Jonathan Haidt: How to Help the Anxious Generation | The All-In Interview

Haidt’s practical answer is collective action, not individual parental willpower. A child without a phone risks exclusion, so he urges families and schools to coordinate around four norms: no smartphone before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free school days, and much more independent play and responsibility.

He locates the generational break in puberty, not simply smartphone ownership. Millennials largely passed adolescence on flip phones, while Gen Z hit puberty as front-facing cameras, viral social feeds, Instagram and high-speed internet converged from roughly 2009–2015, shifting peer life onto screens.

His own students use short-form social media while wishing it had never existed. In Haidt’s NYU Stern class, a large majority of TikTok-like users wished such products had never been invented, while no Netflix users said the same—evidence, in his view, that social media is a collective-action trap rather than ordinary entertainment.

TikTok-style feeds are different from television because the system learns from every pause, click and reaction. Haidt’s core mechanism is a closed behavioral feedback loop: the feed continually adapts to whatever keeps a user engaged, turning media consumption into personalized variable reinforcement rather than a fixed program chosen in advance.

Haidt says the harms are not uniform across children, and he singles out a minority of boys as especially vulnerable to gaming. Depending on the measure, he puts problematic video-game use at roughly 5–12% of boys; heavy users spending three to five hours daily may miss years of social and dating-skill development.

Haidt does not think employers should give up on Gen Z; he says demanding feedback works when framed as growth. He expects young workers to prefer direct correction over protective gentleness, and advises employers to look for team-play and resilience, citing ex-military candidates and major-team-sports backgrounds.