Screens, Stress, and Struggling Kids—Jonathan Haidt Breaks It Down

A phone-based childhood is not a human childhood, and our kids are deprived of so much of what they need in order to grow into healthy adults.

My pleasure, Kelly. I love TED. I've never spoken to TEDMED, so thanks for giving me this connection.

So the most surprising thing to me is that all around the world, mothers in particular have stood up and said, "Let's go." I knew that the book would do well because while I was writing it, I'd tell people about it and everyone would say, "I need this book tomorrow. I don't know what to do." All around the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time, and everyone is sick of it. And I think mothers were more sensitive to their kids being pulled away. I open the book with the metaphor that it's as though someone took our kids off to Mars to grow up on Mars, and it's not going well. And so all around the world, female legislators or spouses of legislators have said, "We got to do something. Let's act." And so phone-free school bills have been passed around the world. Many, many countries are now making their schools phone-free. Many states are doing it. Thousands of school districts are doing it. So the speed — I've been involved in various social change efforts. I've never seen anything like this, and that's because almost everyone sees it, and finally we're taking action. And I'm so grateful for that as a parent.

Yeah. So the book is not primarily about social media and screens. It's about childhood. It's about the great rewiring of childhood. It's a tragedy in two acts. In act one, we lost the play-based childhood. So everyone born before about 1985 — the great majority of us — we had freedom. We went out. We were on our bicycles. We had adventures. We sometimes got hurt. We came back in time for dinner. In the 90s, American parents freaked out and stopped letting their kids out. Crime was plummeting, actually, but we were scared about abduction. Strangely, this happened in Canada and the UK as well. It's not just an American thing, but it's all the English-speaking countries. This didn't happen in Scandinavia or Northern Europe, but all the English-speaking countries. We crushed childhood independence in the 90s. Now, the kids don't get depressed right away. In fact, they're getting on the internet. The internet's amazing. And so, if anyone has seen the Netflix show Adolescence, we all thought like, "Oh, well, my kid's upstairs in his bedroom on his computer. He's learning things. Maybe he'll learn to program. This is going to be good for him. He's safe." That's what we all thought. So that's act one of the tragedy. We lose a human, play-based, physical, real-world childhood.

Then act two is 2010 to 2015. It's incredibly sudden. If you were born in 1995, the last year of the millennials, you turned 15 in 2010, which means you made it through puberty without Instagram. You might have had Facebook near the end, but Facebook wasn't very toxic early on. And it was just you go back and forth to people's pages. Oh, when you had a flip phone, you probably had the Razr flip phone, and your mental health is fine. The millennials are fine. But what happens if you're born five years later? If you're born in the year 2000, let's suppose you're a girl born in 2000. You turn 15 in 2015. 2012 is the year that most Americans now have a smartphone, not a flip phone. It's the year that Instagram becomes super popular because Facebook buys it, huge attention. Now, all the phones have front-facing cameras, high-speed data. And so, in 2015, you're turning 15. That means you went through puberty. You had early puberty with a smartphone, front-facing camera, posting photos of yourself for strangers to judge. You're always checking. You're so concerned what people are saying about you. Constant drama. You're always on your phone. You rarely make eye contact. You have very little shared laughter with friends. Life for a teenager in 2015 is radically different than life for a teenager in 2010. And I believe it's that change that caused the sudden international synchronized rise in anxiety, depression, self-harm, and fall in academic achievement around the world. Not all countries — we don't have data from all countries — but across the developed West in the early 2010s, mental illness skyrockets. School achievement plummets. There we are.

There are two big factors to consider here. The first, the innocent one, is that we were all technoptimists once. You know, in the 1990s, I was walking around saying, "Oh my God, the Cold War is over. Technology is amazing. The internet — it's going to be peace and prosperity from here on in, and it's the best thing to ever happen to democracy." So a lot of us thought that. And you know, the millennials, 1981 through 1995, they grew up with computers and the internet. They learned how to program. They started companies. They were creative. They're flying all over the world. So we're all thinking, oh well, this is just the way things are now, and it's pretty good. And the early internet was amazing. Everyone loved the early internet. So we didn't notice when things got dark. And things got dark beginning in 2009. So in 2009 is when we get the like button and the retweet button. So everything gets super viral now. Before then it was I go to your page, you come to mine. But now you get the news feed conditioned by algorithms based on engagement data. So now it gets super addictive and super viral. This is around 2010, 2011. Social media is changing, and it really is getting its hooks in kids. And we know from the internal documents and the things they've said — they studied child development, they studied adolescent brain development. They knew where the weak points were. They knew how to play on kids' insecurities about their social standing and prestige. And they hooked kids. They knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway. So it gets really dark in the early 2010s. And guess what? That's when social media becomes really damaging. I believe that's when the phone-based childhood really takes shape, right around 2012. And that's when the mental illness crisis hits. But we don't recognize it at first because we still — we have the Arab Spring in 2011. Oh, Facebook is going to save democracy. So we're still techno-optimists in the early 2010s.

Now, things are beginning to shift in the late 2010s. After the Trump election, many people on the left especially are saying, "Oh my God, look at the disinformation, look at all the things that can happen." Jean Twenge published a very important article in The Atlantic in 2017 titled "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" So the conversation about, well, wait, maybe this isn't a good idea. Maybe it's not a good idea to have our kids basically grow up looking at a screen rather than running around and talking to each other. That conversation begins in 2017, and it's making progress by 2019. That's when I really get into it, and Jean and I are publishing articles saying, "Wait, there is research showing harm." Then COVID hits. What kids desperately needed in 2019 was less time on screens, more time outside playing. What COVID gave the entire world that did lockdowns was no time outside, because you might catch COVID on a playground with other kids, and all day on screens. So we have this wreckage happening to childhood minds, to childhood in the early 2020s, but we don't know that it's caused by the screen-based life. We think, oh, COVID, fear, lockdowns. As COVID began to clear, 2022, 2023 — that I believe is why my book did so well in 2024, because by 2023 we're seeing, wait, everything is still really bad, and education keeps going down and down and down. This wasn't COVID; it was something else. And so it's only in 2024, I think, that me and some others were able to make the case: wait, this global destruction of human potential, human capital, human happiness, human education — this was in place before COVID. This started in 2012. And so I think that's why there's a lot of recognition now of what we've done, but we didn't know it really before COVID.

This all starts with the simple correlational observation that just as kids get on social media and smartphones, we get the phone-based childhood. That's when all these terrible things start, right around 2012, 2013. Now, that's just a correlation. I'm a social scientist. We all know that it's very difficult to prove what caused a historical event. And my critics say, "Oh, it's just correlational. You have no evidence of harm." To which I say, "Wait a second. There are so many different lines of evidence of harm." Here we go. First, the correlational data itself is not compatible with the null hypothesis. So my critics say, "Oh, this is just another moral panic. Oh, the phones are harmless. Oh, you know, some studies show benefits, some show harm. So the null hypothesis is there's no connection." But yet, what we find, my research team and I, is whenever we go into these studies, what we find is they all blend together — all the platforms for all the kids and all the outcomes — and you get a correlation of around 0.03 to 0.1. But when you unblend it, when you say, "No, let's not look at all screen time. Let's look at social media use by girls on anxiety and depression," then you get a much larger effect. So of course correlation doesn't prove causation, but the pattern in the correlations is not compatible with the null hypothesis. That's the first.

Second, then we always turn to experiments. Let's do random assignment. Now you can't randomly assign kids to grow up with or without social media. That we can't do directly. But oh, wait a second. Nature did that. So high-speed internet came into different regions at different times in this period, and four studies that we found looked at that. And guess what? When high-speed social internet comes into an area of British Columbia or Spain or Italy, what you find is that rates of hospitalization for mental illness, especially for girls, goes up right afterwards. So that's called a quasi-experiment. And then there are lab experiments in which you randomly assign people to reduce their social media use. This should be the gold standard. It's just one way of operationalizing it, but at least this is a true random assignment experiment. What do they show? Almost all the studies that have people reduce their use for more than a week find reductions in anxiety and depression. That should be case closed. We're done. The problem is that some studies only ask people to get off for a day. And when people are addicted to something — heroin, let's say — and they get off for a day, are they happy? No, they're in withdrawal. So some of my critics say when they combine all the studies together, they get only a small benefit, close to zero. And I keep saying, you're combining one-day studies. Do not blend this together. All the critics usually are doing what we call blender studies. They blend everything together, but if you look at the most relevant cases, you find the evidence.

And finally, let's move outside the lab. If something terrible happened to a generation, well, what do they say? And the eyewitness testimony from Gen Z — they point to this as the major cause of their problems. What do the parents say? They think this is the major cause of their problems. What do the teachers and the principals say? It's very hard to find groups that are working with kids that think the phones are anything but harmful. And finally, we have confessions from the perpetrators. We have all kinds of quotes because all of the — especially the big three, Meta, Snap, and TikTok. Those are the big three that are really destroying childhood. They're all being sued. And so a lot of documents have come out in discovery. At my Substack, After Babel, we put up one for TikTok just using quotes from TikTok employees. They know they are shattering attention, causing addiction, exposing kids to sex and violence and drugs. Like, they say it. So my attitude is, okay, wait, we've got correlational evidence that is consistent. We've got experiments. We've got quasi-experiments. We've got eyewitness testimony. We've got confessions from the perpetrator. What more do you want? And still some of them say, "Oh, there's no evidence of causality, no evidence."

Yeah. So let's talk about girls and social media because that is a very tight connection. And that's what I thought my book would be about because that's where the evidence is clearest. But then we're going to talk about boys and everything else, not just social media, because it turns out the boys are actually doing worse than the girls. But I didn't realize this until the book came out. So girls and social media. One way to think about this is if you were designing a trap for an animal — if you wanted to catch raccoons or butterflies — what do you do? A trap, you put bait, you put something that the animal wants, and they're attracted to it, but once they take it, they can't get out. That's what a trap is. Now, suppose you're a company fishing for girls. You want to trap girls, monetize their attention, show them advertisements. If that's your goal, what's the bait? What's it going to be? It's going to be social information. Girls have a much more developed map of social space. Girls' popularity, girls' social lives are much more about who knows whose secrets, who's friends with who, who's fighting who. Boys are literally more autistic. This is the work of Simon Baron-Cohen. The male brain is just literally shifted a little bit over to high systemizing, low empathizing. Men, boys, they don't think ahead. They're not thinking, well, who had a fight with who, therefore I... So information is much better bait for girls.

So, okay. So here, girls, come on. It's free. Post photos, talk about each other, and then you ping girls by saying, "Do you want to see what someone said about you? Do you want to see a new photo that has you in it?" And so they're very good at getting the girls on. Now, once all the girls are on — this is 2012, when all the girls rush on — once the girls are on, they're trapped. No girl can leave because if you leave, you're alone. You don't know anything. You don't know any information. Your prestige drops. And especially if you're in middle school. Middle school girls are so sensitive. Middle school is the worst period of life for boys and girls, but especially girls. That's when bullying peaks at seventh and eighth grade. This is a horrible time to put kids on social media. So girls are especially drawn in, locked in, and their insecurities get preyed upon relentlessly because what are you doing? You're putting up photos of yourself. You're trying to make yourself look beautiful. But guess what? Most of the photos you see are more beautiful. Their lives are happier. They're richer. Their skin is more perfect. And so it's a giant machine to make most girls feel below average. And so we wonder why girls have such difficulty with self-esteem, with body image, with eating disorders. So that's why I think there's a special relationship with girls. And we see this in a lot of the studies, the correlational studies. The correlation between time spent on social media and mental illness outcomes is almost always bigger — multiple, twice as big often — as that relationship for boys. So there's a special relationship, and this is why I say there is no way to make this safe. The companies want to keep saying, "Oh, but we pulled down bad content. Oh, we've taken out millions of pieces of bad content." Well, yeah, fine. But even if all girls saw was pictures of other girls having fun, this is not good for girls. There's no way to make this safe. That's why I say we've got to just raise the age from 13 with no enforcement to 16 with enforcement. This is just not appropriate for kids. We need to think of this as like gambling or going to strip clubs or other things that we allow adults to do, but they're just not appropriate for children.

Yeah, that's actually — let me just build on what you just said about blender studies. This is a very important point. So even if you zoom in on social media, you're still blending Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok and others, but those are the big three. And what happens? Instagram is by far the best at causing girls to be anxious, depressed, think that they're ugly, think that they're fat. So Instagram has a special relationship. It causes internalizing disorders in girls. Snapchat doesn't do that. Snapchat, however, is the main way that sexual predators get to kids. Sometimes it'll start on Instagram, but then they move to Snap because Snap is designed to have disappearing messages. And Snapchat does not keep records of the conversation. So drug dealers and extortionists — it's perfect for them. They go on, they communicate, and while they tell me that they do keep the metadata, they know that there was some connection, but they destroy the evidence. So Snapchat isn't causing depression, but it is causing sextortion. And then many suicides happen when boys get sextorted. They sometimes kill themselves. So Snapchat causes all kinds of severe harms, but it's not connected to the number of hours you're using. It's: are you talking to strangers? Are you looking for drugs that are lending? So Instagram — depression in girls. Snapchat — meeting men who want money or sex from you will harm you. TikTok — destroying your concentration. TikTok is by far the worst thing for concentration. So it's three different platforms, three different effects.

How does the research go? First thing we do is we say, well, all we're going to look at is time, just hours spent on any social media platform. And what's the correlation of that with depression? And the answer is very small. Of course it is. You're taking three platforms, only one of which has a special relation with depression. You're ignoring all the other harms. And then you conclude that, oh, the correlation is there, but it's too small.

That's right. But notice how you phrase that. We're not seeing a correlation between social media use because all we're thinking about is are they on it for how long. And if we look at that, let's say with Snapchat, we're not going to find an effect. In fact, I saw a study recently, the correlation of time spent on Snapchat with mood and things is actually slightly positive. Now, does Snapchat cause the positivity, or is that the really social kids are more positive? But for Snap, the problem isn't that it makes them depressed. For Snap, the problem is that it introduces them to strangers on disappearing platforms. And so when boys are extorted — I just saw a movie, there's an amazing movie, Can't Look Away, about the parents that are suing Snapchat and others. And a lot of these boys were healthy, happy athletes, good relations with their parents. They weren't depressed, but they were tricked into sharing a naked picture of themselves with what they thought was a sexy girl who was interested in them. And then this extortionist reveals himself and says, "I'm going to send this now to everyone that you know, and unless you give me money right now." And then they keep going and going and going. And there are — someone sent me a list of 40 known suicide cases. The FBI found — they investigated a bunch — they found 20. So we already know of dozens of boys who have committed suicide, sometimes within hours. So this is not because they were on it for a lot of time. This is just — for boys, a lot of bad stuff happens, and for girls, a lot of bad stuff happens on Snapchat. But it's not depression.

So again, that's the point that you have to look at each platform. What are the harms it's causing? If there was any other consumer product in the world where the correlation of amount consumed with depression, anxiety was 0.1 or 0.2, which is what it is for all social media, we'd be freaking out. We'd say no way. And when we zoom in and we find bigger and bigger effects, you know, it's just for some reason we've gotten into this situation where, well, we're not going to get rid of it unless there's proof. There has to be proof that it's harmful. But in public health, we don't use a beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard. We use: is there a reasonable doubt standard. And I think Jean Twenge and I and the others, we've shown, and parents have seen it, there is a reasonable — I could be wrong. Maybe the phones are totally harmless. But can anyone say I'm definitely wrong? Can anyone say they're so confident that these things are safe? Nobody can say that. We're seeing these studies, and there is harm. Then we should be setting regulations around it.

So I'm thinking a lot about Snapchat these days because my daughter is 15, and I have kept her entirely off of all social media while all her friends are on it. And she understands about Instagram. She sees why that's harmful, but she really does want Snapchat because that's the way the kids communicate. And I've been tempted to let her have it, but a couple of things. First, I polled my own students at NYU. Should I let her have it? And some said yes, but the majority said no. Just lots of bad stuff happens. You're talking with lots of strangers. I've spoken with people at Snap. They keep saying, "Oh, no. It's just a platform by which you connect with your close friends. That's all it is. It's just like texting with photographs." But that's not really true. I created an account myself, and I was relentlessly pushed to connect to people I don't know, friends of friends. This is how sex extortionists and bad actors get in. All you have to do is get one kid in a school to accept your friend request. And now the platform will suggest that everybody connect with everybody who's connected through that, at least by one degree. And last week I was talking with some high school boys about this, and they were saying, no, we just use it to talk to our friends. I said, okay, how many friends do you have on your — how many contacts do you have? And one said about a thousand. Another said, oh yeah, about a thousand. Another said 700. So the platform relentlessly pushes you to connect to people you do not know. And then it pushes you to keep sharing snaps. The streaks push you to do it every day. And so if you let your kid on Snapchat, the platform is going to connect them to strangers, guaranteed. And the platform is going to push them to connect — not the optimal amount, but the maximum amount. And when all three platforms are doing this, what we end up with is half of our kids say that they are online almost all the time. One-third of our kids say they're on a social media platform almost all the time. Imagine a child spending 10 hours a day on TikTok, or 10 hours a day on Snap, or 10 hours a day on Instagram. How can this not warp development, block development, block experience, block maturity, block social skills? So I know it's hard, and when you're doing it alone, it's very hard. But my hope is that the book is starting conversations everywhere. So if you delay, if you don't let your kids on until at least 16, at least you won't be alone anymore. Now, once they're 16, I'm not advocating for laws that set it higher, but I think many parents would want to wait further.