As a new school year begins, many students have returned to a drastic shift in phone policies. A growing number of school districts—and even state legislatures—have introduced phone-free policies and are seeing kids come alive again. This shift is due at least in part to Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, which makes a humble yet compelling case that digital devices, specifically internet-connected smartphones, have caused significant changes in what constitutes childhood.

We have been running an experiment on ourselves and our children in real time, and Haidt argues that alarming results are increasingly coming into view: mental illness and anxiety, academic decline, lack of meaningful social relationships, loneliness, and much more. Of course, Haidt is not saying that screen-based internet connected devices are the only factor. But he does argue that the evidence points to causation not just correlation.

Haidt puts words to what many parents, teachers, and others have sensed but have been unable to articulate persuasively. His thesis is that something definitive has changed in how child development now unfolds. He calls it the Great Rewiring from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood” and argues that this “profound transformation of human consciousness and relationships … occurred, for American teens, between 2010 and 2015,” when smartphones became a ubiquitous possession.

Here, I would have to agree with Haidt. I was a high school teacher in the public school system on both sides of that fateful transition, and the smartphone drastically changed the nature of the classroom and the type of challenges students—and teachers—faced.

Haidt argues that the shift to a phone-based childhood is so significant because in a play-based childhood there is a “sequential introduction of age-appropriate experiences” via real time-and-space interactions with peers and adults. However, he continues:

In a phone-based childhood, children are plunged into a whirlpool of adult content and experiences that arrive in no particular order. Identity, selfhood, emotions, and relationships will all be different if they develop online rather than in real life. What gets rewarded or punished, how deep friendships become, and above all what is desirable—all of these will be determined by the thousands of posts, comments, and ratings that the child sees each week.

For boys, the digital world has been a gateway to things like pornography and gaming, which are both environments of artificial risk and conquest. These digital worlds simulate what young men crave, but don’t provide the real-world benefits, which leads to the downward cycle so common for boys today.

For girls, the digital habitat has been oriented more around social comparison and appearance. And, like with boys, there is a real human need and desire there that needs to be met, and the internet provides a poisonous temptation, leading to the challenges many girls are facing today.

Haidt summarizes:

Boys and girls have taken different paths through the Great Rewiring, yet somehow, they have ended up in the same pit, where many are drowning in anomie and despair. It is very difficult to construct a meaningful life on one’s own, drifting through multiple disembodied networks.

Haidt also shows why it is not cranky or old-fashioned to recognize that something significant changes for us when we take our lives online and live through a glowing glass box. Such a recognition is entirely reasonable—and supported by the evidence. Haidt offers four points of comparison that epitomize why humans struggle online.

“Real world” relationships and social interactions are

• embodied
• synchronous
• primarily one-to-one or one-to-several communications
• within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit

“Virtual world” relationships and interactions are

• disembodied
• asynchronous
• one-to-many communications where multiple interactions can be happening in parallel
• within communities that have a low bar for entry and exit

These four points of contrast explain so much of why the digital world impacts us the way it does.

Haidt then goes beyond description and analysis to action. He advances four foundational reforms:

1. No smartphones before high school
2. No social media before 16
3. Phone-free schools
4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence

As Haidt’s reforms gain momentum, we might be nearing an inflection point regarding smartphones and childhood. But let’s not stop there.

If we are taking steps to ban cellphones in schools, what about technologically mediated classrooms with laptops or iPads for every student? And how can we take steps to reclaim our homes, workplaces, communities, or churches from the reign of the screen? This is not just a childhood problem; this is a human problem.

Haidt rightly calls for reclaiming childhood. Let’s go further and reclaim our humanity.

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