A global public health emergency driven by the swift transition from a play-based to a phone-based childhood has created a “global destruction of human flourishing” among young people, according to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. The Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU Stern, speaking at a recent Dartmouth–United Nations Development Program symposium on youth well-being, argued that children born after 1995—Gen Z—are fundamentally different from earlier generations because they experienced puberty amid omnipresent smartphones and social media.
Haidt, who previously explicated many of his thoughts about Gen Z in the New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation, used a powerful metaphor to explain the neurological consequences of this change: tree roots. Saying they are great metaphors for neurons, Haidt explained that tree-root growth is structured by the environment where they are found. He referred to a picture of a tree growing around a Civil War–era tombstone, where the tombstone scratched the bark 100 years ago, and the tree adapted. The same is true for Gen Z, he argued: “Their brains have been growing around their phones very much in the way that this tree grew around this tombstone.”
