Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation provides the clearest example of a book triggering a social movement overnight

N

othing so buoys those of us working in the vineyard of ideas, such as your humble scribe, as seeing before us instances in which intellectual work made a dramatic difference in the ways in which we live our lives. One can point to many such cases in recent years.

Perhaps the most dramatic was the 2024 publication of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, which documented the mental health consequences for children and teenagers worldwide from iPhones and social media. In the two years since publication, state after state, from red to blue, has banned phones in public schools. Pennsylvania is now poised to become the 32nd such state. And phone-free legislation is in the pipeline in eight more states.

Internationally, Brazil has banned all phones in schools nationwide, and Australia enacted another plank in Haidt’s four rules for restoring childhood when it banned all those under 16 from entering into contracts with tech platforms. In a recent appearance at the Jewish Parents Forum, organized by Caroline Bryk of the Tikvah Fund, Haidt said 15 more countries are now contemplating such legislation and that he expects it to be adopted by the entire EU within a year.

In another remarkable reversal, two major American medical associations, which had long maintained that so-called “gender-affirming care” is solidly based scientifically, admitted on successive days at the beginning of February that it is nothing of the kind. And the New York Times, no less, published an editorial last week by Jesse Singal laying out the story of how those leading medical associations allowed themselves to be hijacked by activists in their midst to claim scientific justification for treatments that are in many cases irreversible, and for which no minor could possibly give informed consent.

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons issued new guidelines on February 3 against surgical interventions to those under 19. And the next day, the American Medical Association followed suit, and announced that in the absence of clear evidence of the efficacy of such interventions, they should generally be deferred until adulthood.

Both statements were flat-out reversals of the previous position of both groups, which had lobbied against legislation in multiple states restricting various aspects of “gender-affirming care.” What is most remarkable is that the earlier positions had all claimed to express a scientific consensus.

It never did. The British government’s Cass Review, the largest study yet of youth gender medicine, found “remarkably weak” evidentiary support for the care. The Cass team harshly graded a study by the American Academy of Pediatrics that supported such care: 12 out of a possible 100 in “rigor of development” and 6 out of 100 in “applicability.” Similar reviews by the national health authorities in Finland and Sweden reached the same conclusions.

A THIRD AREA where there has been a remarkable shift in policy is in support for the school choice movement. A quarter century ago, it was generally accepted in legal circles that no school voucher system that benefitted parents of children in parochial schools would pass constitutional muster. Then in Zelman vs. Simmons-Harris (2002), the Supreme Court ruled in a narrow 5-4 decision that vouchers offered to parents who had the choice to use them on either public or private schools, either parochial or not, did not violate the Establishment Clause.

Today, as a result of that decision and several that followed, and the dedicated efforts of the school choice movement, tuition relief in the form of vouchers, education scholarship tax credits, and education savings accounts is available to Jewish parents in over half the states, and a federal education scholarship tax credit is now available to states that opt in. While religious Jewish organizations, led by Agudath Israel of America, have always been strong supporters of school choice, the Jewish Federations of North America is now lobbying Democratic governors to opt in to the federal tax credit, over the objection of teachers unions.

DESPITE THESE EXAMPLES of rapid and high-impact changes in opinion, in part fostered by thinkers and writers, ideas rarely capture widespread support in a vacuum; nor is their impact always salutary. In the latter category, one must acknowledge that Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have made it socially acceptable, particularly among young Americans, to say pretty much whatever one wants about Jews and their nefarious control of American foreign policy.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation provides the clearest example of a book triggering a social movement overnight. But even in his case, he is the first to admit that he drew heavily upon the work of others, notably Jean Twenge’s iGen on the congruity of exploding mental health issues among young girls with the appearance of the iPhone; and Lenore Skenazy on the baleful effects of parental safetyism and desire to protect their children from all forms of failure, discomfort, or danger.

Moreover, the power of ideas cannot be disconnected from their social context. Had so many parents and educators not already noticed the addictive effect of technology on their children and on their ability to connect socially to family and friends or to otherwise live life, rather than just scroll about it, Haidt’s book would not have had the impact it did. In many cases, parents and educators were looking for cover to reassert some control over their children’s unhealthy behaviors. At his most recent appearance at the Jewish Parents Forum, Haidt attributed to the group his awareness of the strength of the parental impulse to protect their children.

The sudden about-face of the leading medical associations on gender-affirming care doubtless owes more to a recent $2 million judgment against a surgeon for the mutilation of a 16-year-old girl than to the reexamination of the evidence for such surgeries, especially as they had never investigated that evidence in the first place. That judgment will likely scare insurance companies away from covering such surgeries or from providing coverage at anything approaching affordable rates.

The successes of the school choice movement are in part an outgrowth of the widespread perception that public education in large swaths of America is a disaster. School closures and remote classes during Covid also played a role, particularly as parents became aware of the degree of ideological indoctrination to which their children were being subjected. And those successes depend on the breadth of the alliance and the contributions of many players, including most notably the Institute for Justice in the legal sphere, and the lobbying efforts of a broad alliance of the groups under the banner of EdChoice and the American Federation of Children nationally.

FINALLY, FEW BATTLES are won once and for all. At the Jewish Parents Forum, Caroline Bryk likened Haidt’s book to the fall of the Berlin Wall. While an accurate metaphor in some respects, Haidt himself was the first to declare that the battle for childhood against technology is hardly over and will require much more than a book. AI, opined Haidt, is an even greater threat — one to our very humanity, and it will take much more than phone bans and age limits to control, as it is embedded, or soon will be, everywhere.

To gear up for that fight, he has set out to create a movement from his perch at New York University Stern School of Business. He has added a team to drive policy, culture, and behavioral change across the globe. The team recently published a book for eight- to 13-year-olds, The Amazing Generation, designed to help young people reimagine a life lived in reality, as opposed to one lived on line.

Haidt has created a Tech and Society Lab focusing on how digital technologies have reshaped childhood and adolescence. His website, After Babel, regularly publishes well-researched and thoroughly documented articles on related topics, including online gambling, video games, and AI chatbots — 67 in the past year, with 66 distinct authors. A recent article by the chief economist at Gallup linked the trend toward permissive parenting to out-of-control technology use, and argued for a parental model that is at once demanding and responsive and loving toward children.

Yes, ideas make a difference, often a large difference. But ultimately, they have to be connected with social and political movements, which involve an entirely new type of organization. And Haidt is an example of someone doing both.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1104. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at [email protected])