This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.
Turning Point: New York City joins in the global movement to ban smartphones in schools from “bell to bell.”
In 2007, Steve Jobs stood on a stage holding up the first iPhone and declared, “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”
By the end of the 2010s, his vision was complete: The iPhone put the internet in our pockets, altering nearly every aspect of daily life, like navigating, shopping, gossiping and dating.
But these devices, along with the addictive social media apps they enable, transformed childhood and wreaked havoc on adolescents’ cognitive development, social relationships and mental health. Young people have become powerless against the multibillion-dollar tech companies whose apps exploit adolescents’ need for social acceptance.
In 2020, Covid-19 pushed even more of their lives onto screens. As pandemic restrictions began to ease, parents across the United States and around the world began to share a sense of fear and helplessness about what smartphones and social media were doing to their children.
This is the backdrop against which my book, “The Anxious Generation,” was published in 2024. The book helped fuel the movement to reclaim childhood from tech companies — a movement that has since spread, driven in part by the protective passions of parents. And while the rebellion began in 2024, the tide seemed to turn in 2025.
Let’s start with the legislation to get phones out of schools. Already, a majority of states have enacted laws to limit phone use in school. Eighteen states and Washington, D.C., have gone all the way and enacted “bell-to-bell” phone restriction policies, which liberate students from the distraction of their phones for the entire school day. Outside of the United States, Brazil has made every school phone-free, and new school phone policies have passed in the Netherlands, Finland and South Korea, among other countries.
We are just beginning to see some of the impacts: Children are more attentive in class and are reading more books; teachers have told me they hear more laughter in the halls and at lunch.
This year also brought a growing global understanding of social media’s harms to young people. Kids are being contacted by anonymous strangers; they are being fed hundreds of short videos through addictive feeds, including many depicting sex, violence and death; they are being encouraged to share photos and videos of themselves with the world for likes and shares. These are inherently adult activities. Several studies have also found that heavy social media use doubles the risk of depression for adolescents. Just as we have age limits in the real world for porn, gambling, alcohol, tobacco and many other products, countries have begun enacting policies to add age restrictions to social media.
Australia is becoming the first country to raise the minimum age for opening a social media account to 16, while also requiring the companies themselves to enforce the age limit. Other countries including Brazil, Denmark and Malaysia are introducing similar legislation. Such laws shift the burden so that parents are no longer the first line of defense against addictive-by-design products targeting their children. As more countries take similar steps, social media companies may ultimately be forced to change their ways.
Children grow through play — especially unsupervised play in mixed-age groups. This is among the healthiest kinds of play, in which children learn to negotiate, take risks, resolve conflicts and build friendships. But beginning in the 1980s, parents grew increasingly fearful that unsupervised time would expose their children to physical or emotional harm. This fear helped lay the groundwork for the phone-based childhood. Over the past two decades, we have overprotected children in the real world — where free play and autonomy help them grow into well-adjusted adults — while underprotecting them online.
Yet parents are beginning to let go. Groups of families are forming “playborhoods” where children are free to roam among the participating homes. A network of parents in Piedmont, Calif., started dropping their children off at a park every Friday to play without supervision. More than 1,000 schools nationwide have adopted the Let Grow Experience, which gives children the assignment to do something new on their own — with permission from their parents but without their help. The town of Newburyport, Mass., handed out prizes each week to kids who tried something new on their own over the summer. And landline phones are making a comeback.
These things may seem small, but in terms of children’s development — and as a representation of a cultural shift — they’re enormous. Parents write to me every day sharing simple yet moving stories. Stories about children riding bicycles around their neighborhoods. Stories about children going into stores alone while mom waits in the car. Stories about conflicts they resolved on their own, friendships formed, knees skinned and adventures had. All of this has been possible because children have more time and attention for — and freedom in — the real world.
These stories give me an enormous sense of hope for the future and for the next generation.
Still, another imminent danger to childhood looms. Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence are already talking with children about sex and suicide, as tech companies race to push A.I. into every possible product — including stuffed animals — without real guardrails. If we don’t curb this experiment, we risk repeating the catastrophe Gen Z experienced when social media took over adolescence. The victims would be Gen Alpha and Gen Beta, whose childhoods could be spent forming empty friendships and relationships with non-humans.
The choice is ours: Consign another generation to be raised by Silicon Valley or choose a new path — back to the real world, to human connection, and to a richer, freer, more joyful childhood.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is the author of “The Anxious Generation.”
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