Toxic Phones—or a Toxic Culture?

Earlier this year, NYU professor Jonathan Haidt published his latest book, The Anxious Generation. The book has been a publishing phenomenon, an instant #1 New York Times bestseller, and in the top 20 on Amazon every week since its publication. One of Haidt’s central claims is that the wide use of smartphones by kids is driving the rise in anxiety and depression seen among children and teens. 

There is a lot to love about his book. But some critics aren’t buying his thesis. Candice Odgers, professor of psychology at the University of California Irvine, wrote in her review for Nature that correlation is not causation and that Haidt’s proposed link between smartphone use and psychiatric outcomes “is not supported by science.” In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson noted that the rise in psychiatric problems among young people isn’t really happening outside the English-speaking world. For example, there was no rise in anxiety among kids in Spain, Greece, or Russia over the same years that rates were skyrocketing in the US, even though kids in Spain, Greece, and Russia are just as likely to possess smartphones as American kids. Maybe what’s really driving the rise in anxiety and depression isn’t the smartphone itself, but a changing American culture, a youth culture that is now much more toxic than it was 15 years ago. 

That is the argument I make in the new edition of my book (October 1) The Collapse of Parenting: namely, that the problems American kids are experiencing are not solely due to smartphones per se, but to an increasingly toxic American youth culture. The smartphones and social media spread that culture, but the smartphones themselves are not the main source of the toxicity. So, what is now so toxic about American culture?  

I have been a medical doctor in the United States for 38 years. As recently as 20 years ago, the culture was much less harmful to kids. What has happened in the past 15 years that has made the culture so much more noxious for children and teens? That’s the question I try to answer in the new edition of The Collapse of Parenting. Briefly, it boils down to three things: the collapse of parenting, the culture of disrespect, and normophobia.

The Collapse of Parenting. Humans are children or adolescents for more years than most animals live. A horse is a mature adult at four years of age. A four-year-old human has barely begun. Why? Scholars tell us that human development takes as long as it does because it takes many years for the grown-ups to teach kids what kids need to know. Human culture is built on the foundation of parental authority. Children have to believe that it’s worthwhile to learn what the parents have to teach. But in recent decades, there has been a transfer of authority from parents to children. Many parents now let kids decide what’s for supper, whether to have a phone or a TV in their bedroom, when to get on social media, what movies to watch, often even when the kid will go to sleep at night. I recognized all that 10 years ago when I wrote the first edition of my book. But the culture has changed for the worse since then, with too many parents letting kids make the call rather than parents judging what is best for their child.

The Culture of Disrespect. American culture has become a culture where it’s cool to be disrespectful. That’s not confined to politics. From the Disney Channel to the most popular videos on TikTok to the Top 10 songs on Billboard, American kids are now immersed in a culture that teaches them that it’s cool and even funny to be disrespectful. Lil Nas X epitomized the culture of disrespect in his #1 hit song in which he sang You can’t tell me nothin’ / can’t nobody tell me nothin’. If you can’t tell me nothin’ / can’t nobody tell me nothin’, then what is the point of going to school, or to synagogue or church? As Bill Maher observed in his May 2024 book: young people are beautiful but stupid. Old people are ugly but more likely to be wise. Maher follows up: if that’s true, then any successful civilization will foster strong bonds across generations, so that the beautiful young people can learn from the wise old people. As I wrote in my book Boys Adrift, comparative anthropologists have found that all successful civilizations do exactly that: they nurture and cultivate strong connections across generations. The culture of disrespect breaks bonds across generations, so that kids look to same-age peers rather than to their parents for guidance. And what the kids now find is a newly toxic culture, rampant on social media.

[I]n recent decades, there has been a transfer of authority from parents to children...too many parents are letting kids make the call rather than judging what is best for their child.

Normophobia.  Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book called Girls on the Edge. The girls I interviewed back then wanted to seem “effortlessly perfect.” When I wrote the revised edition more recently, I found that girls no longer want to seem effortlessly perfect. They don’t want to seem perfect, or even normal, at all. Normal is boring. Normal is “basic white b**ch.” Better to be on the spectrum, or at least anxious and/or depressed. A psychiatric diagnosis can provide an avalanche of excuses curated by TikTok influencers with millions of views. You’re not lazy, you have ADHD. You’re not shy, you have an anxiety disorder, which the influencers tell you is due to a chemical imbalance in your brain. It’s not something you can control. It’s not your fault. 

Earlier this year, Mary Harrington coined the term “normophobia” to describe the growing fear of being normal in our culture, a fear now especially common among young people. In this new culture, today’s online culture, there is almost nothing worse than being white, straight, and neurotypical. This prejudice is embedded in the terms that social media teaches kids to use. Are you “neurotypical” or are you “neurodivergent”? Are you gender-conforming or gender-nonconforming? Normal now means typical. Conforming. And who wants to be typical and conforming? That is so BORING. As Matthew Crawford has observed, normophobia equates “normal” with “unimaginative,” “passive,” and “lame.” Crawford concludes: normophobia “incentivizes healthy people to think of themselves as sick.” And the danger of thinking of yourself as sick is that it can actually make you sick. 

C. S. Lewis wrote 70 years ago, “the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are, is that you very often succeed.” Substitute “more anxious” or “more depressed” for “stupider,” and you begin to understand what is happening with American kids. The collapse of parenting has set kids adrift in a newly toxic culture in which it’s now cool to be anxious and depressed, a culture in which it’s totally lame to be normal. Smartphones and social media may exacerbate the problem, but in my view, smartphones are not the root cause of the problem, only the vector. We as parents need to limit the phones and the screens—not primarily because phones and screens are intrinsically evil, but because they are spreading a toxic culture, the culture of disrespect and normophobia.

The take-home message is simple: it’s not enough to just say “No” to the world of social media and smartphones. We also have to say “Yes” to a healthier culture. We have to offer our children a culture where it’s cool to be healthy and sane, ideally in collaboration with other like-minded families, in opposition to the newly-toxic culture of normophobia and disrespect—where it’s cool to be anxious and depressed.

Leonard Sax MD PhD is the author of The Collapse of Parenting, second edition published October 1 2024 by Basic Books, more information here.

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies.