Jonathan Haidt
Researchers · NYU Stern School of Business
The social psychologist who turned "phone-based childhood" into the defining frame for the youth mental-health debate.
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU Stern whose book "The Anxious Generation" (2024) became a publishing phenomenon, spending more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It popularized four norms for parents and schools: no smartphone before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more unsupervised free play. He earlier co-wrote "The Coddling of the American Mind" (2018) and continues the argument on his After Babel Substack. Through anxiousgeneration.com, he has organized a wide network of parents and schools around reducing children's phone-based childhoods.
Suicide and self-harm are complex and never caused by one factor alone. Problematic screen use, cyberbullying, harmful content, and online exploitation may increase risk or intensify existing distress. If someone is in immediate danger or emotional crisis in the United States, call or text 988.
WORKS IN THE LIBRARY (10)
BOOKS
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Jonathan Haidt's 2024 book argues that a shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood, starting around 2010, is associated with rising rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm-related warning signs among adolescents, especially girls. Haidt describes four mechanisms — social deprivation, sleep loss, attention fragmentation, and heightened social comparison — as pathways linking heavy smartphone and social-media use to these outcomes, alongside overprotective parenting and the loss of unsupervised play. It proposes four norms: no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more independent play. The book spent over 100 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has been credited by news outlets, including Reuters, as an influence on Australia's under-16 social media law. Some researchers have publicly disputed how strongly the cited studies support the book's causal framing.
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
Co-written with First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff, this 2018 book examines a cultural pattern the authors call 'safetyism' — prioritizing emotional protection over resilience-building — that they say took hold on American college campuses and, they argue, is associated with rising anxiety and reduced tolerance for disagreement among young people. The authors name three 'great untruths' (that discomfort is inherently harmful, that feelings are always reliable guides to truth, and that conflicts are battles between good and bad people) which they contend run counter to established findings in cognitive-behavioral psychology. They connect the spread of these ideas partly to overprotective parenting, risk-averse school policies, and a generation that came of age alongside smartphones and constant social-media connectivity. The book recommends measured exposure to manageable adversity, free-speech-protective campus norms, and cognitive-behavioral techniques for building resilience, and became a New York Times bestseller.
VIDEOS
Are Smartphones Ruining Childhood?
In this August 2024 on-stage TED interview with journalist Elise Hu, Jonathan Haidt discusses the argument of his book 'The Anxious Generation': that a shift toward a phone-based childhood, combined with more overprotective parenting, is associated with the mental-health difficulties researchers have tracked among adolescents since the early 2010s. He walks through his proposed four norms — delaying smartphones until high school, delaying social media until 16, phone-free schools, and expanding unsupervised play — and answers questions about the underlying evidence, the school phone-restriction policies already spreading across U.S. states, and how parents and schools might coordinate on shared rules rather than acting alone. Consistent with the book, Haidt frames heavy phone and social-media use as one contributor, among several, to reported anxiety, depression, and self-harm-related warning signs in this age group, not a sole or proven cause.
How Screens Stole Childhood — and How to Get It Back
Speaking at the TED2026 conference, roughly two years after publishing 'The Anxious Generation,' Jonathan Haidt extends his earlier argument about smartphones and social media to newer generative-AI products marketed to children, including classroom tablets, AI 'companion' apps, and algorithmic feeds. He argues these tools are displacing the face-to-face social interaction he believes humans need for healthy development, and that this displacement is associated with the same mental-health warning signs he described in his earlier work. He proposes three principles of what he calls 'tech-skepticism' — treating new child-facing technologies cautiously until their effects are better understood, prioritizing unsupervised play and independence, and building shared, community-level norms around device use rather than leaving individual families to decide alone — as a framework for schools, platforms, and parents weighing whether and how to adopt new AI tools around children.
'Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of'
In this April 2025 episode of The New York Times' 'The Ezra Klein Show,' host Ezra Klein interviews Jonathan Haidt about the rapid spread of school cellphone restrictions — by that point adopted in some form by more than a dozen U.S. states, including California, Florida, and Ohio — and about Haidt's broader argument that a shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood is associated with declines in measures of adolescent flourishing. The conversation also takes up emerging concerns about generative-AI companion apps marketed to children, extending Haidt's smartphone-and-social-media argument to newer technology. Much of the episode covers the practical coordination problems parents and schools face in restricting phone use, questions about how strong the underlying evidence is, and what Haidt frames as the broader stakes of a childhood increasingly organized around screens rather than unsupervised, in-person play.
STUDIES
Specification Curve Analysis Shows That Social Media Use Is Linked to Poor Mental Health, Especially Among Girls
Published in Acta Psychologica, this study by Jean Twenge, Jonathan Haidt, Jimmy Lozano, and Kevin Cummins reanalyzed three large community survey datasets using specification curve analysis, a method that runs many defensible versions of the same statistical model to test whether a result holds up across different reasonable analytic choices. Where some earlier reanalyses had pooled boys and girls together, this paper separated results by sex and examined social media specifically rather than lumping it in with all screen time. Across the three datasets, the authors found a consistent, moderate association between social-media use and poorer mental health specifically among adolescent girls, describing its size as comparable to or larger than associations reported for other studied risk behaviors. The authors frame the finding as a robust statistical association across modeling choices, not proof of a single cause, and call for further research into underlying mechanisms.
Worldwide Increases in Adolescent Loneliness
This study by Jean Twenge, Jonathan Haidt, and colleagues used the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to track school-related loneliness among roughly one million 15- and 16-year-olds across 37 countries, surveyed in 2000, 2003, 2012, 2015, and 2018. The researchers found that reported loneliness at school rose sharply between 2012 and 2018 in 36 of the 37 countries studied, with the share of adolescents reporting elevated loneliness roughly doubling over that window. Country-years with greater smartphone access and internet use tended to show higher loneliness, while broader economic measures such as GDP and income inequality showed little relationship once the survey year was accounted for. The authors describe this pattern as consistent with — though not proof of — rising phone-based and internet-based technology use being one contributor, among others, to a broad, multi-country rise in adolescent loneliness after 2012.
Meta's Internal Research: What the Company Learned About Social Media and Harms to Mental Health from Dozens of Internal Studies
Compiled by Bennett Sippel, Nikolaus Greb, Emma Park, Zach Rausch, and Jonathan Haidt at NYU Stern's Tech and Society Lab, this January 2026 report catalogs 35 internal Meta research studies conducted between 2018 and 2024 on whether the company's products, particularly Instagram, are associated with harm to young users. The source material comes primarily from whistleblower disclosures — including material previously made public by Frances Haugen and Arturo Béjar — and from internal exhibits released through litigation brought by state attorneys general, including Tennessee's. The compiled summaries describe Meta's own survey and behavioral-log research finding associations between product use and outcomes including cyberbullying, body-image concerns, and depression, using Meta's own internal language such as 'problematic use' rather than clinical diagnostic terms. The report presents these summaries as evidence of what the company's internal research found and knew, in the company's own words, not as an independent clinical assessment by TechKids Foundation or the report's authors.
Social Media and Mental Health: A Collaborative Review
First posted in February 2024 and continually updated since (most recently in January 2026), this is an openly editable set of literature-review documents maintained by Jonathan Haidt with Zach Rausch and Jean Twenge through NYU Stern's Tech and Society Lab. Rather than a single finished paper, it is a hub of living documents — organized into major topic reviews, country-specific reviews, and in-progress drafts — that collect and summarize published research bearing on whether social-media and smartphone use are associated with adolescent mood disorders, sleep loss, and school-related difficulties. Haidt states he invites outside academic researchers to request editing access to add studies, comments, or objections directly. TechKids Foundation treats this hub as a continuously updated index pointing to primary research, useful for tracing individual cited studies back to their original sources, rather than as a single finished, peer-reviewed conclusion in its own right.
Scrutinizing the Effects of Digital Technology on Mental Health
In this 2020 comment published in Nature, Jonathan Haidt and psychologist Nick Allen argue that existing research on digital technology and adolescent mental health leans too heavily on correlational surveys and imprecise self-reported screen-time estimates. They call on researchers, technology companies, and funders to invest in more rigorous methods — including device-logged usage data, experimental designs, and pre-registered analyses — to better establish whether, and how strongly, social-media and smartphone use are associated with adolescent anxiety and depression. The piece presents no new data of its own; it is an argument, from two researchers active in the field, about the limits of the existing evidence base and a call to raise its quality. It appeared amid a broader debate in the scientific literature over how confidently researchers can characterize digital technology's relationship to youth mental-health trends, and is notable as Haidt publicly acknowledging methodological limitations in research he otherwise cites.