By Bill McMahon, Director

Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, has been receiving significant attention because it not only outlines the harm smartphones and social media are causing, but it also presents concrete solutions.

In the first half of his book Haidt illuminates studies that show that teenage depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts have surged from 2010 to 2023, paralleling the time frame during which smart phones and social media have become ubiquitous with teenagers. Haidt attributes the alarming surge in teenage anguish to the impact phones and social media have had on four key facets of teen life and health: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.

Haidt goes on to recommend four solutions to the mental health crisis facing teenagers: no smartphones before high school; no social media before 16; phone-free schools; and more unsupervised play and childhood independence.

I would put forth another remedy to the phone and social media induced mental health ailments plaguing young people: enroll your kid in a great overnight summer camp like Moosilauke.

At places like Moose, campers have no contact with phones and social media the whole time they are away from home (up to seven weeks). At Moose, our long-standing policy is that all phones are collected on opening day and are kept in a safe until departure day.

This 24/7 phone free existence immediately helps kids get what they need most to be happy and healthy, including: 

According to Ruth Whippman in her essay Boys Get Everything, Except the Thing That’s Most Worth Having, this last benefit (less loneliness due to more in person time with peers) may be the most critical. She cites that teenage boys now spend two hours less a week socializing than girls due in part to the fact that they spend seven hours more per week than their female peers on screens.

Being phone free also means there are more hours in the day to develop performance character traits like resilience, grit, tenacity, and an overall growth mindset. At Moosilauke, the development of these essential traits comes from a unique combination of elements that includes:

• A program of broad and deep positive risk taking that requires campers to try new things and encounter and overcome failure–on the waterfront, in land sports, and in outdoor adventure experiences. At Moose, you can’t just specialize in your strengths.
• A great peer culture that supports campers to step out of their comfort zone and try things they are not good at.
• A community where campers learn to navigate the ups and downs of living in close quarters with 5-10 of their peers from different socio-economic, geographic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds–without their parents present.
• A community where campers are given real responsibility for themselves, the cleanliness of their cabins, and the success of their trips and activities–without their parents present.
• A community where adults who are not their parents develop strong bonds with campers and provide much-needed mentoring.

And the beauty of being at a phone free camp is that there is no FOMO for the campers since all their friends at camp are also without their phones!

P.S. The morning I was writing this blog, folks around the world read an opinion piece in the New York Times by the surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy that calls for warning labels on social media platforms. Two days later the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, called for a state-wide ban on smartphone use in California schools. Given this momentum, it will be interesting to see what additional protections are in place for teenagers relative to smartphone use in the near future.