Is your child’s brain being rewired? – part 1

September 5, 2025

Does your child have a smart phone?

Does your child spend most of his or her free time on it?

Then maybe, like thousands of other children, your child’s brain is being rewired.

In his book, ‘The Anxious Generation’, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says that a ‘Great Rewiring of Childhood’ has been happening in the last decade or so, causing huge harm to our kids.

And a major cause of this, he says, is the smart phone, which became a common feature of daily life in the 2010s – at the time when Generation Z was reaching adolescence.

‘Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby an into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and … unsuitable for children and adolescents,’ Haidt says.

He explains that childhood is a period in which the brain requires particular experiences and exposures in order for a person to develop into a healthy, mature adult. In the past, these experiences were provided by traditional societies – but now things are changing. And so are children’s brains.

‘The members of Gen Z are, therefore, the test subjects for a radical new way of growing up, far from the real-world interactions of small communities in which humans evolved,’ he writes.

Haidt provides evidence to show that there has been a ‘surge of suffering’ among adolescents since the early 2010s. This includes large increases in major depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicide in younger adolescents, mental health hospitalisation, high psychological distress and alienation in school.

‘Between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities. This Great Rewiring of childhood, I argue, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s,’ Haidt says.

He considers there are four main reasons for this and describes them as ‘foundational harms’ – because they affect so many social, emotional, and cognitive abilities.

Social deprivation

The first is the loss of face-to-face interaction with other people, which plummeted when kids acquired smart phones.

‘People who live only in networks, rather than communities, are less likely to thrive,’ he says. ‘Children need face-to-face, synchronous, embodied, physical play’, Haidt says. ‘Sitting alone in your bedroom consuming a bottomless feed of other people’s content, or playing endless hours of video games with a shifting case of friends and strangers, or posting your own content and waiting for other kids (or strangers) to like or comment is so far from what children need that these activities should not be considered healthy new forms of adolescent interaction.’

Sleep deprivation

‘As soon as adolescents moved from basic phones to smartphones, their sleep declined in both quantity and quality, around the developed world,’ Haidt says.

This has harmful effects such as depression, anxiety, irritability, cognitive problems, poor learning, reduced academic performance, more accidents and more death from accidents.

Attention fragmentation

While the ability to stay on task is a feature of maturity, many adolescents cannot pay attention for any length of time.

Haidt says that 45% of teens use the internet ‘almost constantly’. ‘That means around 16 hours per day – 112 hours per week – in which they are not fully present in whatever is going on around them.’

Addiction

Social media developers exploit characteristics of human of brain function to hook kids into using their social media products – again and again. These repeated activities create pathways in the brain.

‘When we gave children and adolescents smartphones in the early 2010s, we gave companies the ability to apply variable-ratio reinforcement schedules all day long, training them like rats during their most sensitive years of brain rewiring. Those companies developed addictive apps that sculpted some very deep pathways in our children’s brains,’ Haid says.

Haidt says there’s another damning influence of smart phone activity – and that’s the fact that it degrades rather than elevates the human spirit.

‘The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us,’ he says. ‘Social media is a fountain of bedevilments. It trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world’s wisdom traditions: Think about yourself first; be materialistic, judgmental, boastful, and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers.’ (209)

Jonathan Haidt, ‘The Anxious Generation – How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness’, Penguin/Random House, 2024

Next week, we take a look at Haidt’s suggestions about what we can do improve things.

You can see this article on our website here.

How to solve this problem:

EMR Australia recommends the following simple solution: don’t allow smart phones to be sold to children under the age of 16.

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