What sparked the debate over Jonathan Haidt's book?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. In March of last year, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published this book called The Anxious Generation, which caused, let's call it, a stir.
The subtitle of this book says it all. How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
I don't think anybody can dispute that. What he says is controversial.
Oh my God, enough with the panic about kids using smartphones. Facing enormous pushback from other researchers. You cannot disentangle cause from effect.
Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story that many parents are primed to believe. I always found the conversation over this book a little annoying because it got to me. at one of the difficulties we're having parenting, one of the difficulties we're having in society, which is this tendency to instrumentalize everything into social science.
Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it's bad. It is to me a collapse in our sense of what a good life is, what it means to flourish as a human being. And so I stayed a bit out of that debate because on the one hand, I couldn't settle it. And on the other hand, I didn't think I should come in and say it wasn't important.
We're a year later, though, and two things have happened. One is Heitz's book has never left the bestseller list. That is rare. It has struck a chord. The other is that policy is moving in Heitz's direction.
Well, the governor of Utah has signed a sweeping bill to limit children's access to social media.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed one of the most restrictive social media laws in the country.
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