To restore a "normal human childhood," social psychologist Jonathan Haidt laid out four rules during a webinar this week.
No smartphone before high school, Haidt said. His other three rules: No social media before age 16; phone-free schools; and far more play and independence in the real world. Schools have a key role to play in supporting these changes, he said, from implementing cellphone bans to educating families on the importance of such restrictions.
"We need to roll back the phone-based childhood and restore a play-based childhood, and to do that you have to have schools and families," he said. "They have to be working together to do this, to change childhood."
Haidt is the bestselling author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, a book that presents research on the strong relationship between the increased use of smartphones and social media, and rising rates of adolescent anxiety and depression.
Haidt appeared alongside California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Superintendent Alberto Carvalho during Tuesday's webinar, hosted by school-based teletherapy provider Daybreak Health. Nick Melvoin, a member of the LAUSD Board of Education who authored the district's forthcoming cellphone ban, was part of the panel as well.
The discussion centered on youth cellphone use, particularly prolonged exposure to social media on smartphones, and how that has replaced unstructured playtime and growing independence to the detriment of children around the world.
"Levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm were all pretty stable from the late 1990s through 2010, 2011. There's really no sign of any change, and all of a sudden around 2012, the numbers just go shooting up for boys and girls," Haidt said. "So we had a teen mental health crisis that exploded out of nowhere -- no sign of it in 2011 and by 2015 it was everywhere."
The timing coincides with millennials trading in their flip phones for smartphones, Haidt said, with Generation Z being the first to go through puberty scrolling social media. As this became the norm, he said, adolescent mental health and academic performance suffered.
However, Haidt took pains to point out that these negative outcomes are not the result of social media use alone, but also the related dearth of free play in the real world. Such play, he said, is a biological necessity, or "what you need to do to wire your brain."
"It's not just social media -- it's the transition from a play-based childhood, a normal human childhood, where kids are doing things in the world: developing social skills and making eye contact and getting sunlight in their eyes and all the things we think of as part of childhood," he said. "That kind of ends between 2010 and 2015."
Turning the tide on this frightening trend and proposing new norms requires collective action, Haidt said, and schools are best positioned to create the necessary momentum. The easiest step is to go phone free, he said, describing it as a "very low cost, very high benefit" way to begin moving kids in a healthier direction.
He recommended that, as schools inform families about cellphone restrictions, they also let them know research backs this up and they must do their part. Schools should make it clear to students and parents, he said, that it is unhealthy to have a smartphone before high school, to use social media before age 16, and to lack adequate playtime and independence in the world.
Districts should do all they can to build more play into each school day, Haidt said, and foster increased independence. He pointed to Let Grow, a nonprofit he co-founded, as a resource for school-based projects like the Let Grow Play Club, where students are given time and space to interact without adult intervention.
Districts throughout the nation have begun to embrace such changes, as evidenced by the recent wave of cellphone restrictions sweeping U.S. schools. LAUSD, the second-largest school district in the country, will implement its bell-to-bell cellphone ban in January, and California has followed suit with the Phone-Free School Act, requiring all state public schools to limit or ban smartphones by July 2026.
"Everyone who has limited phone use during school time has seen an improvement in academic performance, has seen an improvement in social conditions, fewer behaviors, less bullying, just less disruption," Thurmond said.
The main pushback schools get when it comes to student cellphone restrictions, speakers said, is parents want to be able to reach their children in case of an emergency, but LAUSD Superintendent Carvalho said this does not impact student safety.
"We hear a great deal about how students need their phones in the event of an emergency," he said, "but what we've actually seen is that the use of phones among students actually interferes with their ability to focus and follow procedure during crisis."
The burden, Melvoin said, falls on schools to figure out how they will reach families in an emergency, and also how parents and students can communicate on less urgent issues.