HAMPTONS INSTITUTE: POST-PLAY CHILDHOOD

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and taught for 16 years in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia

Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. In his most recent release, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness he brings to light the  “great rewiring of childhood” in which play-based childhood has been replaced by phone-based childhood. Jon continues to push towards the reforms to put an end to the youth mental health crisis through his public health campaign, The Anxious Generation. 

Overall, Haidt’s research uncovers the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. His mission is to help people understand each other, live and work near each other, and even learn from each other despite their moral differences. Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including HeterodoxAcademy.org, The Constructive Dialogue Institute, and EthicalSystems.org.

Haidt is also the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and of The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff). He has written more than 100 academic articles,which have been cited nearly 100,000 times. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was chosen by Prospect magazine as one of the world’s “Top 50 Thinkers.”  He has given four TED talks and strives to shine a light into what makes morality with his continued work.

Photo: Rob Holys

Harold S. Koplewicz, MD, is the founding president and medical director of the Child Mind Institute, the leading independent nonprofit in children’s mental health. One of the nation’s top child and adolescent psychiatrists, Dr. Koplewicz was the founding director of the NYU Child Study Center from 1997 to 2009 and director of the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research from 2006 to 2011.

Dr. Koplewicz served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology for 25 years, and he is the author of several books, including Scaffold Parenting: Raising Resilient, Self-Reliant, and Secure Kids in an Age of Anxiety (Harmony Books, 2021).

The Child Mind Institute, which Dr. Koplewicz founded in 2009, has reached nearly 64,000 children through clinical care, research evaluations, and school-based programs, and they have delivered mental health resources to over 1.8 million students. Researchers in over 3,350 cities worldwide have published articles using the organization’s open science data sets, and their award-winning website, childmind.org, has brought accessible information to more than 100 million parents, teachers, and mental health professionals worldwide. In 2023, they inaugurated the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Child Mind Institute.

Dr. Koplewicz’s many awards and honors include the 2002 Catcher in the Rye Award from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and WebMD’s 2014 Health Heroes Activist Award. In 2020, he received the Dominick P. Purpura Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He has been repeatedly recognized in America’s Top Doctors, Best Doctors in America, and New York Magazine’s “Best Doctors.”