Real Safety AI Foundation / Research

Children, Schools, and Youth Policy

The Anxious Generators: Moral Panic, Medium Blindness, and the Children the Evidence Forgot

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Working paper. Not peer reviewed.

Written
June 2026
Version
v4
Pages
17
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Abstract

For two generations a recurring movement has warned that a new medium is harming the young, and the current version, organized around Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, holds that smartphones and now artificial intelligence are damaging children and that the remedy is to restrict access by age. This paper argues that the movement is wrong, and wrong in a way that is general rather than special. The four harms the movement attributes to the medium, namely social deprivation, sleep disruption, attention fragmentation, and addiction, are on inspection properties of content, design, social dynamics, and governance rather than of the device, and the strongest empirical work finds the association between screen use and well being to be real but so small that ordinary and harmless variables show effects of comparable size. This holds for every user, child or adult, disabled or not, because the medium is a delivery surface and the valence lives in what is delivered. The paper situates the present alarm in a pattern that runs from Socrates through the novel, the radio, and the television, in which both the recurrence and the predictable fade are diagnostic, and it notes that the movement’s own intellectual leadership reversed itself, moving from a warning against overprotecting children to a program of restriction. It then turns to a part of the case the movement does not account for, that the frightening aggregate is in part manufactured by removing disabled children from the count, including by the published design of the assessments cited in legislative testimony, that the prescribed age restriction strips a legally mandated accommodation from the children who depend on the device most, and that the exception the movement grants for disabled children is fatal to its own universal claim while revealing an ontology its holders would disavow. The argument is built to outlast its occasion and to apply to the next medium the pattern will fear.

Keywords

  • moral panic
  • screen time
  • medium theory
  • design
  • disability
  • Section 504
  • assistive technology
  • artificial intelligence
  • children

Plain language slides

First slide of the plain language summary of The Anxious Generators: Moral Panic, Medium Blindness, and the Children the Evidence ForgotOpen the 20-slide summary (PDF)

Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "The Anxious Generators: Moral Panic, Medium Blindness, and the Children the Evidence Forgot." Real Safety AI Foundation Working Paper, June 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/anxious-generators/

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