The Year The Phone-Based Childhood Began To Reverse

2024 Year in Review

We talk a lot about 2012 as (roughly) the year when the adolescent mental health crisis began. We think that 2024 will be remembered as the year it began to reverse. We are in the middle of a tipping point, a culture change, a vibe shift about the dangers of a phone-based childhood and the importance of free play and childhood independence. After Babel has played a role in bringing about that change.

In this post, Zach and I will highlight some of the most popular and important essays we have published here on After Babel this past year, and we’ll say where we plan to go in 2025. But we first want to say what we think is happening and why it is happening so fast.

The Darkness Has Lifted

Jon recently heard a talk from Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who told a story about Winston Churchill. In October 1941, when Britain stood alone against Hitler and suffered nightly bombing raids, Churchill visited his old boarding school. He was greeted by students who had rewritten a school song to say:

“Not less we praise in darker days the leader of our nation, and Churchill’s name shall win acclaim from each new generation.”

Churchill thanked the boys for the song but then asked them to correct one word: “darker.”

“Do not let us speak of darker days.” he said. “Let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days—the greatest days our country has ever lived—and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable.”

Rabbi Soloveichik’s point was that what may look like a terrible time, filled with immense suffering, can be exactly when the darkness lifts and people begin to see the world as it really is. Once people see reality clearly, they can act—forcefully and together. They can become a heroic generation.

Coming from backgrounds in social psychology, we can see how the internet, social media, AI, and other new technologies are changing our societies and our politics far faster and more profoundly than anyone can comprehend.

We believe 2024 will stand out as the year when the darkness lifted on the mental health crisis engulfing young people in America and around the world. Many adults suspected that the arrival of smartphones and social media had something to do with it, and even many kids said that social media was harming them. Yet it seemed impossible to do anything about it. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle!” people would say. Or, “the train has left the station.”

This sense of widespread despair and resignation explains why The Anxious Generation became an international bestseller, and why laws, norms, and school policies began changing so rapidly in countries where the book has been released. The Anxious Generation offered a clear diagnosis, backed by a great deal of research. It didn’t just point to the phones; It told a story about human childhood and the two big mistakes many societies have made in recent decades: Overprotecting children in the real world while underprotecting them online.

At After Babel, we have been focusing on the origins, impact, and future of these two mistakes. We have spent 2024 trying to better understand the nature and causes of the youth mental health crisis; the historical and sociological trends that brought us here; and the solutions that will most effectively reverse the trends. We are so grateful to host such a wide range of scholars, activists, politicians, public intellectuals, educators, and Gen Z’ers to shed light on these questions and offer solutions.

Top 5 Most Read Posts of 2024

#1. The Ed Tech Revolution Has Failed, by Jared Cooney Horvath.

Published November 12, 2024. 188k views.

“I’m not saying that digital technologies can’t be used for learning; in fact, if these tools were only ever employed for learning purposes, then they may have proven some of the most important academic inventions ever. The argument I’m making is that digital technologies so often aren’t used for learning that giving students a laptop, tablet, or other multi-function device places a large (and unnecessary) obstacle between the student and the desired outcome. In order to effectively learn while using an unlocked, internet-connected multi-function digital device, students must expend a great deal of cognitive effort battling impulses that they’ve spent years honing - a battle they lose more often than not.”

#2. A Time We Never Knew, by Freya India.

Published April 22nd, 2024. 173k views.

“Maybe I’m naive. Maybe all generations look back with nostalgia. But my sense is they don’t do it for a time they never knew. They feel a longing for their youth; their childhood. My parents might flick through black-and-white photos and hear stories from my grandparents and feel intrigued, but not so much grief. I think there is something distinctly different and deserving of our attention about online forums filled with Zoomers wishing that they lived before social media. Wishing it didn’t exist. These are children grieving their youth while they are still children. These are teens mourning childhoods they wasted on the internet, writing laments such as “I know I’m still young (14F), and I have so many years to make up for that, but I can’t help but hate myself for those years I wasted doing nothing all day but go on my stupid phone.””

#3. Yes, Social Media Really Is a Cause of the Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness, By Jon Haidt.

Published April 9th, 2024. 154k views.

“I presented several conceptual problems with the skeptics’ claims about causality and evidence in this essay: Why Some Researchers Think I’m Wrong About Social Media and Mental Illness. For example, I noted that the skeptics focus on testing one narrow model of causality that treats social media consumption as if it were an individual act, like consuming sugar, and then looks for the size of the dose-response relationship in individuals. But much of my book is about the collective action traps that entire communities of adolescents fall into when they move their social lives onto these platforms, such that it becomes costly to abstain. It is at that point that collective mental health declines most sharply, and the individuals who try to quit find that they are socially isolated. The skeptics do not consider the ways that these network or group-level effects may obscure individual-level effects, and may be much larger than the individual-level effects.”

#4. Your Boyfriend Isn’t Your Camera Man, by Freya India.

Published May 29th, 2024. 130k views.

“We need each other. More than ever. As new technologies crush and replace everything that’s real and intimate, we should protect our relationships as much as possible. As social media platforms press all of us to take part, let’s not put unnecessary strain on each other. Take some photos, sure. But as the pressure to post more, perform more, and create more content presses down on all of us, let’s keep those we love out of it. And then, let’s step out of it ourselves.”

#5. Why Children Need Risk, Fear, and Excitement in Play, By Mariana Brussoni

Published February 28th, 2024. 125k views.

Figure. Changes in UK children’s daily time use, based on Mullan (2019). Thanks to Nick Desbarats for making this figure.

“What kids are dying from today are mainly car crashes and suicides, not playing outside unsupervised with friends. Parents are worrying about the wrong causes of injuries and harm. In fact, the very strategies that parents use to try to keep their children safe – driving them around, maximizing supervision, and minimizing freedom – are unintentionally increasing the likelihood of injuries and even death.”

Six additional posts that we think brought new perspectives and important arguments

• How Phones are Making Parents the Anxious Generation, by Lenore Skenazy. July 24th, 2024. 121k.

• The Global Loss of the U-Shape Curve of Happiness, by David Blanchflower, May 27th, 2024. 121k

• The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was A Major Driver of the Loss of the Play-Based Childhood, by Zach Rausch. June 10th, 2024. 120k.

• Smash the Technopoly, by Nicholas Smyth. Dec 19th, 2024. 104k.

• Applying The Bradford Hill Criteria To Social Media Use and Adolescent Mental Health, by Anna Lembke. Dec 17th, 2024. 86k.

• Scott Galloway Explains Why Age Gating Social Media Is Both Necessary and Doable, by Scott Galloway. Dec 02, 2024.

What’s Next?

For 2025, here’s what you can expect as a subscriber and supporter of After Babel:

• More great writing from our staff writers and Anxious Generation colleagues—Freya India, Lenore Skenazy, Catherine Price, Ravi Iyer, and our latest addition, Katherine Martinko

• More great writing from our expanding network of scholars and experts who are exploring the intersections of technology, childhood, parenting, culture, and mental health

• More critical voices—we’ll recruit essays from writers who disagree with our general perspective

• More international coverage. We mostly focused on the U.S. in 2024, but change is happening just as rapidly in many other countries. Each can serve as a lesson or inspiration for others (as Australia did in 2024).

• More Harris Polls, surveying parents and younger children.

• More academic research. We have hired a small research team that will be writing for academic journals, but we’ll post overviews of findings on After Babel when appropriate.

We want to extend our gratitude to all of our guest authors from 2024: Kara Alaimo, Steve Baskin, Arturo Bejar, Gaia Bernstein, David Blanchflower, Kristin Bride, Mariana Brussoni, Caroline Bryk, Alex Bryson, Jess Butcher, Maddie Freeman, Scott Galloway, Cara Goodwin, Daisy Greenwell, Melanie Hempe, Sam Hiner, Jared Cooney Horvath, Seth Kaplan, Andrew Leigh, Anna Lembke, Margaret Loeb, Jacqueline Nesi, Camilo Ortiz, Thomas Potrebny, Trisha Prabhu, Mileva Repasky, Jonathan Rothwell, Ava Smithing, Nicholas Smyth, Ben Spaloss, Rajesh Srinivasan, David Stein, Kevin Stinehart, Lennon Torres, Jean Twenge, Amy Tyson, Darren Whitehead, and Eden Wurmfeld.¹

And a deep debt of gratitude to all of our subscribers for reading, sharing, and supporting our work.

— Jon and Zach

(P.S., while all of our content is free, if you like what we’re doing, we hope you’ll consider becoming a paid member, or recommending this Substack to your friends. All of the money we receive goes toward paying the salaries of our team.)

1. We also want to send thanks to those who’ve helped edit our posts, including a few regulars: Alexa Arnold, Michael Dinsmore, Deb Eschmeyer, Ravi Iyer, Seth Kaplan, Nicole Kitten, Jakey Lebwhol, Rachel Lebwhol, Mckenzie Love, Alec McClean, Maria Petrova, Joanna Rosholm, Chris Said, Liam Sigaud, Lenore Skenazy, David Stein, and Jean Twenge.