The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

by Jonathan Haidt

One of the main skills that adolescents are expected to develop as they advance through middle school and high school is “executive function,” which refers to the child’s growing ability to make plans and then do the things necessary to execute those plans. Executive function skills are slow to develop because they are based in large part in the frontal cortex, which is the last part of the brain to rewire during puberty. Skills essential for executive function include self-control, focus, and the ability to resist off-ramps. A phone-based childhood is likely to interfere with the development of executive function.

App designers often use a four-step process that creates a self-perpetuating loop, shown in Figure 5.3. Figure 5.3. The Hooked model. From Nir Eyal’s 2014 book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. In the book, Eyal warned about the ethical implications of misusing the model in a section titled “The Morality of Manipulation.”55 The Hooked model guides designers through the loop they need to create if they want to build strong habits in their users. The loop starts with an external trigger, such as a notification that someone commented on one of her posts. That’s step 1, the off-ramp inviting her to leave the path she was on. It appears on her phone and automatically triggers a desire to perform an action (step 2) that had previously been rewarded: touching the notification to bring up the Instagram app. The action then leads to a pleasurable event, but only sometimes, and this is step 3: a variable reward. Maybe she’ll find some expression of praise or friendship, maybe not. This is a key discovery of behaviorist psychology: It’s best not to reward a behavior every time the animal does what you want. If you reward an animal on a variable-ratio schedule (such as one time out of every 10 times, on average, but sometimes fewer, sometimes more), you create the strongest and most persistent behavior. When you put a rat into a cage where it has learned to get food by pressing a bar, it gets a surge of dopamine in anticipation of the reward. It runs to the bar and starts ...

those who are addicted to screen-based activities have more trouble falling asleep, both because of the direct competition with sleep and because of the high dose of blue light delivered to the retina from just inches away, which tells the brain: It’s morning time! Stop making melatonin!59

imagine a sleep-deprived, anxious, irritable, and socially isolated student trying to focus on her homework as off-ramps beckon from the phone lying faceup on her desk. Her impaired executive abilities will strain to keep her on task for more than a minute or two at a time. Her attention is fragmented. Her consciousness becomes “the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state”

IN SUM In this chapter I described the four foundational harms of the phone-based childhood. These are profound changes to childhood caused by the rapid technological shift of the early 2010s. Each one is foundational because it affects the development of multiple social, emotional, and cognitive abilities. The sheer amount of time that adolescents spend with their phones is staggering, even compared with the high levels of screen time they had before the invention of the iPhone. Studies of time use routinely find that the average teen reports spending more than seven hours a day on screen-based leisure activities (not including school and homework). The opportunity cost of a phone-based childhood refers to everything that children do less of once they get unlimited round-the-clock access to the internet. The first foundational harm is social deprivation. When American adolescents moved onto smartphones, time with friends in face-to-face settings plummeted immediately, from 122 minutes per day in 2012 down to 67 minutes per day in 2019. Time with friends dropped further because of COVID restrictions, but Gen Z was already socially distanced before COVID restrictions were put in place. The second fundamental harm is sleep deprivation. As soon as adolescents moved from basic phones to smartphones, their sleep declined in both quantity and quality, around the developed world. Longitudinal studies show that smartphone use came first and was followed by sleep deprivation. Sleep...

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There is a clear, consistent, and sizable link7 between heavy social media use and mental illness for girls,

For girls, there is a larger and more consistent relationship. The more time a girl spends on social media, the more likely she is to be depressed. Girls who say that they spend five or more hours each weekday on social media are three times as likely to be depressed as those who report no social media time.

A 2017 study in the U.K. asked teens to rate the effects of the most popular social media platforms on different parts of their well-being, including anxiety, loneliness, body image, and sleep. Teens rated Instagram as the worst of the five apps, followed by Snapchat. YouTube was the only platform that received a positive overall score.25

There are a number of reasons why girls’ core developmental needs are more easily exploited and subverted by social media than is the case for boys (whose needs are more easily exploited by video game companies).

One that is useful for understanding media effects is the distinction between agency and communion, which refer to two sets of motivations or goals found in nearly everyone. One recent review defined them in this way: Agency arises from striving to individuate and expand the self and involves qualities such as efficiency, competence, and assertiveness. Communion arises from striving to integrate the self in a larger social unit through caring for others and involves qualities such as benevolence, cooperativeness, and empathy.29

Researchers have long found that boys and men are more focused on agency strivings while girls and women are more focused on communion strivings.31

Reason #1: Girls Are More Affected by Visual Social Comparison and Perfectionism

The researchers found that Instagram is particularly bad for girls: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression …. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”44 The researchers also noted that “social comparison is worse” on Instagram than on rival apps. Snapchat’s filters “keep the focus on the face,” whereas Instagram “focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle.”

because girls have stronger communion motives, the way to really hurt another girl is to hit her in her relationships. You spread gossip, turn her friends against her, and lower her value as a friend to other girls. Researchers have found that when you look at “indirect aggression” (which includes damaging other people’s relationships or reputations), girls are higher than boys—but only in late childhood and adolescence.46 A girl who feels her value sinking is a girl experiencing rising anxiety. If her sociometer drop is sharp enough, she may become depressed and consider suicide. For depressed or ostracized teens, physical death offers the end of pain, whereas social death is a living hell.

Depression was significantly more contagious than happiness or good mental health. The second twist was that depression spread only from women. When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%. When a man became depressed, it had no measurable effect on his friends.

process is sometimes known as audience capture—a process in which people get trained by their audiences to become more extreme versions of whatever it is the audience wants to see.

If we’re dividing the hours of the day and our mindshare between more and more relationships relative to the past, we’re almost certainly investing less in each individual relationship. Digital substitutions for real-world social engagement reduce the drive to be social but don’t satisfy emotional needs …. I think this created a really powerful trap: this form of interaction superficially satisfied the drive to connect with other people, but that connection was shallow, immaterial, unsatisfying. The human impulse to see other people was dulled without accessing the reinvigorating power of actual human connection.81

IN SUM Social media harms girls more than boys. Correlational studies show that heavy users of social media have higher rates of depression and other disorders than light users or nonusers. The correlation is larger and clearer for girls: Heavy users are three times as likely to be depressed as nonusers. Experimental studies show that social media use is a cause, not just a correlate, of anxiety and depression. When people are assigned to reduce or eliminate social media for three weeks or more, their mental health usually improves. Several “quasi-experiments” show that when Facebook came to campuses, or when high-speed internet came to regions and provinces, mental health declined, especially for girls and young women. Girls use social media a lot more than boys, and they prefer visually oriented platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, which are worse for social comparison than primarily text-based platforms such as Reddit. Two major categories of motivations are agency (the desire to stand out and have an effect on the world) and communion (the desire to connect and develop a sense of belonging). Boys and girls both want each of these, but there is a gender difference that emerges early in children’s play: Boys choose more agency activities; girls choose more communion activities. Social media appeals to the desire for communion, but it often ends up frustrating it. There are at least four reasons why social media harms girls more than boys. The first is that girls are m...

IN SUM Like girls, boys got more depressed and anxious in the early 2010s, in many countries. Unlike girls, boys experienced a slow decline since the 1970s in achievement and engagement in school, work, and family life. Boys and young men withdrew much of their time and effort from the physical world (which was increasingly opposed to unsupervised play, exploration, and risk-taking) and invested it in the rapidly expanding virtual world. Boys are at greater risk than girls of “failure to launch.” They are more likely to become young adults who are “Not in Education, Employment, or Training.” Some Japanese men developed an extreme form of lifelong withdrawal to their bedrooms; they are called hikikomori. In the early 2010s, American teen boys’ thinking patterns shifted from what they had traditionally been (higher rates of externalizing cognitions and behaviors than internalizing) to a pattern more commonly shown by girls (higher rates of internalizing). At the same time, boys also began to shun risk (more so than happened for girls). As boys engaged in fewer risky activities outdoors or away from home, and began spending more time at home on screens, their mental health did not decline in the 1990s and 2000s. But something changed in the early 2010s, and their mental health then began to decline. Once boys got smartphones, they—like girls—moved even more of their social lives online, and their mental health declined. One way that smartphones—amplified by high-speed interne...

we have an immediate gut feeling about an event, and then we make up a story after the fact to justify our rapid judgment—often a story that paints us in a good light.

Kevin started to incorporate more free play into students’ lives by making three changes: Longer recess with little adult intervention. Opening the school playground for half an hour before school starts, to give students time to play before class. Offering a “Play Club.” Anywhere from one to five days a week, a school stays open for mixed-age, “loose parts” free play (featuring things like balls, chalk, jump ropes), usually on the playground, or in the gym in bad weather. (But if the school can keep other rooms open, like an art room, great!) From 2:30 to 4:30 p.m.—your schedule may vary—instead of going home (often to a device or to an adult-led activity), children spend time together playing. It’s a no-phone zone! The kids are given nearly complete autonomy. There are only two rules: They can’t deliberately hurt anyone; and they can’t leave without telling the person in charge. This adult doesn’t organize any games or solve any spats. Like a lifeguard, adults intervene only in the case of an emergency. (Let Grow provides a free Play Club implementation guide on its website.)

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Re-normalizing childhood independence requires collective action, and collective action is most easily facilitated by local schools. When an entire class, school, or school district encourages parents to loosen the reins, the culture in that town or county shifts. Parents don’t feel guilty or weird about letting go. Hey, it’s homework, and all the other parents are doing it too. Pretty soon, you’ve got kids trick-or-treating on their own again, and going to the store, and getting themselves to school.

Families grew smaller and more mobile; people spent more time working and going to school; parenthood was delayed, often into the 30s. New parents lost access to local wisdom and began to rely more on experts. As they did so, they found it easy to approach parenthood with the mindset that had led them to success in school and work: If I can just find the right training, I can do the job well, and I’ll produce a superior product.

Gopnik says that parents began to think like carpenters who have a clear idea in mind of what they are trying to achieve. They look carefully at the materials they have to work with, and it is their job to assemble those materials into a finished product that can be judged by everyone against clear standards:

Gopnik says that a better way to think about child rearing is as a gardener. Your job is to “create a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish.” It takes some work, but you don’t have to be a perfectionist. Weed the garden, water it, and then step back and the plants will do their thing, unpredictably and often with delightful surprises.

Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it’s to give them the toys …. We can’t make children learn, but we can let them learn.

In Gopnik’s terms: Many of us have adopted an overcontrolling carpenter mentality, which prevents our children from flourishing. At the same time, we have underprotected our children in the virtual world by leaving them to their own devices and failing to do much weeding. We let the internet and social media take over the garden. We have left young people to grow up in digital social networks rather than in communities where they can put down roots. Then we are surprised that our children are lonely, starving for real human connections.

A representative set of recommendations that seem reasonable to me comes from the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry:8 Until 18 months of age, limit screen use to video chatting along with an adult (for example, with a parent who is out of town). Between 18 and 24 months, screen time should be limited to watching educational programming with a caregiver. For children 2–5, limit noneducational screen time to about one hour per weekday and 3 hours on the weekend days. For ages 6 and older, encourage healthy habits and limit activities that include screens. Turn off all screens during family meals and outings.9 Learn about and use parental controls. Avoid using screens as pacifiers, babysitters, or to stop tantrums. Turn off screens and remove them from bedrooms 30–60 minutes before bedtime.

It is during elementary school that children start applying the learning mechanisms I described in chapter 2 in full force: conformist bias (do what everyone else is doing) and prestige bias (copy the people whom everyone else looks up to).

Focus more on maximizing in-person activity and sleep than on total screen hours. The main harm done by most screen activities is the opportunity cost, which directly drives two of the four foundational harms that I described in chapter 5: social deprivation and sleep deprivation. If your children are spending a lot of time in person with friends, such as on sports teams or in unstructured play or hangouts, if they are getting plenty of sleep, and if they show no signs of addiction or problematic use on any devices, then you may be able to loosen up on the screen-time limit.

limits are hard to impose if you are the only family imposing them, so try to coordinate with the parents of your child’s friends. When many families impose similar limits, they break out of the collective action trap and everyone is better off.

Shared meals should be phone-free so that family members attend to each other.

Be wary of allowing devices in bedrooms at these younger age, but if you do, then all devices should be removed from bedrooms by a fixed time, which should be at least 30 minutes before the scheduled bedtime.23

Your child’s social media use might be causing problems if: it interferes with their daily routines and commitments, such as school, work, friendships, and extracurricular activities they experience strong cravings to check social media they lie or use deceptive behavior to spend time online they often choose social media over in-person social interactions it prevents them from getting at least eight hours of quality sleep each night it prevents them from engaging in regular physical activity they keep using social media even when they express a desire to stop

Take a gap year after high school. Many young people go directly to college without any sense of what else is out there. How are they supposed to know what they want to do with their lives—or even whether college is their best option? Let young adults discover more about their interests and about the world. They can get a job and save up money. Travel. Volunteer. They are not damaging their college prospects. They are improving their chances of finding a path they want to pursue, and they are improving their competence at following any path. A gap year is intended not to postpone a young person’s transition to adulthood but rather to accelerate it. It’s a year to build skills, responsibility, and independence. You can find a list of organizations that can help your teen plan a gap year at gapyearassociation.org. Scholarships and subsidies are often available.

The idea behind all of these suggestions is to let teens grow more confident and competent by engaging with the real world. Encourage activities that stretch them beyond their comfort zone. Yours too! Risking a serious injury for no good reason is dumb. But some risk is part of any hero’s journey, and there’s plenty of risk in not taking the journey too.

High school students are even more likely to be sleep deprived than middle school students, so help your teen develop a good evening routine, one in which the phone is removed from the bedroom by a set time each night. Most of my students say that the last thing they do at night before closing their eyes is to check their texts and social media accounts. It’s also the first thing they do in the morning before getting out of bed. Don’t let your children develop this habit.

There are many excellent organizations that bring parents together around this cause, including Let Grow, Outsideplay, and Fairplay.5 There are also many excellent organizations that bring parents together and offer ideas and resources for delaying the phone-based childhood or making it less damaging. See Fairplay, the Center for Humane Technology, Common Sense Media, Screen Strong, and others that I’ll list in the online supplement.6 Talk with the parents of your children’s friends. Most likely, they share your concerns, and if you act together to delay smartphones and social media, then it will be easier for you and your children to reject the phone-based childhood and choose real-world community instead.