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highlighting other issues, that they can see above the fray and observe the macro trends that are really shaping our lives, not that stupid anti-phone rhetoric we hear from the Boomers.” It’s not the phones; it’s the lack of third spaces, the omnipresent car culture, the inequality. That defensive pose? I know it well, because I was adept at it—in 2019 I described concern over teens and social media as “alarmist.” Things are different in 2024. Yes, we have new data on the shape of the mental-health crisis among teens, and especially teenage girls, and how it’s worsened since phones got front-facing cameras and platforms became dominant. But the biggest shift doesn’t come from looking at new data; it’s from experience. More and more people have a boomer relative who was radicalized on Facebook, a grandma who won’t look up from her phone during family visits, or a Gen X partner adept at the art of phubbing. We, who are supposed to enjoy grown-adult levels of impulse control, have had trouble sleeping due to doomscrolling, spent Zoom meetings looking at Instagram, or gotten into weird fights with strangers on Reddit that derailed us emotionally for far too long. We, ourselves, with our developed brains, have felt like flies on sticky paper when it comes to social media; of course, children, still forming their selves and navigating the pitfalls of pre-adulthood, may be affected by it too. “Kids probably shouldn’t have smartphones” has lost its generational sting. It has come to look more and more like common sense. Into this apparently promising moment comes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Its compact thesis: We’ve overprotected kids IRL and under protected them online. In the book’s first chapters, Haidt rearticulates a very familiar set of arguments about American kids’ lack of physical freedom. Playgrounds used to be more dangerous! Kids used to roam the woods! Why is everyone always at scheduled activities run by adults? ! The kids never get a bruise or bump, and how will they learn to self-regulate this way? None of this will be new to anyone who’s kept up with popular parenting books in the past few decades. Haidt’s innovation lies in connecting this now-well-articulated picture of overprotected childhood with what happens when those same kids get on phones. The Anxious Generation, he hopes, will be part of a larger collective movement, one he is actively trying to incite by publishing a companion website full of evidence, discussion guides, and sample petitions, and funding billboards and public art in major cities. On his Substack, he wrote recently: “By the end of 2025, we will roll back the phone-based childhood.” Its critical that we all become informed about social media effects we seeing the growing news stories reporting children’s effective their behavior my website blog will take you years of research documentation what ought should been done waring the harm the toxic Esports had we accepted that Bill Gate, Steve Jobs were avoiding this modernize that Clery keenly aware the harm yet ego’s subverted to be first without verifying what was published such as CA ACR 265 K-12 education year 2019 for modern California Computer Science Education Month. 9