Jonathan Haidt: How to make the 'anxious generation' happy again

Four new norms could help children thrive in the digital age. Image: World Economic Forum/Valeriano Di Domenico
- Since around 2011, young people — historically one of the happiest demographics — have been reporting increased levels of depression and anxiety.
- Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University, thinks a new approach to digital technologies could reverse the trend.
- Haidt is proposing four new norms to “restore childhood”, including limiting access to smartphones and social media for under-fourteens.
Academics researching wellbeing have for a long time almost unanimously agreed on one thing: over the typical lifetime, happiness tends to follow a U-shaped curve, peaking at 30, plummeting at age 50, before spiking again after 70. It’s a pattern replicated using data going back as far as the 1970s in almost 150 countries.
But around 2011, researchers noticed an astonishing reversal in this trend. “This empirical regularity has been replaced by a monotonic decrease in illbeing by age,” they reported in an NBER working paper. In plain English, younger people today are unhappier, both compared to previous generations and to their older peers. Or, to quote the title of the most recent book from Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University, they are the anxious generation.
We see this play out in a whole range of data, Haidt told participants in a session at Davos. In the US, for example, reported rates of anxiety among young people have exploded. So too have emergency room visits for self-harm. Similar trends can be seen in places like other English-speaking countries and the Nordics.

“Why did it happen all over the world?” Haidt asked before sharing the theory he also puts forward in his best-selling book: “We have over-protected children in the real world and under-protected them online.”
Today, rather than playing with their friends, kids stay at home on their devices. Instead of hearing chatter and laughter in the corridor of schools, we hear the gentle tapping of screens. The social isolation many of us experienced during pandemic-induced lockdowns was nothing new for children, Haidt said. “They began social distancing as soon as they got smartphones.”

The good news for parents is that, while this trend is worrying, it is not inevitable. There are things we can do. “We can turn this around with four new norms,” Haidt proposed.
Four new norms for the digital age
The first norm is a commitment to not give our children a smartphone until they are at least 14. “Give them a flip-phone if you want to, so they can call and text you,” he said. “But don’t give the entire world access to your child.” The second is to not allow our children to use social media until they are at least 16. “Social media is wildly inappropriate for children — you have strangers trying to talk to them, cyberbullying, explosive drama.”
The third norm is that schools should be a phone-free environment. “All schools need to be phone free from bell to bell — from the morning when kids arrive to the end when they leave,” Haidt explained.
And finally, the fourth norm involves going back to a time where parents felt more comfortable letting their kids walk to the shops or play outside with friends. “The fourth norm is to give them much more independence in the real world,” he said. “Ultimately, our mission is to restore childhood: the kind of wonderful, fun, exciting childhood we all had, which was full of conflicts, failures, exploration, adventure, risk-taking, thrills and all those emotions that you experienced not with your parents, but when you were out, away from your secure home base.”
Ultimately, our mission is to restore childhood.
”Haidt recognized that it might be difficult for individual parents to enforce norms that go so much against the grain in today’s tech-focused world. His advice to parents? Don’t do it alone.
“If you’re the only parent who doesn’t give your kid a phone, well, then you’re a bad mom and your kid feels left out and made fun of,” he said. “But if you work with five of the parents of your kid’s friends so that you’re all on the same page, and you don’t just take away the phones, but you actually encourage them to go out and play together…well then we’ve won.”
A global, collective moment
Around the world, parents and policy-makers are already heeding Haidt’s advice. In the UK, as part of the Smartphone Free Childhood grassroots movement, 85,000 parents have signed a pact committing to delay giving their child a smartphone. To date, parents in 25 countries, from Argentina to Uzbekistan, have joined the movement.
Over in Australia, the government has put in place a social media ban for all children under the age of 16, and mobile phones have been banned in state schools there since 2023.
While the movement is in its infancy, there is some preliminary research that suggests it is already creating a real impact. In Arkansas, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders piloted a phone-free programme in schools.
“We’ve been able to show proof of concept,” she explained when she joined Haidt on stage in the session. “Within just the first year of some of the schools in our state going phone free, we’ve seen a 51% drop in drug-related offenses, a 57% drop in verbal and physical aggression among our students, and a massive increase in overall participation of students in the classroom.” After seeing the results, Sanders is now proposing an outright ban in schools across the state.
In a time of divisions and increased polarization, this feels like one of those rare examples of an issue that everyone can get behind. “There is nothing partisan about this: it’s impacting literally every single family, every single community,” Sanders argued. “We need collective action to bring about a huge cultural shift, because that’s what it’s going to require.”
More on Wellbeing and Mental HealthSee all
Olena Zelenska
February 5, 2025