The Criticism of The Anxious Generation: What Haidt Gets Right, and What the Research Actually Says

The Anxious Generation sold by the millions and helped push real policy — phone-free schools, social-media age limits. It also drew some of the sharpest criticism any popular-psychology book has gotten in years, much of it from researchers who study exactly this question.

Both things are true at once, and most coverage picks a side. This is the honest version: the strongest criticisms, the parts that hold up, and what even Haidt's critics concede. If you want the book's argument first, start with our summary of The Anxious Generation.

Criticism 1: Correlation isn't causation

This is the central scientific objection, and it's the one to understand if you read nothing else.

The book's headline claim is causal: phones and social media caused the rise in teen anxiety and depression. But most of the underlying evidence is correlational — teens who use more social media report somewhat worse mental health. Correlation that strong doesn't establish direction. It's at least as plausible that already-anxious or depressed teens use phones more (to cope, to withdraw, to self-soothe) as it is that the phones made them that way. Probably both happen, in a feedback loop.

The most prominent version of this critique came from psychologist Candice Odgers in Nature, reviewing the book. Her summary, widely quoted since: it's a compelling story, but the science doesn't support the strong causal claim, and treating an unproven cause as settled risks pointing parents, schools, and funding at the wrong target.

Criticism 2: The effect sizes are small

Even where associations between screen use and wellbeing show up in the data, critics argue they're tiny.

Researchers Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski are most associated with this point. Their large-scale analyses found the statistical link between social-media use and adolescent wellbeing is real but very small — in one widely cited framing, about the same magnitude as the association between wellbeing and things like wearing glasses or eating potatoes. The argument isn't that screens have zero effect; it's that the effect is far smaller than a book subtitled "an epidemic of mental illness" implies.

Criticism 3: It underweights everything else

Gen Z came of age through a stack of stressors that have nothing to do with phones: the 2008 financial crisis and its long aftermath, rising tuition and housing costs, climate anxiety, political instability, school-shooting drills, and a global pandemic that detonated in the middle of adolescence for the youngest of the cohort. Critics argue the book treats the phone as the prime mover and gives these too little weight — even though several of them could independently explain a lot of the same mental-health curve.

Criticism 4: The trend isn't as clean as it looks

The "everything changed around 2012" narrative is tidier than the data. Critics point out that the rise in measured mental-health problems isn't uniform across countries, that some of the increase reflects changes in screening, diagnosis, and willingness to report rather than a pure rise in underlying illness, and that the specific inflection points differ depending on which dataset and which country you look at. Writers like Stuart Ritchie and others have pressed on how much of the curve survives once you account for measurement changes.

What the critics still concede

Here's the part the "Haidt is wrong" takes often skip. Even his sharpest critics rarely argue that phones are good for kids, or that nothing happened. The honest middle ground looks something like:

• Sleep and attention are real, mechanism-level harms. You don't need a grand theory to accept that late-night scrolling costs sleep and that constant notifications fragment focus. These are among the least-contested parts of the book.
• The lived experience rings true for a lot of people, which is part of why the book resonated. "I feel worse after an hour on the feed" is a real and common report, even if it's hard to prove at population scale.
• Precaution is defensible even under uncertainty. Phone-free schools and delayed social media are low-risk interventions; you don't need airtight causation to think they're reasonable.

And Haidt hasn't been silent. He and his collaborator Zach Rausch have published detailed, point-by-point rebuttals to the major critiques (on the After Babel Substack) and posted open, pre-registered literature reviews so others can check the evidence. Whatever you conclude, this is an unusually public scientific argument, which is healthy.

The honest verdict

A fair reading of the whole fight: phones and social media very likely made adolescent mental health worse — but they're one significant factor in a crowded field, not the single cause the book's framing suggests. Haidt is probably directionally right and probably overstated. Both can be true.

That distinction matters more than it looks, because it changes what you do about it.

What this means if you're not a parent — you're the generation

If the cause is "phones, full stop," the fix is "remove phones." If the cause is a tangle — phones plus economic precarity plus a comparison environment plus whatever you personally carry — then for an adult who already grew up in it, removing the phone solves the smallest part.

That's the practical upshot of taking the criticism seriously. The anxiety you feel as a grown member of this generation isn't going to be fixed by a screen-time setting, because the phone was never the whole story. It's usually the coping mechanism — the thing you reach for when something underneath feels bad. The work is with the something underneath. We get into that in the main summary, and in practical terms in what to do instead of doomscrolling and our honest dopamine-detox review.

ILTY exists for that underneath part — a companion for the 2am spiral that will hear you out and then push you toward doing something about it. Not a screen-time blocker. The thing the screen time was covering for.

Frequently asked questions

Is The Anxious Generation scientifically accurate? Its descriptive claim (teen mental health declined as smartphones spread) is well-documented. Its causal claim (phones caused it) is contested. Critics including Candice Odgers argue the evidence is largely correlational and the effect sizes are small.

Who are the main critics of Jonathan Haidt's book? Most prominently Candice Odgers (whose Nature review is the most-cited critique), along with Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski on effect sizes, and various other researchers on confounders and measurement. Haidt and Zach Rausch have published rebuttals.

Does the criticism mean the book is wrong? No — it means the book is contested. The likely truth sits in the middle: phones probably made things worse but aren't the sole cause. The sleep, attention, and precautionary arguments hold up better than the strong "single cause" framing.

If phones aren't the whole problem, what helps? For adults already affected, less screen time helps a little; changing your relationship with the discomfort the phone numbs helps more. Start with what to do instead of scrolling.

---

Curious what an honest, non-"just breathe" mental health companion looks like? That's what ILTY is built to be.