The Sustainable Media Center did not bring Jonathan Haidt, Zach Rausch, and a room full of Gen Z leaders together to stage a debate or score points in the ongoing culture war over phones. We did it because the conversation about youth, technology, and mental health has gotten loud, repetitive, and oddly narrow. Too often, adults talk about young people. Less often, they talk with them. Almost never do they listen carefully enough to be changed by what they hear.

This roundtable was an attempt to do something different.

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, and his research partner Zach Rausch from the Tech and Society Lab came in with years of data, patterns, and hard questions about what phones and social media are doing to kids, especially in school settings. Sitting across from them were high school students, college students, filmmakers, organizers, and youth advocates from groups like Design It For Us, the Log Off movement, and Reconnect. The age spread mattered. So did the power dynamics. This was not a panel where adults lectured and young people nodded politely. It was a working conversation.