Katty Kay: It’s been a year since your book came out and caused a huge conversation. I wanted to start by getting a kind of report card of where we are on the various aspects of wh

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Can childhood survive the smartphone?

Below is an excerpt from a conversation between the reporter Katty Kay and Jonathan Haidt who, with his book The Anxious Generation, sparked a global reckoning about mobile phone usage among children when it came out last year.

Katty Kay: It’s been a year since your book came out and caused a huge conversation. I wanted to start by getting a kind of report card of where we are on the various aspects of what you put forward: phones in school, age gating, social media, getting kids to have more free playtime. Who’s doing well and who isn’t in America on all of those issues?

Jonathan Haidt: I knew that the book was going to be popular. What I wasn’t prepared for is that this issue would spread like wildfire around the world, not just in the US. Because around the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time. Everyone hates it. Everyone sees it.

Where it took off most quickly was phone-free schools, because that is something that is more easily done. It’s so hard to teach to a classroom when half of them are watching short videos and playing video games. So, the teachers have hated the phones from the beginning but they were afraid, especially in America – maybe it’s the same in other countries – but in America, there are a lot of parents who want to be able to communicate all the time with their child, and they think they have a right to check in on their child. And, ‘What if something goes wrong? I need to be there.’ So, the overparenting — ...

KK: That’s a paradox, then, because you’ve got the parents who are super worried about the phones; they see what phones are doing to their kids. But they also don’t want their kids to relinquish their phones when they go into school.

JH: Hey, look, people are complicated! They contain multitudes. And I shouldn’t say that everyone saw the problem, because there were a lot of parents who saw the phone as a lifeline. They see the world as very threatening and dangerous. But we have to focus on what it will take to allow kids to have healthy brain development through puberty. We’ve got to give kids a lot less screen time. A lot less fragmenting time. No TikTok. No short videos. Let’s give them a lot more experience interacting with people.

(Katty Kay. www.bbc.com, 10.04.2025. Adaptado)

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