Opinion | Parenting in the Age of Social Media and — Help!

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

In March of last year, Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, published a book called “The Anxious Generation,” which caused, let’s call it, a stir.

I always found the conversation over this book to be a little annoying because it got at one of the difficulties we’re having in parenting and in society: a tendency to instrumentalize everything into social science. Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it’s bad.

This phenomenon is, to me, a collapse in our sense of what a good life is and what it means to flourish as a human being.

So I stayed out of that debate, because, on the one hand, I couldn’t settle it, and on the other hand, I didn’t think I should come in and say it wasn’t important.

But a year later, two things have happened. One: Haidt’s book has never left the best-seller list. That is rare. It has struck a chord.