Some of you have already listened to Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast with author (including of The Anxious Generation, this year’s all-community read) and social psychologist Jon Haidt, which was posted on Monday. Because I am never anywhere where I can actually listen to a podcast (not allowed in Founders, ditto the playing fields, you get the picture), I finally finished it this morning. The title of it is, “Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of.” If you listened to it, you know what I am going to say: it presents one of the most compelling arguments that I have heard recently for St. Andrew’s School and our approach to the formation of strong, curious children built for right human relationships with limited interference from technology.

The podcast and a transcript of it are posted here, and I highly recommend listening.

Also, over the past few days, we have had the first of our two Visit Back Days, where admitted students and their families spend a day with us on campus. On Tuesday after announcements, when the students automatically poured out of the Dining Hall to the Front Lawn to play in the sunshine for the few minutes before the next class, seamlessly inviting admitted students to their four-square and spikeball games, I saw awestruck parents in every door and window on the south side of Founders. Those of us who are here every day think nothing of it; the kids are built for this, as Haidt would remind us, and a childhood rich in face-to-face human relationships and play is what has contributed to the moral formation of good adults for centuries, if not millennia.

In this context of care and meaning, youngsters can build strength for the hard stuff through trial-and-error, mistakes, and disappointments. As Haidt says in the interview, “We need to realize kids have to go through a childhood in the real world with other kids within a moral universe where they experience the consequences of their own actions. And they have to learn how to deal with real people who are frustrating.” And here, in an Episcopal, all-boarding environment filled with caring adults, students are sure to experience this. It’s all for the good.

As we move toward the summer, I ask you to boldly continue this work when your kids are at home—as you have done throughout their lives. Don’t be afraid to go all-in. (After all, we have an active group of students led by Gray ’25 and Max ’25 transitioning students to flip phones. We can do this!) Social media companies are fracking our children’s attention for profit. In the podcast, Haidt says it this way, “And when you have entire trillion-dollar industries, where do they make their money from? I didn’t pay them a penny. You didn’t pay them a penny. Our kids didn’t pay them a penny. That entire value is created by breaking up the day into tiny little bits and sucking out the attention and selling it to advertisers and selling the data.” Letting social media companies strip-mine our students’ precious summer and sell it to advertisers is not ok. And it won’t prepare them for coming back to school, nor for working later in life. In the broadcast, Haidt talks about his undergraduates at NYU Stern: “Our brains are large language models, in a sense. Don’t send me kids whose LLMs were filled in by TikTok. Send me a kid whose LLM was figured within a stable moral community. And that kid is going to be adapted for the future, because he didn’t have the current technology when he was growing up.”

I want to make the case for letting our kids be a little bored this summer. Let’s stack up a big pile of books (start with these recommendations from students and faculty), go for walks around the city or the country without our airpods in our ears, make dinner together, eat together, and clean up together—without screens. Let’s visit extended family and take walks with neighborhood friends. That “stable moral community” Haidt is talking about starts with us; we must make time for it. And in doing so, make time for our children to flourish.