Screens, schools, and the future of childhood: A candid dialogue with Jonathan Haidt

In this powerful and eye-opening conversation, I talk with Jonathan Haidt—author of The Anxious Generation—about how smartphones, social media, and one-to-one devices have rewired both childhood and school.

We explore the sharp rise in anxiety, attention fragmentation, and developmental delays—and how much of it traces back to the early 2010s, when tech flooded both kids’ lives and classrooms.

We also discuss:

• Why screen time is now the real equity issue

• How schools became dependent on EdTech

• What phone-free, distraction-free classrooms look like

• Why recess and unstructured play aren’t luxuries—they’re necessities

• How educators can lead the way in restoring connection, confidence, and joy

While you may have heard Jonathan Haidt speak elsewhere about his book ​The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness​, this conversation was different.

This episode offers both hard truths and hope. If you’ve felt the shift in your students’ behavior, motivation, and mental health over the last decade—this conversation will help you name what’s happening and begin imagining a better path forward.

Later this summer, I’ll share a different perspective from someone who sees personalized AI tutoring as the future of school, and I have to admit, I find that vision just as compelling as what Haidt has shared. Stay tuned!

Listen to episode 327 below,
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ANGELA: I’m a huge fan of your book The Anxious Generation. I think a lot of what you share about anxiety, anti-social behaviors, and shortened attention spans is very apparent to teachers and others who work in K-12 schools. The effects are obvious, but the causes are harder to pinpoint, and the research you did for your book really helps fill that gap. Can you summarize the main factors contributing to the rise in anxiety among young people today, and how they specifically relate to the school environment?

JON: First let me say that I love teachers, and I can prove it because I actually dedicated the book to teachers. I’d already dedicated previous books to members of my family, so I decided: teachers are on the frontline. Teachers are facing so much difficulty with these new problems.

So I dedicated the book to the teachers and principals at PS 3, Lab Middle School, Baruch Middle School, and Brooklyn Tech. These are the schools my kids went to—who have devoted their lives to nurturing children, including mine. So I’m very glad to be talking to teachers. There’s so much that you can do, and there’s so much you’re going through that makes your lives harder. So let’s talk.

Why students seem to be showing up differently now

I first noticed there was a problem because the students coming into universities in 2014 and 2015 were just really different. They were much more anxious. Something was different about people born in 1996 and later. Now we know they’re Gen Z. I didn’t know what it was at the time. I wrote a whole book called The Coddling of the American Mind about how overprotection is partly what’s causing this. That’s true, but in 2017, I didn’t know. We didn’t have good data yet on whether it was social media or phones. I mean, the timing was right, but we didn’t have a lot of studies to demonstrate it.

Well, now we do. The way to think about this is something happened to kids—especially preteens, and especially preteen girls—around 2012. It’s astonishing. I’ve arranged the evidence—the trends in mental health going back decades and across many countries, certainly all the English-speaking countries and Northern Europe—and it’s very clear. There was no sign of a problem until 2010, even 2011. Everything was kind of flat, bouncing around a bit, but no trend. Then all of a sudden, 2012… sort of an elbow, and then a very sharp upward rise in 2013.

So we have a very sudden, international decline in mental health that hits preteen girls the hardest. Some people say, “Oh, it must be the global financial crisis.” Really? That hit preteen girls more than anyone else? That doesn’t make any sense—and that was 2008. Why does this not start until 2012, 2013? There is no other explanation on the table. No one has even offered another explanation. What I’m proposing is just that these things are correlated in history: kids move on to smartphones around 2011, 2012.

The iPhone came out in 2007, but teens didn’t really have it then. They still had flip phones. In 2010, we got the front-facing camera. In 2012, Facebook buys Instagram, and it becomes super popular. So 2012 is really the transition year where the girls, especially, now all have iPhones with front-facing cameras and Instagram accounts. This, I’m calling The Great Rewiring of Childhood.

So take a girl going through puberty in 2015—11 or 12 years old. She’s on her phone. Everyone’s talking about her face, her body, her hair, her skin. She’s posting. She’s not spending much time with other girls because now, there’s so much time on social media. Nowadays, the average is five hours a day. They’re not connecting with other kids very much. This is what I’ve called The Great Rewiring of Childhood. And it especially affected girls, if we look at anxiety and depression.

But now, in our conversation, I think we’re going to need to totally divide up the mental health story. It’s one story, with one set of causes. Then I think the bigger story for education is actually the cognitive fragmentation—the destruction of the ability to attend, to focus, to read a book. That’s a different story with different causes, and that’s probably even bigger for teachers than the mental health crisis.

Yeah, I agree. And I’ve had Jean Twenge on the show to talk about her research. 

She was the first to really discover it. Yes, I draw on her a lot.

Does banning phones in school improve students’ mental health?

Yes—and she really made that strong connection between the smartphone, social media, and what’s going on. I feel like your book expands on that and also gets into the other pieces you’re talking about, like continuous partial attention. So what’s happening in schools? How is this rise in anxiety manifesting in schools?

Teachers are seeing it just as university professors did. We all saw it beginning in 2014, 2015. There wasn’t a mental health crisis in 2012, 2013—but of course, these are 18-year-olds coming in. So I think schools started seeing it a bit earlier.

The unintended consequences of allowing Big Tech to infiltrate schools

But here’s the complexity: roughly the same time that all the kids got on iPhones around 2012, that’s when the EdTech revolution started, too. The iPad comes out in 2010 or 2011—Apple is pushing it hard on schools. I don’t know if they gave it for free or subsidized it, but Apple really wanted to get kids onto the Apple ecosystem.

Then Google develops the Chromebook. They’re pushing hard. Google rises to dominance around 2014–2015. So we have the transformation of kids—the great rewiring of childhood with the smartphone—but also the great rewiring of school, quite literally. Most things now run through iPads and Chromebooks.

We were promised this would revolutionize teaching. It was going to engage students, bring scores up. And what happened? That’s exactly when scores started going down. We now have good longitudinal data. The NAEP—the National Assessment of Educational Progress—showed steady increases from the 1970s through 2012. Not huge, but real. Our students were performing better in 2012 than in previous decades.

Then it starts going down. People only noticed this a year and a half ago when the 2023 data came out. People saw a big drop and said it was COVID. And yes, there was a drop with COVID—but the decline actually started in 2012. So if kids knew so much less after COVID, it’s not because of the virus. It’s because all education was on screens.

It’s very hard for a child to learn anything with a computer or tablet in front of them, because the distraction effects are enormous. They swamp any possible benefit. That’s the conclusion. Again, I’m not an expert in this, but I’ve been reading a lot. On my Substack, After Babel, we now have a whole tab for educators. We’ve got stories from experts on EdTech, and the story is pretty clear: EdTech harms education.

Now—I want to be precise. Putting a computer or a tablet on a kid’s desk—the one-to-one devices—harms education. I’m increasingly confident about that. Using a SMARTboard, that’s probably fine.

I don’t have a reason to think interactive whiteboards are harmful. But if you want kids to pay attention to you—or even to the kid next to them, which is fine—you can’t have a touchscreen on their desk.

So you have to have phone-free schools. That’s a must. There’s no point in bringing kids to school if they have their phones. Just let them stay home and swipe. You’ve got to have a phone-free school—bell to bell, morning to afternoon. Then schools need to reevaluate one-to-one device policies. Probably they should get rid of all of it.

Should you have a laptop cart for certain things? Maybe. Not in elementary school, I don’t think. But in high school, quite maybe. I just don’t know.

To return to your question about anxiety: that all starts around 2012, 2013. I suspect that the anxiety is more from social media and kids—especially girls—being in this horrible attention economy and reputation game. But the declining test scores? I think that isn’t so much social media per se. It’s the videos, the distraction, the constant stream of more interesting content. All these screens. So, huge implications for schools.

It’s interesting that you bring up that larger historical context of Apple and Google competing to get into schools. I’ve been in education since 1999, and I saw that shift. I saw Google take over, in large part because Chromebooks were way cheaper than Apple products. So it was an affordable option for schools.

The goal for years was to go one-to-one with devices. That was how it was framed—as an equity issue. We couldn’t assume that kids had access to a device at home.

That’s right. What a disaster.

Yes—if not every child has a device, then we have to give them one. Whether or not they want it. Whether or not their parents want it. The idea was: this is the only way we’re going to prepare them for the future.

And hindsight is 20/20. I, in large part, bought into that because it made sense at the time. If kids need these devices, why wouldn’t we provide them? We shouldn’t expect families to shoulder that cost, and why should teachers have to do all these workarounds?

I used to write articles about what to do when you only had five computers in your classroom. How to set up stations, and those kinds of things. Then more and more schools went one-to-one, and teachers started saying, “I don’t like this. This isn’t working. This is changing the way my students interact. It’s distracting them. I feel like I’m just monitoring what they’re doing online. This is not teaching. This is not learning as I know it.”

And it has not gotten better. We thought maybe it was just a learning curve—as you said, the great rewiring of schools. Maybe it would get better over time as this became the new normal.

It hasn’t. Kids don’t seem to enjoy it. And teachers are not enjoying it.

That’s right. There’s so much to say here. First, let’s approach this discussion with this fact: if you look at the people who created this technology—if you look at what they do in Silicon Valley—how do they educate their kids?

Oh, Waldorf schools. No devices.

Exactly. They send their kids to schools with no devices because they know how addictive and destructive these things are for children. The people who made it know it best. They want your children to have it—but they don’t let their children have it. That, to me, sounds like what drug dealers do. Drug dealers never give their drugs to their own kids, but they want your kids to have them.

Device access in school was framed as an equity issue…but there were unintended consequences

So the idea that this is an equity issue—I understand the motivation. If we go back to the ’90s, when the internet was new, it really was amazing. It wasn’t that harmful yet. It wasn’t controlled by a few massive companies. It wasn’t designed to addict you. It was an incredible playground—you could access all the information in the world. It was amazing.

And it’s true, of course, that wealthy families could buy computers, and poor families couldn’t. So the equity argument made a lot of sense in the ‘90s. I don’t know whether it was right or not, but it was certainly plausible.

As I show in the book, the first wave of technology—personal computers and the early internet—did not harm mental health. There’s no sign that teen mental health got worse at all. Democracies were also getting stronger. The world was getting better in the ‘90s. We were all techno-optimists.

But then came the second wave: social media. That starts in 2003 with MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook. Teenagers get on social media, and at first, it’s playful. There’s no algorithm, no newsfeed. It’s just about connection. So early social media wasn’t particularly harmful.

Then the iPhone comes out—which was amazing, too—and you put the two together. Instagram was the first platform created exclusively for the iPhone. You couldn’t even use it on a computer. You had to have an iPhone to be on Instagram.

So we’re still techno-optimists at this point. And yes, some rich schools did have laptops. Some of them embraced it—not in Silicon Valley, but elsewhere. So it made perfect sense at the time to think this was an equity issue.

But let me actually show you—it turns out it’s exactly the opposite. Exactly the opposite.

Here are some things we know: when you look at the amount of time kids are spending on screens outside of school, the average depends on the study, but it’s typically eight to nine hours a day. That’s entertainment screen time—not counting homework. This includes swiping, watching Netflix, everything. Eight or nine hours, on average.

It’s a little different when you break it down by social class or race. It’s roughly two hours higher for low-SES kids and two hours lower for high-SES kids.

The equity issue is this: in wealthy families, you often have two married parents. There’s money for babysitters, money for all sorts of activities. They’re able to control it. They can set limits. Most wealthy families—with two married, college-educated parents—tend to put some controls and constraints in place. It’s a constant source of conflict in the family, but they’re able to keep it down.

Whereas, if you have a single parent with two or three kids and a job—what are you going to do? The iPhone looks like the best babysitter in history. You give your kid your old iPhone—we all have one in a drawer from a few years ago—just hand it to your kid, and she quiets down. She seems happy. And you can do what you need to do for hours at a time.

But when we look at the damage being done—no matter which metric we use—more of the harm is happening to low-SES kids compared to high, to Black and Hispanic kids compared to white and Asian kids, and to single-parent families compared to married-parent families.

So yeah, it’s an equity issue.

Get the computers and laptops the hell out of the desks. And the schools in lower-SES neighborhoods. They’re the ones who need the most help getting offline—which is why phone-free schools are the most important policy every school needs to implement.

In addition to the benefits it provides to everyone, it especially helps kids from low-SES families. Because this gives them six or seven hours a day that can be screen-free. Once they leave school, it’s screens all day long. If we want to give them even a little time to look people in the eye, to develop interpersonal skills, to listen to a teacher, to try to work something out for five minutes continuously without an interruption—we have to go with phone-free schools.

It’s a huge equity issue now. And it’s like everything has flipped on its head. It used to be, “We have to get devices to them.” Now, school is the only screen-free time they’re going to have.

That’s right—the only screen-free time may be in schools.

Stay human: Teaching students to protect their brain power in an AI world

There was no post-COVID bounce, because children’s brains and attention spans have been rewired

And I should just add—people were expecting that since NAEP scores had been down since 2012, and especially after COVID, there would be a “COVID bounce.”

Didn’t happen. Did not happen.

There’s no post-COVID bounce. Nope.

Secondly—and you can find these charts online, I’ve shown them in my talks—when you plot NAEP scores, or TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), or really any of these longitudinal surveys of educational outcomes by social class or by quartile—what’s happening to the top quarter? The students who score in the highest 25%?

Answer: They’re not really down since 2012. They’re down a little, but there’s no big dramatic drop for the top performers.

Look at the bottom quarter. That’s where all the drop is. The bottom quartile has been devastated. Their scores are substantially down since 2012—not just since COVID. Of course, they dropped even more during COVID. But again, if we care about equality of outcomes, if we care about improving education for the least advantaged, we’ve done exactly the opposite.

Of course, by accident. We were misled. These things were pushed on us. School districts often said—and some teachers have told me—the instruction came down: “You have to work the technology into everything.”

They were forced to do it. And it was terrible.

Yeah. I think that’s going to be really validating for a lot of teachers to hear, because in many cases, this was not a teacher-led decision.

And then, talking about expecting the post-COVID bounce—I was just speaking with a third-grade teacher in California, where they did remote learning for three years. And she said:

“This is the first year that incoming third graders have had in-person learning for their entire lifetime. They’ve never known anything different.”

Oh yes—California.

Right? They didn’t have any in-person kindergarten. And her point was, she thought things would go back to normal now. Finally. They were so excited. This group of kids was going to be ready to learn. They’d have the interpersonal and social skills, the attention span.

But it didn’t change. It’s the same thing. And it’s so depressing to her and her teammates, because they’re seeing it: there’s something happening to our children. There is a rewiring.

And I’d say, it’s not just children’s brains—it’s adult brains, too. Even though I think you make a really compelling case for why developing brains are more impacted by this, the truth is: all of us are being affected. It’s changing how kids are showing up in school, and it’s changing how we show up, too.

Yes. There was just an article in the Financial Times last week. (There’s a paywall, but if you go to my Twitter—Jon Haidt—you’ll find my tweet where I summarize it.)

What the reporter did was pull together a bunch of studies on people’s ability to focus, concentrate, and even read. Some studies were surveys asking how much trouble people are having. Others tested actual concentration and attention. They looked at kids and adults.

And what they found is that beginning around 2014 or 2015, cognitive difficulties increased—especially in teenagers. We draw from the Monitoring the Future study on that, and the evidence is very clear. But it’s not just teens—it’s adults, too.

This ties into what you said: we’re all feeling overwhelmed. It’s harder to focus because there are a hundred things coming at us. And if we’re doing something that gets even a little boring, our brain knows—there’s something more interesting over here. So it’s affecting all of us.

But here’s the thing: adults are done with puberty. The brain rewires very rapidly during puberty, and that rewiring continues—slowing down in the late teens—but continuing all the way through age 25. That’s when the brain settles into its adult form.

And if you disrupt that process during those key years, there’s a chance the changes are permanent. Now, the brain is still flexible—I’m not saying those third graders are lost. But we’re really going to have to work with them to restore those skills while their brains are still plastic.

So I’m hopeful for the younger ones—especially the pre-pubertal kids. If we work on it, I think we can get there.

But let me ask you a couple of questions, if you don’t mind?

Sure.

We all need to understand what happened. How did we get suckered into this? Angela, can you tell me—why did the schools adopt Chromebooks and iPads so widely? Did the companies push them? Were they free? Subsidized? How did it happen that schools ended up pushing teachers into adopting this tech?

I think there were deals made. Yes, I think some of it was subsidized. I believe some Title I funds were used—so in low-SES communities, where schools receive federal Title I support, the Chromebooks could be paid for with those funds.

And there was this idea that this is what the future is going to be. We need to get devices into the hands of kids.

I think most teachers were really frustrated, because it was requiring them to change everything about the way they taught. Suddenly, everything had to include technology. And a lot of the evaluation standards were changed, too. So if a principal walked into your classroom and you weren’t using technology, you could actually get marked down on your evaluation for that.

Wow. Okay, so that makes sense—teachers weren’t asking for this, but thought leaders were saying, “We’ve got to go this way.” Common sense made it seem like this was the way of the future.

So what you’re saying is, this was mostly a good faith effort—at least within the schools. People really, honestly thought they were doing the right thing for student achievement. For equity.

The impact of phone-free schools

And I’ll just drop in here—the country of Sweden, which was one of the first to digitize everything (Sweden’s very progressive in a lot of ways—they were even ahead of us in moving everything to tech), announced about a year ago that it was a huge mistake. And they’re undoing it. They’re removing all the devices from classrooms, especially in primary school.

And UNESCO—the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization—they’ve had a number of reports, too. In 2023, UNESCO put out a major report basically saying: this stuff is backfiring.

There’s also an incredible book called An EdTech Tragedy. If you just Google it—EdTech Tragedy by Mark West (who worked at UNESCO)—you’ll find it. It lays out what UNESCO discovered about the devastation this technology is causing to education around the world.

The core idea is this: whatever theoretical benefit might exist, when you put a multi-function device in front of a student, they’re going to do multiple things. The distraction effect swamps everything else.

That’s true even for my graduate students at NYU. They can’t have computers in my class. I have an absolute no-screens policy. Because I’ve learned from experience—27-year-old MBA students, if they have their laptops open, they can’t help it. They’re multitasking.

So how do we expect seven- or eight-year-olds to focus if they have a computer or an iPad in front of them?

How do your students take notes?

On paper. I make the slides—I use technology to present—and then I make the slides available to them. So they don’t have to write down what’s on the slides, but they do have to bring paper and pencil to class.

There was some hesitancy when I first started doing this two or three years ago. But even after just a few weeks, they all said it was better. And now, so many of us college professors are doing this. We’ve all seen the damage. So many of us are doing it, and the students say it’s better. They like the class more.

I mean, these are MBA students. They’re paying a lot of money to be here. Why would they want to sit there on Twitter, or online shopping, or texting?

Because we can’t help it. These things are designed to be addictive. We can’t help it.

Yeah. And I think the same thing is true with K–12 students. When you first start talking about no phones in school, there’s some resistance.

And what you propose—what I really like—is using Yondr pouches, or creating a space where phones are completely put away. The kids aren’t even looking at them at lunchtime or in between classes.

That’s crucial.

Yes. Go ahead and talk about that first before I make my point.

So, most schools say they ban phones. What they mean is: “We have a policy. You’re not allowed to take out your phone during class.”

Which is not a real policy. That’s what they have in New York City.

My kids say what that means is: you just have to hide your phone in your book, or put it in your lap, or go to the bathroom to use it. But they’re still on their phones.

If anyone is texting, everyone has to check—because nobody wants to be the one kid who doesn’t know what happened in third period.

So that’s the first thing: you cannot have the phones on the kid. That’s like asking heroin addicts to say, “You must keep your heroin in your pocket, but you are not allowed to shoot up during the day.”

That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that part of what’s happening in schools now is… it’s just not fun. School is no longer fun.

And part of that is because kids don’t have much of a social life anymore.

Jean Twenge and I have a paper where we tracked PISA data—the international education dataset—and what we found was that loneliness in school was stable throughout the early 2000s, all the way through 2012.

And then—after 2012—loneliness in school increases. All over the world. Less in East Asia, but across Europe and the U.S., it goes up.

Why? Well, you and I remember laughing with our friends in school, right? Do you remember how much we laughed? Joking around, teasing each other, running through the halls?

The fun part of school was lunch, recess, and the time between classes—if you were moving from room to room.

Now imagine all of that going away. Imagine the hallways going completely silent. Which I’m sure many of your teachers have seen—especially in schools where the phone ban is only during class time. The kids will flout that ban anyway. But they’ll definitely grab their phones in between classes.

And here’s the most exciting thing to me about phone-free schools: every report says the same thing. Every teacher or principal who’s interviewed about it—especially in the newspaper—always says the same thing:

“We hear laughter in the hallways again. It’s loud in the hallways. It’s loud at lunch. The kids are having fun again.”

So you’ve got to have a phone-free policy. It has to be for the whole day. Bell to bell.

Some people call it a “distraction-free school.” And I actually think that’s a very good label.

I like that. I’ve been using the term “phone-free schools” ever since my Atlantic article two or three years ago—that’s what we’ve been aiming for. But I think “distraction-free school” is even better. Because now it explains why we have to get rid of one-to-one devices. Those are huge sources of distraction.

And it points to the purpose. It’s not about saying “phones are bad.” The problem is distraction. The goal is focus.

Yes. Focus is good.

Exactly. Focus is good. I’m going to start using that term more: distraction-free schools. I’ve got to be a proponent of that now.

Yeah, I really like it. And it ties in perfectly with what you were saying about your MBA students actually liking having to take notes on paper. It’s weird for them at first—but then they adjust.

And it’s the same thing when schools implement distraction-free policies. There’s no phone use at all during the school day. At first, the kids are reluctant. But there are ways to get buy-in and help them understand the purpose.

And almost universally, I’ve never heard of a school trying this and then saying, “The kids and parents hated it so much, we had to go back to letting them use phones.”

That’s right. It never gets undone.

At first, the kids object. And for the first week, maybe even two. But by the third week—that seems to be the magic number I keep hearing—by week three, they realize: “Wait. This is fun. We’re actually having fun at school.”

And to be clear, we’re focused on both mental health and learning. But some of the biggest changes schools notice? It’s in behavioral issues and tardiness.

When school sucks—when it’s just more swiping, drama, and bullying online all day long—kids don’t want to go to school.

But when school becomes fun again, when it feels safe and social, kids actually want to be there.

And another thing—so much drama happens on the phone. A lot of physical fights actually start because of something that happened on social media

Or in some schools, the kids are so focused on social media—not the class—that the way to gain prestige is by having posts go viral. So they lure a kid into the bathroom and beat the hell out of him just to get a video.

You’ve got kids being severely harmed so that other kids can post the beating online. It’s sick. It’s inhumane. It’s cruel.

How to get TRUE student buy-in for your “no phone” policy

And so, there’s just no argument—there’s no argument—for leaving phones in the hands of kids.

Oh—wait. There’s one argument I’d like to deal with. The main pushback comes from parents who say:

What about an emergency? 

Yes. “What if there’s a school shooter?” A tragic question.

I know. We have to think that way, and that’s part of the tragedy—that rather than fixing that issue, we allow kids to be on their phones all day, just in case.

Right. Because of the remote chance of a school shooting.

So here’s the thing. Here’s what I say—here’s what I think any administrator should say:

My kids went to New York City public schools. My daughter is a sophomore. And like every parent, if something awful like that happened, I would desperately want to hear my child’s voice. I’d want to talk to them immediately.

But we have to do what’s best for the kids, not what feels best to us in the moment.

And all the security experts say the same thing: if there’s an actual shooter, the last thing you want is every kid pulling out their phone, calling their parents, making noise, crying, not listening, not paying attention.

Then the parents rush to the school. They block emergency responders. So many cars. So much chaos. The last thing you want is everyone on their phones during a crisis.

What you do want is for the kids to be quiet. Pay attention. Do what they practiced. Follow the lockdown procedures. Be alert. Be ready to act. You don’t want them on the phone. The phone won’t protect them. It’s not going to help.

Right. It’s not going to protect them—and it’s going to distract them. They’ll be texting, not paying attention to instructions, and not staying aware of their surroundings in that moment.

Could the key to student engagement be device-free socialization and play-based learning?

I want to circle back to something you said earlier—about school being fun again.

That gave me kind of an “aha” moment.

We talk a lot about making lessons more engaging, more fun. And part of the push for technology has been because it seems to make learning more engaging for kids. But maybe it’s more addictive than engaging. Maybe what we’re really doing is playing into that addictive cycle.

It’s interesting to think about school being more fun when kids have the kind of social experience that we had growing up—where a big part of why you want to go to school is to see your friends. That was a major motivation.

You knew you were going to laugh with your friends at lunch, during recess, between classes. That was the fun part—not necessarily the lesson content.

But now, kids are checking their phones constantly—seeing what people said about them online.

What if that—restoring real, offline social connection—was actually the key to making school more engaging? What if that’s how we increase attendance and reduce tardiness? By thinking: how can we create truly meaningful, in-person connections again?

Because honestly, the lessons were never the most fun part when we were in school either. The social piece—that’s what really pulled us in.

Exactly. Two quick points.

First, yes—technology can make lessons more engaging. I’m sure it’s more fun to learn math with a game. But here’s the terrible part.

If you gamify a third of the school day—if kids are spending large portions of their day on educational apps that are gamified—here’s what happens:

Gamification means: you make a response, you get feedback, you earn a reward, you get a little hit of dopamine.

So if you’re doing that for a third of the school day, yes—you might actually get more engagement during that third of the day.

But here’s the catch: you’re resetting their brains.

You’re literally making the dopamine circuits less sensitive to stimulation. It starts to take more stimulation just to feel normal. In other words, the gamified part might seem more engaging in the moment—but that ends up making the rest of the day feel less engaging.

They are literally more bored the rest of the time.

So don’t be fooled. Don’t be tricked by consultants saying, “We show higher engagement when kids use our game.” Don’t believe them. You don’t want that.

So that’s the first point—about engagement and learning.

But the more important piece is what you were saying earlier—about fun, play, socializing.

That brings up the other half of the book. I can summarize the core idea this way:

We have overprotected our children in the real world. And we’ve underprotected them online.

Everybody wants to talk about phones, iPads, computers—and that’s really important. We can take action on that today, which makes it powerful. But the other half of the story is about play.

And it’s crucial for people to understand that we are mammals—and all mammal babies play. That’s how we wire up our brains.

There are studies—some of which I reference in the book—on how monkeys and rats (both very social mammals) develop without play. Scientists have ways of raising them together but preventing play.

And when that happens? The animals come out anxious. They don’t develop confidence. You put them in a new environment and they shrink into the corner, paralyzed by fear. They don’t explore. They don’t engage.

Play-deprived mammals are anxious mammals. They haven’t learned how to navigate the world. They haven’t learned how to relate to others. So it’s a terrible thing to deprive children of play.

And we’ve been doing that since the 1980s. That’s when the report A Nation at Risk came out in the eighties.

So A Nation at Risk comes out in the early 1980s, and the education establishment freaks out. The message was: “Oh my God—Singapore is ahead of us. We have to make kids learn more. Lengthen the school year. Cut back summer vacation. No more wasted time!”

And what got cut? Recess. Gym. Art. Anything that wasn’t sitting still and learning math, science, or English.

That was a terrible mistake. And it’s part of what made school less fun. All mammals play. We have to. And that report—A Nation at Risk—contributed to this belief that anything not academic was frivolous.

But it turns out kids—and especially boys—need recess. They need physical movement.

Boys tend to engage in more active, team-based play. Girls also need play, but theirs often involves more imaginative play and smaller groups. Both are vital. But boys especially need opportunities for competition and movement.

And what we’re seeing is that over time, girls have been rising academically while boys have been dropping.

So recess and unstructured play aren’t optional. They’re essential—especially for boys, but really for all kids.

We all had fun at recess. So to take that away… Actually, if you don’t mind, I’d like to lay out the four core norms from the book—because we can solve this problem if we do just four things. And the fourth ties directly back into what we’re talking about here.

1. No smartphones before high school. Parents should not give their kids smartphones. Give them a flip phone, or a phone watch. Nothing that connects to the internet until high school.
2. No social media until age 16. Parents should keep their kids off social media until they’re 16. I’m hopeful that we’ll get laws to support this—Florida has passed such a law, and Australia has as well.
3. Phone-free schools. We’ve already been talking about this. Schools must be distraction-free from bell to bell.
4. Much more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. We have to give kids back agency. Fun. Time doing things together—ideally without adult supervision. That’s how kids learn to be self-supervising and self-governing: by having opportunities to practice.

And schools can do so much more to restore this. For example, recess. In the book, I cite a striking statistic: Federal prisoners in penitentiaries are guaranteed two hours of yard time a day. American elementary school students? Often just 25 minutes—and sometimes that’s combined with lunch.

So when we cut back on recess, we are really hurting our kids. And just bringing more play into the school day would make school more fun—which increases engagement, especially for boys. When boys run around and then sit down, they’re much more ready to learn than if they’ve been sitting still for hours.

Yeah, you’re really speaking teachers’ language here. The reduction—and in some cases, removal—of recess has been a thorn in teachers’ sides for years. It’s so obvious that kids focus better when they’ve had a chance to move. That’s one part of it. And then there’s what kindergarten teachers are always saying—there used to be blocks. There used to be dramatic play centers.

Oh no. Those are gone?

Yes—in most classrooms, gone.

That’s horrible!

It started going away when I was student teaching in the 1990s.

Oh my gosh. So wait—what about pre-K? Is that still focused on blocks and play?

Yes… but even pre-K is becoming more academic now. It’s still play-based, and there are centers, but the push toward academics has crept down even into preschool.

That’s awful.

Because early childhood educators have always understood the importance of play. And I think most educators, in general, get this. They bemoan the loss of recess. What’s so strange to me is this: we’re constantly talking about “following the research” and “using best practices.”  Well, the research has always said that kids need breaks. That they need to move. That they need fresh air, sunshine, and time in nature.

There is no research that says kids should sit in chairs for six hours a day. Somehow, we ignore that research—and instead put the responsibility on teachers. Now it’s your job to squeeze breaks into the day. You have to figure out how to get kids moving.

But what kids really need is simple:

They need recess.

They need unstructured time.

They need free, independent exploration.

And you make such a strong case for that in your book. We can’t schedule every moment of a child’s day with structured activities. They need time to make up their own games.

Exactly. They need unstructured play. Yes, yes, yes.

There’s this really compelling fallacy out there—and I hear it all the time. It goes like this: “If I want my kid to be great at something, the earlier I start them, the better they’ll be.”

So if I want my kid to be a world-class violinist, I’d better start them at age three. Now… with music? Maybe. That might be true.

But when it comes to academics, the research says the opposite. Starting earlier doesn’t really help. You don’t get any benefit from starting kids on math or reading super early.

In Finland—and I think this is true across Scandinavia, but I know it’s true in Finland—they don’t start formal academics until age 7. Before age 7? It’s just play, play, play. And guess what? Kids still learn to read. I mean, you learn to read, you’ve got to learn the alphabet, learn to read. But they don’t really push the academic stuff until age seven because you don’t get an advantage from starting early. You get a disadvantage from suppressing play.

If you want kids to end up in a really advanced state of education, let their brains develop properly in a healthy way with good social skills and an ability to pay attention, which will be enhanced by recess, not damaged by it.

Yes. So the teachers are bought in on this.

The momentum is shifting toward phone-free schools … and we can be part of that

What can we do about this, Jon? How do we change our schools in this way?

Yeah. Well, you know what? So I’ve been speaking to a lot of school superintendents since my book came out a year ago. I have so many invitations to speak at schools, but I just don’t have much time. So what I’ve decided to focus on is superintendents.

I just spoke at the California Superintendents Convention. Tomorrow I’m speaking to all the superintendents in Connecticut. I love them. They’re so enthusiastic. They seem to really get it on the phone-free schools.

The big obstacle was the parents. But they want to go phone-free. And so what I’m saying is I think we actually have alignment here now. We didn’t have it a few years ago. I think we now have alignment.

The parents are now seeing that the devices are a problem. The teachers have seen it from the beginning. The superintendents—they might’ve been wowed by the consultants early on—but they’re seeing the problems now, too.

Nobody seems to know how to deal with them. Things are not getting better. And I think we’re all converging on the idea that the devices are the problem, not the solution.

And so again, we can’t be 100% sure, but it’s sure looking that way. We conducted a gigantic experiment on all American children by doing this—without any control group, without good evidence of efficacy. We just did it.And it looks like it’s been a disastrous experiment. And so I think we need to undo it.

I think it would be nice now to undo it in a systematic way. So let’s say a state or a school district—half of the schools—we’re going to take this entirely out of elementary school, get all the screens out of elementary school. And then let’s see how that compares to the schools that don’t do it. Just for a year or two.

And then if it works, then we do it nationally. Then everybody does it. I’d prefer that it’s done in a way where we can actually get data on what works.

But we have to do it. And I think we have alignment.

Who do you think would oppose that? Who do you think would oppose a move for phone-free schools and no more one-to-one devices?

Just the tech companies, the consultants, and people who make money off of keeping it in schools.

Exactly. And they tricked us.

Maybe some people who feel like, we need to prepare kids for the real world. But again, you’re talking about—we don’t need to do that when they’re five. Maybe in high school.

No, that’s right. That’s right.

Yeah, you want to prepare kids for the real world, you want to prepare them for college—so send me a kid who has never been on a computer, but who can think and focus and has proper executive function and can pay attention, and has good social skills. Send me that kid at age 18.

That kid is going to vastly outperform kids who’ve been on iPads since they were two.