{"id":292369,"date":"2025-07-26T04:24:15","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T04:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/292369\/"},"modified":"2025-07-26T04:24:15","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T04:24:15","slug":"prince-harry-and-the-anxious-generation-author-talk-social-media-and-mental-health-exclusive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/292369\/","title":{"rendered":"Prince Harry and ‘The Anxious Generation’ author talk social media and mental health: Exclusive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prince Harry, long known for being an outspoken advocate on (especially men\u2019s<\/a>) mental health issues, is currently focused<\/a> on a very tricky problem: that of social media and its effects on youth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn many cases, the smartphone\u2026is stealing young people\u2019s childhood,\u201d he said in a conversation, a video of which was exclusively shared with Fortune this week, with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt<\/a>, author of The Anxious Generation.<\/p>\n

Haidt\u2014whose four foundational smartphone rules<\/a> have inspired both celebration and pushback<\/a>\u2014couldn\u2019t agree more, explaining to Harry the premise of his book: that people born after 1995 (Gen Z<\/a>, roughly) throughout the English-speaking world hit puberty with high rates of anxiety<\/a>, depression<\/a>, self-harm, and suicide<\/a>, which all rose sharply between 2010 and 2012. And that it was no coincidence\u2014but instead a direct result of the smartphone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYoung people trade in their flip phones for smartphones,\u201d Haidt said about that moment of generational shifting, \u201cand now [have] a front-facing camera, high-speed internet, a million apps that are competing with each other to hook kids\u2019 attention. So, the \u2018anxious generation\u2019 is helping us understand the incredible destructive force of this transformation of childhood\u2026and what we can do now to stop that from happening and to help those who already have been through it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Haidt and the Duke of Sussex sat down for the intimate discussion (see the full video above) about social media and mental health as part of Harry\u2019s Archewell Foundation<\/a> 2024 Insight Sessions\u2014public conversations, highlights of which appear in a new Insight Report<\/a>\u2014about the impact of technology, with the voices of youth front and center.<\/p>\n

Here, some of the most powerful takeaways from the spirited conversation.<\/p>\n

Parents vs. social media companies<\/p>\n

One of Haidt\u2019s biggest worries about the current state of parenting<\/a> and social media<\/a> is that \u201cwe are overprotecting our children in the real world and underprotecting them online,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd both of those moves are mistakes. They\u2019re bad for development.\u201d It\u2019s why he advocates for <\/a>no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more unsupervised play and childhood independence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also why, Harry said, \u201cit\u2019s very easy for social media companies to point the finger at parents and say, \u2018Well, you know, this is down to you. This is down to your parenting.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s an argument that Haidt rejects.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there were some parents who were getting this wrong and most parents were getting it right, then I\u2019d be very receptive to that argument,\u201d he said. \u201cBut once kids get a phone and social media, the rest of family life turns into a fight over screen time. And this is happening everywhere. This is happening in Silicon Valley<\/a>, where the parents know what\u2019s going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

So why do we give our 10-year-olds smartphones? \u201cThe main reason,\u201d Haidt said, \u201cis because everyone else did. We don\u2019t want our daughter to be the only one who\u2019s left out. I\u2019m facing this now with my 14-year-old daughter on Snapchat<\/a>. So the tech companies put us in a bind, and then they\u2019re trying to blame us for what they did.\u201d It\u2019s why he\u2019s also an advocate of collective action, or parents banding together to agree to delay the purchase of smartphones for their kids.<\/p>\n

What about smartphones for safety?<\/p>\n

Through his insight sessions, said Harry, he\u2019s spoken with parents who say they give their kids phones at a younger age to keep them safe.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a double-edged sword,\u201d he said. \u201cThey want them to have their phone at school in case of emergency, but once, like any kid, you have your phone, even if you\u2019re told you\u2019re not allowed to download that app, kids have a way of working around it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Haidt\u2019s not buying the safety argument, though. \u201cIf you want to give your kid a phone, so if anything goes wrong they can call you, great. Give them a phone. Just don\u2019t give them a supercomputer connected to everyone in the world\u2026 They don\u2019t need that. The millennials had flip phones. They went through puberty with flip phones to call each other, text each other, meet up. It came out fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gen Z, on the other hand, \u201cwent through puberty with a supercomputer blocking out almost everything else in life,\u201d he said. \u201cEverything goes down: much less time with friends, much less sunlight, very many fewer books, many fewer hobbies. You take almost everything out of childhood. You replace it with this and a bunch of million short videos. It\u2019s not much of a childhood.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u2018myth\u2019 of social media as lifeline<\/p>\n

Prince Harry then raised the idea of social media having a positive\u2014and even lifesaving\u2014side.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSocial media, we know, to a large extent, is giving an outlet, an added resource, to kids that perhaps don\u2019t feel comfortable coming to us to talk about their issues and their troubles and their worries,\u201d he said. \u201cKids online will be feeling more connected with complete strangers on social media. So how do you, if you\u2019re a parent, know that your kid is getting good out of social media?\u201d<\/p>\n

Haidt said it is \u201cone of Meta\u2019s favorite talking points\u201d that \u201csocial media is a lifeline for LGBTQ kids, for kids from marginalized communities. And that\u2019s just not true.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is true, he said, \u201cis that the internet was great for them. The internet solved all these problems in the \u201990s. If you\u2019re a gay kid, you\u2019re not out to anyone in a rural part of America or England, the internet was amazing. You could find information, you could find people like you, and you could communicate.\u201d But social media, Haidt insisted, has changed all that.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s no longer even about just me connecting to you,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s now about an algorithm-driven news feed that sends content to you. This is not what they need. If you have any special interest, you can find that with Google<\/a>. You don\u2019t need an algorithm to feed you stuff.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s \u201ca myth,\u201d he said, that Instagram<\/a> and TikTok are lifelines. \u201cThe research, I think, is very clear: When kids have a best friend or especially a small group [of friends], they generally do well. When kids don\u2019t have a close friend or close group, they\u2019re much less likely to do well. When you have 300 connections, you don\u2019t have time for anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on mental health:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Subscribe to Well Adjusted, our newsletter full of simple strategies to work smarter and live better, from the Fortune Well team.\u00a0Sign up<\/a>\u00a0for free today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prince Harry, long known for being an outspoken advocate on (especially men\u2019s) mental health issues, is currently focused…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292370,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7708],"tags":[2665,7709,7721,7719,7499,2915,7718,7720,1281,218,447,7710,519,448,108758,182,7711],"class_list":{"0":"post-292369","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-royals","8":"tag-anxiety","9":"tag-british-royal-family","10":"tag-duchess-of-sussex","11":"tag-duke-of-sussex","12":"tag-editors-picks","13":"tag-exclusive","14":"tag-harry","15":"tag-meghan","16":"tag-meghan-markle","17":"tag-mental-health","18":"tag-prince-harry","19":"tag-royal-families","20":"tag-royal-family","21":"tag-royals","22":"tag-smartphones-and-mobile-devices","23":"tag-social-media","24":"tag-uk-royal-family"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114917635858666006","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292369\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}