Peter Gray’s ‘Restoring Childhood’ says school, not smartphones, is making kids miserable

Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety, by Peter Gray, Penguin Random House, 352 pages, $32

There’s one chart that anyone who thinks they know all about smartphones, social media, and kids should see. Part of its data—showing U.S. teen suicide rates rising steeply between roughly 2010 and 2020—has been widely shared by people out to prove that modern “screen time” has been disastrous for American youth. But if we pan out a little further, a different picture emerges.

In this chart, we can see that the teen suicide rate rose steadily from 1950 until around 1990—an era during which nary a teen was checking Facebook, posting to Snapchat, or texting with friends. Then, throughout the ’90s and early aughts, the rate of teen suicide dropped. Its subsequent rise in the 2010s represents not some unprecedented climb but a return to levels seen in the 1970s and 1980s. (It has also, in recent years, begun once again to fall.)

Suicide isn’t the only index of teen suffering where we see such a pattern. Signs of depression and anxiety also crept up copiously in the second half of the 1900s. Then, for more than a decade, many measures of teen distress decreased. The pattern doesn’t map easily onto modern technology.

I encountered that chart in Restoring Childhood by the Boston College evolutionary psychologist Peter Gray, who is out to challenge the conventional wisdom around kids and digital connectivity. His book also attempts to explain what actually went wrong, then right, then wrong again for American youth.

Gray has studied child development for decades, with particular emphasis on the importance of play. (His Substack is called Play Makes Us Human.) He has penned multiple books critical of conventional American schooling, and he co-founded Let Grow, a group championing childhood independence and challenging public policies that discourage it.

Gray started Let Grow with the New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Reason columnist Lenore Skenazy. Haidt has since become the foremost champion of the idea that smartphones and social media have made young people miserable and must be reigned in. His 2024 bestseller The Anxious Generation asserts that modern technology has caused “an epidemic of mental illness” in our youth.

Gray vehemently disagrees. “I have looked broadly and deeply into the voluminous research on [technology and teen well-being] and have found no convincing evidence that social media or other uses of digital technology are responsible for much if any of the steep rise in teen suffering,” he writes in Restoring Childhood. But he shares Haidt’s disdain for helicopter parenting.

“By treating children as fragile we, as a society, have made them fragile,” writes Gray. “By depriving them of free play and other self-directed adventures, we are denying them the activities that bring kids the greatest joy, that make life for them worthwhile.”

So the first major component of Gray’s theory goes something like this: Healthy childhood development requires play, exploration, autonomy, and opportunities to take on responsibilities, but social changes in the latter half of the 20th century diminished the conditions required for such development.

But then there’s that blip—that 1990 to mid-2000s period when measures of young people’s mental health began to improve after years of decline. This wasn’t a time of declining safetyism. How does he account for this?

This time the source is modern technology, he suggests.

Here’s where Gray really starts diverging from today’s titans of tech panic. He posits that computers, video games, and internet access produced gains in well-being among the young people of the 1990s and ’00s “by providing a new route to autonomy, connections with peers, and [a] sense of competence.”

Computers in general provided an arena for developing a mastery of new skills and with them new confidence. Multiplayer video games provided new avenues for socialization. Chatrooms and then instant messaging allowed teens to hang out away from parents’ watchful eyes. The wider web offered access to niche communities, creative pursuits, and emotional support.

While online play and communication are not “fully adequate replacements” for in-person play and outdoor activity, they’re “certainly better than no play or communication with peers,” Gray suggests. “This new technology created new freedoms for kids, which improved, on average, their mental health. It partially restored childhood.”

If the web boosted young people’s psychological health in its infancy, today’s turbocharged tech access could theoretically make things even better. But that’s supposing that everything else has remained constant. It has not.

“Over the last seven decades, kids’ mental health has declined in step with decreases in their opportunities to play and explore independently and with increases in societally imposed achievement pressures,” he writes.

Gray believes this pressure is to blame for youth distress rising once again.

Today’s young people are bombarded from an early age with extreme academic stress, he notes. They have less time to play, in school and out, due to shrinking recess and lunch periods and growing homework loads. Their free time often revolves around activities planned or supervised by parents, not unstructured and unmonitored play. Sports, too, have become sites of competitive pressure rather than a reprieve from stress, as more parents sign their kids up for travel teams and encourage early specialization.

Throughout high school—perhaps even earlier—today’s students are sold the idea that failure to get great grades, be a star athlete, or otherwise stand out will mean failure to get into a good college and, from there, failure to get a good job. “We turned schools into factories for the manufacture of anxiety, competition, and achievement pressure driven by extrinsic rather than intrinsic motives,” Gray suggests.

That sort of pressure has arguably gotten worse in recent decades, and could plausibly help explain a rise in young people’s psychological problems. But this pressure didn’t start in 2010. How does Gray square this with recent declines starting thereabouts?

The “Common Core” standards that states adopted as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act, Gray argues, have completely changed the face of U.S. education since their widespread adoption a decade and a half ago. “The sharp rise in anxiety, depression, and suicide among U.S. school-aged kids, beginning around 2010, resulted largely from changes in schooling brought on by Common Core and similar government-mandated programs in the few states that did not adopt Common Core,” he writes.

Common Core and similar standards reduced teacher autonomy, with teachers encouraged or required to teach the same lessons on the same day in the same way across school systems. This was combined with more statewide standardized tests, ostensibly to ensure accountability. The result has been more teaching to the test and less school time devoted to play, art, music, social studies, and anything else not being tested.

Gray points to multiple studies where young people cite school as a significant source of sadness, pressure, and anxiety. He also notes that youth hospital admissions for mental health emergencies drop sharply during summer months. Both findings could implicate the broader school environment (social issues, bullying, etc.) as much as educational styles and academic pressure. Either way, they bolster an explanation for teen distress that doesn’t involve screen time.

And schooling affects more than just mental health. Every few months, some college professor will go viral bemoaning his students’ alleged inability to complete a book or poor reading comprehension skills. These laments inevitably turn into a referendum on whether TikTok has killed reading. But as Gray notes, primary and secondary schools have replaced many book-reading assignments with exercises meant to boost students’ ability “to read small snatches of fiction or nonfiction and identify the main message of that snatch, which is the sort of ability assessed by the state exams.” Again, Big School—not Big Tech—could be to blame.

Gray also points to research around the world that either counters Haidt-style phone panic—for instance, nations with similar timelines for tech adoption not seeing similar shifts in teen happiness—or lends support to the theory that schooling changes and achievement pressure are more culpable.

While Gray’s thesis rings more true than the tech theory, it has its gaps. He seems to take for granted, for example, that changes in responses to psychological survey questions reflect real differences in teen distress levels, rather than being, at least in part, a product of decreased stigma around mental health problems, not to mention a growing embrace of therapyspeak and the cultural cache attached to some conditions.

But Restoring Childhood makes a compelling case. In not just knocking the dubious smartphone theory of everything but providing an alternative, the book becomes an important addition to the teens-and-tech discourse.