{"id":7091,"date":"2026-09-15T21:12:31","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T21:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=7091"},"modified":"2026-09-15T21:12:31","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T21:12:31","slug":"peter-gray-restoring-childhood-jonathan-haidt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=7091","title":{"rendered":"What if social media isn\u2019t hurting kids?"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Two years ago, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt released his New York Times<\/em> bestseller The Anxious Generation.<\/em> The book posits that the rise of social media and smartphone use is largely to blame for the prominent decline in teen mental health since 2010. It quickly became a central rallying cry of the social media backlash. Haidt has been credited with helping inspire<\/a> Australia\u2019s nationwide teen social media ban. He has joined forces with bereaved parents who are fighting tech companies in court<\/a>. His name comes up unprompted in conversations with people in power who say his book opened their eyes to an online crisis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Haidt\u2019s theory has received regular critiques from recognized academics. Candice Odgers, a leading adolescent mental health researcher<\/a>, wrote a scathing review of Haidt\u2019s analysis<\/a> in Nature<\/em> that opened by conceding, \u201cthis book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children\u2019s development that many parents are primed to believe.\u201d Now, in the wake of that highly accurate prediction, a former colleague of Haidt\u2019s seeks to not only take down his theory, but also offer an alternative. The biggest question may not be whether he\u2019s correct \u2014 but whether it\u2019s too late to change course if he is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In his new book Restoring Childhood<\/em>, psychology researcher Peter Gray argues that teens\u2019 mental health declined thanks to decades of steadily reduced autonomy, and after a brief period of reprieve, fell again in the 2010s not \u2014 as Haidt argues \u2014 because of phones and social media, but because of rigid schooling methods linked to the Common Core curriculum and government pressure to improve children\u2019s performance<\/a>. And far from being damaging, Gray also argues the adoption of home internet in the 1990s and 2000s actually drove a rebound in teens\u2019 mental health by restoring freedom and connection lost in earlier decades. He fears social media bans aren\u2019t just \u2014 as Odgers has argued \u2014 a distraction from real solutions, but a new harm in themselves.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cYou take a smartphone away from your kids and that study suggests you\u2019ll make them less happy\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In an interview on The Vergecast<\/em>, Gray told me that Haidt\u2019s book \u201ccompletely ignored\u201d dozens of meta-analyses and other research that\u2019s found \u201cnot even a meaningful correlation between the amount of time kids are on social media or on smartphones and their mental health.\u201d Where there is some connection, Gray adds, studies suggest that teens may use social media to cope<\/em> with their depression or anxiety. He references a study in Florida<\/a> that found 11-to-13-year-olds who owned smartphones were more likely to spend real-world time with friends. \u201cYou take a smartphone away from your kids and that study suggests you\u2019ll make them less happy and they\u2019ll have less friends,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Gray says that in studies through the years, kids consistently identify school pressure, not social media, as their top source of anxiety. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s the primary source for everybody, but when you\u2019re looking at the population at large, every single study that I\u2019ve been able to find where kids are asked, \u2018What\u2019s the primary source of your anxiety or your stress or your depression?\u2019, in every single one of them, school pressure comes out on top,\u201d Gray tells me. \u201cNothing else comes close.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Gray and Haidt both believe that since at least the 1980s, increased restrictions on kids\u2019 independence and unstructured play have damaged their resilience. While it used to be common for kids to play together unsupervised, that practice has diminished in part due to the rise of \u201cstranger danger\u201d narratives fostered by rare, but high-profile, crimes. In 2017 the pair helped cofound an organization called Let Grow, which advocates for policies that make it easier for parents to let their children play freely, like ensuring they can\u2019t be considered neglectful for letting kids outside by themselves. But the two have split sharply over the impact of the internet. Gray\u2019s book is intended as a deliberate rebuttal to Haidt\u2019s \u2014 after The Anxious Generation<\/em>\u2019s release, Gray resigned from the board of Let Grow to avoid conflict within the organization.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Haidt did not respond to a request for comment from The Verge<\/em>, but he told The Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s Kaitlyn Tiffany in a July article<\/a> that the 1990s and early 2000s dip in teen suicide rates may be credited to a phase-out of leaded gasoline, since lead exposure has been linked to mental health issues. He also told Tiffany that Gray relied too heavily on a minority dissenting group of researchers. Tiffany writes that many of the more than a dozen tech and child development researchers she spoke to \u201cexpressed concern that Haidt overstates the strength of correlational findings and suggests causation where it hasn\u2019t been proved.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Gray accuses Haidt of stirring a moral panic over technology that isn\u2019t, on the whole, harmful. Looking across research, he says, Common Core is the clearest explanation for the sudden decline in teen mental health. And at the population level, the impact of social media \u201cbalances out. Some kids are doing better, some kids are doing worse because they\u2019re on social media.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe need to stop treating kids as if they\u2019re idiots\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Gray says he\u2019s not opposed to all guardrails, including school phone bans and the concept of age verification for accessing pornography. But he questions the effectiveness of bans on social media, knowing kids are likely to get around them, and is hesitant to restrict platforms that let kids express themselves \u2014 suggesting instead that parents focus on teaching their children to navigate them. \u201cWe need to stop treating kids as if they\u2019re idiots,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe need to start understanding that kids are pretty good at knowing what\u2019s good for them and not good for them and they can benefit from our help in learning how to do these things.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But increasingly, parents of younger teens may not have that choice. Haidt\u2019s theory holds undisputed dominance in many circles, including among politicians. Since Australia\u2019s social media ban for teens, the UK<\/a> and European Union<\/a> are among those considering their own bans or platform limits. In the US, states like California<\/a> and New York<\/a> have enacted limits on certain social media features, and a federal proposal<\/a> would restrict algorithmic feeds for kids under 17. Even among people who find Gray\u2019s arguments about Common Core convincing, some might still see taking kids offline as a harmless precaution.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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With so much momentum behind the backlash against phones and social media, can Gray\u2019s book still make a difference? \u201cI certainly hope it\u2019s not too late,\u201d he says. He points out that some moral panics have petered out. In the 1990s and 2000s, for instance, many people worried that video games like Mortal Kombat<\/em> and Doom<\/em> were making kids more violent, connecting their rise to that of school shootings. Eventually, research showed many mass shooters didn\u2019t play video games<\/a> after all. Attempts at regulation \u2014 including a California ban<\/a> on the sale of violent games to children \u2014 were largely overruled. And many kids who did play them grew up to become those in charge. \u201cThe science won out eventually,\u201d Gray says. \u201cSo it\u2019s not me that\u2019s going to win out. It\u2019s the science that\u2019s going to win out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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