On Board Online • January 12, 2026
By Sara Foss
Special Correspondent
At the start of the school year, every district employee in the Remsenburg-Speonk School District on Long Island received a copy of the same book: The Anxious Generation by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University.
Staff are discussing the book once a month at faculty meetings. In addition, the district is hosting three potlucks with parents to talk about the book.
"I really felt like, 'Wow, I wish I had known all this when I was raising my children,'" said Superintendent Denise Sullivan, who read the book last year and decided it ought to be a community read in her school district. "It was a real call to action for me."
Published in 2024, The Anxious Generation makes a case that cellphones and other Internet-connected devices with round-the-clock access to social media are harming children and teens, fueling a troubling rise in anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide.
The state's new ban on cellphones in schools is a timely hook for talking about the book, educators said.
"The cellphone ban is what's happening," said Mary Halloran, an English teacher at Fayetteville-Manlius High School in central New York. "The book provides a lot of the why."
Over the summer, Fayetteville-Manlius staff read The Anxious Generation. In the fall, the district hosted a series of conversations about the book with parents and other community members.
So, what's so great about Haidt's book? We asked Kelly Zinn, a licensed clinical social worker who has led workshops on how to have a healthy relationship with technology in several districts on Long Island. She will be running a regional book study on The Anxious Generation at Eastern Suffolk BOCES in January and February.
"I work in private practice," Zinn said. "I see the rise in depression and anxiety, and I think a lot of what Haidt is saying is speaking to the concerns that many people are having about children and teens today. One of the reasons educators like this book is because it does reflect what they're seeing in school."
The Anxious Generation presents a wealth of research showing that teen mental health worsened between 2010 and 2015, after the smartphone became ubiquitous - a period Haidt calls, "The Great Rewiring."
He writes that a play-based childhood, in which children and teens play and hang out in-person, fosters socialization and helps children develop independence. But play has been replaced by a phone-based childhood, where socializing and activities occur mostly online.
This is a problem because the play-based childhood is much better for children, according to Haidt. Play gives children ample opportunities to build lasting relationships and acquire interpersonal skills necessary to thrive in adulthood. A phone-based childhood hinders that development, drawing youth into a virtual world that is distracting and addictive. Sites such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat use algorithms that can keep users glued to the sites for hours on end.
"With so many new and exciting virtual activities, many adolescents (and adults) lost the ability to be fully present with the people around them, which changed social life for everyone, even for the small minority that did not use these platforms," Haidt writes. "Social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast, for adolescents, over the course of just five years."
In his book, Haidt presents four recommendations for a healthier childhood in the digital age. They are:
- No smartphones before high school.
- No social media before 16.
- Phone-free schools.
- Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.
Zinn said these are promising strategies, but not a silver bullet. She believes the rise in anxiety and depression in teens and children has numerous causes, and that smartphones and other technology are a contributing factor. Too many children lack opportunities to "experience life's challenge" and develop resilience, connection and well-being.
"A lot of times, what happens for kids is they get a challenge removed from them because somebody feels like it's too challenging," Zinn said. "And the message that's sending is, 'I don't believe you can do this.'"
Critics of The Anxious Generation say Haidt cherry-picked data to support a thesis that is not entirely supported by research. An article in the journal Nature said that the research on what's to blame for rising rates of anxiety and depression in teens is ambiguous, and that the problem is more complex than Haidt makes it out to be.
Educators who spoke to On Board said they've embraced The Anxious Generation because it describes what they've seen among their students - rising rates of mental illness, an uptick in conflicts stemming from bullying on social media, more difficulty concentrating in class and a growing number of students who are addicted to Internet-enabled devices.
Jessica Sheridan, assistant superintendent for staff and curriculum development for Wayne-Finger Lakes BOCES, said that staff were seeing more kids struggle and act out if they weren't allowed to have time on their phones, tablets or computers when they arrived at school. The Anxious Generation helped her understand that these students weren't just being defiant.
"Social media gives them a dopamine hit," she said. "They were going through symptoms of withdrawal."
The superintendent of Wayne-Finger Lakes BOCES, Lynne Rutnik, asked her leadership team to read The Anxious Generation in preparation for a retreat last summer. Chris Bennett, a principal on special assignment, organized small group discussions for the retreat.
Bennett said that one thing that The Anxious Generation opened his eyes to is the addictive nature of social media apps.
"These companies hired psychologists, psychiatrists, researchers to figure out how can we addict a 10-year-old to technology so that we've captured him for the next 70 years," he said. "It made me almost sick to my stomach." Some students, he said, go home, get on their devices and stay on them until bedtime. "They aren't getting outside and playing," he said. "They aren't solving problems."
The way parents and teachers respond to The Anxious Generation is different, noted Sullivan, the Remsenburg-Speonk superintendent. Parents talk about how social media has changed how they parent - how they might feel pressured to throw a lavish birthday party for their child because they saw another parent post pictures of an expensive party on Facebook, for example. Faculty are more likely to question how devices and technologies are used at school. '"
These kind of conversations were what Sullivan was hoping would occur when she had her district buy 32 copies of the book. "For me it was like a moral obligation to educate the adults around us, to educate parents and also the people in our schools so that we have an awareness of how technology is impacting our children and their developing brains."