Technology

Restoring Childhood Says It's Not Smartphones Making Teens Miserable. It's School.

Computers, video games, and the internet actually helped "restore childhood" in the 1990s, suggests psychologist Peter Gray in a new book. Then changes to our education system reversed those gains.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 9.15.2026 9:00 AM

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(Illustration: Restoring Childhood/Peter Gray/Thesis/Midjourney)

Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety, by Peter Gray, Penguin Random House, 352 pages, $32

There's one chart that anyone who thinks they know all about smartphones, social media, and kids should see. Part of its data—showing U.S. teen suicide rates rising steeply between roughly 2010 and 2020—has been widely shared by people out to prove that modern "screen time" has been disastrous for American youth. But if we pan out a little further, a different picture emerges.

In this chart, we can see that the teen suicide rate rose steadily from 1950 until around 1990—an era during which nary a teen was checking Facebook, posting to Snapchat, or texting with friends. Then, throughout the '90s and early aughts, the rate of teen suicide dropped. Its subsequent rise in the 2010s represents not some unprecedented climb but a return to levels seen in the 1970s and 1980s. (It has also, in recent years, begun once again to fall.)

Suicide isn't the only index of teen suffering where we see such a pattern. Signs of depression and anxiety also crept up copiously in the second half of the 1900s. Then, for more than a decade, many measures of teen distress decreased. The pattern doesn't map easily onto modern technology.

I encountered that chart in Restoring Childhood by the Boston College evolutionary psychologist Peter Gray, who is out to challenge the conventional wisdom around kids and digital connectivity. His book also attempts to explain what actually went wrong, then right, then wrong again for American youth.

Gray has studied child development for decades, with particular emphasis on the importance of play. (His Substack is called Play Makes Us Human.) He has penned multiple books critical of conventional American schooling, and he co-founded Let Grow, a group championing childhood independence and challenging public policies that discourage it.

Gray started Let Grow with the New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Reason........

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