Maybe it's not the glowing rectangles that broke childhood, but the school day. Writing for the Atlantic, Kaitlyn Tiffany digs into psychologist Peter Gray's upcoming book, Restoring Childhood, which takes direct aim at Jonathan Haidt's hugely influential The Anxious Generation, published in 2024. Haidt blames smartphones and social media for today's youth mental-health crisis and backs strict limits on kids' screen use. Gray, however—once Haidt's ally in the "free play" movement and a co-founder, along with Haidt, of the nonprofit Let Grow—now calls that argument "immoral" and says it fuels a broader pattern: Whenever kids struggle, adults respond by taking away one more freedom. He calls it a "knee-jerk reaction," adding that Haidt's tome "is helping to jerk some of those knees even further."
Gray's counterclaim: The real culprit is an intensified, test-driven school system, especially after Common Core was introduced, layered on top of decades of shrinking independence in kids' offline lives. Digital spaces, he argues, actually offer teens a rare zone of autonomy and connection that briefly improved mental health. "Everybody was ignoring that," Gray says. "Nobody was writing about that." Tiffany tracks the personal rift between the two academics, the shaky spots in both men's evidence, and the experts who say everyone is chasing a single villain when many forces are at work. "This is a common trap that we fall into when trying to figure out what's going on with those declines," one Bath Spa University psych professor tells Tiffany. "We try to answer the question of 'What one big thing can explain this?' The answer, in my view, is that there isn't one big thing." More here.
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