This fall, when Suzanna Kruger walked into her biology classroom, she noticed something strange: Two dozen students were staring back at her.
“They were willing to make eye contact,” Kruger, a 55-year-old high school teacher in Seaside, Oregon, told me. “They even said hello.”
It was something she hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. “If a kid had their phone in class, I could just simply walk up to them, and they would hand it over,” Kruger said. But by the fall of 2021, when students returned from a year of distance learning, she said she had started feeling like the teacher from Charlie Brown.
“They looked at me like I was just going ‘wah, wah, wah,’ ” Kruger said, adding that most kids in her class were either asleep with their heads on their desks, wearing headphones, or doing a “dead-eyed scroll” through TikTok. And when she asked them to turn over their device, she said most students just “refused.”
“I’m 55, and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do another 10 years of this.’ ”
This past fall, the Seaside School District became one of the first in Oregon to ban cell phones for both middle and high schoolers, forcing kids to lock their devices in pouches near the school entrance until the end of the day. Seaside has joined thousands of schools nationwide in recently banning smartphones, as a growing body of evidence shows they’re linked to falling test scores and rising rates of teen mental illness. This January, just over two million students will return to phone-free schools as statewide bans go into effect in Virginia and South Carolina. The following month, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the nation, will join them.
Over the past decade or so, the warnings about smartphones have reached a fever pitch. Netflix’s The Social Dilemma, a blockbuster 2020 documentary, revealed just how badly social media algorithms warp our brains, changing our behavior and beliefs. The star of that movie, computer scientist Tristan Harris, had been calling out the dangers of social media for years through his Center for Humane Technology. Parents across the country have campaigned to get phones out of schools, launching groups like Wait Until 8th or OK to Delay.
So why is this movement finally getting results now? I spoke to a dozen people—educators and activists and parents—and they all offered the same answer: Jonathan Haidt.
In March, the New York University social psychologist, who has studied the negative effects of phones on kids for years, published a book called The Anxious Generation, which immediately became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. It has remained on the list ever since, thanks to a range of influential boosters on both sides of the political aisle. It’s impossible to think of another book that’s been equally celebrated by both Democrats and Republicans: Barack Obama recently named Haidt’s book one of his favorites of the year, while Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the GOP governor of Arkansas, posted an Instagram video of herself with Haidt, promoting his message to her 885,000 followers. Even Bill Gates, who helped wire America by co-founding Microsoft, has listed The Anxious Generation as one of his top four reads of 2024.
Cookbook author Jessica Seinfeld, who has three children with her husband, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, was one of Haidt’s earliest and most vocal online advocates. She told me Haidt’s book “came along at just the right time”—when the negative effects of the Covid-era reliance on screen learning were being widely reported. Even The New York Times, which encouraged social restrictions during the pandemic, is now finally acknowledging that school closures damaged an entire generation.
“We have the first generation of kids who are native to phones and social media,” Seinfeld said, and “the addiction got really real” during Covid. “I can’t tell you how many moms have come up to me and said, ‘My kids hate me because I won’t let them get a phone, and I’m the only one.’ ”
Many parents felt “very alone” and like they were “swimming upstream” if they tried to fight their kids, Seinfeld told me. “But now, many parents feel less alone in this fight for their kids’ mental health thanks to Jon.”
Apple released the first iPhone in the summer of 2007. But it wasn’t until May 2023 that Florida governor Ron DeSantis became the first state leader in the nation to ban phones in K-12 public schools. After Governor Sanders read Haidt’s book this year, she sent a copy to every legislator in her state as well as to all 49 other U.S. governors, urging them to ensure “phone-free schools” for children under 16. Since then, at least seven governors have thrown their weight behind the cause, with Governor Gavin Newsom of California becoming the most recent to join the cause.
Jean Twenge, a psychologist specializing in generational differences, says she first started ringing the alarm about how smartphones were leading to a teenage mental health crisis with her 2017 book iGen, but this year is when the “dam broke.”
“There’s been a lot of progress in the last year after years of relatively slow progress,” said Twenge. “A lot of that has to do with Jon’s book—it really pushed the conversation even more into the forefront. It’s inspired a lot of principals and superintendents to put stricter rules in place.”
Part of the book’s power is its simplicity. Haidt spells out four “foundational rules” to inspire a “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” They are: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, no phones at school, and more unsupervised play and independence for kids. Haidt has consistently repeated these talking points at talks around the country and on his Instagram page, where he has 341,000 followers.
Even so, Haidt told me he is “astounded” by how quickly the movement has spread throughout America, even rippling across the pond to the UK. “The only other example of social change I’ve seen that has moved this quickly is the fall of the Iron Curtain,” he told me. When I asked him why it took so long, he called it a “collective action problem,” in which the general public resents the status quo, but individuals are too scared to challenge it.
“Every parent thought, ‘I don't want to give my kid a smartphone at the age of 10, but she comes home and tells me, ‘Mom, I’m the only one.’ That’s the magic phrase—‘I’m the only one who doesn't have one.’ ”
He added that it’s usually only “a minority of parents who want to be in touch with their children all the time.” In a recent survey of 1,500 parents who send their kids to school with a smartphone, 78 percent said they do it only in the case of an emergency, such as a school shooting. “But when it’s clear that all the schools” are banning phones, Haidt told me, “then the principals or heads of schools can more easily resist” the social pressure to allow devices in the classroom.
By next September, Haidt concluded, “I think we’re going to have the great majority of schools in the United States phone-free.”
Caroline Bryk, the executive director of the Jewish Parents Forum, is one of the parents who was spurred to act by Haidt’s book. “Covid confirmed what a lot of us already suspected: that the tech is extremely addictive and problematic,” said Bryk, a mother of four and a former teacher in the Chicago public school system. “All of us were desperate—we’re working full-time, we have kids in school. The tech became a crutch.”
Over the past year, she’s helped push at least 60 Jewish day schools across the U.S. to move toward adopting Haidt’s four norms. Some, especially the K-8 institutions, she said, have gone full ban—others are in the process of “changing their communal norms” around technology use. She says teachers at schools that have banned phones now ask her: “Why didn’t we do this sooner?”
“It’s liberating,” she concluded.
Kruger, the Seaside biology teacher, agrees. With a full ban now in place at her school, she says her students are finally back to their old selves—even asking if they can hang back to finish experiments. “When they had their phones, they just seemed so overcome with ennui. And now that they don’t have them, they seem so young again,” she said. “So fresh and excited.”
For nearly a decade, Seaside High School principal Jeff Roberts said he’d been “dancing around” a phone ban. There was no question phones were causing “constant turmoil” at his school. But after he read Haidt’s book, he went to the school board to propose a ban from “bell to bell”—throughout the entire school day.
It’s been only one semester since the ban has taken effect, but Roberts says the school’s failure rate has fallen by 30 percent, meaning a full third of students who would have likely flunked a class are now on track to pass. Just as important, he says, is a sound he’s lately been hearing in the school cafeteria, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean. It’s a sound he says he’d almost forgotten.
“I heard laughter,” he said. “And I mean laughter. And there wasn’t a single phone in sight.”
