Few books have sparked more national conversations than Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation .” Haidt details “the great rewiring of childhood” and its risks to kids’ emotional well-being from growing up in a world saturated by screens.

This spotlight has contributed to a rise in school cellphone bans , including a near-total prohibition for Ohio classrooms in the last state budget. There has also been pushback, such as from University of Oxford psychologist Lucy Foulkes, countering that Haidt assigns too much blame to screens , and that it’s not realistic or desirable to deny kids these technologies.

But this debate misses half of Haidt’s argument. It’s not just the sudden dominance of the “phone-based childhood” that threatens mental health, it’s also the sudden disappear

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