Margaret Chisolm (JHU) interviews Jonathan Haidt (NYU), a recipient of the 2023 Barry Prize, about his pathbreaking research on social media and adolescent mental health, and how it relates to his earlier work on other major social challenges. youtube.com/watch?v=hqzIek…

Haidt is right! Churches make this same mistake as well. They focus on smart phone social media content & not the medium itself; and all of the parents who think that if the content is good, it doesn’t matter. It does! “The medium is the message.” The medium itself is harmful!

Sociology would be vastly improved by throwing one right-leaning social scientist in every seminar room just to say “you sure about that?” whenever everyone else nods their head in agreement. slowboring.com/p/the-crank-re…

Big news in the debate over correlation vs. causation: Zach Rausch and I re-analyze a recent meta-analysis of experiments and find that reducing social media use for more than a week DOES improve mental health. Abstaining for a day causes withdrawal. afterbabel.com/p/the-case-for…

“Your phone is an experience blocker.” - Jonathan Haidt on this week’s Holy Post. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…

Looking for easy, fun, and safe ways to give your kids more independence? Let them do the grocery shopping alone (or with a sibling) by age 8, while you wait in the car. Russ Perry explains. Let Grow letgrow.org/grocery-shop-g…

Thanks to TED Talks for giving me a chance to discuss the current state of debate around The Anxious Generation, and some new ways of thinking about the vast opportunity cost of phone-based life ted.com/talks/jonathan…

In 2017, when I first linked social media to the increases in teen depression, "that's correlation, not causation" was a common response. Now there are enough experiments to show causality. To those who say we still need more studies, my question is this: How much longer are we

“How can any poor person vote for Republicans when Republican policies hurt them so badly?” It is important to understand this point: It is a serious mistake to assume that people are simply always voting in their self-interest.

Important new report from American Institute for Boys and Men on how life has changed for men and women, by SES, since around 1980. By far biggest declines for working class men. Big implications for American politics, for raising healthy children, and for helping fellow Americans

90% of teachers back phone-free classrooms, 83% support all-day bans in NEA poll. tinyurl.com/yvnwun52 Jonathan Haidt Jean Twenge (author of GENERATIONS, iGEN) #teachers #distracted #parenting

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Can anyone find stories of families who gave their 11 year old a smartphone and social media, and the child then came out of her shell and flourished? Much more common is the opposite, as here, from Mireille Silcoff: nytimes.com/2024/09/02/opi…

I really connected with Terry Mattingly, over the ways that a phone-based childhood blocks spiritual and moral development

Is your school considering going phone-free? We had a great post from Carolyn Bryk, on how a network of Jewish day schools did it, together. Now she has updated her post, showing how the schools are changing norms beyond school: afterbabel.com/p/how-schools-…

Giving kids more independence seems to be a powerful treatment for anxiety. Try the Let Grow Experience, in your family or better yet your kids' schools. letgrow.org/program/experi… Let Grow thecoddlingmovie.com/p/independence…

The Anxious Generation is #1 again on the NYT nonfiction hardcover and audiobook lists. That's 23 weeks in a row in the top 4. Parents and teachers are reading it in groups and taking collective action. For guidance on actions to take, see anxiousgeneration.com/take-action