How do we put the genie back in the bottle now that 97% of 12-yearolds own a smartphone ? Professor Jonathan Haidt is here to help
IT SEEMS PERTINENT that when Jonathan Haidt turns up for our inter view, he finds me in the lobby of his London hotel scrolling mindlessly on my phone.
‘Don’t apologise!’ smiles the New York University professor and author of bestselling book The Anxious Generation: How The Great Rewiring Of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic Of Mental Illness when I point out the irony. ‘We all do it.’
Which is exactly why we’re here.
It would be an understatement to say his new book has hit a nerve. It’s dominated the best-seller charts, both here and in the US, where Haidt lives with his wife and two teenage children. Everybody from Oprah (who he recently sat down with to talk about the teen mental health crisis and our phone-obsessed culture) to MPs, newspaper columnists and campaigners is raising concerns about the issues it covers. Namely, what Haidt calls our children’s descent into a ‘phone-based childhood’, which data shows is making them anxious and depressed.
In his book he explains how the mental health crisis among young people, which had been stable for years, began to ramp up around the time the first smartphone was introduced, in the early 2010s.
‘The reaction to the book has been explosively positive,’ he tells me. ‘It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Usually it’s very hard to change people’s minds but, in this instance, I don’t have to change anybody’s mind. Parents know there’s an issue.
Teachers know there’s an issue. They just don’t know how to find their way out of it.’
In the UK today, 55% of eight to 11-yearolds own a mobile phone. While almost all (97%) of 12-year-olds do, with smartphones being as ubiquitous in the first term of secondar y school as a new blazer.
Meanwhile, Haidt tells me he was shocked by new research from Ofcom that found nearly a quarter of five to seven-year-olds have a smartphone.
‘Basically, nobody in the UK starts puberty, which is an incredibly important time, without a smartphone,’ says Haidt. ‘We have to reverse that.’
He loves the work of Daisy Greenwell, the British mother who set up the movement Smartphone Free Childhood along with her friend Clare Fernyhough, and he contacted them to tell them so.
Greenwell and Fernyhough’s campaign encourages parents to form class WhatsApp support groups where they all agree not to normalise giving young children phones. They’re also pushing for stronger rules at school around smartphone use and to increase the age limit of social media apps from 13 to 16.
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