Dr. Jonathan Haidt Is Leading a Parenting Movement—Here’s What He Wants You to Know About Technology and Kids’ Mental Health

In an age dominated by screens, social media, and shrinking childhood freedoms, renowned psychologist and one of Parents’ Next Gen winners, Jonathan Haidt, is leading a growing global movement to help parents reclaim their kids’ mental health, independence, and joy. With the release of his bestselling 2024 book The Anxious Generation and his activism throughout 2025, Dr. Haidt has emerged as one of the most influential voices in parenting today.

Dr. Haidt, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, has spent years researching the mental health crisis among young people. His conclusion? The dramatic rise in anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal is closely tied to the early and excessive use of smartphones and social media. Dr. Haidt is on a mission to help kids “break up” with their phones and reclaim mental health, which is why he’s a Parents Next Gen winner.

Not content with just influencing parents, Dr. Haidt turned to children themselves. He co-authored an interactive graphic novel called The Amazing Generation—a playful guide to help 5th to 8th graders “break up with their phones” and rediscover the joys of real life, out in December 2025. Parents across the country have embraced it as a tool for opening conversations and creating family screen-time rules collaboratively.

Dr. Haidt’s influence reached even wider after recently appearing with Michelle Obama on her podcast. Together, they tackled one of today’s thorniest parenting issues: how to set boundaries in a tech-driven world. “Understand that your children are not your friends,” Obama emphasized, echoing Dr. Haidt’s call for strong, deliberate parenting. The episode prompted an explosion of online dialogue and further fueled the movement of parents supporting each other in creating healthier home environments.

Dr. Haidt spoke exclusively to Parents.

What motivates you to do the work that you do?

What motivates me? Gosh, so many different motivations. It started as just scientific curiosity about why the mental health stats suddenly got so horrible in 2012. What happened? Then it moved on to be, ‘This is the biggest problem I have ever seen. This is actually changing an entire generation of human beings.’ So now it’s become really more of a mission.

At Anxious Generation we are helping families and organizations around the world to make change. It’s become so many different motivations, but it’s been really thrilling because almost everyone wants to change this.

How are you raising your children to be changemakers?

I’m raising my kids, first, to be independent. I haven’t really thought about making them changemakers per se. My daughter’s 15, my son is 18, and we focused on just giving them more independence than we were ready for, like pushing ourselves to listen to Lenore Skenazy, who advocates for free-range childhood.

So, we focused on just letting them out more in New York City, letting them navigate, letting them do errands. Now my kids, they go all over the city on city bikes. They’re confident. So I’ve just been focusing on getting them to fly and then they’ll find their way in the world.

It seems like devices can be particularly threatening to boys’ outlook and sense of self. How can we raise young boys to thrive and not just survive?

Well, the most important thing for raising boys is that they have to have thousands or millions of real-world experiences, some of which involve risk and conflict.

Unfortunately, our kids, our boys, are having thousands or millions of video games. And it’s not just the video games. It’s the porn. It’s the vaping. It’s so many online activities. So, we’ve got to delay boys descending into video games and porn.

We’ve got to send them out into the world to play and have adventures, even though that’s kind of scary for us. We have to overcome our own fears and give our boys the kind of childhoods that their fathers or grandfathers had, at least to the extent that we can.

What would you say to parents who have an issue with delaying—they have a teen who is feeling excluded and wants social media?

Let’s say we’re first on the smartphone. You can give your kid a non-smartphone. It’s fine to have your kid be in contact with their friends. But just try to hold out on a smartphone because that’s a gambling casino and pornography, and everything else in their pocket.

On social media, it can be harder. If your kid has one other friend who isn’t on social media, it’s a lot easier than if every single friend is on social media.

And finally, just educate yourself about social media. On my Substack afterbabel.com, we have posts giving quotations from employees at Snapchat and TikTok. And if you know what they know, you wouldn’t let your kids on TikTok and Snapchat. So it’s hard. My daughter is 15. I’ve not let her have any social media and I am imposing a cost on her in the short run. But in the long run, I think I have a happier daughter who is going to flourish and fly the nest.

What would be your word of advice for parents?

We all feel anxious about letting our kids out, letting them out of our control, letting them out of our view. But we have to do what’s best for the kids, not what’s best for our own feelings. And we have to overcome our anxiety if we want to give our kids a chance of overcoming their anxiety.

We have to let them grow up, take small risks by themselves without us there, to discover that they can do it. It can be as simple as sending your kid into a grocery store. If you have a seven-year-old child who’s been shopping with you 50 or 100 times, knows how to do it, you say, “Here’s some money, go get a quart of milk. I’ll wait here in the parking lot,” or “I’ll wait at the front of the store.”

Just start small, and you will be anxious that first time, but your kid is going to be jumping up and down with excitement that you gave them this chance to do something. We all need to feel useful, and our kids have to feel useful, so let them do useful things. That’s how they’ll grow up. One last question, because you gave so many hopeful ideas there.

Do you have any specific advice for dads?

So my advice to dads is that while moms have been sort of leading the movement to push back on smartphones, the other half of this is you have to give your kids an exciting, real-world childhood, which includes thrills and risk-taking and running around and wrestling.

And this is where dads excel. Dad is the one who’s going to pretend to be a predator stalking the child and pretending to be a big, scary monster. That sort of stuff is incredibly healthy for kids. Dad’s the one who’s going to be throwing them up in the air. 

That mix of fear and excitement with safety is the most powerful thing you can give your kids to overcome their own anxieties and become a force in the world. Dads are uniquely qualified, or I should just say on average, they enjoy it more, and they tend to gravitate to that role. So this is where I think dads are really really crucial.