school, is that standardized test are increasingly requiring children to use a computer to assess their knowledge. So while we know the best way for children to learn is through direct (human) instruction, we require them to take nationally normed state and local assessments on a computer. Which begs the question, how accurate is the data around standardized testing scores? I continue to hear scores are decreasing and simultaneously we’re learning about the negative impacts edtech has on student engagement and achievement.
Tech: Belzebub's Black Box of Demons.
Not to mention the brain cancer that is being caused by Wi-Fi, and mood changes induced by the magnetic field of these devices.
I'm grateful that our school already prohibits phones. I do worry about edtech plus as you briefly but critically mentioned the access to school issued devices during school hours.
I am fortunate that for my fairly young child, teachers so far have taken an approach with edtech of only using as much as mandated by the district, but they still all have chromebooks. I hear, at least in other grades, of use of devices for games during indoor recess and free time, pragmatic with large class sizes but not ideal.
Glad to see your article; I read iGen prior to having kids and am glad the concerns have been since popularized.
Great piece. Helped create a documentary ’I am Gen Z’ couple of years back on the topic. Wait for the pushback from social media promoters ’correlation is not causation’. Internal studies already provided them with the evidence, but like Philip Morris et al and cigarettes inconvenient evidence that impacts profit margins is PR’d out of existence.
How the learning is accomplished shapes its effectiveness. Here is one idea to improve both: https://pjwilk.substack.com/p/the-best-preparation-for-ai-is-a