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