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An AI marking case study: from four hours to twenty minutes

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An AI marking case study: from four hours to twenty minutes

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AI assessment can reduce workload without removing the teacher

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The Fractured Narrative of Toy Story 5

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On the difficulty of crafting the right messaging about digital wellness

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Gareth Southgate didn’t tackle the real issues facing young men | Letters

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Letters: The former England manager sidestepped politics in a well-meaning but flawed television documentary, writes Dr Michael Richardson. Plus Lucy Kellaway on the importance of male teachers as role models for young men

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‘Eyes up, screens down’: Victoria restricts tech in high school classrooms to two hours a day in national first

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Academic says laptops have ‘completely overtaken’ traditional note-taking and research and other states should ‘absolutely’ follow the state’s lead

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Discussion with J Haidt about social media bans

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Radical with Amol Rajan - Social Media Bans: Are We at a Global Turning Point? (Jonathan Haidt) - BBC Sounds

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Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, on how to go smartphone free.

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Why personalising education based on student interests doesn’t work

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Why personalising education based on student interests doesn’t work

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You can’t learn everything through the medium of Taylor Swift

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There is no right age! The search for age-appropriate ways to support children’s digital lives and rights - Professor Sonia Livingstone

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There is no right age! The search for age-appropriate ways to support children’s digital lives and rights

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Published in Journal of Children and Media (Vol. 19, No. 1, 2025)

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The UK shouldn’t rush to a social media ban for children under 16 - Professor Sonia Livingstone

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Media@LSE - Promoting critical research into the vital role of media and communications in contemporary society

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The UK shouldn’t rush to a social media ban for children under 16 - Media@LSE

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LSE’s Professor Sonia Livingstone argues that caution and more evidence is needed before implementing a social media ban for under-16s in the UK.

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Radio discussion about social media ban

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Will Guyatt on Instagram: "Australia introduces its social media for under 16s in a little over two weeks from now and there are many questions.  I joined BBC Radio Five Live to discuss the topic, and whether a similar ban could ever happen here in the UK."

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1 likes, 0 comments - willguyatt on November 21, 2025: "Australia introduces its social media for under 16s in a little over two weeks from now and there are many questions.  I joined BBC Radio Five Live to discuss the topic, and whether a similar ban could ever happen here in the UK.". 

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Australia’s Big Social Media Pivot: The Ban, the Rollout, and the Real-World Consequence

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Australia’s Big Social Media Pivot: The Ban, the Rollout, and the Real-World Consequences

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Anti-bullying advocate Lucy Thomas on Australia's under-16 social media ban.

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Anti-bullying advocate Lucy Thomas on Australia's under-16 social media ban.

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Potential effects of the social media age ban in Australia for children younger than 16 years

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Please confirm you are a human by completing the captcha challenge below.

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Australia’s social media ban comes into force despite clinicians’ concerns

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Australia’s social media ban comes into force despite clinicians’ concerns

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Australia’s ban on social media use by young people has come into effect, requiring platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube to verify the age of users and restrict access by anyone under 16. The federal government introduced legislation to establish a minimum age for social media use in November 2024,1 which came into effect on 10 December 20252 despite more than 140 Australian and international experts, academics, and organisations signing an open letter criticising the ban.3 The law requires social media platforms to take “reasonable steps” to ensure that Australians under 16 cannot create or keep an account,2 but it does not dictate specifically how age should be verified. Clinicians and researchers have raised concerns about the ban being a blunt instrument for a complex problem …

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Social media ban - UK government press release.

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Department for Science, Innovation and Technology

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Social media to be banned for under-16s in landmark government move to give kids their childhood back

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Social media platforms to be blocked from offering services to under-16s, marking a line in the sand and setting a new normal for future generations.

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UK Government bans social media for under 16s - June 2026

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What is the UK social media ban for under-16s?

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The measures will see apps including TikTok and Snapchat blocked for UK teens early in 2027.

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Gareth Southgate's view of white working class boys

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Gareth Southgate has exposed the real crisis young men face in Britain

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The toxic masculinity panic gripping our nation ignores the true challenges and lived experiences of white working-class boys

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Parental Backlash against Students Using Devices in Public Schools (Natasha Singer)

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How a Southend school tackled misogyny and became a happier place

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An Essex school is out of special measures after getting a grip on bullying and sexist behaviour.

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Sweden says not to ICT in schools

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Back to books - Sweden’s schools cutting back on digital learning

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Swedish classrooms swap laptops for books, pens and paper, raising concerns from the tech sector.

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BBC News - Teachers vow to 'fight censorship' after school book row - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gv7y9jvydo?app-referrer=deep-link

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Schools minister Lotta Edholm moves students off digital devices and on to books and handwriting, with teachers and experts debating the pros and cons

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Since young children went back to school across Sweden recently, many of their teachers have been putting a new emphasis on printed books, quiet reading time and handwriting practice, and devoting less time to tablets, independent online research and keyboarding skills.

The return to more traditional ways of learning is a response to politicians and experts questioning whether Sweden's hyper-digitalised approach to education, including the introduction of tablets in nursery schools, had led to a decline in basic skills.

Sweden's minister for schools, Lotta Edholm, who took office 11 months ago as part of a centre-right coalition government, was one of the biggest critics of the all-out embrace of technology.

"Sweden's students need more textbooks," Edholm said in March. "Physical books are important for student learning."

The minister announced in August that the government wanted to reverse the decision by the national agency for education to make digital devices mandatory in preschools. It plans to go further and to completely end digital learning for children under age six, the ministry has told the Associated Press.

Although Sweden's students score above the European average for reading ability, an international assessment of fourth-grade reading levels, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), highlighted a decline among Sweden's children between 2016 and 2021.

In 2021, Swedish fourth graders averaged 544 points, a drop from the 555 average in 2016. However, their performance still placed the country in a tie with Taiwan for the seventh-highest overall test score.

In comparison, Singapore - which topped the rankings - improved its PIRLS reading scores from 576 to 587 during the same period, and England's average reading achievement score fell only slightly, from 559 in 2016 to 558 in 2021.

Some learning deficits may have resulted from the coronavirus pandemic or reflect a growing number of immigrant students who don't speak Swedish as their first language, but an overuse of screens during school lessons may cause youngsters to fall behind in core subjects, education experts say.

"There's clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair rather than enhance student learning," Sweden's Karolinska Institute, a highly respected medical school focused on research, said in a statement in August on the country's national digitalisation strategy in education.

"We believe the focus should return to acquiring knowledge through printed textbooks and teacher expertise, rather than acquiring knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy."

The rapid adoption of digital learning tools also has drawn concern from the UN education and culture agency. In a report published in August, Unesco issued an "urgent call for appropriate use of technology in education". The report urges countries to speed up internet connections at schools, but at the same time warns that technology in education should be implemented in a way that never replaces in-person, teacher-led instruction and supports the shared objective of quality education for all.

In the Swedish capital, Stockholm, Liveon Palmer, nine, a third grader at Djurgardsskolan elementary school, expressed his approval of spending more school hours offline. "I like writing more in school, like on paper, because it just feels better, you know," he told the Associated Press.

His teacher, Catarina Branelius, said she was selective about asking students to use tablets during her lessons even before the national-level scrutiny.

"I use tablets in math and we are doing some apps, but I don't use tablets for writing text," Branelius said. Students under age 10 "need time and practice and exercise in handwriting ... before you introduce them to write on a tablet".

Online instruction is a hotly debated subject across Europe and other parts of the west. Poland, for instance, just launched a programme to give a government-funded laptop to each student starting in fourth grade in the hope of making the country more technologically competitive.

In the US, the coronavirus pandemic pushed public schools to provide millions of laptops bought with federal pandemic relief money to primary and secondary students. But there is still a digital divide, which is part of the reason why American schools tend to use both print and digital textbooks, said Sean Ryan, president of the US school division at textbook publisher McGraw Hill.

"In places where there is not connectivity at home, educators are loath to lean into digital because they're thinking about their most vulnerable [students] and making sure they have the same access to education as everyone else," Ryan said.

Germany, which is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, has been famously slow in moving government programmes and information of all kinds online, including education. The state of digitalisation in schools also varies among its 16 states, which are in charge of their own curricula.

To counter Sweden's decline in fourth grade reading performance, the Swedish government announced an investment worth kr685m (£50m) in book purchases for schools this year. Another kr500m will be spent annually in 2024 and 2025 to speed up the return of textbooks.

Not all experts are convinced Sweden's back-to-basics push is exclusively about what's best for students.

Criticising the effects of technology is "a popular move with conservative politicians", Neil Selwyn, a professor of education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, said. "It's a neat way of saying or signalling a commitment to traditional values.

"The Swedish government does have a valid point when saying that there is no evidence for technology improving learning, but I think that's because there is no straightforward evidence of what works with technology," Selwyn said. "Technology is just one part of a really complex network of factors in education."

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Switching off: Sweden says back-to-basics schooling works on paper

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Schools minister Lotta Edholm moves students off digital devices and on to books and handwriting, with teachers and experts debating the pros and cons

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AI toys misread human emotions

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AI toys for young children need tighter rules, researchers warn

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In first study of its kind, Cambridge researchers found AI toys could misread some children’s emotions.

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Review in UK about banning social medias for u 16s

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UK social media ban for under 16s consultation begins

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Discussions over what measures to implement to protect children’s wellbeing will last for three months.

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Tech making us less smart

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In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.

By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.

King's initial efforts have been mirrored across the country. In 2024, the U.S. spent more than $30 billion putting laptops and tablets in schools. But more than a quarter-century and numerous evolving models of technology later, psychologists and learning experts see a different outcome than the one King intended. Rather than empowering the generation with access to more knowledge, the technology had the opposite effect.

Earlier this year, in written testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said that Gen Z is less cognitively capable than previous generations, despite its unprecedented access to technology. He said Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the previous one.

While skills measured by these tests, like literacy and numeracy, aren't always indicative of intelligence, they are a reflection of cognitive capability, which Horvath said has been on the decline over the last decade or so.

Citing Program for International Student Assessment data taken from 15-year-olds around the world and other standardized tests, Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school, such that more screen time was related to worse scores. He blamed students having unfettered access to technology that atrophied rather than bolstered learning capabilities. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 also didn't help.

"This is not a debate about rejecting technology," Horvath wrote. "It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works. Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them."

The writing was perhaps already on the wall. Fortune reported in 2017 that Maine's public school test scores had not improved in the 15 years the state had implemented its technology initiative. Then-governor Paul LePage called the program a "massive failure," even as the state poured money into contracts with Apple.

Gen Z will now have to face the ramifications of eroding learning capabilities. The generation has already been hit hard by the transformations of the 21st century's other technological revolution: generative AI.

Early data from a first-of-its-kind Stanford University study published last year found AI advancements to have "significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the U.S. labor market." But a less capable population means more than just poorer job prospects and fewer promotions, Horvath warned; it endangers how humans are able to overcome existential challenges in the decades to come.

"We're facing challenges more complex and far-reaching than any in human history-from overpopulation to evolving diseases to moral drift," he told Fortune. "Now, more than ever, we need a generation able to grapple with nuance, hold multiple truths in tension, and creatively tackle problems that are stumping the greatest adult minds of today."

Technology's impact on learning

Classroom technology usage has ballooned in recent years. A 2021 EdWeek Research Center poll of 846 teachers found 55% said they are spending one to four hours per day with educational tech. Another quarter reported using the digital tools five hours per day.

While teachers may be intending for these tools to be strictly educational, students often have different ideas. According to a 2014 study, which surveyed and observed 3,000 university students, students engaged in off-task activities on their computers nearly two-thirds of the time.

Horvath blamed this tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning. When one's attention is interrupted, it takes time to refocus. Task-switching also is associated with weaker memory formation and greater rates of error. Grappling with a challenging singular subject matter is hard, Horvath said. For the best learning to happen, it's supposed to be.

"Unfortunately, easehas never been a defining characteristic of learning," he said. "Learning is effortful, difficult, and oftentimes uncomfortable. But it's the friction that makes learning deep and transferable into the future."

Sustained attention to a singular subject is anathema to how technology today has been deployed, argues Jean Twenge, San Diego State University psychology professor studying generational differences and the author of 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World. More time on screens isn't just ineffective in facilitating learnings; it's counterproductive.

"Many apps, including social media and gaming apps, are designed to be addictive," Twenge told Fortune. "Their business model is based on users spending the most time possible on the apps, and checking back as frequently as possible."

A Baylor University-led study published in November 2025 uncovered why this is: TikTok required the least amount of effort to use, even less than Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, by balancing relevant videos with surprising and unexpected content.

Concerns over social media addiction have become so dire that 1,600 plaintiffs, across 350 families and 250 school districts, filed a lawsuit alleging Meta, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube created addictive platforms leading to mental health challenges like depression and self-harm in children.

Solving the tech crisis

Horvath proposed a swath of solutions to Gen Z's tech problem, at least as it pertains to classroom use. Congress, he suggested, could impose efficacy standards to fund research on what digital tools are actually effective in the classroom. The legislature could also require strong limits on tracking behavior, building profiles, and collecting data on minors using tech.

Some schools have taken matters into their own hands. As of August 2025, 17 states have cracked down on cellphone use in school, banning the technology during instructional time, and 35 states have laws limiting the use of phones in the classroom. In fact, more than 75% of schools have said they have policies prohibiting cellphone use for nonacademic purposes, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, though enforcing those bans has been met with variable success.

Ultimately, Horvath said, the loss of critical thinking and learning skills is less of a personal failure and more of a policy one, calling the generation of Americans educated with gadgets victims of a failed pedagogical experiment.

"Whenever I work with teenagers I tell them, 'This is not your fault. None of you asked to be sat in front of a computer for your entire K-12 schooling,'" Horvath said. "That means we...screwed up-and I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad."

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The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents | Fortune

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Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said older generations "screwed up" giving students access to so much technology: "I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad."

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Scot Gov materials

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Digital Discourse Initiative – Tools for schools to counter online hate and disinformation

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Tools and strategies for schools to counter the effects of online hate

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Musk insults the Spanish PM about his opposition to social media in Spain

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Elon Musk calls Spanish PM a ‘tyrant’ over plan to ban under-16s from social media and curb hateful content

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Pedro Sánchez says urgent action needed to protect children from ‘digital wild west’, drawing anger from owner of X

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Spain bans social media for under 16s.

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Spain announces plans to ban social media for under-16s

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Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez says the move will protect children from the “digital Wild West”.

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Molly Mae - neoliberal girlboss

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Molly-Mae proves the absurdity of “girlboss” feminism

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It’s easy to say you can achieve whatever you want – if you’re rich, white and conventionally beautiful.

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CPRMB | Research & Policy for Men and Boys in the U.K.

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The U.K.'s primary research group identifying barriers facing men and boys. Evidence-based policy research across education, work, and community wellbeing.

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What teachers need to know about restoring students’ confidence, agency and sense of meaning in a traumagenic society

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Boys to be taught the difference between porn and real life.

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Boys to learn difference between porn and real life to tackle misogyny in England’s schools

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Teachers to be given extra training as Keir Starmer warns ‘toxic ideas are taking hold early and going unchallenged’

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Teachers in England face growing misogyny and need help dealing with sexual aggression, says Phillips

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Teachers in England face growing misogyny and need help dealing with sexual aggression, says Phillips

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Comments from safeguarding minister come as violence against women and girls strategy due to launch

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Boys to be sent on courses to tackle misogyny in schools DEC 2025

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Teachers to be trained to spot early signs of misogyny in boys

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The measure is part of the government’s strategy to tackle violence against women and girls which will be unveiled on Thursday.

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IFAS - Institute for Addressing Strangulation

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The IFAS works to increase awareness of risks associated with strangulation & suffocation. A successful campaign has helped ensure a specific offence of strangulation and suffocation was introduced in Section 70 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. This came into force on 07 June 2022.

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Nearly half of sexually active young people in UK have experienced strangulation, study shows

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Survey reveals crisis of distress, consent issues and physical harm caused by strangulation during sex

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These teens turned their rooms into tech-free zones. This was the result

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ByKristian Johnson and Kate BerryBBC News

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What happened when teens tried out tech-free bedrooms?

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Elizabeth and Henry are among those ditching technology in their bedrooms to see how they cope.

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BBC News - Ban social media for under-15s, says French report warning of TikTok risks
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crkjep23403o

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Tech companies including Snapchat and Facebook reported more than 9,600 cases of adults grooming children online in the UK in just six months last year - the equivalent of about 400 a week.

Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA), have grown increasingly alarmed about the growing threat from sextortion and other crimes targeting teenagers.

The US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) last year received 546,000 reports from tech firms of adults across the world soliciting children - a 192% increase from 2023.

As many as 9,600 of these reports came from the UK in the first six months of 2024. Snapchat reported far more troubling material to NCMEC than any other platform in that period, its records show.

The children's charity, NSPCC, described the figures as "shocking" and said they were likely an underestimate.

The NCA has launched what it called "unprecedented" campaigns in the UK to alert teachers, parents and children to the dangers of sextortion, in which victims are blackmailed into sharing abusive, explicit images.

The NCA said: "Sextortion is a heartless crime, which can have devastating consequences for victims. Sadly, teenagers in the UK and around the world have taken their own lives because of it."

The NCMEC data is significant as it is based on reports from online platforms and internet providers - such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok - rather than victims, who can be reluctant to disclose the abuse.

Tech firms are obliged under US law to flag suspicious material to NCMEC. The figures show that Snapchat reported about 20,000 instances of concerning material - including sextortion and child sexual abuse images - in the first half of last year.

This is more than the combined number of reports from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly known as Twitter), Google and Discord. It is understood that Snapchat revised its policies for reporting this content last year and that as a result, subsequent figures will be lower.

Rani Govender, of the NSPCC, said sextortion and other financially motivated sexual crimes had a "devastating" impact on youngsters, affecting their ability to trust or seek help and in some cases leading to suicide.

NCMEC said it was aware of "more than three dozen" teenage boys worldwide who had killed themselves after falling victim to sextortion since 2021.

Govender said some tech firms were "inadvertently turning a blind eye to the abuse occurring on their watch" by introducing protections such as end-to-end encryption, which make it harder to spot harmful content.

Unlike some other platforms, Snapchat does not have end-to-end encryption on its text-based chats.

Police forces are increasingly concerned that predators are turning to ever more sophisticated attempts to target children online.

The Guardian has uncovered a 101-page manual giving detailed instructions on how best to exploit young internet users, including advice on the best phones, encryption, apps and alter egos to use.

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The dossier teaches users how to turn victims into "modern-day slaves" by acquiring explicit images before they then feel "compelled to comply with the extortionist's demands".

The guide was allegedly produced by a 20-year-old man called Baron Martin from Arizona, US, who was arrested by the FBI in December and calls himself "the king of extortion". Martin claims it has been "the catalyst for thousands of extortions", according to the US Department of Justice.

According to researchers, the sextortion manual was distributed on a number of "Com networks" - online communities where mostly young men share sadistic and misogynistic material and encourage each other to commit crimes.

Milo Comerford, of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) thinktank, said: "The continued accessibility of this kind of chillingly detailed sextortion guide points to the growing risk posed by toxic online communities that exploit and abuse children."

The FBI has identified scores of online gangs who collaborate to identify vulnerable victims before targeting them using a feigned romantic interest to obtain compromising photos.

Those are then used to blackmail the victim to either provide further explicit images, self-harm, or carry out another act of violence or animal abuse.

Comerford, of the ISD, said "robust multi-agency" safeguards were urgently required to build awareness of the risks of sextortion among young people, parents, guardians, teachers and others.

He added: "These transnational networks are comprised of a constantly shifting landscape of groups that use social media platforms to identify, groom, and harm their victims, and in some cases engage in mass violence."

Snapchat and Facebook have been approached for comment.

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FBI and NSPCC alarmed at 'shocking' rise in online sextortion of children

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Snapchat logged about 20,000 cases last year of adults grooming children online, more than other social media platforms combined

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Gamifying war

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Paul AdamsDiplomatic correspondent in Kyiv

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Ukraine launches new points for killing Russians scheme

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The scheme allows Ukrainian troops to trade videos of confirmed kills on the battlefield for prizes.

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Secondary schools in England to tackle ‘incel’ culture and teach positive role models

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Government says new guidance will challenge ‘manosphere’ myths as DfE reports epidemic-scale misogyny

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Lost Boys UK report

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Skip to content

Boys and young men are in crisis. Whilst the last hundred years have been marked by great leaps forward in outcomes and rights for women, in this generation it is boys who are being left behind. And by some margin.

From the day they start primary school, to the day they leave higher education, the progress of boys lags behind girls. The proportion of young men failing to move from education into employment or training has been steadily growing for thirty years. Since the pandemic alone, the number of males aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) has increased by a staggering 40 per cent compared to just seven per cent or females. For those young men who are in work, the much-vaunted gender pay gap has been reversed. Young men are now out-earned by their female peers, including among the university educated.

The growing divergence in boys' and girls' outcomes does not only apply to education and employment. We are also seeing a growing divide in the social and political attitudes of the sexes. In Britain, as in countries across the developed world, young men are increasingly drawn to conservative, traditionalist or right-wing political movements, whilst young women become ever more liberal and left-progressive. In an increasingly online existence, boys and girls no longer walk the same path from childhood to adulthood, with their interests, values and aims in life increasingly incompatible with each other. As Britain grapples with an epidemic of family breakdown, millions of boys are deprived of any positive model of manhood.

For boys and young men in Britain-especially those who are poor-the picture is an increasingly bleak one. And, where the divergence is particularly apparent, we also highlight different outcomes across certain ethnic groups. Over the coming months, the CSJ will be looking for solutions to this growing problem. This report aims to paint a stark picture of what is happening in six significant areas of life. It makes the urgent case that action is needed.

This report will not cover every issue facing young men and boys, but it is a start.

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Boys and young men are in crisis. Whilst the last hundred years have been marked by great leaps forward in outcomes and rights for women, in this generation it is boys who are being left behind.

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Lost Boys. Alex Blower talks about his book where he challenges the phrase, toxic masculinity.

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Is ‘toxic masculinity’ starting the wrong conversation?

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In her interview, Kristiina Tammisalo (University of Turku) explains how digital tools impact our youngest learners and what teachers, parents and carers need to know to support their wellbeing.

Furthermore, Marco Gui (University of Milano-Bicocca) challenges the notion that constant connectivity is harmless in his interview, examining its psychological toll on young users and offering practical steps to help reclaim a healthier offline balance.

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Explore how technology impacts our mental health, relationships, and learning environments. This playlist brings together expert interviews, practical insigh…

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Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh says AI has made us dumbed down machines

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Author Irvine Welsh has written a sequel called Men in Love, because the world is “so full of hate”.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
This is more evidence to support the idea that schools should restrict/ ban smartphones. 

Smartphone bans in Dutch schools have improved learning, study finds in Netherlands  https://t.co/7jXIVSjMkL

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.entities.urls[].title
Smartphone bans in Dutch schools have improved learning, study finds

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.entities.urls[].description
After initial concerns, pupils are said to be more focused and have better social interactions with each other

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
This is more evidence to support the idea that schools should restrict/ ban smartphones. 

Smartphone bans in Dutch schools have improved learning, study finds in Netherlands  https://t.co/7jXIVSjMkL

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
This is more evidence to support the idea that schools should restrict/ ban smartphones.

Smartphone bans in Dutch schools have improved learning, study finds in Netherlands https://t.co/7jXIVSjMkL
— Tom Bennett OBE (@tombennett71) July 4, 2025

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
This is more evidence to support the idea that schools should restrict/ ban smartphones. 

Smartphone bans in Dutch schools have improved learning, study finds in Netherlands  https://t.co/7jXIVSjMkL

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.entities.urls[].title
Smartphone bans in Dutch schools have improved learning, study finds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.entities.urls[].description
After initial concerns, pupils are said to be more focused and have better social interactions with each other

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
This is more evidence to support the idea that schools should restrict/ ban smartphones. 

Smartphone bans in Dutch schools have improved learning, study finds in Netherlands  https://t.co/7jXIVSjMkL

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
This is more evidence to support the idea that schools should restrict/ ban smartphones. 

Smartphone bans in Dutch schools have improved learning, study finds in Netherlands  https://t.co/7jXIVSjMkL

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.entities.urls[].title
Smartphone bans in Dutch schools have improved learning, study finds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.entities.urls[].description
After initial concerns, pupils are said to be more focused and have better social interactions with each other

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By all accounts, Sabrina Carpenter is in control.

The 26-year-old singer, who signed a record deal with Disney at 12 and became a star in her teens, worked through 10 years and five albums before Espresso, a cheeky and dementedly catchy single from her album Short n' Sweet, became the song of summer 2024. She writes or co-writes all of her songs with a signature imprint - saucy, clever, unabashedly horny and in on the joke of being both attracted to and disappointed by men. ("Did you say you're finished? Didn't know we started," she teases in new single Manchild.) A recent Rolling Stone cover profile espoused her intelligence, craftiness and deadpan humor. (Asked which famous ex Manchild is about, she answered, "It's about your dad.") She's taking the now-unusual step of releasing a new album only a year after her breakout for no more reason than she has ideas, feels creative, and wants to - "my brain is sharp, let's write", she told Rolling Stone.

But though Carpenter is evidently in the driver's seat, the music video for Manchild finds her as a passenger, eye-rolling at a series of incompetent men on a surreal hitchhiking jaunt through the desert. Besides humorously imagining the manchild's shortcomings as vehicles, poking fun at some traditional movie pinups and relishing enjoyably strange images, the video continues Carpenter's star-making playfulness with the idea of being a sexy, submissive vixen, Betty Boop for gen Z. The single came accompanied by cover art for her upcoming album, Man's Best Friend, in which the pint-sized Carpenter, clad in a black minidress, appears on her knees, pawing for the attention of an anonymous man in a suit, his hand loosely gripping her blonde bombshell hair.

Unsurprisingly, the internet hasn't reacted well. Carpenter, a sharp student of pop music, is clearly working in the Madonna tradition of sexual provocation for provocation's sake, poking fun at tropes and people's prudishness with an alluring frankness. But online, one would have you believe that she's set back the cause of feminism by a good 10 years. On Reddit, on her Instagram, on the dregs of the rightwing rage-bait website formerly known as Twitter, users - overwhelmingly women - have accused Carpenter of caving to the male gaze, promoting regressive attitudes, not understanding satire and even threatening women's safety at large. "Insanely misogynistic imagery", wrote one Instagram user, echoing the sentiments of the entire r/popculture subreddit. "Sabrina this is not the slay you think it is ..." wrote another.

On TikTok, the image has folded easily into one-woman explainers on how the cover is actually the opposite of empowering, or how the furore encapsulates the context-less, ahistorical, flattened discourse that is everything wrong with modern society, etc. (For what it's worth, there's also a semi-convincing theory that Carpenter will eventually reveal a larger image in which she also plays the man in the suit.) A women's aid group for victims of domestic abuse in Glasgow went as far as calling it, absurdly, "a throwback to tired tropes that reduce women to pets, props, and possessions and promote an element of violence and control".

In short, the discomfort is palpable, if predictable. Though female sexuality is de rigueur in pop music, we are still not used to seeing pop stars in control of their own sexuality, let alone framing themselves as the submissive. Carpenter on all fours rubs against the prevailing rhetoric of female sexual empowerment - "be on top", "have sex like a man", "call the shots". Fuck, not be fucked. Dominance as the only acceptable mode, submission for sexual pleasure as inherent weakness. To be submissive and strong at once is to break some brains, the idiosyncrasies and confidence of one woman's sexual performance inflaming the chronic poster's allergy to fun, as well as the internet's incentive for black-and-white thinking.

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Carpenter, unapologetically girly and often bedecked in lace lingerie, knows exactly what she's doing. With only an album cover and one song to go by, it's still too soon to see the full scope of her tongue-in-cheek satire, but the outline of riffing and reclaiming male fantasies is clear. The Rolling Stone shoot - floral, pastoral, fairy-esque - invokes the imagery of tradwives, the third rail of female empowerment discourse online. Such women sell a fantasy of chicken eggs, meals from scratch, barefoot and pregnant and always in service of the man. They also sell sex, albeit quietly, as baby-making machines for the head of the family. Carpenter in gingham lingerie, posing with a deer in the woods surrounded by flowers, makes the subtext literal: this is a male fantasy for men who do not like women's independence, and she is owning it.

The thing missing from all this commentary is a sense of fun, which Carpenter appears to be having in spades. Like Addison Rae, a fellow recent breakout who frequently performs in a bra and underwear, Carpenter's pop performance relishes the messiness, sexual exploration and growth of one's mid-20s via refreshingly catchy tunes. Rae's brown-eyed, Louisiana girl-next-door perkiness, athletic dancing and pure pop instincts recall a young Britney Spears - except, crucially, she is 24, and has been pursuing mega-fame on her own terms for years on TikTok. Both she and Carpenter exist at the young adult nexus of self-awareness and youthful abandon, their frank sexuality both cheeky and serious.

It's worth noting that how Carpenter and Rae's look influences the conversation. Both are conventionally gorgeous, styled as pinups but not busty, obviously Hollywood but still seemingly natural. The Man's Best Friend image would read differently if Carpenter adhered more to the prevailing trends of body modification. If, in other words, she looked like a Kardashian, transforming her body and looks into a male-brained ideal of a female cyborg. With each passing day, I am personally less and less interested in perceived artistic "authenticity" - supposedly confessional lyrics, lore, celebrities pandering that they're just like you - and more and more drawn in by authenticity of form, real or perceived. In a sea of snatched faces, plumped lips and freakishly hourglass bodies, it feels refreshing to see pop stars who are still idealized but within normal human proportions. When it comes to the amorphous cause of women, I'm much more concerned with the paradigm shift toward celebrities flaunting their plastic surgery - human bodies metamorphosed through procedures and substances at exorbitant cost, like the Pygmalion myth in reverse - than Carpenter on her knees.

But she'd probably say I'm overthinking it. This is pop music, after all - sex sells, and whether people are buying her shtick or not, we're still talking about her album.

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Is the Sabrina Carpenter album art really that offensive?

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The internet has been divided over the suggestive cover of the pop princess's new album, but it's possible some might be missing the point

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Boulter believes a lot of the abuse she is sent is from people who have placed bets on her matches, given it comes after victories as well as defeats.

She says she has become better at moving on from it, or simply not looking at her direct messages, but the impact is clear.

"As far as death threats, it's just not something you want to be reading straight after an emotional loss," she says.

"A lot of the time you get it after you win as well."

Statistics shared exclusively with BBC Sport demonstrate the level of abuse aimed at players through social media, and what is being done to try to address it.

The figures - provided by data science firm Signify, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and Women's Tennis Association (WTA) - show that in 2024, about 8,000 abusive, violent or threatening messages were sent publicly to 458 tennis players through their social media accounts.

A significant proportion of abuse stems from betting, according to Signify, which has been working with tennis authorities on detecting abuse through an artificial intelligence-led detection system called Threat Matrix.

More than a quarter of all abuse (26%) was targeted at five players.

The most prolific account sent 263 abusive messages, and 15 accounts were escalated to law enforcement.

Nine of the 10 most prolific accounts - the majority of which were related to angry gamblers - were either suspended or had content removed.

Details of 39 account holders were shared with the tennis authorities and betting industry for further action.

Across the year, angry gamblers sent 40% of all detected abuse, with messages clearly related to betting activity because of the timing or content of the abuse.

Asked for a response, a Betting and Gaming Council spokesperson said its members "do not tolerate abuse on social media, which has no place in betting or sport".

It added: "It is vital social media companies take swift action against users, and remove offensive content."

Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, declined to provide a comment on the record but has developed various tools to try to prevent people from seeing abuse - including hiding and filtering offensive or unwanted comments or images and technology that tracks and removes abuse.

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Katie Boulter: British tennis player reveals social media abuse she has received

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Britain's Katie Boulter speaks exclusively to BBC Sport about the levels of social media abuse she receives.

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‘We can’t pit boys against girls’: headlines overshadow struggles of a generation of girls

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Growing crisis among boys dominates the narrative but girls in England also face unprecedented mental health challenges and systemic pressures

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Misogynistic content driving UK boys to hunt vulnerable girls on suicide forums

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Exclusive: Police set up taskforce to tackle online violence as young men seek victims on eating disorder forums

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Lost Boys - The Centre for Social Justice

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Lost Boys - The Centre for Social Justice

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Skip to content

Boys and young men are in crisis. Whilst the last hundred years have been marked by great leaps forward in outcomes and rights for women, in this generation it is boys who are being left behind. And by some margin.

From the day they start primary school, to the day they leave higher education, the progress of boys lags behind girls. The proportion of young men failing to move from education into employment or training has been steadily growing for thirty years. Since the pandemic alone, the number of males aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) has increased by a staggering 40 per cent compared to just seven per cent or females. For those young men who are in work, the much-vaunted gender pay gap has been reversed. Young men are now out-earned by their female peers, including among the university educated.

The growing divergence in boys' and girls' outcomes does not only apply to education and employment. We are also seeing a growing divide in the social and political attitudes of the sexes. In Britain, as in countries across the developed world, young men are increasingly drawn to conservative, traditionalist or right-wing political movements, whilst young women become ever more liberal and left-progressive. In an increasingly online existence, boys and girls no longer walk the same path from childhood to adulthood, with their interests, values and aims in life increasingly incompatible with each other. As Britain grapples with an epidemic of family breakdown, millions of boys are deprived of any positive model of manhood.

For boys and young men in Britain-especially those who are poor-the picture is an increasingly bleak one. And, where the divergence is particularly apparent, we also highlight different outcomes across certain ethnic groups. Over the coming months, the CSJ will be looking for solutions to this growing problem. This report aims to paint a stark picture of what is happening in six significant areas of life. It makes the urgent case that action is needed.

This report will not cover every issue facing young men and boys, but it is a start.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Boys and young men are in crisis. Whilst the last hundred years have been marked by great leaps forward in outcomes and rights for women, in this generation it is boys who are being left behind.

# data[].attributes.headline
‘Teachers are describing something different’: the escalating culture of misogyny in Australian classrooms | Sexual consent | The Guardian

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‘Teachers are describing something different’: the escalating culture of misogyny in Australian classrooms | Sexual consent | The Guardian

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‘Teachers are describing something different’: the escalating culture of misogyny in Australian classrooms | Jess Hill

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Alongside stories of increasing ‘performative toxicity’ among boys, teachers say this generation is also the most switched on ever. Can education really change student behaviour?

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Creating a safer world: the challenge of regulating online pornography - GOV.UK

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Creating a safer world: the challenge of regulating online pornography - GOV.UK

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Assessment of the legislation, regulation and enforcement of pornography and recommendations for government and regulatory bodies.

Request an accessible format.

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need a version of this document in a more accessible format, please email alt.formats@dsit.gov.uk. Please tell us what format you need. It will help us if you say what assistive technology you use.

The Independent Pornography Review is an assessment of the legislation, regulation and enforcement of pornography. The review provides recommendations for government, regulatory bodies, and the sector to ensure that harmful impacts of pornography are addressed.

To strengthen the evidence base and inform the final recommendations, the review held a call for evidence in early 2024.

This report includes mentions of content that some readers may find distressing and disturbing. This includes references to sexual violence, child sexual abuse material, as well as offensive and explicit language. Content warnings have been included ahead of relevant chapters, but please be aware that this report may be difficult to read at times.

Government response

Read the letter to Baroness Bertin in response to the Bertin report on the Independent Pornography Review.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Creating a safer world: the challenge of regulating online pornography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Assessment of the legislation, regulation and enforcement of pornography and recommendations for government and regulatory bodies.

# data[].attributes.headline
Smartphone use and mental health: going beyond school restriction policies - The Lancet Regional Health – Europe

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Smartphone use and mental health: going beyond school restriction policies - The Lancet Regional Health – Europe

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Smartphone use and mental health: going beyond school restriction policies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Smartphone and social media use are plausibly associated with poorer mental health
outcomes among adolescents, with likely mechanisms including: increased access to
cyberbullying and views supportive of eating disorders, suicide, and self-harm1; impaired
cognitive functions2; unhealthy social comparisons3; and displacement of healthy behaviours
(sleep, exercise, in-person social interactions).4 However, the epidemiological evidence
for a causal association is weak,5,6 as most studies are ecological and/or cross-sectional,
showing correlation rather than causation and not adjusting for potential confounders.

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Tech & Teens: the impact of digital technology on wellbeing | Global Kids Online

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Tech & Teens: the impact of digital technology on wellbeing | Global Kids Online

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Tech & Teens: the impact of digital technology on wellbeing

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From 2020 to 2025, researchers from IRTIS at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic conducted a series of in-depth studies exploring how smartphones, social networks, and online gaming influence ado

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London School of Economics and Political Science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
London School of Economics and Political Science

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Probe after adult content viewed on school iPads - BBC News

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Probe after adult content viewed on school iPads - BBC News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Probe after adult content viewed on school iPads

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
City of Edinburgh Council says it is working on new ways to block children seeing inappropriate content.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
London School of Economics and Political Science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
London School of Economics and Political Science

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Research database- page listing a selection of high quality sources

# data[].attributes.headline
The False Promise of Device-Based Education

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The False Promise of Device-Based Education

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The False Promise of Device-Based Education

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‘Counsellors at Beira’s Place in Edinburgh said strangulation and “breath play” had become so ubiquitous in online pornography that teenagers believed it was a routine sexual act they were expected to perform and enjoy.’ — ⁦@thetimes⁩ https://t.co/YhCZcWounH
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) October 14, 2024

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BBC News - Stephen Fry: Musk and Zuckerberg have 'polluted culture'
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ceq5q3jlnz3o

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Social media: Why algorithms show violence to boys - BBC News

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Social media: Why algorithms show violence to boys - BBC News

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Social media: Why algorithms show violence to boys

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An insider tells the BBC why teenage boys are being targeted with extreme content.

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Learning with Data - Data Education in Schools

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Learning with Data - Data Education in Schools

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Hybrid Plug in the Numbers Interactive Lesson

On the 28th May 2024, Data Education in Schools and Digital Skills Education welcomed a class of 24 students (P7) from Newcraighill Primary School to the University of Edinburgh for the Interactive Lesson Plug in the Numbers, delivered in a hybrid format for the first time. Six primary classes from the...

British Data Awards Ceremony 2024

The Data Education in Schools team are thrilled to have won the 'Education Initiative of the Year' Award at the British Data Awards last night. Jo Spiller (Programme Director) and Jasmeen Kanwal (Project Officer) attended the awards ceremony in the Great Hall of the Grand Connaught Rooms in Covent Garden,...

Creative AI for Teachers

On Tuesday 30th April, Data Education in Schools and Digital Skills Education were delighted to host a workshop for teachers on the use of Generative AI to create art in the classroom. Craig Steele (DES Digital Skills Consultant and Director at Digital Skills Education) and Daniel Devine (Digital Skills Education)...

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Learning with Data - Data Education in Schools

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Empowering school learners to succeed in a data driven future

# data[].attributes.headline
Internet Safety Resources for Educators - Be Internet Awesome

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Internet Safety Resources for Educators - Be Internet Awesome

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Be Internet Awesome curriculum gives educators the tools and methods they need to teach digital safety fundamentals. The materials developed by Google in partnership with iKeepSafe enable educators to bring the most critical teachings-and the excitement of Interland-into the classroom.

Included in the curriculum are lesson plans for the five topics, with activities and worksheets that were designed to complement Interland.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Align with ISTE Standards

Don't require any personal information or login

Can be used across devices

Are free for everyone

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We've created internet safety resources to make it easier for educators and students to incorporate and practice good digital habits in the classroom.

# data[].attributes.headline
Be Internet Legends - A Program to Teach Children Internet Safety

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Be Internet Legends - A Program to Teach Children Internet Safety

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Be Internet Legends - A Program to Teach Children Internet Safety

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Be Internet Legends - A Program to Teach Children Internet Safety

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Be Internet Legends is a multifaceted program that includes a fun and free of charge web-based game called Interland and an educational curriculum to teach children how to be safe and responsible explorers of the online world.

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Be Internet Legends resources | Parent Zone | At the heart of digital family life

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Be Internet Legends resources | Parent Zone | At the heart of digital family life

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Be Internet Legends resources | Parent Zone | At the heart of digital family life

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Functional connectivity changes in the brain of adolescents with internet addiction: A systematic literature review of imaging studies | PLOS Mental Health

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Functional connectivity changes in the brain of adolescents with internet addiction: A systematic literature review of imaging studies | PLOS Mental Health

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Functional connectivity changes in the brain of adolescents with internet addiction: A systematic literature review of imaging studies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Internet usage has seen a stark global rise over the last few decades, particularly among adolescents and young people, who have also been diagnosed increasingly with internet addiction (IA). IA impacts several neural networks that influence an adolescent’s behaviour and development. This article issued a literature review on the resting-state and task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies to inspect the consequences of IA on the functional connectivity (FC) in the adolescent brain and its subsequent effects on their behaviour and development. A systematic search was conducted from two databases, PubMed and PsycINFO, to select eligible articles according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Eligibility criteria was especially stringent regarding the adolescent age range (10–19) and formal diagnosis of IA. Bias and quality of individual studies were evaluated. The fMRI results from 12 articles demonstrated that the effects of IA were seen throughout multiple neural networks: a mix of increases/decreases in FC in the default mode network; an overall decrease in FC in the executive control network; and no clear increase or decrease in FC within the salience network and reward pathway. The FC changes led to addictive behaviour and tendencies in adolescents. The subsequent behavioural changes are associated with the mechanisms relating to the areas of cognitive control, reward valuation, motor coordination, and the developing adolescent brain. Our results presented the FC alterations in numerous brain regions of adolescents with IA leading to the behavioural and developmental changes. Research on this topic had a low frequency with adolescent samples and were primarily produced in Asian countries. Future research studies of comparing results from Western adolescent samples provide more insight on therapeutic intervention.

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Social Media (and Overprotective Parents) Changed Childhood

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Social Media (and Overprotective Parents) Changed Childhood

# data[].attributes.headline
Ofcom: Almost a quarter of kids aged 5-7 have smartphones - BBC News

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Ofcom: Almost a quarter of kids aged 5-7 have smartphones - BBC News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Chris Vallance & Philippa WainTechnology reporters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ofcom: Almost a quarter of kids aged 5-7 have smartphones

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The regulator calls the data a “wake up call”, and says parents and industry need to do more.

# data[].attributes.headline
Author Jon Haidt has a solution for social media addiction

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Author Jon Haidt has a solution for social media addiction

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In his new book, Jonathan Haidt argues social media has damaged Generation Z. Getty Images/iStockphoto

"Suppose that when your first child turned ten, a visionary billionaire whom you've never met chose her to join the first permanent human settlement on Mars ... Would you let her go?"

"Of course not," writes Jonathan Haidt.

But the social psychologist argues in his upcoming book, " The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness," that parents have made a similar bargain with Big Tech - by sending children to a virtual planet for untold hours every day.

Haidt, a NYU Stern professor of ethical leadership, writes that the past decade has seen "the radical transformation of childhood into something inhuman: a phone-​based existence."

In fact, as he points out, teen girls are spending an average 20 hours a week - effectively a part-time job - on social media.

It's bred the most depressed and anxious generation in history, studies show.

Haidt, whose book is out March 26, argues that smartphones and social media have contributed to a "great rewiring" of childhood - causing sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation, addiction and spiritual degradation.

The result, he says, is the most depressed and anxious generation in history. But boys and girls have been hit differently.

"Social media really does a number on girls," Haidt told The Post. "It takes all the worst parts of middle school - social comparison, focusing on your looks, insecurity - and multiplies them by ten."

His meta-analysis of studies looking at social media's impact on young people revealed a link between heavy social media usage and poor mental health outcomes among girls.

When it comes to boys, however, there's less of a one-to-one link.

"For boys, the story is less clear. There's no one smoking gun," Haidt explained. "They've just experienced a progressive withdrawal from the real world, where boys have historically exerted effort."

He points to porn and video games as major contributors: "The trend is really accelerating as the virtual world becomes so magnificently enticing and attractive."

Haidt is the father of a 14-year-old daughter and a 17-year-old son.

"We still have the same problem that all parents have, which is just trying to say stop spending so much time on your screens," he said. "There is still a constant, a chronic tug of war over usage."

Although he gave his son a phone in fourth grade and daughter one in sixth grade, because they walked to school in New York City, he wishes he'd given them flip phones rather than smartphones in retrospect.

But Haidt said both his children have benefited from a family rule of no social media until 16. He recommends other parents do the same - and hold off on smartphones until high school.

"We have to delay the phones but also give them engaging activities in the real world," he said. "[Parents] have under-protected children online but we've also overprotected them in the real world. And we need to address both halves.

"Kids need to be anchored in the real world with real relationships, real responsibilities, real love. Virtual activities don't substitute," he added.

As a professor, Haidt said Gen Z has been receptive to his message - and eager for change.

"They see the problems of their phone-based childhoods. They see that it's a huge waste of their time," he told The Post. "But when I ask them why they don't get off TikTok and Instagram, they say they can't because everyone else is on them."

He sees it as part of a larger collective action problem - one in which individuals want to make a change but fail to do so because the group isn't - that's leaving us paralyzed, and glued to our screens.

"We're trapped in a collective action problem that we haven't been able to solve, even though most people hate what's going on."

"The Anxious Generation" is teeming with solutions - and entire chapters on what families, schools, educators and big tech companies can do to bring childhood back to Earth.

"We can solve this problem most of the way within a year if we just work collectively," he told The Post. "These are collective action problems, and we can solve them with collective action, even if we don't get help from our lawmakers."

His proposed solutions include staving off smartphones and social media until the teen years, banning phones during the school day, and promoting unsupervised childhood play.

That, he says, is the shortcut to short-circuiting our collective action problem: "Each parent who takes action makes it easier for other parents in the community to do the same. Each school that goes truly phone-​free liberates all of its students to be more present with each other."

And Haidt believes parents are ready for change.

"It's like I'm pushing on open doors," he told The Post. "Everyone is fed up with what phones are doing to their children and their lives. Wherever I go, whoever I talk to, they want to help, and they want to read the book."

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Kids' phone-based existence is 'inhuman' - and 10 times worse than any middle-school horrors: author

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Jonathan Haidt, author of the buzzy new book "The Anxious Generation," says social media has "rewired childhood" to the point of danger - and made girls' lives much wo...

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The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right - The Atlantic

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The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right - The Atlantic

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Jonathan Haidt's new book, The Anxious Generation, makes the case against devices for children-even if they desperately want them.

I did not know this at the time, but apparently my children were part of a generation of guinea pigs. "It's as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children," Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

Haidt convincingly uses data to argue that a sharp uptick in depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide among young people is directly tied to the wide distribution of smartphones. He points to surveys that have been asking teenagers for decades questions about mental health, such as: "Life often seems meaningless" or "A lot of times I feel lonely." Survey results remained pretty consistent, and some numbers were even improving, before they took a sharp, negative turn somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

The solution, Haidt says, is "easy." In this episode of Radio Atlantic, he advocates that parents don't give middle schoolers smartphones so they can reclaim the old way of socializing, that social-media platforms raise the minimum age for use to 16, and that schools ban cellphones during the day, among other straightforward solutions. The picture, however, looks a lot less clear when you talk with an actual young person. In this episode, I spoke with my child Jacob, and we juxtapose theory with lived experience. You'll hear a mother (me) wrestle in real time with the consequences of parenting decisions as Haidt makes the case that we should collectively agree to rescue our kids from this experiment.
Listen to the conversation here: Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: What's up? What are you up to?

Jacob Rosin: Not much. I just got home. I'm going to do my laundry soon and then pack.

Hanna Rosin: Oh, right. You're leaving Sunday.

Jacob Rosin: Hm.

Hanna Rosin: Yeah. What's "hm"?
[Typing]
Hanna Rosin: What are you typing?
[Typing]
Jacob Rosin: I'm just chatting with friends.

Hanna Rosin: Wait, you're chatting with friends while we're doing this interview?

Jacob Rosin: I do this all the time. Don't worry about it.

Hanna Rosin: So you're going to chat with friends throughout this interview?

Jacob Rosin: Have we started the interview yet?

Hanna Rosin: No, we haven't.

Jacob Rosin: Okay.
[Typing]
Hanna Rosin: Oh my God. Tell me when you're ready.

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hanna Rosin. And that is my 20-year-old child, Jacob.

Jacob Rosin: I'm ready.
[Music]
Jacob Rosin: Wait-how long will this take? Sorry.
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: This is basically how it goes with me and Jacob. I always think it's just me and them talking. And I'm always surprised to learn there's someone else in the room. The feeling is like when you're at a party and you're talking to someone, and their eyes are scanning for someone more interesting.

Hanna Rosin: Okay, so what would you say that most of our fights are about?

Jacob Rosin: I mean, I don't know how to get more specific than phone usage, but I think it also might be phone usage while also not paying attention to something important.

Hanna Rosin: Right, phone usage and then-

Jacob Rosin: Is this a leading question?

Hanna Rosin: No, I am genuinely trying to figure out how close my perception is to your perception.

Jacob Rosin: Okay.

Hanna Rosin: What would you say is my position, or maybe your parents' position, and what is your position in this fight?

Jacob Rosin: I mean, I think most of the time when I'm on my phone, my friends are in the phone, and the idea is that there's a real world out there that I should be paying attention to because it is more immediate, and I can't really come back to it in the same way, I guess.

Hanna Rosin: I see. So you recognize that there's a world in your phone, there's a world outside-

Jacob Rosin: That is probably more important to me.

Hanna Rosin: What's more important to you?

Jacob Rosin: The world on the phone.

Hanna Rosin: And I'm irritated because I think the world outside should be more important to you. Is that a fair summary?

Jacob Rosin: Maybe, yes.

Hanna Rosin: There's this expression that this MIT professor who writes about stuff has: "We are forever elsewhere." Do you think that's true? Does that bother you?

Jacob Rosin: Does it bother me? No. That's just how I am. I just do that. I think about other stuff.

Hanna Rosin: Does it feel distracting? Or like your mind-
[Typing]
Hanna Rosin: Are you online again?

Jacob Rosin: That was only a brief exchange. I'll close Discord. Hold on.

Hanna Rosin: I'm not sure Jacob is typical, although given what the latest research is showing about how phones intrude into kids' lives, they might not be that atypical.

Jacob is autistic and did not glide easily into middle- and high-school social dynamics. It was always just much easier for them to have fun with friends online.

But I have been pretty typical as a parent, trying to figure out what to enforce around phones. Jacob and their siblings were part of the guinea-pig generation, the first kids to get smartphones during puberty. And we, the parents, knew nothing. We had no wisdom to go by. We just watched as they dove in deeper and deeper and had no idea if this was excellent and fresh and creative, or totally ruinous.
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: When did you first get your cell phone?

Jacob Rosin: I remember waking up to look at my phone and look at the results of the 2016 election, so it was at least before then.

Hanna Rosin: Yeah, okay. How would you say it changed your-

Jacob Rosin: Over time, it absolutely made me feel more connected with social media and particularly Discord.

Hanna Rosin: Can you say more about that?

Jacob Rosin: I did not really feel like I had any real friends before that point, even though I allegedly did.

Hanna Rosin: Did you feel like you started to compare yourself to other people or anything like that?

Jacob Rosin: I've been doing that since I was born, baby.

Hanna Rosin: What does that mean? What do you mean?

Jacob Rosin: I don't know if the internet ever brought that habit. I think it's just a habit. Maybe it started to be negative when metrics got involved.

Hanna Rosin: What do you mean?

Jacob Rosin: Well, if I do something funny, that I think is funny, on Twitter.com and only get one like for it, or it's whatever-you know what I mean.

Hanna Rosin: Right. Like in school, it's vague: who likes you, who sits next to you, or whatever. But then on social media, it's really specific.

Jacob Rosin: In school, I'm not even paying attention to that stuff.

Hanna Rosin: Mm-hmm. But on social media, you are.

Jacob Rosin: Yeah.

Hanna Rosin: In 2017, about a year after Jacob got their first phone, The Atlantic published the story, "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?"

Destroyed. That is a big word. I don't know many parents who look at their kid and think, You're destroyed. But now, in 2024, the question of "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" is less of a question and more of a: Yeah, actually, they probably did.

Jonathan Haidt: All right, is Hannah on already?

Hanna Rosin: Hey, it's me. Hi, it's Hanna. I'm sorry-it's "Hanna Rosin." It could be "Hannah Rozin," but it's not.

Haidt: Yeah, I know. And I'm Jon Haidt. It's often "Jon Hate."

Hanna Rosin: So I talked to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

Hanna Rosin: Oh, Jon Haidt. I've been calling you "Jon Hate."

Haidt: As half the world does.

Hanna Rosin: Haidt has a new book called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Like a lot of parents, I keep up with the research. And for the sake of household peace, I would like to dismiss all this stuff about teens and smartphones as alarmist. But Haidt's book compiles some pretty compelling data.

Hanna Rosin: The way I understand your research over the last 10 to15 years is you have been trying to counter the argument of alarmism with extremely specific data. I mean that is how I understand the point of this book.

Haidt: Exactly. Sometimes it is correct to be alarmed and, as a professor and social scientist, I want to make damn sure that if I'm going to tell people they should be alarmed, I better be right and I better be able to back it up.

Hanna Rosin: One of the big things that Haidt looked at was data from a national survey called, Monitoring the Future. It's a wide-ranging survey that dates back to the '70s, and it asks eighth, 10th, and 12th graders a bunch of questions-everything from what they think of the government to their attitudes toward drug and alcohol use.

But what Haidt was most interested in were questions tracking mental health. In the survey, students are given statements and then agree or disagree with them on a scale of 1 to 5.

Haidt: On Monitoring the Future, there's some really sad items about meaninglessness, hopelessness, like: I often feel that my life is meaningless or I feel that my life has no purpose.

Hanna Rosin: Or I'm feeling lonely and socially isolated at school. I mean, they're in a language that is relatable. That's why I wanted to talk about them. It's sentences that a teenager could relate to.

Haidt: That's right. So if you plot with the year on the x-axis going back to the '90s or sometimes the '70s, and then you plot a bunch of lines, then what you see is the numbers-the lines-bounce around. A number of them, they really do go down a bit. Down is good. Down is like, I don't agree with that. I don't feel depressed.

Hanna Rosin: Fewer people say that, or fewer people agree with those depressing statements.

Haidt: That's right. And this is also a period when suicide rates are dropping. Gen X had the highest suicide rates in history. For whatever reason, the Millennials are actually doing better than Gen X, and that's very clear when you look at the '90s and the 2000s. So you get flat lines, or you get lines sloping down. And if you cut off your data collection after 2010, no hint of a problem.

Now, in 2010, teens are just beginning to get iPhones. But what's remarkable to me is that the mental-health data doesn't get worse slowly. The mental-health data is fine in the 2000s. And then all of a sudden-right around 2012-2013-everything falls off a cliff.

Hanna Rosin: I just want to track the timeline, because these are such short periods that people are thinking in their head, Okay, what happened then? What happened then? So 2012 is the wide acceptance of cell phones? Because it's not when smartphones came around.

Haidt: The iPhone comes out in 2007, but it's just amazing in that it's a digital Swiss Army knife, and there were no apps other than the ones that came with it. And then the next year we get the app store, and then we get notifications.

So it's not until 2010-2011 that you have this thing in your pocket, which is not a digital Swiss Army knife that you pull out when you need something. It is now a portal that millions-millions-of companies now can use to get to you, as a child. Without your parents' permission or knowledge, they can get to you. They can send you notifications. They can try to get you to stop your homework and: Come-look at what someone just said about you.

So it's in the 2010s that the phone becomes a master rather than a servant. 2010 is also when Instagram is available for public use. 2010 is also when the front-facing camera is put on. Also, high-speed internet: By 2012-2013, most people do have high-speed internet.

So the point is: Between 2010-when phones weren't toxic, people weren't on Instagram, most people didn't have high-speed data-2010 things were fine. By 2015, everything's different.
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: For example, what happens if you're a kid and you make a mistake? Haidt admits that childhood wasn't perfect before the invention of the smartphone-obviously the smartphone didn't invent bullying-but now the act of growing up, and everything that comes with it, is on display for thousands and possibly millions to see, including your mistakes.

Haidt: There's a huge difference between practicing all these things on a small stage-not a stage. Let's say in a small group where mistakes are not very costly. So you say something stupid, and then your friend is mad at you, and then maybe she gives you the cold shoulder. Maybe she even starts a rumor about you. So that's the way it always was. That's very painful, but it's still relatively low stakes.

What happens when now it's on a stage, where if you say anything wrong or you anger anyone, she can find an ugly photo of you-maybe she can find a nude photo that you swapped with some boy-and now she can put it out there for the world to see, and thousands of people comment on it. It might even get into the newspapers or something like that.

This is a level of shame and humiliation that no teenager can stand, and this, I think, is one of the reasons why the suicide rate is up. Because when you are being publicly shamed on a big stage, life is a living hell and death is an escape.

Hanna Rosin: But we don't actually know how many suicides are related to social-media shaming, just to be clear.

Haidt: No, no, that's right because thankfully suicide is still very, very rare. But what we can say is that it's up for all groups of teenagers. It's way, way up for preteen girls. They have very low rates to begin with, but their rates have tripled since before 2010. So it's way up. And even if it's anecdotal-that is, even if because so few kids killed themselves. But you know, we saw all those parents at the Senate hearings.

Hanna Rosin: Parents who are against Meta because-

Haidt: Because their kids are dead, yeah. They saw it happen. They can see what happened. The kid was, you know, was bullied, shamed, sextorted. She was on webpages promoting self-harm and suicide. Are they all wrong? I don't think so.
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: After the break, Haidt offers some solutions for what we should do-we the schools, we the government, and we the parents-about the smartphone problem.

After which, I ask Jacob if they wish they'd never had a cell phone.
[Break]
Hanna Rosin: It's the early 2010s, and according to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, this is around the time that teen mental health starts tanking. Haidt believes that the uptick in depression, anxiety, and self-harm in young people-it all got really bad when the first teenage girl moved her life online: She downloaded Instagram, posted on Tumblr, and started checking obsessively for comments and likes.

Haidt: And some of her friends did, too, so that now their consciousness, their focus was hours a day on their phones and was happening in the virtual world. That's when the problems start. That's the great rewiring of childhood. You get much less eye contact, social contact. It all goes through the screen.

Hanna Rosin: Okay, so the key factor here that shifted is real-time socialization: eye contact, social cues, laughter, navigating the real-time reactions of people. That's what you're saying is the key difference? It's being real time in person with your peers.

Haidt: Yes, there are about 15 different causal pathways. There are many ways that the phone-based life is harming boys and girls, but if I had to pick one, that would be the one.

You know, here I am. I'm a 60-year-old man talking about, you know, Kids these days. You'd think that I'm wrong, right? You'd think, What do I know? You'd think that with all the talk about, you know, Let's raise the age to 16. Let's not let kids have smartphones 'til 14-these are the things I say-you'd think that somewhere on planet Earth, there would be a young person who would write an essay saying, This is wrong. I can't find that person. I found one essay from a woman in Canada that kind of defended it. That's it.

Hanna Rosin: Wait-just one question. There are plenty of teenagers who would say, The phone opened up whole new worlds to me that were not available to me before.

Haidt: Sure, for individuals, they might say that about themselves, but find me any kind of movement or even any individual who is arguing, No, grownups, you don't understand. Don't take away our social media. Don't stop 11-year-olds from being on it. Middle-school kids should have access. I can't find that now.

Maybe there's a TikTok video somewhere where they do that. But each generation, you know, if you try to raise the drinking age, at some point, I bet somebody wrote something saying, No, don't raise the drinking age. So my point is: Don't just listen to the correlational data. Don't just listen to the experimental data, which we haven't even talked about. Don't just listen to the parents. Don't just listen to the teachers, all of whom are speaking with almost one voice: This is messing up our kids.

Talk to the kids. And what you find is, while many will say that they enjoy the social connections on Instagram or TikTok-they'll say they enjoy it-but they don't say, And it's good for us overall.

Hanna Rosin: To me, it's a little complicated. I have a child who would say they were addicted but also would say that online is where they found their friends and where they found people who shared their interests, and that's something they couldn't do in real life. And I find it hard to very simply say it's all terrible, because I also see the ways in which it's rewired childhood in a way that I can't personally access, because I don't have a lot of friends that I just know online, but in a way that's also real.

Haidt: That's right. It greatly increases the quantity of social interactions. That's true. And it greatly decreases their quality. But here's the thing: If you were right-that it's opening up all these possible social relationships, that it's doing all this good-if you were right, then loneliness should have gone down in the 2010s, and it didn't. It goes up like a hockey stick.

Hanna Rosin: Right. And I suppose you could have some kids for whom that's true, but the vast majority of kids are not true.

Haidt: Yep, exactly.

Hanna Rosin: So the last section I want to talk about is solutions.

Haidt: Yes.

Hanna Rosin: I think part of the reason that people resist your argument or want to think of it as alarmist is because the solution seems completely out of reach. If I'm a teenager-

Haidt: No, it's easy.

Hanna Rosin: ( Laughs.) It's not easy. I mean, if I'm a teenager, I'm listening to this, I'm thinking, This is culture. This is the world we live in. These companies are bigger than I am. The social culture is bigger than I am. The emotional culture is bigger than I am. There aren't any particular government regulations on any of this. All my friends are here. So for you to tell me, "Okay, go back and play in the woods," it's like: with who and when? That just seems like a nonstarter.

Haidt: Okay. Hanna, I have been involved since college in many efforts to bring about social change. I ran a gun-control group in Connecticut in the '80s. That was hard. To change people's minds is really hard.

You know what's easy? Walking into a situation where most people want to change, they don't like what's happening, they just need a coordination device, they just need an escape path out of a collective-action problem. And then I can come along, and I can say, Here's your path. Let's just do it. Let's do it at the same time. And then it's easy. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but compared to other kinds of social change, this one we can solve in the next year or two.

So here's how we do it: The reason why so many of us give our kids a smartphone in sixth grade is because she comes to us and says, Dad, everyone else has a smartphone. I'm being left out. That's a collective-action problem. So what I'm proposing in the book is four norms, and it won't solve it entirely, but it'll roll it back most of the way. Four norms.

The first norm: No smartphone until high school. Let's clear this all out of middle school. Middle-school kids desperately need a more old-fashioned childhood, where they have a few close friends, and they talk and they gossip and they do other things face-to-face.

Hanna Rosin: So this is a parental culture. You can't legislate that.

Haidt: No, that's right.

Hanna Rosin: You're saying change your parental culture.

Haidt: Yep, that's right. So that's the first one. The second norm: No social media 'til 16. These platforms are just completely inappropriate. Kids should not be growing up on a stage.

Hanna Rosin: Have you tried that experiment?

Haidt: Yeah. Well, yes. I told my kids no social media in middle school, and my son finally opened his own Instagram account without telling me in 10th grade. But he'd proven himself so responsible. And he was on the track team, which is great, and so they needed to communicate, and he was already at that time, whatever, 14, 15. So I said, Okay. That's okay. But for my daughter, I've said absolutely not-no to Instagram or to Snapchat.

Hanna Rosin: Until what age?

Haidt: Well, for now, I've said 16, and I'm hopeful that this norm-so I have to publicize the book really quickly. She's now 14, so I better get this norm changed next year so that she'll be able to put up with it. But anyway-

Hanna Rosin: And do you know that she's not? I mean, the "anyway" is the difficult part. I feel like once you get into the weeds, this is what happens. You will forbid a kid. They can start an Instagram account under any name that you would have no idea about.

Haidt: She watches TikTok on a web browser. She doesn't have it on her phone, but we don't need perfect here. What we need is to break the norm. We need to break the pattern where, in every free moment, the phone comes out, and TikTok and Instagram go up. That's what we have to stop.

Third norm is phone-free schools. There is nothing good that comes from kids having the greatest distraction device ever built in their pockets during class.

And then the fourth norm is more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. If you're going to take away the phone-based childhood, if you're going to greatly cut back on screen usage, we can't just let them look at the wall. We can't just say, Well, go read a book. Go learn to make canoes, or something. We have to give them back each other. That's what they really want. That's where they thrive, is when they can play and hang out with other kids without adults telling them what to do.

So those are the four norms: No smartphone 'til high school. No social media 'til 16. Phone-free schools. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.
[Typing]
Hanna Rosin: So the reason I'm asking all these questions is because there is this book coming out, called The Anxious Generation. And its argument is that-this is what he writes: "It's as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children." And the argument is that rates of depression, mental-health issues, all kinds of things just skyrocketed. You know, kids became less able to-

Jacob Rosin: I mean, have you paid attention to the world lately?

Hanna Rosin: What do you mean?

Jacob Rosin: Everything sucks. I don't think that social media is the cause of that, but social media definitely made people more aware of that. And it was going to start happening no matter what we did about it. I don't know about the phones.

Hanna Rosin: And do you think that-I look back and think, Should we have put more restrictions? We tried one time, and it was, you know, warfare, but should we have tried harder?

Jacob Rosin: Well, what kind of restrictions do you mean by that?

Hanna Rosin: Forced you to not have your phone at night, you know, put your-

Jacob Rosin: Realistically, yeah, that probably would have helped at some point, but it's too late now.

Hanna Rosin: Oh God, I feel so bad. So how do you think your life would have been different if you didn't have a phone?

Jacob Rosin: I think I would have been a lot unhappier, generally.

Hanna Rosin: A lot un happier.

Jacob Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Hanna Rosin: Yeah. The story that it sounds like you tell about your life and social media is: I got my phone. It gave me a pathway to socializing and social connection. That pathway is addictive, but it's less lonely because at least I had a pathway to socializing.

Jacob Rosin: Pretty much.

Hanna Rosin: Can I propose an alternative story, and you just tell me what you think?

Jacob Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Hanna Rosin: What if there's a story that you never got a cell phone? You were lonely and, at some point, you just would have had to socialize?

Jacob Rosin: I don't think that's true. I do not think I would have been pushed into it by necessity.

Hanna Rosin: Because that's what always-like, as a parent, honestly, that's what haunts me a little bit. I remember when you came back from camp. Remember that camp that you hated?

Jacob Rosin: Yeah.

Hanna Rosin: I remember picking you up from that camp. Where was it? In North Carolina or something?

Jacob Rosin: Yeah.

Hanna Rosin: Anyway, so we picked you up from that camp, and that camp did not allow phones, so you didn't have your phone for a month.

Jacob Rosin: Yes, I did not.

Hanna Rosin: And you definitely wrote letters of misery from camp-like, summer camp, I-hate-this-place kind of letters. But you were so chatty when we picked you up because you had not had your phone for a month. And I know you hated that place, but I think about that all the time. Like, What if we had just done some experiment of Jacob can't have a phone for a long time? Would you have been forced to socialize more?

Jacob Rosin: I don't know how much I would actually follow through. But I might. I don't know.

Hanna Rosin: You don't know?

Jacob Rosin: There's no way to find out now.

Hanna Rosin: I mean, my purpose in talking to you is: There is this book. It's written by grownups. It's written by grownups who grew up after the internet age about teenagers. And I'm torn because part of me thinks, like, I ruined Jacob's life by not taking their phone away more. And part of me thinks, These grownups don't understand kids, and there's something we're all missing about this experience.

Jacob Rosin: I would not at all say you ruined my life by doing that. I actually feel like I only got to live my life because of my phone.

Hanna Rosin: Oh.

Jacob Rosin: And yeah, that probably sounds a little depressing, but I think there might be an assumption among people who say stuff like this that everyone who's on the phone is using it to replace real human interaction. I totally disagree with that. Everything on the phone is real human interaction. Well, most things. There are things that are not.

Hanna Rosin: And how typical do you think your experience is?

Jacob Rosin: Very not typical.

Hanna Rosin: Oh, very not typical. Okay. But you don't think I ruined your life then?

Jacob Rosin: No. No.

Hanna Rosin: Thank you. Thank you for saying that.
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: What are you gonna do just now, get back online?

Jacob Rosin: Honestly, yeah. I probably will.

Hanna Rosin: Okay. Okay, that's fine.

Jacob Rosin: I'll stop the recording. Actually, maybe I'll just go watch videos. I don't know.

Hanna Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Andrea Valdez, fact-checked by Sam Fentress, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Parents who are listening: Please share with us creative strategies you've come up with to limit cellphone use without causing domestic warfare. I'll give you mine: When Jacob was younger, instead of saying, say, Half an hour of screen time, Jacob, I would ask them when they thought they would be done with their video game or conversation. So it might be like 36 minutes or 27 minutes, and that way, they could finish out the game or the conversation, and the endpoint would feel more natural to them. If you have one, send it to radioatlantic@theatlantic.com, and we will share our favorites.

Kids who are listening: If you have creative ideas, please share them, too.

Thank you, Jacob, for playing along. I'm Hanna Rosin. And thank the rest of you for listening.

Hanna Rosin: Okay. All right. Great. All right, love you. I'll talk to you later.

Jacob Rosin: Bye.

Hanna Rosin: Bye.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jonathan Haidt's new book, The Anxious Generation , makes the case against devices for children-even if they desperately want them.

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Review of his book by The Atlantic

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The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

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Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you've likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States-fairly stable in the 2000s-rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.
Read: It sure looks like phones are making students dumber
As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley's preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. "Something has really gone wrong," Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly--if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations--then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

Number of emergency-department visits for nonfatal self-harm per 100,000 children (source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online-particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity-all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents' smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.
Jonathan Haidt: Get phones out of schools now
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But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood--including adolescence--and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There's an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

1. The Decline of Play and Independence

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhoods are extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child's brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills-physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.

Brain development is sometimes said to be "experience-expectant," because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal's brain can "expect" to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it's hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel "American" in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn't arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn't come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they'll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions-flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail-often-in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.
From the April 2014 issue: The overprotected kid
Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities--play, exploration, and intense socializing--were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

But overprotection is only part of the story. The transition away from a more independent childhood was facilitated by steady improvements in digital technology, which made it easier and more inviting for young people to spend a lot more time at home, indoors, and alone in their rooms. Eventually, tech companies got access to children 24/7. They developed exciting virtual activities, engineered for "engagement," that are nothing like the real-world experiences young brains evolved to expect.

2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves

The internet, which now dominates the lives of young people, arrived in two waves of linked technologies. The first one did little harm to Millennials. The second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn't hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn't access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult--they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

3. Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

The phone-based childhood created by that second wave-including not just smartphones themselves, but all manner of internet-connected devices, such as tablets, laptops, video-game consoles, and smartwatches-arrived near the end of a period of enormous optimism about digital technology. The internet came into our lives in the mid-1990s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of that decade, it was widely thought that the web would be an ally of democracy and a slayer of tyrants. When people are connected to each other, and to all the information in the world, how could any dictator keep them down?

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn't sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns, even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet's ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people--widely referred to as "digital natives"--were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, "The cost of a thing is the amount of ... life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." It's an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice-all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you've committed them to something else. So it's important that we grasp just how much of a young person's day is now taken up by their devices.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average. The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

These very high numbers do not include time spent in front of screens for school or homework, nor do they include all the time adolescents spend paying only partial attention to events in the real world while thinking about what they're missing on social media or waiting for their phones to ping. Pew reports that in 2022, one-third of teens said they were on one of the major social-media sites "almost constantly," and nearly half said the same of the internet in general. For these heavy users, nearly every waking hour is an hour absorbed, in full or in part, by their devices.

In Thoreau's terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent's day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of "friends," "followers," and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It's also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it's a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they're used to scroll through social media. Exercise declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010 s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people's time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.
Read: What happens when kids don't see their peers for months
You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn't much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn't that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features-typical for hundreds of thousands of years-that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that's what getting "in sync" does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender's motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one's reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.
From the September 2015 issue: The coddling of the American mind
These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their "experience expectant" brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call "discover mode" or "defend mode" at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people's internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people's internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

Percentage of U.S. college freshmen reporting various kinds of disabilities and disorders (source: Higher Education Research Institute)

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting "safe spaces" and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to "microaggressions" and sometimes claimed that words were "violence." These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

The debate around adolescents' use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyond mental health. I've touched on some of them-social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. Here are three additional harms.

Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They're certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it's easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly- one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

Addiction and Social Withdrawal

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn't have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. " Internet gaming disorder," which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes "significant impairment or distress" in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement "I am addicted to pornography"-and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called "problematic social media use," which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of "problematic use" are higher for girls.
Jonathan Haidt: The dangerous experiment on teen girls
I don't want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that's when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad--a process that plays out over many generations--young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why v ideos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden's thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn't add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today.

Percentage of U.S. high-school seniors who agreed with the statement "Life often seems meaningless." (Source: Monitoring the Future)

Durkheim's observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as "Life often feels meaningless." But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt "meaningless" increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

6. Young People Don't Like Their Phone-Based Lives

How can I be confident that the epidemic of adolescent mental illness was kicked off by the arrival of the phone-based childhood? Skeptics point to other events as possible culprits, including the 2008 global financial crisis, global warming, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting and the subsequent active-shooter drills, rising academic pressures, and the opioid epidemic. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I've looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: "It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it." She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn't just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, writes,

The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop-desperate to forget the gaping holes they're bleeding out of, even if just for ... 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they're so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier.

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life-a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn't spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: "Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens," an internal document said. "This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups."

How can it be that an entire generation is hooked on consumer products that so few praise and so many ultimately regret using? Because smartphones and especially social media have put members of Gen Z and their parents into a series of collective-action traps. Once you understand the dynamics of these traps, the escape routes become clear.

7. Collective-Action Problems

Social-media companies such as Meta, TikTok, and Snap are often compared to tobacco companies, but that's not really fair to the tobacco industry. It's true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there's a big difference: Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.
From the May 2022 issue: Jonathan Haidt on why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they'd need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That's a standard economist's question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they'd need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, "Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?" A majority of students said yes--58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It's what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

8. Four Norms to Break Four Traps

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because "everyone else" has one, and many parents give in because they don't want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone-or even if, say, only half of the child's sixth-grade class had one-parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study, these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

No social media before 16

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that's where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube-only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren't supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes--times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students' minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes "good parenting." And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility--for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others--then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don't replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

9. What Are We Waiting For?

An essential function of government is to solve collective-action problems. Congress could solve or help solve the ones I've highlighted-for instance, by raising the age of "internet adulthood" to 16 and requiring tech companies to keep underage children off their sites.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we're going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.
Read: Why Congress keeps failing to protect kids online
There are now hundreds of organizations--most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children--that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org, suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students--with their parents' consent--choose something to do on their own that they've never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Even without the help of organizations, parents could break their families out of collective-action traps if they coordinated with the parents of their children's friends. Together they could create common smartphone rules and organize unsupervised play sessions or encourage hangouts at a home, park, or shopping mall.

Parents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children's attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

The four norms I have proposed cost almost nothing to implement, they cause no clear harm to anyone, and while they could be supported by new legislation, they can be instilled even without it. We can begin implementing all of them right away, this year, especially in communities with good cooperation between schools and parents. A single memo from a principal asking parents to delay smartphones and social media, in support of the school's effort to improve mental health by going phone free, would catalyze collective action and reset the community's norms.

We didn't know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It's time to end the phone-based childhood.
This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt's forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

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Students at a middle school in Beverly Hills, California, used artificial intelligence technology to create fake nude photos of their classmates, according to school administrators. Now, the community is grappling with the fallout.

School officials at Beverly Vista Middle School were made aware of the "AI-generated nude photos" of students last week, the district superintendent said in a letter to parents. The superintendent told NBC News the photos included students' faces superimposed onto nude bodies. The district did not share how it determined the photos were produced with artificial intelligence.

"It's very scary, because people can't feel safe to, you know, come to school," a student at Beverly Vista Middle School who did not want to be identified told NBC Los Angeles. "They're scared that people will show off, like, explicit photos."

Beverly Hills Police Lt. Andrew Myers told NBC News that police responded to a call from the Beverly Hills Unified School District late last week and took a report about the incident. A noncriminal investigation is underway, Myers said. Because the investigation involves juveniles, Myers said, no further information can be shared.

The Beverly Hills case follows a series of similar incidents involving students' creating and sharing AI-generated nude photos of their female classmates at high schools around the world. A New Jersey teen victim spoke about her experience in January in front of federal lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to advocate for a federal law criminalizing all nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes. No such federal law exists.

In a letter to parents obtained by NBC News, Beverly Hills Unified School District Superintendent Michael Bregy characterized the deepfake incident as part of "a disturbing and unethical use of AI plaguing the nation."

"We strongly urge Congress as well as federal and state governments to take immediate and decisive action to protect our children from the potential dangers of unregulated AI technology," Bregy wrote. "We call for the passing of legislation and enforcement of laws that not only punish perpetrators to deter future acts but also strictly regulate evolving AI technology to prevent misuse."

Bregy told NBC News that the school district would punish the student perpetrators in accordance with the district's policies. For now, he said, those students have been removed from the school pending the results of the district's investigation. Then, Bregy said, student perpetrators will be punished with anything from suspension to expulsion, depending on their level of involvement in creating and disseminating the images. Outside the district, however, the path to recourse for student victims is less clear.

In 2020, California passed a law that allows victims of nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes to sue the people who created and distributed the material. A plaintiff can recover up to $150,000 in damages if the perpetrator is found to have committed the act with malice. It's not clear whether damages have ever been awarded under the law.

The president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, Mary Anne Franks, a professor at George Washington University Law School, said California's laws still do not clearly prohibit what happened at Beverly Vista Middle School - based on the information that is available about the incident. Not all nude depictions of children are legally considered pornographic, so without more information about what the photos depict, their legality is unclear.

"The civil action in California could potentially apply here, but it's always difficult for victims to identify who the perpetrators are, get the legal assistance they need and then actually pursue the case," Franks said.

"It's hard to think about what justice would be for the students," she continued. "The problem with image-based abuse is once the material is created and out there, even if you punish the people who created them, these images could be circulating forever."

The technology to create fake nude images has rapidly become more sophisticated and accessible over the past several years, and high-profile incidents of celebrity deepfakes - like ones of Taylor Swift that went viral in January - have brought even more attention to consumer apps that allow users to swap victim's faces into pornographic content and "undress" photos.

In deepfake sexual abuse cases involving underage perpetrators and victims, the laws have not always been applied.

The digital news outlet 404 Media investigated a case last year involving a high school in Washington state, where police documentation revealed that high school administrators did not report students making AI-generated nude photos from their classmates' Instagram photos. The incident was a possible sex crime against children, the Washington police report said, but administrators tried to handle the situation internally before multiple parents filed police reports. After police investigated, a prosecutor declined to press charges.

"My hope is that legislators start realizing that while civil penalties may be useful for certain victims, it's only going to be a partial solution," Franks said. "What we should be focusing on are deterrents. This is unacceptable behavior and should be punished accordingly."

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A Beverly Hills middle school is investigating AI-made nude photos of students

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The Beverly Hills Police Department said a report was taken at the California school late last week, and an investigation is underway.

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Making sure that you call every student to account, regardless of the issues those individuals might be facing, is the cornerstone of good behaviour management.

That's according to behaviour consultant, university lecturer and author, Bill Rogers.

Teachers need to be leaders of responsible behaviour, he explains, and to consciously craft the language they use in the classroom to that effect. Taking an approach that aims to "appease" students, or to make the teacher "liked", he adds, simply won't work.

"You can't only rely on the goodwill that you bring to these students to address their behaviour," Rogers says.

Some will disagree with his take on things, but Rogers' approach has been honed through extensive experience of working in education.

Over several decades - he initially worked as a teacher and then a behaviour consultant for the Victorian Department of Education in Australia, before moving into private consultancy - he has become a go-to name for teachers looking to get to grips with behaviour, via his hugely popular books, including Classroom Behaviour: a practical guide to effective teaching, behaviour management and colleague support, which is now in its fourth edition and has been translated into several languages.

Rogers' work has taken him to schools around the world, where he team-teaches and coaches staff, as well as lecturing on behaviour management, discipline, effective teaching and teacher welfare.

Bill Rogers on behaviour management

We caught up with him to hear his latest thoughts on behaviour in schools, how it has changed since the pandemic and the pitfalls that he commonly sees in classrooms.
Lots of schools have said that student behaviour has been considerably worse since the Covid pandemic and the long periods of lockdown. Has this been your experience?
I think that's been somewhat overrated. The pandemic has had an effect on children's understanding of - and relationship with - school in their normal schooling journey, but I think with the distance we've travelled now, we don't need to keep harping on about that, as if somehow that's a major block to their ongoing learning.

If we do, we're reinforcing the worst and effectively saying that these children are now the victims of something that was unfair and difficult and traumatic, which it was. It was traumatic. But I think we're a long way past that and if we keep returning to it, we're getting into a form of victimisation, suggesting to these kids that they can't help behaving in distracting and disruptive ways as learners, and socially, because of Covid.

Children know how school works and what it means to be a learner with 25 others in a classroom, and for most year groups, they knew enough about that pre-Covid for that memory to be rebuilt reasonably quickly. And I do say reasonably quickly, not straight away, but over several months. So to keep returning to it now is only to invest another form of unhelpful and unnecessary victimisation on the child.
What are the main issues you're seeing at the moment in schools around behaviour?
I think my main concern in addressing behaviour is the rise of an approach to leadership in the classroom that's more inclined to appease students rather than lead them in their behaviour. I'm coming across a number of younger teachers who find it difficult to appropriately lead for behaviour or even correct for behaviour, although I prefer the word "lead".

So, if students are chatting or calling out or butting in while the teacher tries to settle the class, they'll be saying things like, "Guys, come on, please. You know you're supposed to be listening now, don't you?" They're using a more appeasing, questioning approach, instead of using thoughtful, respectful behaviour leadership language to raise students' awareness of how they are behaving.
Read more:
For example, if a couple of students are chatting while one of my colleagues or I am trying to settle a class, we would say, "Some of you are still chatting over here," and then make eye contact.

Said respectfully and with appropriate confidence this raises the "behaviour awareness" of the students. Then we follow with a behaviour direction: "You need to be facing this way and listening, without chatting. Thanks."

We finish with a brief "thank you", rather than a "please", because we're not making a request.

Of course, this relies on the teacher having already established sensible, age-appropriate classroom routines and rules, based on core rights and responsibilities: the right to a safe environment at school; the right to be treated, fairly and respectfully; and the right to learn without undue distraction or disruption.
What do you think is happening that's leading some teachers to take less helpful approaches to behaviour?
Some of the emphasis I'm seeing with younger teachers is that they want to be accepted and liked, rather than leading for behaviour and learning. They start with wanting to have a positive relationship with students, which is an important aim, but we build that through the quality of our teacher leadership and the quality of our teaching, both of which are professional obligations.

I'm very conscious of young teachers not taking the time to think about crafting their language for behaviour leadership, whether it's settling a class down or dealing with acting up. This kind of diffident connectedness with the students is based in, I think, a misunderstanding of how we ought to relate to young people as the teacher leader. We are the adult in the room, who is responsible for the learning opportunities of our students.

I won't even say "good morning" to the class until they've settled down. Some teachers go into quite raucous classrooms and start by raising their voice, not in a nasty way but in an almost pleading way. It will not be helpful to say "good morning" to a class until they've returned to the teacher the respectful calmness they're seeking to communicate to them. And only when the class has settled should the teacher say, "Thank you everyone, you're settled now. Good morning. Let's start."
What would you say to teachers who find themselves in that mode with their students?
We need to craft our behaviour leadership language as carefully and thoughtfully as we would any other aspect of our teaching.

My colleagues and I do a lot of work with beginning teachers, and sometimes even more experienced teachers, to think about that language of behaviour leadership and what it seeks to do. The primary aim is to raise students' behaviour awareness and then cue them to own their behaviour.

For example, when we use behaviour leadership language, we avoid unnecessary use of "don't" or "why". We wouldn't say "why are you calling out?" or "why are you talking when I'm trying to teach?" because we are not looking for reasons why a student is being distracting, at this point.

We're also not trying to be overly negative by saying things like "don't call out", and "don't swing on your chair", as this only tells students what we don't want them to do.

Instead, by giving cues that raise awareness, followed by directional and reminder cues, we are more likely to get students to take ownership of their behaviour.

We need to be conscious about crafting behaviour leadership language so that when we're under pressure, we're not left merely to goodwill. By crafting our language, we will be more able to lead for behaviour and get back to the core business of teaching and learning.
And when incidents do occur, what's your approach to restorative behaviour conversations?
We do a lot of work on following up with students one-to-one and working through a restorative conversation. But that doesn't mean restorative conversations at the cost of not calling the student to account for their behaviour. A restorative conversation is not a restorative conversation if it does not acknowledge what the student has been doing that's distracting, disruptive or worse. It needs to lead them to be aware of the impact of their behaviour and of the possibility of a restorative outcome.

Again, we do a lot of work on crafting our language so that those restorative conversations meet our responsibility to call the student to account - for example, when they were being highly distracting in the classroom - and working with them to call them back from that to their responsibility, with our support. Our role is not to hold grudges with our students but to work with them so that next time we're in the classroom, they'll be aware of their behaviour, and always aware of our support.
Where students are having difficulties outside of the classroom that may be having an impact on their behaviour, how should teachers respond?
In most schools in Britain, Australia and America, the statistics range from about 5 to 10 per cent of students designated as "at-risk", in terms of behaviour that is significantly affecting their learning and social relationships. That may arise from family trauma; some of those children go back to deeply disturbing family situations and school is the one safe and secure place in their lives, thank goodness.

School is one of the key places in any community. It's not just a school; for some students, it's a place where they can come and feel safe, have sane adults around them and feel emotionally and psychologically secure. Schools need to work to support at-risk students who have trauma, or have been diagnosed with behaviour disorders or have emotional issues that are related to those complex issues, or to neurodiversity. The question is, how do we support them in a way that doesn't deny the need to still call them to account for their behaviour?

"We have to address the behaviour, no matter how difficult the situation is at home"

If you're working with a young person who is in an asylum seeker situation, for example, who has possibly been in unimaginable situations, when they behave in a way that is highly disruptive or aggressive in the classroom or the playground, how do we deal with that student with an awareness of their causative pathology, yet still call them to account for their behaviour? Because ultimately, we have to address the behaviour, no matter how difficult the situation is at home.

The worst thing you can do for at-risk children is to revictimise them when they come to school. If we effectively say, "You can't really help your behaviour, son. Your father's an excuse for a man, your mother's coping on medication and alcohol, there's no nutritious food in the family home and there's lots of screaming and shouting and guilt trips, so we can't help you behave yourself; we can't help you to be literate, numerate, socially engaged, and socially aware," we're not helping that student at all. So we need to work with the student at school to "devictimise" them and build their hopeful life chances.

The least helpful teachers are the ones who try to overprotect these children, even well-meaningly, by not giving them clear direction about their behaviour, as well as crucial affirmation and encouragement.
What do you say to those who would challenge that approach?
There are lots of people outside of our profession - like some academics and social commentators - who are unreflectively critical of schools in the way they work with children with trauma backgrounds, but the best research that I've read, and the best practice I've seen in schools who work with children with trauma, shows that we are are able to support these pupils with all sorts of programmes within the school and build links with people outside of school in terms of psychological and professional counselling (although I appreciate that support is thin on the ground) while at the same time still calling them to account for their behaviour and enabling appropriate behaviour support at school.

And that applies even to autistic children, or those with other special educational needs. Because it is a teacher - not a psychologist, or an academic, or a social commentator - who has to deal with that student's behaviour in the public domain of a classroom of 25 or so students. And they can't teach every child if there are four or five children disrupting the class.

If you imagine 25 children in the classroom and you've got a child running around, mainly for attention, notwithstanding a diagnosed or symptomatic behaviour disorder, you can't treat him uniquely at that point. You have to deal with his behaviour. That is the point. No matter how difficult the home life is, once he comes to school, and his behaviour is significantly affecting the rights of others, we can't treat him uniquely; we can't start a counselling session in the classroom. We can do those things outside of class, however, and we should do. But we're also going to teach him how to behave in the school setting.

The best work being done in the literature - by good people, who are on the ground doing research - is helping children through programmes that teach them to be behaviourally aware and socially aware in relation to their behaviour, and teaching them how to behave through modelling and rehearsing the behaviours in a one-to-one context. The teacher, or a teaching assistant or a Sendco, will work with the child on a guided programme to teach them the academic and social behaviour skills they need back in the classroom.

The emphasis here is not primarily on a counselling model (although this approach supports that), but an educational model: teaching the student how to take charge of his behaviour, both cognitively and emotionally so that when he's back in the classroom, there's a much higher likelihood that he will be a more consciously aware learner, even on a restricted timetable or in a slightly different class structure. The student is also more aware of how his behaviour is affecting others.

The best practice builds on this, within a whole-school approach to behaviour leadership and
buttressed by significant colleague support. And that's the best work I'm seeing in schools.

A lot of these commentators just have no idea what it's like in a classroom. They make ill-informed comments about schools and, unfortunately, some make comments about teachers that are so significantly far from the reality of what they have to face, day after day, that their commentary becomes almost ludicrous.
Bill Rogers works regularly in the United Kingdom each year. He was talking to Zofia Niemtus, who is a freelance writer.

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Bill Rogers: Where we are going wrong on behaviour

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Rather than trying to be liked and accepted, teachers need to call every student to account, and craft their language to lead for better behaviour, says Bill Rogers

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The Artificial Human - Should I let my kids use AI for their homework? - BBC Sounds

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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LSE policy briefing - influences aimed at children

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LSE policy briefing - influences aimed at children

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What are influencers?

Influencers are people who have a large following on social media. The term 'influencer' comes from promoting products, behaviours and ideas to their followers.

There are influencers for every topic on the internet, from beauty bloggers, vloggers, gamers and more. Like celebrities, they provide entertainment, information, comfort, and inspiration for children.

Influencers can be good role models for children, encouraging habits such as inclusivity and good self-esteem. But, they can also have a negative effect, encouraging unsafe or unhealthy behaviours and views.

Some influencers are children themselves, often being more relatable to a young audience. But this can also put pressure on children who admire them to act in the same way, or try and achieve unrealistic goals.

For example, lots of influencers get gifted products in exchange for promoting brands. Children may feel they need to buy these products to keep up with a trend. This can lead to overspending, or worries about what others will think if they can't.

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Influencers are people who have a large following on social media. The term 'influencer' comes from promoting products, behaviours and ideas to their followers. There are influencers for every topic on the internet, from beauty bloggers, vloggers, gamers and more. Like celebrities, they provide entertainment, information, comfort, and inspiration for children.

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Eleven-year-old Lulu was once top of her class at a leading school in Xiangyang, a city in central China - but last year, her grades started to slip. Education is seen as the main gateway to social mobility in the country, and with a massive population vying for a limited number of places at top universities, the pressure to perform in school is intense. Following a clampdown on after-school tutors by the government, Lulu's mother, Yang Hongyi, opted for an alternative approach to raising her daughter's grades: She bought an artificial intelligence-powered educational tablet from iFlytek, priced at 8,999 yuan ($1,255). "No one wants their kid to fall behind so early in life," Yang told Rest of World.

Tech companies like iFlytek and Baidu are now part of a growing industry leveraging AI to build tablets designed for learning. The iFlytek T20 Pro - the model Yang bought for her daughter - looks like an iPad but runs a modified version of Android. The device's software is locked, which means children can't download games or use other forms of entertainment. Instead, it comes with an array of apps that leverage Xinghuo, iFlytek's large language model AI. These include a chatbot to converse with students in English, a gamified quiz tool to analyze test results, and OCR (optical character recognition) software that claims to be able to scan and grade handwritten essays like a teacher would.

Driven by this new wave of tablets touting AI capabilities, the market for educational devices in China is projected to be worth $20 billion in 2026, according to the research firm Frost & Sullivan. Personal educational devices, like portable dictionaries, have existed in China for decades, but AI hype is reviving the industry as tech companies jump in. Baidu, one of China's biggest tech companies, has a line of tablets built around its AI chatbot Ernie. Even livestream megastar Austin Li is now peddling educational tablets to parents on short-video app Douyin.

Another factor driving the demand for educational tablets is a government clampdown on tutoring. China's after-school educational system is an enormous business: 137 million students took some form of out-of-school class in 2016. In an attempt to alleviate the pressure that students and parents face, the government ordered a review of 124,000 offline and 263 online education firms, and revoked the licenses of 96% of offline businesses and 87.1% of online ones. But while the supply of tutors is decreasing, the demand for them is as high as ever. Chen Hengyi, a primary school teacher in Wuhan, told Rest of World that almost all of the above-average students in his class still receive tutoring. That demand is causing prices for tutors to shoot up, forcing some parents to turn to alternative solutions for additional education - like AI tablets.

A study carried out by the consultancy firm iResearch found that 56.3% of surveyed parents expect to spend 10%-30% of their education budget on smart learning devices in the future, while 15.7% would be willing to spend over 40%, as their spending on tutoring declines. IFlytek's business performance reflects the trend: According to the company's financial report in the second quarter of 2023, educational devices and services comprised 29.14% of its revenue, with a gross profit margin of 48.64%, making education the largest and most profitable among iFlytek's four listed service areas.

Terry Hong, a parent of two boys in the coastal province of Shandong, told Rest of World she bought two different educational tablets for each of her kids. "I got an iFlytek AI tablet for my oldest, who is top of his class, because iFlytek is better for test preparation. For my younger son, I bought a BBK AI tablet because it's better for younger kids who are struggling a bit," Hong said. Melody Liu, a Chinese parent in Japan, bought an iFlytek tablet during a trip home, aiming to immerse her two children - aged 7 and 5 years - in Chinese K-12 education. "Chinese students are always learning more advanced material at the same grade level compared to their global peers," Liu told Rest of World. "If they can keep up with the Chinese pace, schooling in Japan will be smooth sailing."

Cities like Yang's home of Xiangyang are at the center of this boom, with a sharp rise in shops dedicated to educational tablets: IFlytek claims it opened 768 stores in 2022, a 100% increase from 2021, and aims to expand rapidly in 2023. But a review of the company's listed store locations on its WeChat mini-program by Rest of World found only 1,103 stores - most of which were in smaller, less-developed cities. Many of these regions lack educational resources and have limited opportunities, forcing parents to look elsewhere for after-school education.

The AI tablets have filled a gap in China's education market, especially for parents in less-developed cities, who felt they were not competent enough to assist their children with school work and were less savvy about technology. "A well-marketed solution that targets [parents'] insecurities is very easy to sell," Rui Ma, a China tech analyst and founder of the Tech Buzz China podcast and newsletter, told Rest of World. "The iFlytek machine is just such a neatly quantifiable device that I think it's easy for them to make the investment."

Despite the hype surrounding AI, education professionals told Rest of World these tools can have a limited impact on enhancing academic performance. "These tablets don't offer much beyond resources already available online," said Kelly Zhang, an experienced tutor and former employee of AI education company Squirrel AI.

"While I do mostly enjoy the AI software, the content feels like it's made in a rush and lacks quality control."

"Many teenagers don't have the focus or self-motivation needed to make the most of these tablets," said Edward Wang, a former contractor at Gankao, a leading test-prep company that has launched its own educational tablet. Wang, who has had over six years of experience as a tutor, was commissioned by Gankao to create a comprehensive test-prepping content system, including video lectures and exams, for the tablet. "Our data indicates that most video classes have an under 20% open rate and an under 10% completion rate," he said.

Hong, the parent in Shandong, said her children have benefited from studying with the tablet, although an effective learning session requires her supervision. Yang complained that the feature to scan handwritten essays only worked about half of the time, and spotted other factual errors in the material given to her daughter. "While I do mostly enjoy the AI software, the content feels like it's made in a rush and lacks quality control," she said.

Purchases from public school systems could be another factor driving tablet sales. A considerable number of iFlytek tablets are bought by public schools, according to an iFlytek sales agent who preferred to remain anonymous because of concerns about his job security. Wang, the contractor, attributes iFlytek's success outside of retail largely to its strategic partnerships with local governments, which integrated the company's products like AI tablets, smart whiteboards, and AI grading systems in the public schools' daily operations. "IFlytek is not a company that can be defeated," he said.

Parents are sometimes pressured into purchasing these tablets by the school their children attend. Two parents interviewed by Rest of World claimed that teachers and school officials have pushed them to buy the tablet, by incorporating it in daily teaching. Despite the Chinese government's 2022 ban on the compulsory sale of educational devices in schools, such mandates have persisted under the radar. The anonymous iFlytek sales agent told Rest of World that some schools have circumvented direct sales by imposing a "subscription fee" for tablet use on parents, who are billed every semester.

IFlytek denied that the company was involved in any kind of partnership with public schools to force purchases on parents.

Hong has made rigid study plans for her sons involving the AI tablet. After coming home from primary school, the boys have dinner, complete homework, and then study math and English for an hour each before they proceed to bedtime reading. All the additional learning happens with the help of educational tablets, usually under their mother's supervision. "Both my boys are about one semester ahead of their school curriculum," Hong said, with much pride.

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Parents turn to AI tablets after China's tutor crackdown

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Tech companies iFlytek, Baidu, and BBK are cashing in on parents who fear their child will fall behind their peers.

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The problem of anti-feminist ‘manfluencer’ Andrew Tate in Australian schools: women teachers’ experiences of resurgent male supremacy

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The problem of anti-feminist ‘manfluencer’ Andrew Tate in Australian schools: women teachers’ experiences of resurgent male supremacy

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Lucy Faithfull Foundation Scotland (previously called Stop It Now! Scotland) provides support services to prevent and stop child sexual abuse that are tailored for Scotland.

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The Lucy Faithfull Foundation - Stop It Now

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn about the charity The Lucy Faithfull Foundation who created the Stop It Now! UK and Ireland helpline and campaign.

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Gen Z boys and men more likely than baby boomers to believe feminism harmful, says poll

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Fifth of men aged 16-29 look favourably on social media influencer Andrew Tate

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A 14-year-old girl who is believed to have killed herself was allegedly made fun of in a group chat by boys at her school, an inquest has heard.

Mia Janin, a year 10 pupil at the Jewish free school (JFS) in Kenton, north-west London, was found dead at her family home in Harrow on 12 March 2021.

Her father, Mariano Janin, has said he believes she was cyber-bullied by other pupils at JFS.

Mia's friends said in statements made to police after her death, and read out at Barnet coroner's court, that she was bullied by other pupils at the school and that their friendship group was nicknamed the "suicide squad" in the months leading up to her death.

One of Mia's TikToks was shared to a Snapchat group chat run by male pupils at JFS, where they made fun of her, the statement said.

One child said the boys used the group chat to share nude photos of girls. "They took screenshots of girls' faces on social media and made fun of them. They shared a video of Mia's TikTok and made fun of her," the child added.

The child said the boys also Photoshopped girls' faces on to the bodies of pornography performers. "They used girls faces on porn stars' bodies to upset us."

The child also said they had a conversation with Mia the day before she died and that Mia asked: "If you died would people care about you the next day?"

"We laughed it off, that was all she said, it was just in normal conversation," the child said.

Another child said the TikTok video had been posted by Mia the night before she returned to school after the end of Covid restrictions.

Police believe the TikTok was posted on 10 March, as she returned to school on 11 March.

The child said that Mia had received lots of negative comments on the video from other pupils at JFS. "Mia said she was fine, but I don't think that she was fine," she said.

Mia's father told the inquest his daughter asked if she could move school after coming home on 11 March.

The inquest heard that his wife, Marisa, who has since died, told Mia she could be homeschooled for the rest of the school year, and that they would look into moving her to a new school after. Mia then went to bed. Hours later, she was dead.

Area coroner Tony Murphy said there was no evidence that any images or videos involving Mia had been shared in the group chat, except for the TikTok.

The inquest heard that Rabbi Howard Cohen, former deputy headteacher at JFS, told the boys to close down the group after Mia's death. JFS's position is that the school was not aware of the existence of the group chat before Mia's death.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

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Schoolgirl, 14, found dead after alleged bullying by boys, London inquest hears

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Friends of Mia Janin, who is believed to have killed herself, told police male pupils made fun of her on Snapchat group

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Do Young Americans Support Hamas? Look at TikTok.

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The app is digital fentanyl made by China. And it is brainwashing our youth against the country and our allies, argues Rep. Mike Gallagher.

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Under cover of a shoplifting panic, the Tories are pushing through a shocking expansion of facial recognition | Akiko Hart

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This widespread use in shops would be a sudden and dramatic increase of government and police surveillance powers , writes Akiko Hart from Liberty

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Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families | Schools | The Guardian

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Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families | Schools | The Guardian

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Criminal justice and antiracist campaigners have raised concerns over an app being used by schools in Bristol to "monitor and profile" pupils and their families.

The app, which is being used by more than 100 schools, gives safeguarding leads quick, easy access to pupils' and their families' contacts with police, child protection and welfare services.

One of the concerns campaigners have is that the Think Family Education (TFE) app includes analysing which children could be at risk of exposure to criminality, which they argue risks leading to more discrimination against pupils from minority ethnic or working-class backgrounds.

Staff using the app have told the criminal justice campaign charity Fair Trials that they keep it secret from parents and carers, and admitted many would be concerned about it if they knew of it.

Bristol city council and Avon and Somerset police, who worked together on the system, insist it is in place to protect children, not criminalise them, and deny it is secret, pointing out that information about its existence is publicly available.

But Fair Trials said the vast majority of parents would know nothing about the app. Griff Ferris, the charity's senior legal and policy officer, said: "Schoolchildren should not be monitored, profiled and criminalised by secretive police databases. Surveillance is not safeguarding.

"Systems like this uphold existing discrimination against children and families from minoritised ethnic and more deprived backgrounds. This system is expanding the net of surveillance. It should be shut down."

A spokesperson for the antiracist organisation No More Exclusions Bristol said: "Technologies that gather and use information in the name of 'public safety' overwhelmingly reproduce racialised ideas of problematic behaviour."

Liz Fekete, the director of the Institute of Race Relations, strongly criticised elements of the app, saying the approach "stigmatises whole families and leaves even primary school children vulnerable to police surveillance and intelligence gathering".

When it was consulted, the Bristol City Youth Council, an elected group of young people, expressed reservations that if the system was not used properly it could lead to "prejudice and judgment".

Systems to collate information about children are used in other parts of England but Bristol city council describes Think Family as "innovative" and a number of local authorities are watching how the app works.

On its website, the council says the Think Family database, which the app draws on, includes information from about 50,000 families across the city collected from agencies including social care, police and the Department for Work and Pensions. It says it highlights "vulnerabilities or needs" and uses "targeted analytics" to help identify children at risk of sexual or criminal exploitation.

Critics say the reality is that this risks children from minority ethnic or poorer backgrounds being profiled as being involved in gangs or county lines operations.

Schools using the TFE app receive alerts about children's and family members' contact with police, antisocial behaviour and domestic violence incidents. The system also gives schools access to sensitive personal details about families' financial situations.

School safeguarding leads told Fair Trials that they kept the system secret from children and their families. One said: "They [parents and carers] wouldn't know about this ... parents will have no kind of sight of it at all ... They just don't know of its existence."

They described the system as "an early warning process" and admitted: "I think there's a bit of a risk it getting out there that schools hold this kind of central bank of information."

A spokesperson for Bristol city council said the Think Family database was introduced to counter the trend of agencies working in silos at a time of a "generational squeeze" on public finances.

The spokesperson said: "The introduction of the Think Family Education app means that schools ... have access to appropriate information in a secure and restricted way to make decisions about how they support children. There are strict controls in place about who can access this information, how they do this and the reasons why."

A spokesperson for Avon and Somerset police said the database gave professionals working with children joined-up information to identify and safeguard those at risk of criminal and sexual exploitation.

"The TFE app gives professionals immediate access to this information, helping them to act swiftly on any identified risks." The spokesperson said neither the app or database assessed the likelihood of an individual to commit a crime.

The force said "robust privacy and sharing agreements" had been approved by the Information Commissioner's Office and development of the system done in collaboration with the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Call to shut down Bristol schools' use of app to 'monitor' pupils and families

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Exclusive: Think Family Education app gives safeguarding leads easy access to pupils' and relatives' contacts with police and child protection

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British photographer Rankin found 15 teenagers who don't regularly use photo editing apps and took simple, natural portraits of them. After a quick lesson on how to use basic editing apps on their phones, they were asked to filter their image so that it would get more likes. The results are an astonishing look at how our online images are becoming increasingly homogenized and the effects these beauty ideals are having on our youth. (2019)

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Interview: Before and After Photos of Teens Asked to Edit Their Selfies for Social Media

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British photographer Rankin found 15 teenagers who don't regularly use photo editing apps and took simple, natural portraits of them. After a quick lesson on how to use basic editing apps on their phones, they were asked to filter their image so that it would get more likes.

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Should schools follow Gordonstoun and ban pupils from using smartphones?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lisa Kerr, the Gordonstoun principal, wants children to engage in real, not virtual, relationships, but not everybody agrees with outright banning mobile phones in schools.

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TikTok fined €345m for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

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Irish data regulator says platform put 13- to 17-year-old users’ accounts on default public setting, among other breaches

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Three Decades of Research: The Case for Comprehensive Sex Education - ScienceDirect

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Three Decades of Research: The Case for Comprehensive Sex Education - ScienceDirect

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Three Decades of Research: The Case for Comprehensive Sex Education

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School-based sex education plays a vital role in the sexual health and well-being of young people. Little is known, however, about the effectiveness o…

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Sexual development and behaviour in children | NSPCC Learning

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Sexual development and behaviour in children | NSPCC Learning

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Introduction

It's important that everyone who works with children and young people has a good understanding of how children develop sexually. This can help you recognise which sexual behaviours are developmentally typical and identify if a child is displaying behaviour that is problematic or harmful.

We've put together some information about the stages of typical sexual development and behaviour for different age groups. We've included examples of behaviour that is common and uncommon, and information about what to do if you are worried that a child is displaying problematic or harmful sexual behaviour.

Stages of child sexual development

All children go through phases of sexual development. Just like every other part of growing up, some children mature sooner or later than others. For example, some children may have developmental delays whilst others may reach puberty early.

In general, typical sexual behaviour should be:

playful and curious, not aggressive or angry (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013)

displayed towards children of a similar age, stage of development and physical size, who know each other well (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), 2009)

voluntary and consensual (NCTSN, 2009).

Typical sexual behaviour should not cause physical or emotional harm to anybody involved (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013).

The tabs to the left contain some examples of typical sexual behaviour for different ages.

Healthy and unhealthy relationships

Learn how to recognise the signs that a young person is in an unhealthy relationship and what action you can take to help them.

Under 5-years-old

Under 5-years-old

At this stage, it's common to notice natural exploratory behaviour emerging when children feel safe and comfortable. This includes:

having no inhibitions about nudity (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

touching their own private parts (NCTSN, 2009; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault & Family Violence (SECASA), 2017; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

showing curiosity about other people's private parts or naked bodies (Healthy Children, 2019; NCTSN, 2009; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2020; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

talking about bodily functions, using words like 'poo' and 'wee' (NCTSN, 2009, Virtual Lab School, 2021)

consensually role playing with their peers, exploring different relationships or roles such as 'playing house', 'playing mummies and daddies' or 'playing doctor' (Government of Canada, 2012; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; Virtual Lab School, 2021).

Very young children can have erections, beginning from birth (Virtual Lab School, 2021).

It is uncommon for younger children to discuss specific sexual acts, use explicit sexual language or have adult-like sexual contact with other people (Stop It Now, 2007).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Find out how to recognise and respond if a child is displaying problematic or harmful sexual behaviour

5- to 9-year-olds

5- to 9-year-olds

As children get a little older, it's common to see them displaying behaviour like:

becoming more modest and asking for privacy (Government of Canada, 2012; SECASA, 2017; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

asking questions about sex and relationships, such as what sex is, where babies come from and same-sex relationships (Government of Canada, 2012; NCTSN, 2009; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

consensually exploring relationships with peers, for example mimicking adult relationships by holding hands with a 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend' or giving them a kiss on the cheek (NCTSN, 2009; SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007).

As children become more aware of social norms and 'rules' around sexualised behaviour, it's common for them to test boundaries. This might include using 'naughty' words they've heard from other people (NCTSN, 2009).

It's uncommon for children aged 5-8 to have adult-like sexual interactions, discuss specific sexual acts or self-stimulate in public (Stop It Now, 2007).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Learn more about problematic or harmful sexual behaviour and what to do if a child is displaying it

9- to 13-year-olds

9- to 13-year-olds

During these ages, children begin to get more curious about sex and relationships. They may start to be attracted to other people. Examples of typical sexual behaviour during this stage are:

having or wanting to have a romantic relationship with peers (of the same or different gender) (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

using sexual language, making jokes about sex or discussing sexual acts with peers (SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

wanting more privacy (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; NCTSN, 2009; SECASA, 2017; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

looking for information about sex in books, online or in the media (this might lead to accidentally finding sexual pictures or videos) (Government of Canada, 2012; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; NCTSN, 2009; Stop It Now, 2007; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

masturbating in private (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; NCTSN, 2009; SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020; Virtual Lab School, 2021).

It's uncommon for children in this age group to display sexual behaviour in a public place, or regularly display adult-like sexual behaviour such as having oral or genital contact or intercourse (Stop It Now, 2007; 2020).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Discover how to identify problematic or harmful sexual behaviour and what you should do in response

13- to 17-year-olds

13- to 17-year-olds

During adolescence, sexual behaviour becomes more private and young people begin to explore their sexual identity. You might notice them:

experimenting sexually and consensually with the same age group (SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020)

looking for information about sex and sexual relationships (Stop It Now, 2007; 2020)

masturbating in private (SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020).

The age of consent to engage in sexual activity in the UK is 16-years-old. However, the law is there to protect children from abuse or exploitation. It is not designed to unnecessary criminalise children.

It is uncommon for adolescents to masturbate in public, or display sexual attraction towards a much younger child (Stop It Now, 2007; 2020).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Find out how to identify if a child is displaying problematic or harmful sexual behaviour
Schools, colleges and other education settings play an important role in teaching children and young people about healthy relationships.
> Find out more about how your school or organisation can prevent HSB and peer-on-peer sexual abuse

References and resources

References and resources

References

Government of Canada (2012) When children act out sexually: a guide for parents and teachers. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

Healthy Children (2019) Sexual behaviours in young children: what's normal, what's not?. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) (2009) Sexual development and behaviour in children: information for parents and caregivers (PDF). [Los Angeles]: NCTSN.

National Sexual Violence Resource Centre (2013) An overview of healthy childhood sexual development (PDF). [Alabama] National Children's Advocacy Center.

South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault & Family Violence (SECASA) (2017) Age appropriate sexual behaviours in children and young people: information for carers, professionals and the general public (PDF). East Bentleigh: SECASA.

Stop It Now (2007) Do children sexually abuse other children? Preventing sexual abuse among children and youth (PDF). Massachusetts: Stop It Now.

Stop It Now (2020) Tip sheet: age-appropriate sexual behaviour. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

Virtual Lab School (2021) Understanding normative sexual development & behaviour. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

Resources

Promoting healthy relationships

Provides tips on how you can promote healthy relationships to children of different ages or children who have special educational needs or disabilities. Aimed at the education sector but is also helpful for other sectors.
> Access our tips and guidance
Relationships and sex education (RSE) resources

We've put together a range of resources you can use to teach young people about relationships, health and sex education. Includes resources for children with special educational needs and disabilities.
> View the resources
Harmful sexual behaviour

Provides information on recognising, responding and preventing harmful sexual behaviour in children and young people.
> Learn more about harmful sexual behaviour
Recognising and responding to abuse

Outlines best practice for recognising and responding to abuse or concerns. Includes information about consent, reporting concerns, whistleblowing, mandatory reporting and more.
> Find out more
Podcast episodes

Listen to our short three-part series on responding to harmful sexual behaviour in schools, assessing sexualised behaviour and preventing harmful sexual behaviour.
> See all episodes
Training

We've produced two elearning courses for primary and secondary schools so you can develop your understanding of how to recognise and respond to concerns about harmful sexual behaviour.
> See the courses
Support for parents and carers

Many parents and carers may feel unsure about how to talk to their child or children about sex, sexuality and relationships. You can find advice to share with parents and carers on the NSPCC website.
> Read and share our advice for parents and carers
Support for children and young people

If a child or young person needs confidential help and advice direct them to Childline. Calls to 0800 1111 are free and children can also contact Childline online.

Childline provides information and advice for young people about sex and relationships.

You can also order Childline posters and wallet cards.

Introduction

It's important that everyone who works with children and young people has a good understanding of how children develop sexually. This can help you recognise which sexual behaviours are developmentally typical and identify if a child is displaying behaviour that is problematic or harmful.

We've put together some information about the stages of typical sexual development and behaviour for different age groups. We've included examples of behaviour that is common and uncommon, and information about what to do if you are worried that a child is displaying problematic or harmful sexual behaviour.

Stages of child sexual development

All children go through phases of sexual development. Just like every other part of growing up, some children mature sooner or later than others. For example, some children may have developmental delays whilst others may reach puberty early.

In general, typical sexual behaviour should be:

playful and curious, not aggressive or angry (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013)

displayed towards children of a similar age, stage of development and physical size, who know each other well (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), 2009)

voluntary and consensual (NCTSN, 2009).

Typical sexual behaviour should not cause physical or emotional harm to anybody involved (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013).

The tabs to the left contain some examples of typical sexual behaviour for different ages.

Healthy and unhealthy relationships

Learn how to recognise the signs that a young person is in an unhealthy relationship and what action you can take to help them.

Under 5-years-old

Under 5-years-old

At this stage, it's common to notice natural exploratory behaviour emerging when children feel safe and comfortable. This includes:

having no inhibitions about nudity (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

touching their own private parts (NCTSN, 2009; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault & Family Violence (SECASA), 2017; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

showing curiosity about other people's private parts or naked bodies (Healthy Children, 2019; NCTSN, 2009; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2020; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

talking about bodily functions, using words like 'poo' and 'wee' (NCTSN, 2009, Virtual Lab School, 2021)

consensually role playing with their peers, exploring different relationships or roles such as 'playing house', 'playing mummies and daddies' or 'playing doctor' (Government of Canada, 2012; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; Virtual Lab School, 2021).

Very young children can have erections, beginning from birth (Virtual Lab School, 2021).

It is uncommon for younger children to discuss specific sexual acts, use explicit sexual language or have adult-like sexual contact with other people (Stop It Now, 2007).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Find out how to recognise and respond if a child is displaying problematic or harmful sexual behaviour

5- to 9-year-olds

5- to 9-year-olds

As children get a little older, it's common to see them displaying behaviour like:

becoming more modest and asking for privacy (Government of Canada, 2012; SECASA, 2017; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

asking questions about sex and relationships, such as what sex is, where babies come from and same-sex relationships (Government of Canada, 2012; NCTSN, 2009; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

consensually exploring relationships with peers, for example mimicking adult relationships by holding hands with a 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend' or giving them a kiss on the cheek (NCTSN, 2009; SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007).

As children become more aware of social norms and 'rules' around sexualised behaviour, it's common for them to test boundaries. This might include using 'naughty' words they've heard from other people (NCTSN, 2009).

It's uncommon for children aged 5-8 to have adult-like sexual interactions, discuss specific sexual acts or self-stimulate in public (Stop It Now, 2007).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Learn more about problematic or harmful sexual behaviour and what to do if a child is displaying it

9- to 13-year-olds

9- to 13-year-olds

During these ages, children begin to get more curious about sex and relationships. They may start to be attracted to other people. Examples of typical sexual behaviour during this stage are:

having or wanting to have a romantic relationship with peers (of the same or different gender) (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

using sexual language, making jokes about sex or discussing sexual acts with peers (SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

wanting more privacy (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; NCTSN, 2009; SECASA, 2017; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

looking for information about sex in books, online or in the media (this might lead to accidentally finding sexual pictures or videos) (Government of Canada, 2012; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; NCTSN, 2009; Stop It Now, 2007; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

masturbating in private (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; NCTSN, 2009; SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020; Virtual Lab School, 2021).

It's uncommon for children in this age group to display sexual behaviour in a public place, or regularly display adult-like sexual behaviour such as having oral or genital contact or intercourse (Stop It Now, 2007; 2020).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Discover how to identify problematic or harmful sexual behaviour and what you should do in response

13- to 17-year-olds

13- to 17-year-olds

During adolescence, sexual behaviour becomes more private and young people begin to explore their sexual identity. You might notice them:

experimenting sexually and consensually with the same age group (SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020)

looking for information about sex and sexual relationships (Stop It Now, 2007; 2020)

masturbating in private (SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020).

The age of consent to engage in sexual activity in the UK is 16-years-old. However, the law is there to protect children from abuse or exploitation. It is not designed to unnecessary criminalise children.

It is uncommon for adolescents to masturbate in public, or display sexual attraction towards a much younger child (Stop It Now, 2007; 2020).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Find out how to identify if a child is displaying problematic or harmful sexual behaviour
Schools, colleges and other education settings play an important role in teaching children and young people about healthy relationships.
> Find out more about how your school or organisation can prevent HSB and peer-on-peer sexual abuse

References and resources

References and resources

References

Government of Canada (2012) When children act out sexually: a guide for parents and teachers. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

Healthy Children (2019) Sexual behaviours in young children: what's normal, what's not?. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) (2009) Sexual development and behaviour in children: information for parents and caregivers (PDF). [Los Angeles]: NCTSN.

National Sexual Violence Resource Centre (2013) An overview of healthy childhood sexual development (PDF). [Alabama] National Children's Advocacy Center.

South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault & Family Violence (SECASA) (2017) Age appropriate sexual behaviours in children and young people: information for carers, professionals and the general public (PDF). East Bentleigh: SECASA.

Stop It Now (2007) Do children sexually abuse other children? Preventing sexual abuse among children and youth (PDF). Massachusetts: Stop It Now.

Stop It Now (2020) Tip sheet: age-appropriate sexual behaviour. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

Virtual Lab School (2021) Understanding normative sexual development & behaviour. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

Resources

Promoting healthy relationships

Provides tips on how you can promote healthy relationships to children of different ages or children who have special educational needs or disabilities. Aimed at the education sector but is also helpful for other sectors.
> Access our tips and guidance
Relationships and sex education (RSE) resources

We've put together a range of resources you can use to teach young people about relationships, health and sex education. Includes resources for children with special educational needs and disabilities.
> View the resources
Harmful sexual behaviour

Provides information on recognising, responding and preventing harmful sexual behaviour in children and young people.
> Learn more about harmful sexual behaviour
Recognising and responding to abuse

Outlines best practice for recognising and responding to abuse or concerns. Includes information about consent, reporting concerns, whistleblowing, mandatory reporting and more.
> Find out more
Podcast episodes

Listen to our short three-part series on responding to harmful sexual behaviour in schools, assessing sexualised behaviour and preventing harmful sexual behaviour.
> See all episodes
Training

We've produced two elearning courses for primary and secondary schools so you can develop your understanding of how to recognise and respond to concerns about harmful sexual behaviour.
> See the courses
Support for parents and carers

Many parents and carers may feel unsure about how to talk to their child or children about sex, sexuality and relationships. You can find advice to share with parents and carers on the NSPCC website.
> Read and share our advice for parents and carers
Support for children and young people

If a child or young person needs confidential help and advice direct them to Childline. Calls to 0800 1111 are free and children can also contact Childline online.

Childline provides information and advice for young people about sex and relationships.

You can also order Childline posters and wallet cards.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sexual development and behaviour in children | NSPCC Learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Find out more about developmentally typical sexual development and behaviour in children and how to respond to inappropriate or harmful behaviour.

# data[].attributes.headline
Students’ New Surveillance State | University of Virginia School of Law

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Students’ New Surveillance State | University of Virginia School of Law

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, American public school students are being watched and tracked online, according to a new law review article by Danielle K. Citron, a University of Virginia School of Law professor who writes and teaches about privacy, free expression and civil rights.

Teachers, administrators and school resource offices have the tools to watch - in real time - students' searches, emails, chats, photos, calendar invites, geolocation and more, according to Citron's research. Private companies are facilitating this continuous and indiscriminate surveillance by scanning, tracking and analyzing the most intimate aspects of young people's lives - their online activities.

Her article, " Under Their Eye: The Surveilled Student," which is forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review, provides an analysis of the costs and benefits of this surveillance, identifies the underlying legal issues and provides recommended solutions. Citron, a recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant," is the Jefferson Scholars Foundation Schenck Distinguished Professor in Law and the Caddell and Chapman Professor of Law at UVA. Among a bevy of other thought-leadership positions, Citron is the co-director of the Law School's LawTech Center (along with Professor Elizabeth A. Rowe) and the vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit devoted to fighting for civil rights and liberties in the digital age.

How did the idea for this article come together?

For my first and second books, about cyberstalking and intimate privacy, I focused on the different ways cyber abuse impacts adults, although I did allude to children. I knew that I wanted to tackle the question about children's safety and privacy as a separate line of inquiry because the cost-benefit analysis and our understanding of their intimate privacy would be different. I wrote this piece as the first part of a larger book project that I'm co-authoring with Hany Farid, a computer scientist and distinguished policy wonk who's an expert on children's online safety and the father of PhotoDNA. Hany is why we have technical tools to prevent the reposting of child sexual exploitation material. We want to write a book together about children's internet safety and privacy, and I want to begin laying the legal foundation for our project.

This article will be part of a series of articles cultivating an understanding of student and youth intimate privacy as a subpart of intimate privacy. My most immediate follow-up to this article is a co-authored piece with Professor Ari Waldman concerning youth intimate privacy - how law tends to give parents control over their children's privacy and how some parents have interests that diverge from children's and undermine their children's well-being with access to their most intimate thoughts, searches and lives. This is especially true for children who are exploring their gender identity and sexual orientation. Scholars who write about gender and transgender identity say that when one's gender identity is revealed without their permission at an early age - when they're outed - it can shatter who they are at their core.

Why are students a distinct issue?

Young people need intimate privacy when they're in the process of forming their identity, which is their full-time job. Every day, young people are searching, chatting, texting, emailing, browsing, reading, and sharing on their laptops. They are using school-provided laptops to research a paper, search for information about reproductive health and research information about their sexual identity. Their thinking and innermost thoughts are expressed and recorded in their online activities. Digital technologies can be indispensable to students' self-development. Online tools can enable self-exploration, enhance the sense of human dignity, and facilitate close relationships. They can, yes, but those wonderful possibilities are not guaranteed. For students, all of those possibilities are in jeopardy.

Students are now under continuous surveillance by public schools and companies in ways that adults would reject. In 2013, U.S. adults made clear that they don't want even a small semblance of this, when they rejected the continuous and indiscriminate monitoring of telephone data that was then provided to government.

So why do now we have children's internet activity on school-provided laptops being scanned, analyzed, and reported to public schools and school resource officers?

Public school districts think federal law requires them to monitor their students, which is a misunderstanding of the federal Children's Internet Protection Act. CIPA was passed in 2000, when students had access to school computers only when they were physically at school, whether in computer labs or classrooms. The idea was that we didn't want students to be in the computer room looking at porn, so schools had to block porn to receive a federal discount for internet access. That's literally what Congress was thinking about. But schools are effectively saying, "Because we have to block porn, it requires us to see, block and, crucially, monitor everything students do with laptops," even though students use these laptops at home, on weekends, and during the summer and holidays. So, students are being monitored by schools every second of every day. This is happening even though CIPA has a clear disclaimer that continuous tracking of students online is not required.

Schools ignore that disclaimer in the name of protecting students from self-harm, bullying and threats. They are not just blocking pornography and other visual obscenity, as the law requires, but they are spending public funds on contracts with private companies that scan and analyze students' online activities. Those private companies rely on software to alert them about concerning material; their content moderators - who are not well-trained - have seconds to review the flagged material, which they then forward to school administrators and other officials. Those alerts usually are flagged after school hours and on weekends, so law enforcement officers are the ones who are contacted.

What has been Congress' reaction to this?

The Federal Communications Commission, which has enforcement power over these issues, has been silent on this activity, even though advocates have brought the issue to their attention. Given the FCC's inaction, schools continue to get federal discounts on internet access and to proceed with the over-surveillance of children. Senators Warren, Blumenthal and Markey spearheaded a congressional inquiry in 2021 into the private-public surveillance of students, and they made clear in their report that this is far beyond what federal law requires and they're worried, as I am, that the surveillance chills students' free expression and worse endangers students, especially nonwhite students who end up facing discipline for minor infractions. They were very clear that this pervasive student surveillance was bad for students, bad for their privacy, not great for safety and unclear as to efficacy.

Where is the misunderstanding?

The federal law at issue explicitly says "Nothing in this title [...] shall be construed to require the tracking of Internet use by any identifiable minor or adult user." It explicitly says so in the law! So, it is this odd misinterpretation, to read one part of the statute and ignore the other.

Why would schools have incentive to go further than just blocking pornography and other visual obscenity, as the law requires? Why are they using this law to monitor for safety threats?

School administrators say that the monitoring makes teachers feel safer and better informed to help prevent student self-harm, suicide and threats. I believe them. School administrators and teachers are genuinely concerned about the safety and well-being of their students. But I think schools have to look at the surveillance in a clear-eyed manner. They need to work on understanding the risks to privacy and whether these surveillance tools are effective at all, or instead if they are making students less safe. They need to consider how they can best balance addressing safety concerns while protecting privacy. This article is just a first step to say, "Hey, we don't even know if these tools work, because they don't let us inside the systems to do the efficacy analysis."

Why aren't we allowed inside their black box, to see what they're collecting, whether it's effective and what they plan to do with the data?

These are private companies being granted access to all student data and then shielded from liability because they're acting on behalf of government, which is frankly bonkers. Because they're private entities, they don't have to respond to records requests, as government agencies do.These companies are getting quite a bit of private funding because investors think they're going to make money when they get bought or go public. These companies may be bought by Google or Amazon or Microsoft. We should worry about that - the end goal of the dominant tech companies. My concern grows out conversations with chief privacy officers who have said in public that the goal is to own all personal data and provide all the services of our lives, including health care. I'm not saying anything that's confidential; these goals are part of the public record, so to speak.

So this is the trade-off for school safety?

This is big business, and the biggest losers are students. I'd love the promise of safety to be fulfilled. Less bullying, less sextortion and child pornography, all the ways we could protect children at school. Right now, privacy and safety are viewed as incompatible. But it's not a zero-sum game - we can protect students' intimate privacy and endeavor to protect their safety. But right now, we're not doing this meaningful calculus at all and right now, I think students are less safe. Children are more often being disciplined for minor infractions like cursing than for [true] threats. This is often left to the discretion of school resource officers, and we find that Black students are disciplined more often in these cases. Kristin Henning at Georgetown Law wrote a brilliant book about the policing of students by school resource officers and how it brings all the recurring pathologies of the criminal justice system into the schools.

What other literature and data did you rely on?

I'm building on the work of intrepid journalists, congressional findings by Senators Warren and Markey, and scholarly research - that work gives us some important insight to what is happening. Legal scholars have been looking at the implications for school surveillance on the Fourth Amendment as well.

I've worked with the Center for Democracy and Technology for years, and they have done amazing qualitative and quantitative research on the chilling effects and the pervasiveness of these surveilled laptops. Something like 89% of teachers reported that their students' laptops are being monitored by companies like Bark and Gaggle. (There are five or so dominant student surveillance companies). And then CDT did qualitative and quantitative studies about how the surveillance impacts kids, and they interviewed parents and students.

What were their findings?

They have six main findings and five recommendations for reform. They offer a ton of data and anecdotes about how this monitoring technology has serious and harmful impacts on K-12 students, including students no longer trusting their teachers to protect their interests.

What impact do you hope the article will have?

Through my work with the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, I'm in touch with lawmakers and their staff. Usually people contact us - Capitol Hill staffers, state lawmakers or advocacy groups that I've worked with. For example, I have a new piece coming out about how to fix Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act with six very concrete proposals that should be law. Rep. Jake Auchincloss read the paper and spent an hour on the phone with me and his staffer Joe Valente. After working closely together, we are working on a draft bill based on my proposal. Every time I write, I try to articulate the theory behind my concepts like intimate privacy and pair those concepts with concrete proposals rooted in reality.

A modest reform would be reworking CIPA's monitoring provision so schools understand they are not required to track students online to obtain federal funding. But they should go further and regulate monitoring so that schools can qualify for the discount only if their surveillance technologies are independently shown to be effective and to minimize harm to privacy, expression and equality. And the details of the contracting process and the terms of contracts should be out in the open.

If these are public school districts, what about changing policy at the local level?

I'm not giving up on city and state lawmakers. In fact, most of my success in the work that we've done at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative has been with state lawmakers. When we proposed criminalizing the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images, we worked with members of Congress who introduced a bill that has been reintroduced four times; it is now called the SHIELD Act. Thanks to the intrepid work of CCRI's president, Dr. Mary Anne Franks, we're still supporting efforts to get that federal bill passed into law. By contrast, in the decade that we've been working on these issues, we now have 48 states, D.C. and Guam that have criminalized the practice. When we started, it was three. As Professor Richard Schragger has illuminated in his scholarship, localities are important laboratories of democracy. I am game to work with local school boards and local government on these issues.

What are parents' attitudes toward this?

Some are not fully informed of what's going on and how it's not actually making students safer. And then there are parents who do not like this at all. But schools are the deciders and they want students to use school-provided laptops to do their work, while protecting their in-school networks from viruses and other malware. The question is whether those laptops should be equipped with monitoring software in the way that such monitoring is currently conceived. That is what I am interrogating.

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Professor and privacy expert Danielle K. Citron of the University of Virginia School of Law calls for reforming the "permanent surveillance state" imposed on American public school students.

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Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its tech-heavy schools - The Washington Post

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Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its tech-heavy schools - The Washington Post

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‘I want it to hit people in the gut’: Chris Ofili on his epic, three-wall Grenfell fresco | Chris Ofili | The Guardian

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‘I want it to hit people in the gut’: Chris Ofili on his epic, three-wall Grenfell fresco | Chris Ofili | The Guardian

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n May 2017 Chris Ofili was at a gathering on the Lido in Venice, following the opening of an exhibition, when he was told a young artist wanted to meet him. Ofili, 54, cuts a lean, muscular figure, but with more salt than pepper in his hair, he is feeling his years professionally. "When you get to this age you're a little bit disconnected from the younger group," he says. "And I thought, 'That's really nice. Somebody would actually formally like to meet me.'"

In the near distance, he saw 24-year-old Khadija Saye, whose work was being exhibited at the Biennale with other emerging artists as part of the Diaspora Pavilion. "She had this really radiant presence," recalls Ofili. "There was an undeniably genuine, honest presence about her. And I said yeah, of course I want to meet her. We did a brief selfie and maybe exchanged a few words. But it was enough to realise, 'That's a good person there and I hope she makes really good art, because that combination can be quite special.'"

On the brink of a breakthrough ... Andichurai, from the series In This Space We Breathe by Khadija Saye. Photograph: © 2017 Estate of Khadija Saye, All Rights Reserved. Image courtesy of the Estate of Khadija Saye

Saye was, in fact, on the brink of a breakthrough with a haunting photographic series called Dwelling: In This Space We Breathe. "It turns out she made quite extraordinary, mystical, alchemic self-portraits and works fusing her history and the history of photography," says Ofili. "This work that reached into the past but also went into the future."

Just over a month later Saye was dead. She lived with her mother, Mary Mendy, on the 20th floor of the inflammable tomb and now charred monument to corporate disgrace, otherwise known as Grenfell Tower, where 72 people died in a fire. Saye had no phone to call for help - the police had taken it during a wrongful arrest - so she took to Facebook to ask for prayers and advice as she struggled to escape through the thick smoke.

A couple of days later, Ofili was back in his studio in Trinidad when he heard Saye had passed away. "At that point the fire was still burning," he says. "I remember thinking, 'What?' I didn't really understand what you're supposed to do with the loss of somebody that young who had such huge potential."

Today, in a piece by Ofili called Requiem, an image of Saye hovers high on the middle wall of Tate Britain's northern staircase. Emerging from a cluster of yellow and orange, encircled by the souls of the perished, she holds to her ear an andichurai, a Gambian incense pot and treasured possession of her mother. It is a depiction based on one of Saye's own photographs, currently exhibited at Tate Modern, also to be shown alongside Requiem.

'Beyond words' ... Chris Ofili's Requiem, installed on the walls of Tate Britain's north staircase. Photograph: Thierry Bal/© Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist

Entering the staircase from the top, passing through opaque doors, one's immediate impression is of riotous reverence. Just beneath the apex, Saye appears as though from a stained glass window in a passageway dominated by arresting purples and blues. To the left, a prophet or witness bows, his dark robes aglow in the light of the flaming building he is presenting. Tears fall from his face into an ocean of despair from which souls are trying to escape.

I was conscious that whenever I passed Grenfell, I looked away. But this luxury has expired

To the right, a flute-playing, satyr-like figure rests beneath the lilac shade of a Ceanothus Concha (the same tree that sits in a garden dedicated to Saye in east London where she once worked). It lures the souls towards it with its melody as blossoms float across the canvas. The effect reminded me of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where a stained glass window bearing the image of a black Christ - funded and created as a gift from the people of Wales after Klansmen bombed the church and killed four little girls after Sunday school in 1963 - is visible from the pulpit. If approaching the work from the bottom of the staircase, you ascend, as though underwater, through the calmer blues of the tear-soaked stream in which the souls swim, to become enveloped in more vivid colour and clearer narrative.

Ocean of despair ... a detail of Requiem. Photograph: Thierry Bal/© Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist

Requiem stands on its own, but is nonetheless pulled together by threads from Ofili's significant body of work. There's the witness, who also features prominently in Poolside Magic; his tears, echoing No Woman No Cry; the satyr, a constant feature of The Seven Deadly Sins. When the Tate originally offered Ofili the space for a new commission, which will stand for at least 10 years, he was sceptical. "The space felt awkward," he says. "It felt dated. It felt like the last kind of place I would want to make a piece of art: a thoroughfare. It didn't feel like it had any central focus."

Thinking back to similar opportunities he's had, particularly at Tate, he reflected on No Woman No Cry, a tribute to the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, whose image appears in each tear; and more recently Blue Devils, which addressed stop and search. "I thought OK, stay in that vein. Try and think of something that would address the public and the hundreds of thousands of people coming through here."

Focus ... Saye appears as if from a stained glass window Photograph: Thierry Bal/© Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist.

Quite what that thing would be eluded him for some time. It wasn't until he was in a car heading into central London from Heathrow, following another Venice trip, that it dawned on him that every time he passed Grenfell he looked away. "This time I was really conscious that I was looking away. So I looked at it again and started having these horrible thoughts about Khadija being in that building. And that's when I thought, 'Right, I really have to try and address Grenfell because this luxury of looking away, and packing away those thoughts, has expired. But I knew it was a very vulnerable and tender subject, where you could do more damage than good. And I felt that if I was going to address it, I was going to have to understand it."

He delved into the literature and testimony that emerged from the tragedy, but ultimately came back to that evening in Venice. "I thought my entry could be through the one person that I think I knew in the building who lost a life. And if I went in that way, I could keep it personal and not be too broad."

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He then set about his artistic research, visiting churches and chapels in Padua, studying the work of 13th-century painter and architect Giotto di Bondone. Focusing on frescoes, he felt a particular responsibility because the work would be up on a wall for at least a decade. "It's important at times to use skill and platform to say something that's beyond words, really. I think this is beyond words. You can't talk for 10 years. But somebody can look at something and have their own personal responses in 10 years' time."

The space was altered in a range of ways to accommodate his vision, which in turn used the space quite differently to the painting by David Tremlett that preceded it.

'We have to ask ourselves how this was allowed to happen' ... Ofili. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Raised in Manchester to Nigerian parents, Ofili has lived primarily in Trinidad since 2005, but zigzagged across "the black Atlantic", spending much of his time in London and New York. Referring to the diasporic connections made through colonialism and slavery, he says: "No matter what their plan was when they went over to conquer, there's another potential of how we can stay connected and use and exchange ideas. I'm determined to keep that callaloo mixture authentically mine. Not a generalised version. This is actually my dish. This is the way I make it. We work with what we've got."

When I interviewed him 13 years ago at his studio in the hills overlooking Port of Spain, he explained why he avoided polemic in his art. "A lot of black art that came before was set up to critique the system. I thought that was boring. Basically, you would have to be right all the time. And I was not interested in being right all the time. I wanted to be sincere and outrageous and friendly and rude and experimental and conventional. I just wanted to try to be who I am."

This informed his approach to Requiem. "I could get so much wrong if I was relying only on facts. But if I could stay in an emotional place, then there's no right and wrong, it's just connection to self, and I knew I was equipped in my emotional response. Because that's a lot to work with. I want this to hit people in the gut. The only way to do that is to say, 'Wake up, wake up!'" He clicks his fingers as though to stir someone from their slumber.

This preventable fire signalled the dominance in British life, and death, of the four horsemen of late-stage capitalism: inequality, austerity, deregulation and privatisation. Six years later, with the official inquiry still in progress and nobody yet held accountable, a body of artistic work is building in response. In the last five months alone there have been Steve McQueen's film and Gillian Slovo's play at the National Theatre, both titled Grenfell. What was it about tragedy, I ask Ofili, that has made it such a touchstone? "It was the direct by-product of a system," he says. "And we have to ask ourselves 'What set things up to allow these things to happen? Because human beings did this: there was no AI involved."

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'I want it to hit people in the gut': Chris Ofili on his epic, three-wall Grenfell fresco

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The artist has finally chosen to address the tragedy - with Requiem, a vast work depicting a flaming building, fleeing souls and an ocean of tears. He explains why he placed an artist who died at its centre

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hat do you get when you combine artificial intelligence with human stupidity? There are, unfortunately, numerous responses to that question. But in this particular case the answer can be found in Iowa's Mason City Community School District, where school administrators are using ChatGPT to help them ban books.

Ahead of the new school year, school staff have been busy trying to comply with a new state law, Senate File 496, the Parental Rights and Transparency Act, requiring every book in Iowa public school libraries to be "age appropriate" and devoid of "descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act". Of course, nobody wants hardcore porn in school libraries, but this sweeping bill, which also restricts education about gender identity and sexual orientation, isn't trying to prevent that nonexistent problem: it's about indoctrination. Republicans don't want kids learning anything that goes against their narrow worldview so, over the past couple of years, they've gone on a censorship orgy, trying to ban everything from gender studies to psychology to African American studies.

A hallmark of Republican legislation is its ambiguity. The party can't explicitly decree "we want to ban everything we don't like", because that would be blatantly unconstitutional. So instead, it couches its laws in vague language like that contained in this book-banning law. There is very little guidance in the legislation as to what constitutes a description of a sex act. (Would "the two elephants mated" count, for example?) The only real pointer given is that sex in religious texts like the Bible is absolutely fine and exempt from the law. That ambiguity gives them plausible deniability: we're not banning books, we're protecting children! It also tends to make people over-comply for fear of violating the law. One state senator told the Iowa Capital Dispatch that she knew a teacher who had removed every book from her classroom to make sure she was in compliance with the new law. Others have resorted to using AI to help them navigate the legislation.

"It is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements," Bridgette Exman, the assistant superintendent of Mason City School District, said in a statement quoted by Iowa newspaper the Gazette. "Therefore, we are using what we believe is a defensible process to identify books that should be removed from collections."

How many books are we talking about? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands? Nope. The answer to this question is the same as the answer to life, the universe, and everything: 42. The district had compiled a list of 42 titles from banned book lists across the US which needed review. Nobody, let alone an educator, could possibly read 42 books! Hence the need for technology.

So how does ChatGPT, a generative AI tool that is incapable of critical thought and whose processes, training method and underlying training datasets are worryingly opaque, figure out which books are too lewd for the eyes of young Iowans? Nobody knows. It's not clear, for example, if ChatGPT has actually "read" the books it has been asked about. All we know is that an administrator typed "does [x] book contain 'a description or depiction of a sex act'?" into ChatGPT, then waited for a reply. ChatGPT, which doesn't have a moral compass, did its job diligently and without protest: it identified 19 books as being too scandalous and they were pulled from the shelves. The banned books included The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Beloved by Toni Morrison and The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

While dystopian, Exman's tactics are smart in their own way. It is, as she put it, a "defensible process". If the powers-that-be later find a contraband book in the library, school administrators can simply blame ChatGPT. What, one wonders, do the people behind ChatGPT make of all this? They keep going on about how AI is going to advance humanity. And yet, as cases like this demonstrate, AI is far more likely to be harnessed to advance the views and agenda of powerful people. Welcome to a future where the computer constantly says no.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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Can't decide which books to ban? Leave it to ChatGPT! | Arwa Mahdawi

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Ordered to remove unsuitable books from their libraries, school administrators in Iowa outsourced the job to AI. So long, The Color Purple, Beloved, The Handmaid's Tale, writes Arwa Mahdawi

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School district uses ChatGPT to help remove library books | Popular Science

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School district uses ChatGPT to help remove library books | Popular Science

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School district uses ChatGPT to help ban library books

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Faced with new legislation, Iowa’s Mason City Community School District asked ChatGPT if certain books ‘contain a description or depiction of a sex act.’

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PragerU is a conservative media org that creates ‘educational’ videos for students — and its kids content has been approved for Florida classrooms. Here’s what you need to know.

(with @johnknefel @mmfa + @andrewsparfea)

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PragerU is a conservative media org that creates ‘educational’ videos for students — and its kids content has been approved for Florida classrooms. Here’s what you need to know.

(with @johnknefel @mmfa + @andrewsparfea) https://t.co/fSZyoSGMXz

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PragerU is a conservative media org that creates ‘educational’ videos for students — and its kids content has been approved for Florida classrooms. Here’s what you need to know.

(with @johnknefel @mmfa + @andrewsparfea) pic.twitter.com/fSZyoSGMXz
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) August 10, 2023

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
PragerU is a conservative media org that creates ‘educational’ videos for students — and its kids content has been approved for Florida classrooms. Here’s what you need to know.

(with @johnknefel @mmfa + @andrewsparfea) https://t.co/fSZyoSGMXz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
PragerU is a conservative media org that creates ‘educational’ videos for students — and its kids content has been approved for Florida classrooms. Here’s what you need to know.

(with @johnknefel @mmfa + @andrewsparfea) https://t.co/fSZyoSGMXz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
PragerU is a conservative media org that creates ‘educational’ videos for students — and its kids content has been approved for Florida classrooms. Here’s what you need to know.

(with @johnknefel @mmfa + @andrewsparfea)