The Anxious Generation: what the evidence supports, and what it means for young children

Odgers, C. L. (2024). The great rewiring: Is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? Nature, 628(8006), 29–30. doi:10.1038/d41586-024-00902-2

Who was studied: A review of The Anxious Generation by a psychologist who writes that she has studied adolescents' mental health and technology use for the past 20 years.

Design: Book review in a scientific journal (expert commentary, not new data)

What they found: Odgers argues that the book's central claim, that digital technology is rewiring children's brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness, is not supported by the research. Studies have found no, small, or mixed associations, and where links over time appear, they more often suggest that young people who already struggle use social media more or differently. She agrees with some of Haidt's proposals, such as stricter content moderation and designing platforms with users' ages in mind, but doubts that age bans and phone bans will work in practice.

Orben, A., & Przybylski, A. K. (2019). The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(2), 173–182. doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0506-1

Who was studied: 355,358 adolescents in three large US and UK survey datasets.

Design: Specification curve analysis of large surveys (correlational)

What they found: Instead of running one analysis, the authors ran a very large number of reasonable versions of it to see how much the answer depended on the researchers' choices. The association between digital technology use and well-being was negative but small: technology use explained at most 0.4% of the variation in adolescents' well-being. The authors concluded that associations this small were too small to warrant policy change.

Gray, P., Lancy, D. F., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2023). Decline in independent activity as a cause of decline in children's mental well-being: Summary of the evidence. The Journal of Pediatrics, 260, 113352. doi:10.1016/j.jpeds.2023.02.004

Who was studied: A review of research on children's independent activity and on trends in young people's mental health.

Design: Narrative review (the authors' argument, built from existing studies)

What they found: The authors describe a large decline over several decades in children's opportunities to play, roam, and do things without adults directing them, alongside a decline in young people's mental health over the same period. They argue that independent activity makes children happier in the moment and builds coping skills over time, and propose that its decline is one of the main causes, though not the only one, of rising anxiety and depression.

Thrul, J., Devkota, J., AlJuboori, D., Regan, T., Alomairah, S., & Vidal, C. (2025). Social media reduction or abstinence interventions are providing mental health benefits—Reanalysis of a published meta-analysis. Psychology of Popular Media. doi:10.1037/ppm0000574

Who was studied: A reanalysis of the experiments included in Ferguson's 2025 meta-analysis on reducing social media use.

Design: Reanalysis of a published meta-analysis

What they found: Analyzing the same experiments differently, the authors reported that reducing or stopping social media use was linked with mental-health benefits, in contrast to Ferguson's finding of no clear overall effect. The two analyses disagree about how to combine the studies, so the question remains open.

Weak to moderate for the book's main causal claim. The rise in reported anxiety and depression among adolescents in the 2010s is well documented, but most of the evidence linking it to phones and social media is correlational, the average links are small, and researchers disagree about what the experiments show. The case for play and independence rests on a different kind of evidence: reviews and expert consensus that play matters for development, plus a historical argument that its decline harmed mental health, which is plausible but hard to test directly. Little of the research on phones and social media is about children under 8.

• They don't show that smartphones or social media are the main cause of the rise in teen anxiety and depression. They also don't rule out that they contribute; the size of any effect is still debated.
• They don't tell us much about 4- to 7-year-olds directly. The book and its critics are mostly about adolescents and social media, not young children and tablets or TV.
• They don't set a safe number of hours or a safe age for a first phone. Haidt's four norms are his proposals, not findings from a trial.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness was published in 2024 by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University. It became a bestseller and has fed into debates about children, phones, and school phone policies in many countries.

Haidt's argument has two halves. The first is that childhood moved from being play-based to being phone-based. He calls the years between 2010 and 2015, when many teenagers switched from basic phones to smartphones loaded with social media, the "Great Rewiring" of childhood. He links this to the rise in reported anxiety, depression, and self-harm among adolescents, especially girls, that began in the early 2010s in the US and several other countries.

The second half is about the decades before smartphones. Haidt argues that children in many wealthy countries were already losing free play and independence, as parents and schools grew more protective. In his phrase, children have been overprotected in the real world and underprotected online. Most of the book's data come from adolescents, and much of it is about social media rather than screens in general.

Haidt's solution is four norms, designed so that families don't have to hold out alone. On the book's website they read: "No smartphones before high school," "No social media before 16," "Phone-free schools," and "More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world."

The first two are about timing. Before 9th grade, roughly age 14, Haidt suggests only a basic phone, with limited apps and no internet browser. The third asks schools, from elementary through high school, to keep phones in lockers or locked pouches during the school day. The fourth is the one that applies to young children right now. Developmental research supports play and independence for young children; the claim that their decline caused the rise in teen anxiety is itself debated.

One widely discussed critique came from Candice Odgers, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, in a 2024 review in Nature. Her main point is about causation: the book's graphs show technology use and mental-health problems rising at the same time, but two lines going up together can't show that one causes the other. Researchers who have looked for large effects, she writes, have found a mix of no, small, and mixed associations.

Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski, then at the University of Oxford, had made a related point before the book appeared. In their 2019 analysis of more than 355,000 adolescents, they showed that the answer could change depending on how researchers chose to analyze the same data. Across all those choices, technology use explained at most 0.4% of the differences in teenagers' well-being. Haidt and his collaborators respond that averages across all technology use can hide larger effects for heavy social media use, especially among girls.

Odgers also points to other pressures on this generation, including economic hardship, school shootings, and too few mental-health services: in the US there is, on average, one school psychologist for every 1,119 students.

They also argue that the timing of the decline across several countries fits the arrival of smartphones; and that experiments in which people cut back on social media show benefits. Those experiments are themselves disputed. A 2025 meta-analysis by Christopher Ferguson in Psychology of Popular Media found no clear overall effect of reducing social media use. Haidt and Zach Rausch have posted detailed criticisms of how it was done on their blog, and a reanalysis of the same studies by Johannes Thrul and colleagues, in the same journal, reported mental-health benefits. The question is unsettled.

A cautious reading of the research supports a few modest conclusions rather than either side's strongest version.

First, the decline in adolescent mental health is real enough to take seriously, though how much of it reflects more open reporting is still discussed. Second, the average association between screen or social media use and well-being is small in most large studies, and the direction of cause is hard to establish. Third, small averages can still matter for some children, for example when screen use cuts into sleep or when a child is drawn into harmful content.

For young children, the research looks different. A 2022 meta-analysis of 87 studies, covered in our brief on screen time and child development, found that more screen time was linked to slightly more behavior problems in children ages 12 and under. The link was small and mostly correlational, much like the findings for teenagers.

So the message that follows from the anxious generation debate is neither "phones are poisoning children" nor "there's nothing to worry about." It's that the strongest claims haven't been shown, and that the practical steps worth taking don't depend on settling the argument.

Haidt's book is mostly about teenagers, but its idea of a play-based childhood starts much earlier, and for this age group it's the part with the most support.

Developmental research has long described play as one of the main ways young children learn. The American Academy of Pediatrics' 2018 report The Power of Play describes play with parents and peers as building social-emotional, language, and self-regulation skills, and asks pediatricians to encourage it at checkups.

Independence at 4 to 7 looks small, and that's fine. It might be pouring their own milk, choosing what to wear, walking ahead to the corner and waiting, paying at a counter, or playing in the next room without an adult directing the game. Gray and colleagues argue that activities children manage on their own build confidence and coping in ways adult-directed activities don't. It has not been tested in a trial with young children.

Screens may matter at this age mostly through what they displace: time on a tablet is time not spent playing, moving, talking, or sleeping. Researchers call this the displacement idea, and it has not been tested well in young children. Still, it is a simple thing to check: does your child's day have room for all four, with some screen time fit in around them?

Phones and social media are a later decision. Our article on what age a kid should get a phone looks at that choice in detail. For now, the most useful steps for a parent of a 5-year-old are to protect play and to let them do a little more on their own each month.

What is The Anxious Generation about?

It's a 2024 book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt arguing that the shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood, mostly between 2010 and 2015, caused a sharp rise in teen anxiety and depression. He proposes four norms: no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more independence and free play. Many researchers dispute how strong the evidence for the causal claim is.

Is The Anxious Generation backed by science?

Partly. The rise in reported anxiety and depression among teenagers in the 2010s is well documented, and play matters for development. But many researchers, including Candice Odgers in a 2024 Nature review, argue that the evidence that phones and social media are the main cause is weak: most studies are correlational, and the links they find are small. The debate continues.

Who is Jonathan Haidt?

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business. Before The Anxious Generation he was best known for The Righteous Mind and, with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind. His research on morality and emotion is widely cited. In her Nature review, Odgers writes that he admits he is no specialist in clinical psychology, child development, or media studies; his supporters point to the timing of the decline across countries and to experiments that cut back social media use.

What age does Jonathan Haidt recommend for a first smartphone?

Haidt recommends waiting until high school, around age 14, for a smartphone, and until 16 for social media. Before that, he suggests a basic phone with limited apps and no internet browser. These are his recommendations, not findings from a study comparing children who got phones at different ages.

Your child's app in the program runs three minutes a day and ends by itself. Week 5 of the parent track, Your fear for them, and letting them try, is about stepping back so your child can do more on their own.

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• Screen time and child development: a small link, and new advice
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• Screen Time Rules for Kids: A Simple Family Plan for Ages 4–7
• How to reduce screen time for kids: 1 in 5 children ages 6–11 spend 4+ hours a day on screens