The following is excerpted from The Free Press. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
The Anxious Generation was published one year ago today. Our plan was to promote the book in the spring, take the summer off to recharge, then get to work in September on Jon’s next book, a deeply depressing investigation of technology’s effects on democracy.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, the book catalyzed a movement around the world. Most spectacularly, schools, states, and entire countries implemented phone-free school policies, and Australia raised the age for opening social media accounts to 16.
This went well beyond our wildest expectations of what could happen.
The question is why this change is unfolding so quickly—and what this mass movement says about the state of our culture and its prospects for renewal.
Wherever children have smartphones in their pockets and social media on those smartphones, family life turns into an eternal struggle over screen time. That’s been our reality for a while. Then came Covid-19.
For several years, children—deprived of school and every other normal social activity—were confined to their screens. As Covid restrictions faded away, the device addictions they had amplified did not. And that struggle between parents and their kids only intensified.
By early 2024, parents were sick of it. Teachers, too, were exhausted from competing for their students’ attention against platforms designed by multibillion-dollar companies to grab and hold attention. So we didn’t need to persuade people that there was a problem. The Anxious Generation put into words, graphs, and metaphors what parents, teachers, pediatricians, and young people had felt for more than a decade: that smartphones, social media, and video games were pulling children out of the real world and transporting them someplace strange, inhumane, and harmful.
What the book made clear was the extent of the problem. It turned out most parents felt that way but lacked the tools to establish new cultural norms for their communities. Through book clubs, Facebook groups, text threads, podcasts, PTA meetings, faith-based gatherings, and just about every place where parents, teachers, and community leaders talked among themselves, parents organized.
The book framed the situation as a collective action problem from which we could escape, but only if we do it collectively. The escape route? Four simple norms for collective action.
We can give you an update on the progress of the movement and draw lessons for the future by reviewing what has happened for each of the four norms. Each gives a glimpse of the profound change that’s underway:
Norm 1: No Smartphones Before High School (or Age 14)
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
