In early 2021, the journalist Matt Richtel spoke to a father who was a few weeks into a nightmare. Tatnai Burnett was a doctor, his wife was a therapist, and, until middle school, their daughter Elaniv had seemed to be the happy beneficiary of loving parents and a stable home. Then, without apparent external cause, she became depressed and began cutting herself. Her parents sought treatment, including medication and therapy, but on March 1, 2021, Elaniv took an overdose of pills. She arrived at the hospital conscious, then started hallucinating and having seizures, before going into cardiac arrest and being placed on life support. She died on March 5th, shortly before her sixteenth birthday. Later that month, her father tried to make sense of what had happened while talking to a reporter.

Richtel was at work on what would become “The Inner Pandemic,” a 2022 series for the New York Times about American teens’ mental health—which, by many measures, had been deteriorating for some time. “I could barely hold it together,” he writes in his new book, “How We Grow Up” (Mariner), recalling his harrowing conversation with Burnett. “I was a journalist, yes, but more than that a father of two children who themselves were on the verge of adolescence.” Richtel’s response was visceral. “I desperately wanted to understand,” he writes.

In recent years, a seductively intuitive hypothesis to explain stories like Elaniv’s has taken shape: it’s the phones. A smartphone, equipped with TikTok and Instagram, contains in one sleek package an assortment of forces that might make a teen unhappy—toxic social dynamics, unrealistic body image, incitement to paralyzing self-consciousness, even a reason to avoid such fundamentals of well-being as a good night’s sleep. And—parents and professional commentators generally acknowledge—phones don’t make adults feel so great, either. The explanatory power of technology is tantalizing. (In Elaniv’s case, there was no obvious tech factor, but her parents still grasped after the dominant narrative: “We controlled electronics, monitored friendships,” Burnett tells Richtel, helplessly.) The phone consensus is bipartisan, appealing to right-wing moralism and left-wing anti-corporate sentiment alike. States including Florida, Utah, California, and New York have all moved to variously restrict teens’ access to social media, or, if you like, to restrict social-media companies’ access to teens; Texas recently came close to passing a bill that would have banned minors from social media altogether.

A flock of whistle-blowers, journalists, and documentarians have sought both to illuminate the situation and to service parental anxieties. Alarming statistics circulate, along with lists of milestones missed and failures of intellectual and social engagement. Talk to any high-school teacher and anecdotal evidence of a phone-beholden generation abounds. But nailing down the particulars of the problem proves more slippery. Which digital media are bad, under what circumstances, and for whom? According to one oft-cited figure from a 2022 Pew Research Center report, forty-six per cent of teens say that they are online “almost constantly,” a statement that somehow has the ring of both truth and hyperbole. It’s easy to imagine a lot of teens saying that, and harder to know what they mean. (The survey’s other possible responses were “several times a week or less often,” “about once a day,” and “several times a day,” all of which suggest a formal and polite level of acquaintance with one’s smartphone.) In 2023, the Surgeon General released an advisory titled “Social Media and Youth Mental Health,” which called for more research. “Nearly 70% of parents say parenting is now more difficult than it was 20 years ago, with technology and social media as the top two cited reasons,” the advisory notes. Yet, though it takes the form of a statistic, this statement bears only a tenuous relationship to anything quantifiable. For one thing, “parents” here refers to people with children under the age of eighteen—a pool with limited firsthand expertise about what it was like to be a parent twenty years ago.

In “How We Grow Up,” Richtel expands his reporting to take in the experience of contemporary adolescence more generally. His hope, he explains, is to answer a pair of broad questions. First: “What is the core, universal purpose of adolescence?” And second: “Why is adolescence undergoing unprecedented change? What is happening right now?” Nowhere in his title does the term “online” or “social media” appear, but the image on the book’s cover seems to supply a predictable answer to the latter line of inquiry: a big, blurry phone, clutched in two hands and held aloft, obscuring the face of a teen.

The conversation that Richtel’s book joins began in earnest nearly a decade ago, with Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State. Twenge was already a generational diagnostician when she set out to analyze young people born between 1995 and 2012. Previously, she’d written a book on millennials (born in the eighties and early nineties): “Generation Me,” published in 2006, promises in its subtitle to assess “Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before.” With “iGen,” her 2017 best-seller, she offers an account of “Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us.” The book supplies a term that achieved no widespread purchase (“iGen”) and a premise that did: that today’s teens have been, in a fundamental and unprecedented way, deformed by technology. Using survey databases and interviews, Twenge documents a decline in well-being that coincides with the growth of smartphone use. The group she calls iGen had entered adolescence just as these technologies took hold.

Several years later, the New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt proposed another name for this cohort: “the Anxious Generation.” Haidt’s book of the same title was published early last year and has not left the Times best-seller list since. Its author, meanwhile, emerged as a leading voice of alarm by picking up where Twenge left off. In “The Anxious Generation,” Haidt calls her work “groundbreaking,” but notes that, at the time she was writing, “nearly all evidence was correlational.” Armed now with ever larger data sets and some experimental findings, he argues that, between 2010 and 2015, a generational “rewiring” took place, thanks to two forces. The first was a parental overemphasis on children’s safety. The second was the phones. This combination of “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world” brought about a shift from “play-based” to “phone-based” childhood, he writes, with young people’s mental health as a casualty.

Part of Haidt’s appeal to terrified parents is his willingness to provide a stern and confident prescription: no smartphones before high school, no social media before sixteen, no phones in schools, and more independent childhood play. His guidance draws on the work of a former journalist named Lenore Skenazy. After winning media notoriety with a 2008 New York Sun column about letting her nine-year-old ride the subway alone, Skenazy reinvented herself as an activist against helicopter parenting, and published a book called “Free-Range Kids.” Haidt read it when he was a parent of young children, and subsequently partnered with Skenazy to help found Let Grow, a nonprofit that advocates for increased childhood independence. He credits her with shaping his thinking, but he’s also repackaged her ideas in a way that’s enabled them to be taken seriously: where Skenazy offers advice with an air of rambunctious provocation (for a time, she hosted a reality show called “World’s Worst Mom”), Haidt projects sober objectivity. His previous book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” co-authored with Greg Lukianoff, also addresses generational change and mental health—in that case, as manifested in campus conflicts and cancel culture. The authors explain in “Coddling” that they based their argument on a combination of “wisdom literatures” and cognitive-behavioral therapy. Haidt adopts a similar formula—classics plus social science—in “The Anxious Generation,” a book in which quotations from Epictetus and Buddha nestle alongside charts from the C.D.C.

Even as “The Anxious Generation” has set the terms for teens-and-phones discourse, it has attracted critics, some of whom seem primed to react against Haidt as a cancel-culture warrior. Others, though, have questioned his facts—in particular, the data underpinning his argument that phones offer the only reasonable explanation for a stark decline in teen mental health. Haidt points to a selection of statistics across Anglophone and Nordic countries to suggest that rising rates of teen unhappiness are an international trend requiring an international explanation. But it’s possible to choose other data points that complicate Haidt’s picture—among South Korean teens, for example, rates of depression fell between 2006 and 2018. Meanwhile, in the U.S., suicide rates have increased for virtually all age groups in the past two decades, not just for teens. Even in the areas in which Haidt’s case appears the strongest—for instance, concerning rising rates of depression among American teen-age girls—definite connections are elusive. The science journalist David Wallace-Wells has pointed out that the sudden increase in depression among teen girls coincides not just with the rise of smartphones but with a shift in screening practices that followed the Affordable Care Act: new guidelines recommended annual depression screenings for teen-age girls (and mandated that insurers cover them). More girls were saying that they were depressed, yes, but more doctors had started asking.

Richtel, entering this debate, stakes out a position between Haidt’s and those of his skeptics. Rather than questioning the existence of a teen mental-health crisis, Richtel seeks to contextualize it. Phones, in his view, aren’t a singular explanation, even if they are a legitimate concern. “I don’t think you need to be an evolutionary biologist or anthropologist to see the basic logic in this,” he writes. “SPENDING TEN HOURS A DAY WITH YOUR FACE BURIED IN A SCREEN IS NOT GOOD FOR THE DEVELOPING BRAIN.” In a chapter called “Social Media: This Is the Actual Science Behind the Boogeyman,” he explains his reluctance to make clear-cut statements on causality. “I’m guessing this can feel very unsatisfying,” he writes. “Like, really frustrating. Parents and policymakers want answers. I want to provide them. It would be really nice, were it true, to be able to say that the rise in mental health distress is a direct result of heavy use of social media. It’s just not that straightforward, though. The only thing worse than no answer is a false one.”

Like Twenge and Haidt before him, Richtel proposes a name for today’s teens: “Generation Rumination.” But he situates their turmoil in a consideration of adolescence as a cultural, sociological, and psychological stage that has emerged in recent centuries. The distress teens feel is, he believes, a reasonable response to a world whose challenges are increasingly abstract and intellectual rather than physical. “Generation Rumination is growing up in the realm of the mind and psyche,” he writes. “Asking why some are struggling is like asking why some adolescents of yesteryear skinned their knees and broke their bones while trekking over a mountain to explore new terrain.” At the same time, adolescence itself has changed as the age of puberty has fallen. Since the eighties, a growing body of research has found that girls in particular are starting puberty much younger than was once considered typical—as early as six or seven. Richtel argues that this means young people are now stranded for longer than ever in a state of heightened vulnerability; he describes studies indicating that adolescent brains are particularly drawn to novelty and social information (in addition to the risk-taking and poor judgment for which they’ve traditionally been known), laying them especially open to the temptations of the phone. “Changing environment + changing puberty = neurological mismatch,” he writes. Richtel intersperses his research with the stories of several teens, who help illustrate the broad strokes of his theory. “I don’t want to blame the internet, but I do want to blame the internet,” one kid, who’s struggled with anxiety and depression, tells Richtel. “I feel like if I was born in 2000 BC in the Alps, I’d still be depressive, but I think it’s wildly exacerbated by the climate we live in.”

In addition to reporting on technology and health, Richtel writes thrillers—in 2007, the year the first iPhone appeared, he published one called “Hooked,” about Silicon Valley villains racing to develop ever more addictive technologies. His sideline comes through in the prose of “How We Grow Up,” which is full of cliffhanger paragraph breaks and staccato fragments. It’s a book that seems acutely conscious of holding the reader’s attention, resorting at times to bullet points and chatty interjections. (While explaining “The Sorrows of Young Werther”: “Way to go, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe! You helped establish the idea of adolescence as one of terrible tumult.”) This is never truer than in a chapter addressing teens directly, titled “Hey, Adolescents, Own Your Own #*^& (or These People Will): An Open Letter to Adolescents Explains How You Can Take Back Power from Heartless Money-Grubbers.” Richtel has reported extensively on the dangers of distracted driving, and perhaps it’s a credit to his prior work that he’s inclined to treat teens and their phones as part of the broader phenomenon of our tech-mediated lives—a phenomenon in which the teens themselves are active participants rather than pliant victims. “Adolescents do not just form their own identities,” he writes. “They help form ours. They are the future-makers, and they’ve been doing that for a long time.”

It would be too dismissive to call the concern over teens and technology a moral panic, as some skeptics have done. But, if it isn’t a moral panic, it has at least become an irresistibly gripping cultural drama—a story operating on the level of emotion rather than data. Parents are daunted, exhausted, and afraid. A fear underlying the discourse of teens and phones is that technology might sever the parent-child bond, leaving the child a stranger. “The boy had changed, and was lost,” Haidt writes, summarizing one kid’s transformation from cheerful at age nine to screen-fixated at age fifteen.

The terror of losing a child to online darkness is enough to power the recent Netflix series “Adolescence,” which, despite its title, is less about young people than about the distance their elders feel from them. It centers on a thirteen-year-old British boy named Jamie, who is accused of murdering a female classmate. Both kids are born around 2011, making them late members of Twenge’s iGen, or, as it has become better known, Gen Z. Jamie’s guilt is quickly established; the mystery is how and why he did what he did. To the police detectives who visit his school, teen behavior is a cipher to be decoded, almost literally: their breakthrough arrives when the lead detective’s young son takes pity on his dad and tells him what all the emojis in Jamie’s Instagram replies mean. (They’re manosphere arcana.) At one point, another detective laments that they haven’t spent more time learning about the victim. “We’ve followed Jamie’s brain around this entire case,” she says. Maybe so, but his inner life remains inaccessibly remote. Jamie has a big head, like a baby, and skinny limbs; his flashes of menace have the horror-movie quality of an evil doll. The audience’s most sustained encounter with the boy takes the shape of an hour-long meeting between him and a court psychologist. He is a patient, a specimen to be examined, and viewers, like the psychologist, are tugged between fear for him and fear of him.

Fear is a note rarely absent from generational analysis of teens. “Always emphasize that you want to help them, that you’re on their side, and that the feedback you’re offering is to help them succeed,” Twenge counsels the managers of iGen employees, sounding a bit like she’s giving advice to novice zookeepers on entering a big-cat enclosure. Haidt’s book, meanwhile, begins with an extended analogy in which kids are pestering their parents to let them move to Mars, possibly never to return. The dominant strain of anxiety at present focusses less on the outright monstrous (as with nineties fantasies of teen-age “superpredators”) than on the brainwashed or body-snatched. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me” read the headline of a widely circulated Vox article from 2015, amid the period of campus culture wars that Haidt took on in “Coddling.” Technology is a vector; it transmits whatever ills and ideologies a parent imagines might lure a child beyond reach. Like the ongoing debate over kids and gender, the teens-and-phones discourse taps into a dread that your kid might stumble onto new ideas, very likely online, and be irreversibly transformed.