What if social media isn’t hurting kids?

Two years ago, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt released his New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation. The book posits that the rise of social media and smartphone use is largely to blame for the prominent decline in teen mental health since 2010. It quickly became a central rallying cry of the social media backlash. Haidt has been credited with helping inspire Australia’s nationwide teen social media ban. He has joined forces with bereaved parents who are fighting tech companies in court. His name comes up unprompted in conversations with people in power who say his book opened their eyes to an online crisis.

Haidt’s theory has received regular critiques from recognized academics. Candice Odgers, a leading adolescent mental health researcher, wrote a scathing review of Haidt’s analysis in Nature that opened by conceding, “this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe.” Now, in the wake of that highly accurate prediction, a former colleague of Haidt’s seeks to not only take down his theory, but also offer an alternative. The biggest question may not be whether he’s correct — but whether it’s too late to change course if he is.

In his new book Restoring Childhood, psychology researcher Peter Gray argues that teens’ mental health declined thanks to decades of steadily reduced autonomy, and after a brief period of reprieve, fell again in the 2010s not — as Haidt argues — because of phones and social media, but because of rigid schooling methods linked to the Common Core curriculum and government pressure to improve children’s performance. And far from being damaging, Gray also argues the adoption of home internet in the 1990s and 2000s actually drove a rebound in teens’ mental health by restoring freedom and connection lost in earlier decades. He fears social media bans aren’t just — as Odgers has argued — a distraction from real solutions, but a new harm in themselves.

In an interview on The Vergecast, Gray told me that Haidt’s book “completely ignored” dozens of meta-analyses and other research that’s found “not even a meaningful correlation between the amount of time kids are on social media or on smartphones and their mental health.” Where there is some connection, Gray adds, studies suggest that teens may use social media to cope with their depression or anxiety. He references a study in Florida that found 11-to-13-year-olds who owned smartphones were more likely to spend real-world time with friends. “You take a smartphone away from your kids and that study suggests you’ll make them less happy and they’ll have less friends,” he says.

Gray says that in studies through the years, kids consistently identify school pressure, not social media, as their top source of anxiety. “That doesn’t mean it’s the primary source for everybody, but when you’re looking at the population at large, every single study that I’ve been able to find where kids are asked, ‘What’s the primary source of your anxiety or your stress or your depression?’, in every single one of them, school pressure comes out on top,” Gray tells me. “Nothing else comes close.”

Gray and Haidt both believe that since at least the 1980s, increased restrictions on kids’ independence and unstructured play have damaged their resilience. While it used to be common for kids to play together unsupervised, that practice has diminished in part due to the rise of “stranger danger” narratives fostered by rare, but high-profile, crimes. In 2017 the pair helped cofound an organization called Let Grow, which advocates for policies that make it easier for parents to let their children play freely, like ensuring they can’t be considered neglectful for letting kids outside by themselves. But the two have split sharply over the impact of the internet. Gray’s book is intended as a deliberate rebuttal to Haidt’s — after The Anxious Generation’s release, Gray resigned from the board of Let Grow to avoid conflict within the organization.

Haidt did not respond to a request for comment from The Verge, but he told The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany in a July article that the 1990s and early 2000s dip in teen suicide rates may be credited to a phase-out of leaded gasoline, since lead exposure has been linked to mental health issues. He also told Tiffany that Gray relied too heavily on a minority dissenting group of researchers. Tiffany writes that many of the more than a dozen tech and child development researchers she spoke to “expressed concern that Haidt overstates the strength of correlational findings and suggests causation where it hasn’t been proved.”

Gray accuses Haidt of stirring a moral panic over technology that isn’t, on the whole, harmful. Looking across research, he says, Common Core is the clearest explanation for the sudden decline in teen mental health. And at the population level, the impact of social media “balances out. Some kids are doing better, some kids are doing worse because they’re on social media.”

Gray says he’s not opposed to all guardrails, including school phone bans and the concept of age verification for accessing pornography. But he questions the effectiveness of bans on social media, knowing kids are likely to get around them, and is hesitant to restrict platforms that let kids express themselves — suggesting instead that parents focus on teaching their children to navigate them. “We need to stop treating kids as if they’re idiots,” he told me. “We need to start understanding that kids are pretty good at knowing what’s good for them and not good for them and they can benefit from our help in learning how to do these things.”

But increasingly, parents of younger teens may not have that choice. Haidt’s theory holds undisputed dominance in many circles, including among politicians. Since Australia’s social media ban for teens, the UK and European Union are among those considering their own bans or platform limits. In the US, states like California and New York have enacted limits on certain social media features, and a federal proposal would restrict algorithmic feeds for kids under 17. Even among people who find Gray’s arguments about Common Core convincing, some might still see taking kids offline as a harmless precaution.

With so much momentum behind the backlash against phones and social media, can Gray’s book still make a difference? “I certainly hope it’s not too late,” he says. He points out that some moral panics have petered out. In the 1990s and 2000s, for instance, many people worried that video games like Mortal Kombat and Doom were making kids more violent, connecting their rise to that of school shootings. Eventually, research showed many mass shooters didn’t play video games after all. Attempts at regulation — including a California ban on the sale of violent games to children — were largely overruled. And many kids who did play them grew up to become those in charge. “The science won out eventually,” Gray says. “So it’s not me that’s going to win out. It’s the science that’s going to win out.”