Distracted by Design

At the turn of the millennium, technology companies based on the West Coast of the United States created a set of world-changing products that took advantage of the rapidly growing internet. Some of them helped people to connect and communicate, and therefore it seemed likely they would be a boon to the growing number of emerging democracies. But the tech industry wasn’t just transforming life for adults. It began transforming life for children too. Children and adolescents had been watching a lot of television since the 1950s, but the new technologies were far more portable, personalized, and engaging than anything that came before.

There was little sign of an impending mental illness crisis among adolescents in the 2000s.¹ Then, quite suddenly in the early 2010s, things changed. Mental illness went up in many countries between 2010 and 2015 for Gen Z (and some late millennials) while older generations were much less affected. Why was there a synchronized international increase in rates of adolescent anxiety and depression?

The oldest members of Gen Z began puberty around 2009, when several tech trends converged: the rapid spread of high-speed broadband in the 2000s, the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, and the new age of hyper-viralized social media. The last of these was kicked off in 2009 by the arrival of the “like” and “retweet” (or “share”) buttons, which transformed the social dynamics of the online world. Before 2009, social media was most useful as a way to keep up with your friends, and with fewer instant and reverberating feedback functions it generated much less of the toxicity we see today.² A fourth trend began just a few years later, and it hit girls much harder than boys: the increased prevalence of posting images of oneself, after smartphones added front-facing cameras (2010) and Facebook acquired Instagram (2012), boosting its popularity. This greatly expanded the number of adolescents posting carefully curated photos and videos of their lives for their peers and strangers not just to see, but to judge. As a result, Gen Z is the first generation to have gone through puberty hunched over smartphones and tablets, having fewer face-to-face conversations and shoulder-to-shoulder adventures with their friends.

Children have been drawn powerfully to screens since the advent of television, but they could not take those screens with them to school or when they went outside to play. Before the iPhone, there was a limit to the amount of screen time a child could have, so there was still time for play and face-to-face conversation. But the explosion of smartphone-based apps such as Instagram in the exact years in which Gen Z teens and preteens were moving from basic phones to smartphones marked a qualitative change in the nature of childhood. By 2015, more than 70 percent of American teens carried a touch screen around with them,³ and these screens became much better at holding their attention, even when they were with their friends. By 2022, a third of teens said they were on one of the major social media sites “almost constantly,” and 46 percent of teens reported that they used the internet “almost constantly.”⁴

Predatory Practices

For businesses that earn revenue based on displaying ads alongside user-generated content, there are three basic imperatives: (1) get more users, (2) get users to spend more time using the app, and (3) get users to post and engage with more content, which attracts other users to the platform. One way that companies get more users is by failing to enforce their own rules prohibiting users under 13.

Younger users are particularly valuable because the habits they form early often stick with them for life, so companies need younger users to ensure robust future usage of their products. They therefore view the loss of market share among younger users as an existential threat.⁵ Documents brought out by the whistleblower Frances Haugen* show that Meta has long been trying to study and attract preteens and has even considered how to reach children as young as four.⁶

As for the second imperative, one way that companies get users to spend more time on their apps is by using artificial intelligence to select what to put into a user’s feed. Based on the time users spend viewing different kinds of content, AI then serves them more such content.⁷ Technology designers long ago learned that reducing effort increases time spent, so features like autoplay and infinite scroll encourage increased consumption of content.

To achieve their third objective—incentivizing users to post more content—platforms take advantage of the fact that adolescents are highly sensitive to social status and social rewards. Features like Snapchat “streaks” gamify social interaction by encouraging users to send a picture to their friends every day in order to not break a publicly visible streak. Another example is setting people’s privacy settings to public by default, so that whatever they post becomes content for the largest possible pool of users.

Minors should be protected from products that are designed to addict them. I wish that companies would treat children and adolescents with more care on their own, but given market incentives and business norms, it is likely to take legislation to force them to do so.

Schoolhouse Blues

The evidence that phones in pockets interfere with learning is now so clear that in August 2023, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) issued a report that addressed the adverse effects that digital technologies, and phones in particular, are having on education around the world.⁸ The report acknowledged benefits of the internet for online education and educating some hard-to-reach populations, but noted that there is surprisingly little evidence that digital technologies enhance learning in the typical classroom. The report also noted that mobile phone use was associated with reduced educational performance and increased classroom disruption.⁹

Additional evidence that phones may be interfering with education in the United States can be found in the 2023 National Assessment of Educational Progress (otherwise known as the nation’s report card), which showed substantial drops in test scores during the COVID era, erasing many years of gains. However, if you look closely at the data, it becomes clear that the decline in test scores began earlier.¹⁰ Scores had been rising pretty consistently from the 1970s until 2012, and then they reversed. COVID restrictions and remote schooling added to the decline, especially in math, but the drop between 2012 and the beginning of COVID was substantial. The reversal coincided with teens trading in their basic phones for smartphones, leading to a big increase in attention fragmentation throughout the school day.^†

What Governments and Tech Companies Can Do

There are four main ways that governments and tech companies could improve the virtual world for adolescents.

1. Assert a Duty of Care

In 2013, the British filmmaker Beeban Kidron made a documentary called InRealLife, about the lives of teens in the online world. What she learned about the ways tech companies exploit adolescents alarmed her. After much consultation, she developed a list of design standards that tech companies could adopt that would make time online less harmful to children and adolescents. The list came to be called the Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC), and it was enacted in the United Kingdom in June 2020.

The code was revolutionary for asserting that companies have some moral and legal responsibility for how they treat minors. They have a duty to design their services in the “best interests” of children (defined as anyone under 18). For example, it is usually the case that the best interest of the child is served by setting all defaults about privacy to the highest standard, while the best interest of the company is served by making the child’s post visible to the widest audience possible. The law therefore requires that the default settings for minors be private; the child must make an active choice to change a setting if she wants her posts to be viewable by strangers. Same thing for geolocation data; the default should be that nobody can find the location of a child from a post or from the use of an app, unless the child elects to make such data public. Another stipulation: Platforms must be transparent and clear about what they are doing, explaining their privacy policies and the nature of parental controls in language (or perhaps videos) easy for children to understand.

While the code applied only to services offered in the UK, the law has already had two broader effects. First, many of the tech companies decided that it wasn’t worth the difficulty to offer different products in different countries, so they made a few of the changes globally. Second, the state of California adopted its own version of the AADC, which was passed into law in 2022, and other states have since passed their own versions.¹¹ Of course, it makes little sense for individual US states to enact laws about something as sprawling and placeless as the internet. It would be far preferable for the US Congress to act, and there is now strong bipartisan support for several important bills, such as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA),^‡ which includes many ideas from the AADC.¹²

2. Raise the Age of Internet Adulthood to 16

In the late 1990s, as the internet was becoming a part of life, there were no special protections for children online. Companies could collect and sell children’s data without the knowledge or consent of their parents. In response, the US Federal Trade Commission recommended that Congress enact legislation requiring websites to obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from children. Representative (now Senator) Ed Markey from Massachusetts drafted such a bill, and he defined a child as anyone under the age of 16, for data collection purposes.^§ The e-commerce companies of that era objected, and they teamed up with civil liberties groups who were concerned that the new bill would make it harder for teens to find information about birth control, abortion, or other sensitive topics.¹⁴ In the negotiations over the bill, a compromise was reached that the age would be lowered to 13. That decision had nothing to do with adolescent brain development or maturity; it was just a political compromise. Nonetheless, 13 became the de facto age of “internet adulthood” for the United States, which effectively made it the age of internet adulthood for the world. Anyone who is 13, or at least says they are, can be treated as an adult for the purposes of data acquisition. In addition, the bill, known as COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act), failed to impose any obligation on companies to verify anyone’s age. They were only required to avoid collecting data from users when they had direct evidence that the user was under 13.

3. Facilitate Age Verification

There is not, at present, any perfect method of implementing a universal age check. There is no method that could be applied to everyone who comes to a site in a way that is perfectly reliable and raises no privacy or civil liberties objections.¹⁵ But if we drop the need for a universal solution and restrict our focus to helping parents who want the internet to have age gates that apply to their children, then a third approach becomes possible: Parents should have a way of marking their child’s phone, tablet, and laptop as devices belonging to a minor. That mark, which could be written either into the hardware or the software, would act like a sign that tells companies with age restrictions, “This person is underage; do not admit without parental consent.”

A simple way to do this would be for Apple, Google, and Microsoft—who create the operating systems that run nearly all of our devices—to add a feature to their existing parental controls. In Apple’s iOS, for example, parents already set up family accounts and put in birth dates for their children when they give them their first iPhones. The parent already gets to choose whether to allow the child to download only age-appropriate apps, movies, and books from Apple’s own services. Why not just expand that ability so that a parent’s choice is respected by all platforms for which age restrictions are appropriate or required by law?

Apple, Google, and Microsoft could create a feature, let’s call it “age check,” that would be set to “on” by default whenever a parent creates an account for a child under the age of 18. The parent can choose to turn age check off, but if on is the default, then it would be very widely used (unlike many features in current parental controls, which many parents don’t know how to turn on). If age check is left on, then when anyone uses that phone or computer to try to open or log in to an account, the site can simply verify by communicating with the device to answer two questions: (1) Is age check on? If so, then (2) Does the person meet our minimum age? (For example, 16 to open or access a social media account, 18 to access pornography.) This kind of device-based verification offers a way that parents, tech companies, and platforms can share responsibility for age verification.

4. Encourage Phone-Free Schools

All schools, from elementary through high school, should go phone-free to improve not only mental health but academic outcomes. Governments at all levels could support this transition by allocating funds to pay the small cost of buying phone lockers or lockable pouches for any school that wants to keep phones out of students’ pockets and hands during the school day. Departments of education at the state and federal levels could support research on the effects of phone-free schools, to verify whether they are beneficial for student mental health and academic performance.

Mountain Middle School in Durango, Colorado, went phone-free back in 2012, at the start of the mental health crisis. The county around the school had among the highest teen suicide rates in Colorado when Shane Voss took over as head of school. Students were suffering from rampant cyberbullying, sleep deprivation, and constant social comparison.¹⁶

Voss implemented a cellphone ban. For the entire school day, phones had to stay in backpacks, not in pockets or hands. There were clear policies and real consequences if phones were found out of the backpack during school hours.¹⁷ The effects were transformative. Students no longer sat silently next to each other, scrolling while waiting for homeroom or class to start. They talked to each other or the teacher. Voss says that when he walks into a school without a phone ban, “It’s kind of like the zombie apocalypse, and you have all these kids in the hallways not talking to each other. It’s just a very different vibe.”

The school’s academic performance improved, and after a few years it attained Colorado’s highest performance rating. An eighth-grader named Henry explained the effect of the phone ban. He said that for the first half hour of the school day, his phone is still in the back of his mind, “but once class starts, then it’s just kinda out the window and I’m not really thinking about it. So it’s not a big distraction for me during school.”**

In 2010, teens, parents, schools, and even tech companies didn’t know that smartphones and social media had so many harmful effects. Now we do. In 2010, there was little sign of a mental health crisis. Now it’s all around us. We are not helpless, although it often feels that way because smartphones, social media, market forces, and social influence combine to pull us into a trap. We’re all trying to do our best while struggling with incomplete knowledge about a rapidly changing technological world that is fragmenting our attention and changing our relationships. Each of us, acting alone, perceives that it’s too difficult or costly to do the right thing. But if we can act together, the costs go way down.

If you’re a teacher and you’re fed up with the social chaos and learning disruption caused by smartphones and social media, link up. Legislation to rein in tech companies and ban cellphones in schools is needed, but you don’t have to wait. Talk to your fellow teachers and urge your school’s leadership to reconsider the policy not just on phones, but on all devices that let students text each other or check social media while they are sitting in your class. You shouldn’t have to compete for your students’ attention with the entire internet. See if your school can coordinate a message to parents asking them to support change. If teachers speak with a unified voice and ask parents for help educating their children, the odds of success are high.

Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business. He has cofounded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology to help important institutions work better, including LetGrow.org, Heterodox
Academy.org, ConstructiveDialogue.org, and EthicalSystems.org. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has written more than 100 academic articles and several bestselling books, including The Happiness Hypothesis (2006), The Righteous Mind (2012), and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). This article is adapted, with permission, from his 2024 New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, published by Penguin Random House.

*For a Q&A with Frances Haugen and two young leaders of Design It For Us, see “Fighting for Safer Social Media” in the Spring 2025 issue of American Educator: go.aft.org/7tv. (return to article)

^†Since I published The Anxious Generation in 2024, evidence has continued to mount that social media use among children harms cognitive development, reading achievement, family relationships, and mental health. See, for example, go.aft.org/x1v and go.aft.org/kjw. (return to article)

^‡In October 2025, more than 400 organizations, including the AFT, sent a letter to leaders of the US Senate and House of Representatives imploring them to pass this bill and pledging that they “will not rest until KOSA is law.” For details, see go.aft.org/ebv.
 (return to article)

^§In December 2025, Australia became the first country to raise the age—from 13 to 16—at which youth can create social media accounts and to require the companies that create the apps to enforce the law.¹³ (return to article)

**If your school has adopted or is considering new cellphone policies, you can gauge their effectiveness for free using the Toolkit for Assessing Phones in Schools. For more information, see go.aft.org/gr5. (return to article)

Endnotes

1. J. Twenge et al., “Birth Cohort Increases in Psychopathology Among Young Americans, 1938–2007: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of the MMPI,” Clinical Psychology Review 30, no. 2 (March 2010): 145–54.

2. See for this story J. Haidt and T. Rose-Stockwell, “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks,” The Atlantic, December 2019, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/social-media-democracy/600763. I note that Tumblr had introduced a “reblog” feature in 2007, but its effects were small compared to Twitter’s “retweet” in 2009.

3. A. Lenhart, Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015 (Pew Research Center, April 9, 2015), pewresearch.org/internet/2015/04/09/teens-social-media-technology-2015.

4. E. Vogels, R. Gelles-Watnick, and N. Massarat, Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022 (Pew Research Center, August 10, 2022), pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022.

5. A. Heath, “Facebook’s Lost Generation,” The Verge, October 15, 2021, theverge.com/22743744/facebook-teen-usage-decline-frances-haugen-leaks.

6. G. Wells and J. Horwitz, “Facebook’s Effort to Attract Preteens Goes Beyond Instagram Kids, Documents Show,” Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2021, wsj.com/articles/facebook-instagram-kids-tweens-attract-11632849667.

7. Meta, “Instagram Reels Chaining AI System,” June 29, 2023, updated November 11, 2025, transparency.meta.com/features/explaining-ranking/ig-reels-chaining.

8. See Global Education Monitoring Report Team, Technology in Education: A Tool on Whose Terms? (UNESCO, 2023). See a summary of the phone recommendations here: P. Butler and H. Farah, “‘Put Learners First’: Unesco Calls for Global Ban on Smartphones in Schools,” The Guardian, July 25, 2023, theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/26/put-learners-first-unesco-calls-for-global-ban-on-smartphones-in-schools.

9. Zach Rausch and I have been collecting the evidence related to phone-free schools in a collaborative review document, available at J. Haidt, “Collaborative Review Docs,” jonathanhaidt.com/reviews.

10. National Assessment of Educational Progress, “Scores Decline Again for 13-Year-Old Students in Reading and Mathematics,” US Department of Education, 2023, nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023.

11. The law is unlikely to take effect for many years, if ever. The platforms are blocking implementation of design codes in multiple states with lawsuits alleging that most of the provisions of the AADC violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The platforms are essentially arguing that they cannot be regulated because any regulation would have some effect on the speech carried out on the platform.

12. Zach and I are collaborating with the Center for Humane Technology to collect and analyze the many approaches being proposed or implemented by governments and legislatures in the United States and other countries. You can find the link at J. Haidt, “Collaborative Review Docs,” The Anxious Generation, February 20, 2024, anxiousgeneration.com/reviews. Also see J. Haidt and Z. Rausch, “It’s Time to Make the Internet Safer for Kids,” Wired, November 26, 2024, wired.com/story/digital-social-media-safeguards-children-policy.

13. J. Jargon, “How 13 Became the Internet’s Age of Adulthood,” Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2019, wsj.com/articles/how-13-became-the-internets-age-of-adulthood-11560850201.

14. The next generation of the internet can and should be built so that people control their own data and can decide how it is used. See ProjectLiberty.io for one such vision.

15. J. Brundin, “This Colorado Middle School Banned Phones 7 Years Ago. They Say Students Are Happier, Less Stressed and More Focused,” CPR News, Colorado Public Radio, November 5, 2019, cpr.org/2019/11/05/this-colorado-middle-school-banned-phones-seven-years-ago-they-say-students-are-happier-less-stressed-and-more-focused.

16. The phone policy works like this: “There’s a warning the first time a phone is out of a student’s backpack. On the second infraction, the phone is confiscated and parents have to pick it up. The third time, a student must hand the phone into the office at the beginning of the school day and pick it up at the end, for a set period of time.”

[Illustrations by Nadia Radic]