“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, an 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.”