The Anxious Generation phone alternatives, charted

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation spent more than a year on the bestseller lists making one argument: childhood moved onto phones around 2012, and kids’ mental health followed it down. Whatever you make of the causation debate (serious researchers do contest it), the book leaves parents with a practical question it spends less time on: if not a smartphone, then what, concretely? Here is the data behind the book’s alarm, and the device decisions its four norms actually imply.

Three things are true at once in this chart. The rise Haidt writes about is real: 39% of girls in 2013, 57% by 2021. The burden is not evenly carried: the girls’ line sits roughly twice as high as the boys’. And the newest data point bends the right way: 53% in 2023, the first improvement in a decade of surveys. The CDC called the 2023 numbers “a glimmer of progress”: a reason for resolve, not relief.

The four norms, translated into decisions

The book’s prescription is four collective norms. Each one is abstract until it meets a shopping decision:

• No smartphones before high school. The decision this forces isn’t “no phone.” It’s which non-smartphone. Kids still need to call grandparents and friends. That’s a screen-free phone, a kids’ landline like Tin Can, or a talk-and-text cell like Gabb. We priced all of them in the companion piece.
• No social media before 16. Easiest to keep when the feed physically isn’t in the device. A filtered smartphone enforces this norm through ongoing vigilance; a phone with no screen enforces it through physics.
• Phone-free schools. Largely out of your hands, and moving fast: most US states now restrict phones in school in some form. A home-based phone is the rare device this norm never touches.
• More independence and free play. The norm parents skip, and the one Haidt weights most. A kid who can call the neighbor kid on their own, with no parent brokering a playdate over text, is practicing exactly this. It’s the argument for giving the kid a phone of their own, just not a smartphone.

What following the book looks like at our house

Full disclosure: we make one of the options. Ring Ring is a home phone built for the first norm: a real handset on the kitchen counter (or any analog phone you already own), a Trusted Circle only a parent can edit, and independence for the kid inside it: they dial their people themselves, no screen involved. From $59 with a $0/mo plan between Ring Ring families. The honest comparison with every alternative, including our competitors’ strengths, is our first-phone guide.

Whatever device you land on, the book’s deepest point survives the researchers’ arguments about effect sizes: the norms only work as norms. One family delaying alone is an argument at home; five families delaying together, with a way for their kids to reach each other, is a childhood.

Sources

• CDC, Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report: 2013–2023 (all mental-health figures in the chart; US government work, public domain).
• CDC newsroom, 2023 YRBS release (the 2021→2023 improvement).
• Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation (Penguin Press, 2024), and anxiousgeneration.com (the four norms).
• Wait Until 8th (organizing the delay by grade).