AT THE HEART OF THIS OTHERWISE bleak analysis of the state of adolescence today is a touchingly sentimental, and rather old-fashioned sense of what childhood once was, and could be again if adults are prepared to accept the damage that mobile phones are doing to young people.
Jonathan Haidt is well qualified to write this damning study of political, parental and corporate neglect: he is Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University, a social psychologist, and author of a number of books which have explored the increasingly fragile mental states of teenagers today.
His thesis is simple: he argues that Gen Z, the generation born after 1995, are the “test subjects” for a
