UNLOCK 34.1 Looks Like Jonathan Haidt Did a Moral Panic

Jonathan Haidt recently padded his bestselling career by telling worried parents that their kids' anxiety was caused by smartphones and social media — and that the fix was bans.

I always thought the argument was depoliticized, correlational, and suspiciously convenient for parents who'd rather blame a device than interrogate the world they've handed their children. Now the research is catching up.

Psychologist Jen Lumanlan's challenge in Psychology Today exposed the romanticized and racially selective "golden age" childhood Haidt keeps gesturing toward. A major NBER working paper from Allcott et al. studied over 1,300 US schools using Yondr pouches and found near-zero academic effects. A Dutch study by Vanluydt et al. in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence found that full bans may actually undermine school belonging, especially for girls.

Meanwhile, Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas does what Haidt won't: it plants digital technology inside a structural critique of platform capitalism. That's the conversation I want to have.

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SOURCES

Jen Lumanlan, "What Research Really Shows About School Phone Bans," Psychology Today, July 2025

Hunt Allcott, E. Jason Baron, Thomas Dee, Angela L. Duckworth, Matthew Gentzkow, and Brian Jacob, "The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches," NBER Working Paper No. 35132, April 2026

E. Vanluydt, R. van den Eijnden, L. Vonk et al., "Disconnect To Reconnect: How Variations between Types of Smartphone Bans Influence Students' Well-being and Social Connectedness in Dutch Secondary Education," Journal of Youth and Adolescence 55 (2026): 551–569

UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report, "Phone Bans in Schools Are Spreading Worldwide as the Policy Debate Rages On," March 2026

Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (encyclical on artificial intelligence and human dignity), May 2026

Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024)

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Avsnitt(82)

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