The Cowbell

Article by Tara DaPra, Teaching Professor & 2024-25 Instructional Development Consultant

Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, was supposed to be about how the rise of smartphones and social media were damaging democratic society. But when he wrote the chapter on adolescent mental health, he knew there was much more to say about what smartphones and social media were doing to children and teens, what Haidt has dubbed “the Great Rewiring of Childhood.” This book is essential reading to help us understand our students today, the youngest of whom were in 8th grade when the pandemic began, and how the college classroom can be the space for them to re-wire once more.

First, how we got here: Haidt claims that two big shifts have happened to create this re-wiring in children born after 1995. First was the decline of what he dubs “the play-based childhood,” which began even earlier, in the 1980s, when fears about safety permeated the culture. Instead of children being allowed to wander parks and neighborhoods with one another, as you or your parents might have done, children were continually supervised, giving rise to the term “helicopter parenting.” They could no longer take the ordinary risks of childhood—or, in turn, develop the resilience and confidence those opportunities provided.

Then in the late 2000s, with the advent of the iPhone, the “phone-based childhood” was born. But instead of parents providing the same vigilant protection against internet-based dangers, they did the opposite, underprotecting children during vulnerable stages of brain development. For girls, their time was largely spent on social media, while boys were pulled into the spheres of gaming and pornography.

On this two-pronged shift in childhood, Haidt writes,

We decided that the real world was so full of dangers that children should not be allowed to explore it without adult supervision, even though the risks to children from crime, violence, drunk drivers, and most other sources have dropped steeply since the 1990s.[1] At the same time, it seemed like too much of a bother to design and require age-appropriate guardrails for kids online, so we left children free to wander through the Wild West of the virtual world, where threats to children abounded. (67)

While some argue that Haidt overstates the correlation between the rise of smartphones and adolescent mental illness, the thrust of Haidt’s argument is that the “the Great Rewiring of Childhood” has created “the Anxious Generation.”

Thankfully, this book does more than describe the problem. He also offers solutions, starting with advice for parents to protect their children. First, Haidt argues that parents must delay giving children their own smartphones, arguing that an internet-connected watch or the texting and basic apps of a “dumbphone” is all they truly need. He praises the movement “Wait Until 8th” (224) but then advises parents to wait even longer, until high school, and encourages parents to support one another in this. It’s so much easier to hold out, he says, if parents do it together.

Second, he tells parents that children should not have social media accounts before 16 and argues for stronger age-verification laws. Haidt writes, “Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers” (15). (This parent is going to wait until her kids are 16 for both social media and smartphones, if she can help it.)

But beyond personal action, Haidt advocates for collective action. In particular, he argues that schools play an important role in driving change, and he calls for phone-free schools, all the way from elementary school through high school. He doesn’t endorse the compromises that some local K-12 districts are exploring, such as students putting phones in a pouch when they walk into a classroom or allowing access during the lunch hour. Instead, Haidt writes, “Students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked pouches during the school day” (15). This means no phones for seven hours, full stop—not until the final bell has rung. The Anxious Generation (and his blog After Babel) describes schools that piloted such programs, and the results were astonishing: students talked to one another. They engaged in class activities and felt less lonely and they learned. They weren’t thinking about the next text or that mean social media post they had to wait forty minutes to respond to. They were free.

Finally, Haidt calls for young children being allowed much more free and unsupervised play, including “junkyard playgrounds” (259), which the New York Times reported on in 2019 but also 2016 and 1971. Haidt argues that letting children play without constant adult intervention is essential to their well-being: “That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults” (15).

But what does this mean for those of us teaching and serving college students today? What control do we have over their use of phones in our classrooms, between periods, or, for that matter, how much free play they were afforded as children, how much screen time they had as teenagers who came of age during the pandemic?

We can, of course, encourage students to put away phones during our face-to-face classes, and I do, especially during the five- or ten-minute increments that students are freewriting or otherwise generating ideas for a larger project. But I’d bet that most of us are not interested in policing phones. Instead, I’d argue that when teaching face-to-face classes, we should lean in to what’s always made those such effective learning spaces: facilitate rich discussions. Haidt writes, “Synchronous, face-to-face, physical interactions and rituals are a deep, ancient, and underappreciated part of human evolution” (57). We can create space in our classrooms for students to talk to one another, to make eye contact, to take small risks, and, with any luck, to be producers of knowledge. And even as some students talk more than others, let’s not forget the benefits of active listening: “When people practice silence in the company of equally silent companions, they promote quiet reflection and inner work, which confers mental health benefits” (207).

“The Great Rewiring of Childhood” has changed our college classrooms, and not for the better. But our students are hungry for the chance to “develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.” Like those who saw the value of letting kids play in piles of construction debris, we can create the space and then watch while our students create from it.