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

by Jonathan Haidt

By 2014, nearly a third of teen girls were spending over 20 hours a week on social media sites. That’s half of a full-time job—creating content for the platform and consuming content created by others. That is time no longer available for interacting with friends in person. The work is often joyless, yet many feel compelled to do it, lest they “miss out” on something or be excluded.[22] Eventually, for many, it becomes a mindless habit, something they turn to dozens of times each day.

a healthy human childhood with a lot of autonomy and unsupervised play in the real world sets children’s brains to operate mostly in “discover mode,” with a well-developed attachment system and an ability to handle the risks of daily life. Conversely, when there is society-wide pressure on parents to adopt modern overprotective parenting, it sets children’s brains to operate mostly in “defend mode,” with less secure attachment and reduced ability to evaluate or handle risk.

This altered cell structure is called reaction wood, or sometimes stress wood. Trees that are exposed to strong winds early in life become trees that can withstand even stronger winds when full grown. Conversely, trees that are raised in a protected greenhouse sometimes fall over from their own weight before they reach maturity.

There is no way to live with other humans without conflicts and deprivations. As the Stoics and Buddhists taught long ago, happiness cannot be reached by eliminating all “triggers” from life; rather, happiness comes from learning to deprive external events of the power to trigger negative emotions in you.

Researchers who study children at play have concluded that the risk of minor injuries should be a feature, not a bug, in playground design. In the U.K., they are acting on this insight, adding construction materials, hammers, and other tools (which are used with adult supervision).[22] As one enlightened summer camp administrator told me, “We want to see bruises, not scars.”

The play researchers Brussoni, Sandseter and Kennair, and Peter Gray all help us see that antifragile children need play that involves some risk to develop competence and overcome their childhood anxieties.

He analyzes changing parental behavior as a response to social, economic, and technological changes in the 1980s and 1990s: for example, the rise of cable TV (and 24/7 news cycles) and its ability to spread stories that frighten parents; the rising number of women working and the corresponding increase in day care and after-school programs; and the increasing influence of parenting “experts,” whose advice was often a better reflection of their social and political views than of any scientific consensus.

Across cultures and throughout history, mothers and fathers have acted on the assumption that if their children got into trouble, other adults—often strangers—would help out. In many societies adults feel duty-bound to reprimand other people’s children who misbehave in public.

once unsupervised children became a rarity, the occasional sighting of one was enough to cause some neighbors to call 911, bringing down the police, Child Protective Services, and occasionally jail time for anyone who dared to give their child the independence they themselves had enjoyed 30 years earlier.

But in a psychologically safe group, members can disagree with each other and criticize each other’s ideas respectfully. That’s how ideas get vetted. What emerged on campus as emotional safety, in contrast, was a much broader concept that came to mean this: I should not have to experience negative emotions because of what someone else said or did. I have a right not to be “triggered.”

A securely attached child usually settles within a few seconds or minutes, shifts back to discover mode, and heads out for more learning. This process happens dozens of times a day, hundreds of times a month, and within a few years children become less fearful and more likely to want to explore on their own—perhaps by walking to school or a friend’s house with no help from an adult.[56]

Pornography sites also welcome children, as long as they click a box to say that they are 18 or older. Porn sites will show them how to have anal sex long before they’ve had their first kiss.

Putting it all together, the Great Rewiring and the dawn of the phone-based childhood seem to have added two to three hours of additional screen-based activity, on average, to a child’s day, compared with life before the smartphone. These numbers vary somewhat by social class (more use in lower-income families than in high-income families),

In contrast, sitting alone in your bedroom consuming a bottomless feed of other people’s content, or playing endless hours of video games with a shifting cast of friends and strangers, or posting your own content and waiting for other kids (or strangers) to like or comment is so far from what children need that these activities should not be considered healthy new forms of adolescent interaction; they are alternatives that consume so much time that they reduce the amount of time teens spend together.

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Gen Z are an incredibly isolated group of people. We have shallow friendships and superfluous romantic relationships that are mediated and governed to a large degree by social media. . . . There is hardly a sense of community on campus and it’s not hard to see. Oftentimes I’ll arrive early to a lecture to find a room of 30+ students sitting together in complete silence, absorbed in their smartphones, afraid to speak and be heard by their peers. This leads to further isolation and a weakening of self identity and confidence, something I know because I’ve experienced it firsthand.

Teens need more sleep than adults—at least nine hours a night for preteens and eight hours a night for teens.

A study by Jean Twenge and colleagues of a large U.K. data set found that “heavy use of screen media was associated with shorter sleep duration, longer sleep latency, and more mid-sleep awakenings.”[37] The sleep disturbances were greatest for those who were on social media or who were surfing the internet in bed.

Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron” is set in an ultra-egalitarian future America where, by constitutional amendment, nobody is allowed to be smarter, better looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The “handicapper general” is the government officer tasked with enforcing equality of abilities and outcomes. Anyone with a high IQ is required to wear an earpiece at all times that buzzes loudly every 20 seconds or so with a variety of noises designed to interrupt sustained thinking, thereby bringing the person down to the functional intelligence of the average citizen. I thought about this story as I began to talk with my students a few years ago about how their phones were affecting their productivity.

Phones

When you add it all up, the average number of notifications on young people’s phones from the top social and communication apps amounts to 192 alerts per day, according to one study.

Studies show that adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are heavier users of smartphones and video games,

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.

There is a clear, consistent, and sizable link[7] between heavy social media use and mental illness for girls,[8] but that relationship gets buried or minimized in studies and literature reviews that look at all digital activities for all teens.[9] Journalists who report that the evidence of harm is weak are usually referring to such studies.

If an experimenter assigns some adolescents to abstain from social media for a month while all of their friends are still on it, then the abstainers are going to be more socially isolated for that month. Yet even still, in several studies, getting off social media improves their mental health.

Figure 6.3 shows the percentage of American high school students who spent more than 40 hours a week using social media platforms. That’s like working a full-time job while also being a full-time student. By 2015, one in seven American girls had reached this astronomical level.

Nearly all adolescents care how they look, especially as they begin to develop romantic interests. All know that they will be chosen or passed over based in part on their appearance. But for adolescent girls, the stakes are higher because a girl’s social standing is usually more closely tied to her beauty and sex appeal than is the case for boys.

So what happened when most girls in a school got Instagram and Snapchat accounts and started posting carefully edited highlight reels of their lives and using filters and editing apps to improve their virtual beauty and online brand? Many girls’ sociometers plunged, because most were now below what appeared to them to be the average. All around the developed world, an anxiety alarm went off in girls’ minds, at approximately the same time.

there is “prestige bias,” which is the social learning rule I described in chapter 2: Don’t just copy anyone; first find out who the most prestigious people are, then copy them. But on social media, the way to gain followers and likes is to be more extreme, so those who present with more extreme symptoms are likely to rise fastest, making them the models that everyone else locks onto for social learning.

Anyone who revealed an interest in mental health was soon inundated with videos of other teens displaying mental illness and receiving social support for doing so.[60] In August 2023, videos with the hashtag #mentalhealth had more than 100 billion views. #Trauma had more than 25 billion.

What percentage of girls were sharing nudes? I asked. “Twenty . . . thirty?” they guessed. “The thing is, with boys,” Cassy said, “if you don’t send them nudes, they say you’re a prude.” “Or scared,” said Maggie. Had a boy ever asked them for nudes? I asked. “Yes,” they said. “They blackmail you,” Cassy said. “They say, Oh, I have embarrassing pictures of you, if you don’t send nudes I’ll send them all out on social media.”

When everything moved onto smartphones in the early 2010s, both girls and boys experienced a gigantic increase in the number of their social ties and in the time required to service these ties (such as reading and commenting on the posts of acquaintances or maintaining dozens of Snapchat “streaks” with people who are not your closest friends).

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.

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

For example, in 1972, women earned only 42% of bachelor’s degrees. By 1982, women were just as likely as men to graduate from college. But for the next 20 years, women’s enrollment rose rapidly while men’s did not, so that by 2019 the gap had reversed: Women earned 59% of bachelor’s degrees, while men earned just 41%.

These young people are called hikikomori, a Japanese term that means “pulling inward.”[21] They live like hermits, emerging from their caves mostly at odd hours when they are less likely to see anyone, including family members. In some families, parents leave food for them by their doors. They calm their anxieties by staying inside, but the longer they stay in, the less competent they become in the outside world, fueling their anxiety about the outside world. They are trapped.

Durkheim and his concept of anomie can explain why all of a sudden, in the early 2010s, boys as well as girls began to agree much more vigorously with the statement “Life often feels meaningless.”

The Great Rewiring of Childhood pulled young people out of real-world communities, including their own families, and created a new kind of childhood lived in multiple rapidly shifting networks. One inevitable result was anomie, or normlessness, because stable and binding moralities cannot form when everything is in flux, including the members of the network.

The strongest and most satisfying communities come into being when something lifts people out of the lower level so that they have powerful collective experiences.