Kids need to explore the world and that includes social media
I've written a number of times about what has become conventional wisdom – spread primarily by academics like Jonathan Haidt – that phones and/or social media are evil, and that they cause teenagers in particular to develop anxiety, depression, etc. and therefore should be regulated. Haidt's book The Anxious Generation has either directly or indirectly led to laws against teen use of social media in Australia, the UK and Canada, and many other countries are reportedly considering similar legislation. As I've tried to point out in previous newsletters, all of this has come about despite the fact that there is virtually no concrete evidence in the psychological literature of any causal link between phones or social media and teen rates of depression, anxiety, or suicide – in fact, in some cases the exact opposite. Candace Odgers, a leading researcher in this area, has said in a review of Haidt's book that his views are "not supported by the science," and a meta-analysis of the research found the correlation between teen use of social media and rates of depression to be "indistinguishable from zero."
Odgers is one of the most prominent researchers to take issue with Haidt's interpretation of the science in this area, but she is far from the only one. A recent piece in The Atlantic looked at the views of another prominent psychologist – someone who at one point was a close colleague of Jonathan Haidt's, but has since diverged from him to the point where he said he now believes Haidt's views are diametrically opposed to the truth. The psychologist in question is Peter Gray, who is perhaps best known for exposing the Stanford prison experiment as a fake. He also wrote a book entitled Free To Learn that was published in 2013, and argued that one of the biggest contributors to anxiety, depression, and other mental challenges among young people is their more regimented upbringing compared to previous generations, and in particular, a lack of free-form play time. Here's how his thesis is described in the Atlantic piece:
Gray’s academic work defines play as a self-directed activity done only for its own sake. This, he came to believe, enables kids to figure out how to solve their own problems, nurture their own relationships, make their own rules, and manage their own disappointments. But he says that our society has spent the past 70 years or so interfering with that process. We’ve made it harder and harder for kids to do anything: They’re kept indoors for greater portions of the day and given less unstructured time; they play organized sports supervised by adults; they don’t go anywhere alone. Gray grew certain that this loss of independence has been harmful to their mental health.
You may not have heard of Gray or his book, but his arguments about the necessity of free play (or "self-directed activity," as psychologists prefer to call it) became very popular with parents who believed that their children's lives both at school and elsewhere had become too regimented. As the Atlantic piece notes, the book was "celebrated by advocates of free-range parenting and won endorsement from academic luminaries such as Steven Pinker." Indeed, when Gray’s fellow psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff published their 2018 best seller on the threat of safetyism, The Coddling of the American Mind, they used the title of Gray’s TEDx talk “The Decline of Play” as a chapter header. At the time his book came out, Haidt told a writer for The Atlantic that Gray was the star academic in the section of his book that dealt with play, and he said he wished that “every school in America could hear a talk by Peter Gray."
Until recently, Gray and Haidt were still thinking along the same broad lines when it comes to teens and mental challenges, although the focus of their work went in somewhat different directions. In 2017, the two joined a number of other psychologists and experts concerned about the mental wellbeing of teenagers and founded a nonprofit called Let Grow. The organization, which raised about $2 million in donations in 2024, encourages parents and teachers to stop watching kids so intently, and also tries to combat legislation that portrays a lack of child supervision as criminal behavior – what are known as “neglect laws." Let Grow also has a program called Play Club, which helps schools offer age-mixed free-play time in which kids mostly supervise themselves. Gray and Haidt both served on the group’s board of directors until recently.
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Play extends to the internet
The fact that the two academics' views were diverging became obvious when Haidt sent Gray a pre-publication version of the manuscript for Anxious Generation. Gray told The Atlantic that when he first read the book, he was appalled. “The book frankly makes me mad,” he said. “I have to say that. I think it’s unethical.” Haidt's book goes on at some length about the benefits of free play, but Gray said that the overall message of Anxious Generation was antithetical to his research. Not only did Haidt's book seem to suggest that teens who could no longer access their cellphones would suddenly return to the days of free play without technological distractions, which seemed highly unlikely, but Haidt's proposals would take away what Gray believed were some of the few freedoms they had left, like the ability to communicate privately with their friends.
Haidt also seemed to believe that kids could not be trusted to roam around the internet, or even learn how to do so. According to The Atlantic's summary of his views on the subject of the internet and social media and their impact on the mental wellbeing of teenagers, Gray believes that "children’s need for unstructured play and exploration (guided by some safety rules and common sense) applies not just to vacant lots and city parks and backyards in the suburbs, but now extends to the wild spaces of the internet," which presumably includes apps and services like social media. Kids should be free to play and explore the world without their parents’ supervision, according to Gray – even when they go online – because to grow up well, they have to be able to "play in the world that they’re growing up in." In a critique of Haidt's work posted in 2024, Gray wrote:
I have no question about Jon’s integrity. I am sure he believes the message he is presenting in this book and sees it as promoting valuable social reform. When I read, at Jon’s request, a pre-publication draft of the book, I told him I could not support it, and I explained why. I had at that time already looked quite broadly and deeply at the research pertaining to questions about effects of screens, Internet, smartphones, and social media on teens’ mental health and found that, despite countless studies designed to reveal such harmful effects, there was very little evidence for such effects. I was also concerned that Jon’s book would feed into and exacerbate what already was verging on a moral panic about potential harms of smartphones and social media on kids.
As I've argued before, I think Haidt's book has done exactly what Gray was afraid it might do – namely, it has played into and exacerbated a moral panic over smartphones and social media and their alleged impact on the emotional and psychological wellbeing of teenagers. The architect of the Australian social-media age-gating law, South Australian premier Peter Malinouskas, described in an interview how his wife had recommended Haidt's Anxious Generation to him, and how after reading it he had resolved to take action. His wife "put the book down on her lap and turned to me and said you've really got to do something about this," he said. "And then I stopped and thought about it and thought maybe we actually can." So he introduced state-level legislation hoping it could win federal support. It did, and since then the UK has passed a new law it says was modeled on the Australian one (modeled so closely that it too offered virtually no evidence that such a law was necessary), and Canada is also considering one.
As a journalist who once worked for the Columbia Journalism Review, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that one of the biggest proponents of Jonathan Haidt's views about cellphones and social media and their impact on the wellbeing of teenagers has been the media. A piece in the Financial Times suggested that smartphones and social media "are destroying children’s mental health,” while The Guardian described the smartphone as “a pocket full of poison.” In the latter article, a review of Haidt's book, the writer says that Haidt makes his case "persuasively." The evidence linking mental illness in teenagers to smartphones and social media use is "mounting," the writer argues, despite the fact that the study cited shows only correlation rather than causation. As some psychologists have argued, this could be a sign that depressed and anxious teens use their phones and social media more – in part because doing so might help.
There is no one thing
In his critique of Haidt's book, Grey notes that it is "not at all surprising to me that the book has been praised to the skies by people who do not do research in this field and strongly criticized by people who do." He quotes from Odgers review in Nature, where she said that there were two main observations she wanted to make about the book. The first was that the book was definitely "going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe." Another thing that was likely to stem from this popularity, Odgers wrote, is that the book's proposal that social media is to blame "might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people." It has almost certainly done so. As I wrote recently here, bans are also hard to administer, as Australia's experience shows. Here's what I wrote in my most recent piece, which was written after Britain passed a similar law earlier this year:
Not only is there no real evidence that the ban is working in terms of protecting kids under 16 from online harms (which themselves are poorly defined), but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that it isn't working in a more practical sense – i.e., it's not keeping teens off social media in any real way, because there are innumerable ways for them to evade the restrictions with ease. Even the Australian government itself has confirmed this in its recent eSafety report, which noted that despite the platforms in question removing or blocking millions of accounts, a survey of parents with teens who had social-media accounts showed that around seven in ten children under 16 remained on social-media platforms despite the legislation.
In his critique of Haidt's book, Gray notes a number of things that both Haidt and other psychologists who push the same theory (including Jean Twenge, who often works with Haidt) ignore, including: 1) Mental suffering among US teens increased dramatically between 1950 and 1990, but the peak in 1990 was as great as it is today, even though the public internet didn't exist yet, and neither did social media. In fact, Gray says, the initial response to the appearance of the consumer internet was an improvement in teen mental health between 1990 and about 2010; 2) Reviews of studies aimed at correlating time on social media with mental suffering among teens have shown mixed results with no consistent overall conclusion. Some studies show a small positive correlation, some show a small negative correlation, some show no correlation; 3) When teens themselves are asked about the source of their mental suffering, the great majority say it is school pressure. Much other evidence also points to school as a cause.
I should note here that Gray's analysis of the reason for teen emotional and psychological problems is also not universally accepted. Odgers, who endorsed his upcoming book called Restoring Childhood, told The Atlantic that both Gray and Haidt frustrate her with the way they search for conclusions that explain the data. While both agree that video games and unleaded gas are likely responsible for the improvement in mental health in the 1990s and 2000s, they come up with a different explanation for why those numbers decrease. For Haidt it is smartphones and social media, and for Gray it is the arrival of widespread testing that was part of the Common Core curriculum, which he says increased stress. Both also downplay other obvious factors, she says, such as the fact that adults underwent a mental-health crisis during the same period. “Caregiver mental health is by far the strongest predictor of childhood mental health,” Odgers said.
In a way, both are suffering from the same problem, according to Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology. It's "a common trap that we fall into when trying to figure out what’s going on with those declines,” he told The Atlantic. “We try to answer the question of ‘What one big thing can explain this?’ The answer, in my view, is that there isn’t one big thing.” Unfortunately that kind of argument doesn't play into a moral panic, and therefore isn't likely to sell a lot of books.
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