From Bans to Skills: An ADHD Researcher Responds to The Anxious Generation

From Bans to Skills: An ADHD Researcher Responds to The Anxious Generation

There is no doubt that the most influential book about screen time right now is Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. While it is ostensibly about screen time for children and teenagers under 16, it has much wider implications for the rest of us, because it is helping to set the agenda for how we all think and talk about phones, social media, and mental health. The book is already shaping public debate and policy talk in Aotearoa New Zealand, where arguments about phones, schools, and social media restrictions have travelled quickly into mainstream discussion.

As a screen time researcher, I feel obligated to write about The Anxious Generation from that broader perspective. I’m also a parent of two young boys, and someone who has spent a lot of time thinking (and worrying) about what 24/7 connectivity is doing to our attention, relationships, and sense of self.

So, I eventually did what I probably should have done in the first place: I turned down the volume on the commentary and sat with the book itself.

There is quite a lot in The Anxious Generation that resonated with my own research and, at times, with my own life. The timing of the rise in anxiety and depression, especially for girls, alongside the spread of smartphones and front-facing cameras, is hard to dismiss out of hand. Even where the causal story remains contested, Haidt is right to press the question of whether smartphones and social media became super-powered self-comparison machines at exactly the moment young people were forming their identities.

Relatedly, I also think he is onto something with ‘prestige bias’: the way social media platforms intensify status competition by turning social life into metrics, rankings, and visible signs of approval. This was, in fact, one of the main reasons why I ditched Facebook back in 2013 — because of how it quantifies sociality.

His arguments about risky play and the value of ‘discover mode’ also landed with me, because they speak to a deeper truth that childhood and adolescence need exploration, uncertainty, and room to fail.

I also recognise the force of his concerns about highly immersive games, especially for boys. I enjoyed gaming in my late teens and twenties but often noticed how scattered and icky I felt after a prolonged session. I would struggle to put the controller down, and people close to me would comment on how irritable I became afterwards.

Perhaps most intriguingly for Saving Screen Time, Haidt explicitly acknowledges that disconnection has ‘group‑level effects’: going phone-free is easier when the people around you are doing it too. That is essentially the design premise of Saving Screen Time: disconnection is not just an individual self-control problem; it is a social and infrastructural one.

My deepest disagreement is with the analytic lens of the book. The Anxious Generation is, fundamentally, a media-effects argument: media are treated as an exposure or dosage that acts on vulnerable young people and produces measurable harms. That framing can identify patterns, but it also narrows what we can see.

What drops out, above all, is agency. The central question becomes what screens do to young people, rather than what young people do with screens, how they navigate them, what needs these technologies meet, and how those dynamics differ across bodies, brains, and social worlds. When you only look at exposure and outcomes, you lose sight of the everyday tactics, negotiations, and experiments that people use to live with these devices.

There is, however, an entire subfield of research that tries to grapple with both harm and use: digital disconnection studies. Rather than treating the phone as a kind of environmental toxin, this work asks how people actively reshape their media environments: why they disconnect, how they do it, when it helps, and what it costs. In that literature, disconnection is understood as something people do: a practice, a strategy, a capability, and often a collective experiment rather than a rule imposed from above.

That way of thinking is much closer to how I believe we need to approach these questions, especially for people with ADHD, whose relationships with screens are rarely simple stories of passive exposure. It opens up space to talk about skills, supports, and alternative infrastructures, not just restrictions.

A major limitation of the media-effects approach is that social media appears mostly as a toxin rather than as social infrastructure. The book tends to flatten very different kinds of digital environments into one undifferentiated harm, as though Instagram’s comparison engine, YouTube rabbit holes, and a closed Discord community for a niche interest all amount to the same thing

But for many young people, especially those on the margins, social media is not just performance or distraction. It can be a place to find identity resources, niche communities, health information, neurodiversity networks, queer community, and forms of belonging not available offline.

There is also a version of developmental essentialism lurking in The Anxious Generation. Haidt’s core claim is that social media is simply too harmful for developing adolescent brains. The solution he proposes is a set of age-based bans and restrictions: no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, and phone-free schools.

Reading this, I was reminded of older arguments for single‑sex schooling: boys are too distractible in mixed classrooms; they cannot be expected to regulate themselves around girls, so we remove the girls. Research on single‑sex schools has since shown that the promised developmental benefits are weak at best, and that such schooling may increase gender salience and reduce cross‑gender social competence.

The structural logic is similar here. Instead of teaching young people how to manage the attentional and social challenges of networked environments, we propose to wall them off from those environments entirely during a critical period of life. As others have wryly pointed out, it is not as though adults are naturally capable of managing these technologies, while young people are not.

The Anxious Generation is also riddled with neurotypical bias. Haidt idealises 'real-world' interactions as embodied, synchronous, and situated in communities with high barriers to entry and exit. Online interactions, by contrast, are cast as disembodied, asynchronous, and easy to abandon, therefore inherently less developmentally valuable.

For many disabled and neurodivergent people, this hierarchy is backwards. Asynchronous communication is not a degraded substitute for synchronous talk; it is the form that makes participation possible. Nancy Baym’s Personal Connections in the Digital Age documents how deeply embodied, emotionally rich, and socially consequential online communication can be, and reminds us that panics about ‘unreal’ mediated relationships are historically recurrent.

Crip technoscience scholars have also shown that technologies are often built to normalise neurodivergent people toward neurotypical standards, rather than to honour and support different ways of sensing and processing the world. Haidt’s insistence on synchronous, in-person sociality as the developmental gold standard slots neatly into that tradition.

One of the most striking gaps in the book is how little attention it gives to the business model of social media. Haidt is very good at naming harms, but much less interested in the political economy that produces them. There is now a substantial body of research on the attention economy, platform capitalism, and the design of systems built to capture, hold, and monetise attention, and that literature helps explain why these environments feel so compulsive in the first place.

This is where thinkers like Mark Fisher and Shoshana Zuboff become useful. If doomscrolling, compulsive checking, and endless platform engagement are tied to forms of capitalist extraction, then the problem is not simply that children have encountered a dangerous tool too early.

From the perspective of Saving Screen Time, the better question is not simply whether screens are good or bad. It is how people, especially people with ADHD, learn to manage intensely sticky digital environments in ways that preserve attention, care, and connection. That means taking harms seriously without collapsing into a model where protection can only come through bans.

The project starts from three propositions. First, constant connectivity can be harmful, especially for people whose attention and affect already run hot. Second, digital platforms are now woven into the infrastructure of everyday life, so “just log off” is not a complete answer. Third, disconnection can be understood as a skill and a practice: something people can learn, test, negotiate together, and adapt to their own lives.

That is why I am interested in disconnection not as refusal in the abstract, but as a set of lived experiments. What helps someone with ADHD stay off an app that continually pulls them back in. What kinds of group agreements make phone-free time more possible. What alternative forms of sociality, information, and support people need if they are going to disconnect without becoming more isolated. These are the questions Haidt opens up for me, even when I think his answers are too narrow.

Despite my disagreements, I think The Anxious Generation matters because it has made it harder to dismiss concerns about digital life as mere panic or technophobia. It has forced a much wider public to ask what kind of childhood, adolescence, and social world we are building around phones, platforms, and permanent connectivity.

But if we stop at the level of bans, we stop too early. What is needed is a richer conversation about agency, neurodiversity, capitalism, infrastructure, and the collective conditions that make disconnection possible. As a parent, I want my kids to have boredom, risky play, and relationships not permanently mediated by metrics and alerts. As a researcher, I want us to develop better ways of living with technologies that are now deeply embedded in ordinary life, especially for those of us whose brains have never fit the fantasy of calm, linear, self-regulating attention.

That, for me, is the project of Saving Screen Time: not a crusade against phones, but a search for better ways of living in, and occasionally out of, the networks we’ve built.