Professor Jonathan Haidt of NYU’s Stern School of Business has been focused on the destruction of American youth by safetyism and smartphones

AS

a lowly toiler in the vineyard of ideas, nothing excites me more than examples of how sometimes, ideas alone can change the world. Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, for instance, has been writing about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at a dizzying pace for the last three years or so. And Professor Jonathan Haidt of NYU’s Stern School of Business has been focused on the destruction of American youth by safetyism and smartphones.

Neither man contented himself with simply decrying a bad situation. Rather, both offered concrete plans to remedy the situation. Rufo has already presented the incoming Trump administration with executive orders and legislation to reverse the hold of DEI in education and throughout the government. And Haidt developed four simple rules to guide parents and school authorities: (1) no smartphones before age 14; (2) no social media before age 16; (3) phone free schools, i.e., bell-to-bell; and (4) encouragement of free, unsupervised play, while giving children and teenagers more responsibility at earlier ages.

Olivia Reingold takes up the story of Haidt’s successful battle against smartphones in “How Jonathan Haidt Won the Fight Against Smartphones in Schools” (The Free Press, Dec. 30 2024). Across the political spectrum, from California’s progressive governor Gavin Newsom to Arkansas’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders, politicians are pushing for bans on smartphones in K-12 schools altogether, and the movement to dramatically limit smartphone use among teenagers is constantly gathering speed.

Reingold writes that she spoke to a dozen people in search of the explanation for the movement’s recent successes. All pointed to Professor Jonathan Haidt and his recently released book The Anxious Generation as the key. Haidt is far from the first to raise the alarms about the destructive impact of smartphones on youth around the world. Jean Twenge’s 2017 book, IGen, identified a major generational mental health shift around the introduction of iPhones. And computer scientist Tristan Harris starred in Netflix’s 2020 documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” about how social media algorithms warp our brains. But Twenge, whose research Haidt cites often and whose essays he has posted at his After Babel website, acknowledges that not until this year and the appearance of The Anxious Generation, did the “dam break.”

At the Tikvah Fund’s recent Jewish Leadership Conference, Haidt, in a discussion with Caroline Bryk, the director of Tikvah’s Jewish Parents Forum, compared the sudden shift of sentiment on smartphones and social media to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Almost all those living under Communism hated the system, until finally one day the whole rotten system came tumbling down.

Similarly, he said, parents hated smartphones and social media, all teachers despised it, and principals saw the results in dramatically declining test scores — a worldwide phenomenon, Haidt notes. Parents and teachers could both see how addictive the phones were, and how they had completely distracted teens from reading and any contemplative activity, while retarding social development. But parents, in particular, were slow to act in the face of their children’s pleas that they would be the only ones without smartphones and find themselves socially excluded.

The theft of childhood, Haidt told Bryk, was a tragedy in two acts. From 1990-2010, kids lost an unsupervised, play-based childhood because of an excess of parental concern about their children’s safety. And in the second act, from 2010 to 2015, teens began coming to maturity, with the internet, facing cameras, Snapchat and Instagram, all on one small device in their pockets.

Reingold captures the contrast between schools with smartphones and those without, in two vignettes from Seaside High School in Oregon. Suzanna Kruger, a high school biology teacher described to Reingold what her class was like just a year ago: Most kids were either asleep with their heads on their desks, wearing headphones, or doing a “dead-eyed scroll” through TikTok. And if she asked them to hand her their phones, most just refused.

After reading Haidt’s book, Jeff Roberts, the school principal, who had been distressed about the negative impact of smartphones for nearly a decade, proposed a bell-to-bell ban in the school. Within one semester, the rate of failures dropped 30 percent. But even more important, Roberts reported hearing a sound in the school cafeteria that he had almost forgotten: the sound of students laughing, instead of staring at their phones. Kruger summed up the change in her students: “When they had their phones, they just seemed so overcome with ennui. And now that they don’t have them, they seem so young again. So fresh and excited.”

ALERT READERS will remember that I mentioned Haidt’s work in passing last week, as well as the work of Christine Rosen, who has written on the impact of technology on our experience of the world. She recommended an Amish approach of extreme skepticism toward new technologies and their impact on our selves, our families, and communities. I speculated that the Orthodox world is likely the best suited to formalize that skepticism in meaningful ways due to the strength of our communal structures.

Little did I know that confirmation would arrive in my inbox within a few days, in the form of material from JPF and a link to the discussion between Haidt and Caroline Bryk at Tikvah’s Jewish Leadership Conference. At the latter, Haidt called the collective action taken by 50, mostly Modern Orthodox day schools, spurred by the Jewish Parents Forum, “the most inspiring example of collective action I have seen anywhere.”

In December 2023, Bryk convened a conference of leaders of dozens of Jewish schools at which Haidt spoke. Less than five months later, she organized a two-day technology summit bringing together 200 principals and board members from 50 Jewish schools across the United States and Canada.

The communication between schools in different communities has resulted in a number of initiatives that have spread quickly among the 50 or so institutions and parents with children in those schools. One such initiative involved building teams of parental ambassadors in different grades. Those ambassadors meet with other parents, share the latest information about the impact of technology, both individually and in larger parlor meetings, which often involve expert speakers.

The parental groups buttress the newly instituted school rules against smartphones during the school day by encouraging parents to sign pledges not to provide their children with smartphones or access to social media until specific ages. Those pledges make it much easier for parents to resist the plaintive cries of their children that they will be the only ones without the latest devices.

In many cases, the Jewish schools have gone even beyond Haidt’s minimal guidelines by extending the no smartphone policy not just to the school premises but to school buses before and after school, and, in the process, helping kids rediscover the lost art of conversation. And Jewish camps, most of which have long had no smartphone policies for campers, have extended that restriction to counselors as well.

Haidt credits the work of Caroline Bryk and the ability of the Jewish community to act collectively to protect its most precious resources — its children — as having been a major impetus behind the spread of his movement to restore childhood and the teenage years.

Miracles Come to Light

A few months back, I ran into an old buddy from the gym whom I had not seen in a while at a shivah house. Since we were sitting next to one another and the aveil was otherwise distracted, we had a chance to catch up a bit.

He told me that one of his sons had been serving in Gaza for months. Finally, he got a brief leave for Shabbos, after four members of his platoon were killed in battle. On Motzaei Shabbos, he was crossing Har Nof’s major street when he was struck by a car driving too fast. He was thrown nearly ten feet in the air and his head cracked into the windshield on the way down, leaving a hole all the way through the windshield. He landed unconscious on the pavement.

A girl who lives in the same building as the young soldier witnessed the accident, and immediately called her father and told him to run to their neighbor and tell him that his son was killed by a car on Rechov Shaulzon. Her father wisely did not relay the message as delivered by his hysterical daughter, but rushed to tell his neighbor that his son had been struck by a car.

By the time the two of them reached the scene of the accident, the victim was being loaded into an ambulance, but at least he was conscious enough to identify his father to the ambulance driver. At the hospital, he was put through a battery of tests, including an MRI.

The MRI picked up two needlepoint-sized tumors in his brain, which would have remained asymptomatic for a long time as they grew. When he was strong enough for surgery, the tumors were removed and found not to be malignant. But any tumors in the brain are dangerous, whether malignant or not, and had the MRI not picked up the tumors, far more complicated brain surgery would have been required down the road.

In short, the near fatal accident served to detect a threatening condition that otherwise would not have been discovered until much later.

This is not the first time that I have heard a similar story. Our regular Shabbos guest underwent tests some years back to determine his suitability to donate a kidney to his late wife, who required a transplant. In the process of doing the tests, it was discovered that one of his kidneys was cancerous. Only because of his willingness to donate a kidney was the cancer caught before it was too late or had spread to other parts of his body.

And my friend Rabbi Hanoch Teller once made a movie entitled “Do You Believe in Miracles?” One of the episodes involved someone who insisted on donating a kidney to a cousin who was “like a brother” to him, over his wife’s strenuous objections. And again, when his kidney was removed in order to be transplanted into his cousin, it was discovered to be cancerous, likely saving his life. His desire to save his cousin’s life had saved his own.

It is Zos Chanukah, as I record these stories of how situations often turn out far differently from how they initially seem to us. May the reflection on the great miracles of Chanukah sensitize us to the less well-known miracles that surround us at all times.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1044. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)