What if It’s Not the Phones?

Gray’s theory, which he laid out in a 2013 book called Free to Learn, quickly found a welcome audience. The book was celebrated by advocates of free-range parenting and won endorsement from academic luminaries such as Steven Pinker. When Gray’s fellow psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff published their 2018 best seller on the threat of safetyism, The Coddling of the American Mind, they used the title of Gray’s popular TEDx talk “The Decline of Play” as a chapter header. Haidt, who is an Atlantic contributor, told me that Gray was “the star academic” in the section of his book that deals with play. “I wish every school in America could hear a talk by Peter Gray,” he said.

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You will not be surprised to hear that Haidt has a very different reading of the evidence. When I asked him what he made of the claim that computers were actually a boon to children’s mental health from 1990 to 2010, he instead proposed that any improvement during that period might have resulted from the phasing out and banning of leaded gasoline. (Lead exposure has been tied to developmental disorders and mental-health problems.) As for Gray’s critique of his smartphone-and-social-media hypothesis, Haidt said that it was overly reliant on the dissenting opinion of what he characterized as a minority of researchers. In particular, he mentioned Candice Odgers, a psychology professor at UC Irvine, and Christopher Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University.

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