Academics researching wellbeing have for a long time almost unanimously agreed on one thing: over the typical lifetime, happiness tends to follow a U-shaped curve, peaking at 30, plummeting at age 50, before spiking again after 70. It’s a pattern replicated using data going back as far as the 1970s in almost 150 countries.

But around 2011, researchers noticed an astonishing reversal in this trend. “This empirical regularity has been replaced by a monotonic decrease in ill-being by age,” they reported in an NBER working paper. In plain English, younger people today are unhappier, both compared to previous generations and to their older peers. Or, to quote the title of the most recent book from Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University, they are the anxious generation […].

Today, rather than playing with their friends, kids stay at home on their devices. Instead of hearing chatter and laughter in the corridor of schools, we hear the gentle tapping of screens. The social isolation many of us experienced during pandemic-induced lockdowns was nothing new for children, Haidt said. “They began social distancing as soon as they got smartphones.”

The good news for parents is that, while this trend is worrying, it is not inevitable. There are things we can do. “We can turn this around with four new norms,” Haidt proposed.

The first norm is a commitment to not give our children a smartphone until they are at least 14. “Give them a flip-phone if you want to, so they can call and text you,” he said. “But don’t give the entire world access to your child.” The second is to not allow our children to use social media until they are at least 16. “Social media is wildly inappropriate for children — you have strangers trying to talk to them, cyberbullying, explosive drama.”

The third norm is that schools should be a phone-free environment. “All schools need to be phone free from bell to bell — from the morning when kids arrive to the end when they leave,” Haidt explained.

And finally, the fourth norm involves going back to a time where parents felt more comfortable letting their kids walk to the shops or play outside with friends. “The fourth norm is to give them much more independence in the real world,” he said. “Ultimately, our mission is to restore childhood: the kind of wonderful, fun, exciting childhood we all had, which was full of conflicts, failures, exploration, adventure, risk-taking, thrills and all those emotions that you experienced not with your parents, but when you were out, away from your secure home base.”

Adapted from https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/jonathan-haidt-digitaltechnology-social-media-childhood/