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

by Jonathan Haidt

When people are raised in a community that they cannot easily escape, they do what our ancestors have done for millions of years: They learn how to manage relationships, and how to manage themselves and their emotions in order to keep those precious relationships going.

In other words, evolution has provided humans an extended childhood that allows for a long period of learning the accumulated knowledge of one’s society—a kind of cultural apprenticeship, during adolescence, before one is seen and treated as an adult.

Play with some degree of physical risk is essential because it teaches children how to look after themselves and each other.[9] Children can only learn how to not get hurt in situations where it is possible to get hurt, such as wrestling with a friend, having a pretend sword fight, or negotiating with another child to enjoy a seesaw when a failed negotiation can lead to pain in one’s posterior, as well as embarrassment. When parents, teachers, and coaches get involved, it becomes less free, less playful, and less beneficial. Adults usually can’t stop themselves from directing and protecting.

Of course, a smartphone opens up worlds of new possible experiences, including video games (which are forms of play) and virtual long-distance friendships. But this happens at the cost of reducing the kinds of experiences humans evolved for and that they must have in abundance to become socially functional adults. It’s as if we gave our infants iPads loaded with movies about walking, but the movies were so engrossing that kids never put in the time or effort to practice walking.

The way young people use social media is generally not much like free play. In fact, posting and commenting on social media sites is the opposite of Gray’s definition. Life on the platforms forces young people to become their own brand managers, always thinking ahead about the social consequences of each photo, video, comment, and emoji they choose. Each action is not necessarily done “for its own sake.” Rather, every public action is, to some degree, strategic. It is, in Peter Gray’s phrase, “consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.”

Attunement forms the foundations for later emotional self-regulation. Children who are deprived of this joyful, mutually trusting social experience often face emotional difficulties and exhibit erratic behavior in their later years. They can have difficulty forming healthy attachments as adolescents and as adults they may be less able to cope with unexpected challenges, regulate emotions, make sound decisions when risk is involved, or learn to deal effectively as they enter into more and more complex social interactions.[17]

Girls especially come to delight in singing songs together, jumping rope together, or playing rhyming and clapping games (such as pat-a-cake) in which high-speed hand motions are perfectly matched between the partners while high-speed nonsense songs are sung at the same time. Such games have no explicit goal or way to win. They are pleasurable because they use the ancient power of synchrony to create communion between unrelated people.

In a real-life social setting, it takes a while—often weeks—to get a good sense for what the most common behaviors are, because you need to observe multiple groups in multiple settings. But on a social media platform, a child can scroll through a thousand data points in one hour (at three seconds per post), each one accompanied by numerical evidence (likes) and comments that show whether the post was a success or a failure. Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conformity engines ever invented. They can shape an adolescent’s mental models of acceptable behavior in a matter of hours, whereas parents can struggle unsuccessfully for years to get their children to sit up straight or stop whining.

Henrich argues that the reason people become so deferential (starstruck) toward prestigious people is that they are motivated to get close to prestigious people in order to maximize their own learning and raise their own prestige by association. Prestigious people, in turn, will allow some supplicants to get close to them because having a retinue (a group of devoted attendants and followers) is a reliable signal to the community of their high standing in the prestige rankings. Platform designers in Silicon Valley directly targeted this psychological system when they quantified and displayed the success of every post (likes, shares, retweets, comments) and every user, whose followers are literally called followers.

Children are born with two innate learning programs that help them to acquire their local culture. Conformist bias motivates them to copy whatever seems to be most common. Prestige bias motivates them to copy whoever seems to be the most accomplished and prestigious. Social media platforms, which are engineered for engagement, hijack social learning and drown out the culture of one’s family and local community while locking children’s eyes onto influencers of questionable value.

Unsupervised outdoor play teaches children how to handle risks and challenges of many kinds. By building physical, psychological, and social competence, it gives kids confidence that they can face new situations, which is an inoculation against anxiety.

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.

Taleb noted that some things, like wineglasses, are fragile. We protect fragile things from shocks and threats because we know they cannot withstand even a gentle challenge, such as being knocked over on a dinner table. Other things are resilient, such as a plastic cup, which can withstand being knocked off the table. But resilient objects don’t get better from getting dropped; they merely don’t get worse.

Taleb coined the word “antifragile” to describe things that actually need to get knocked over now and then in order to become strong.

The ultimate antifragile system is the immune system, which requires early exposure to dirt, parasites, and bacteria in order to set itself up in childhood. Parents who try to raise their children in a bubble of perfect hygiene are harming their children by blocking the development of their antifragile immune systems.

Well-intentioned parents who try to raise their children in a bubble of satisfaction, protected from frustration, consequences, and negative emotions, may be harming their children. They may be blocking the development of competence, self-control, frustration tolerance, and emotional self-management. Several studies find that such “coddling” or “helicopter parenting” is correlated with later anxiety disorders, low self-efficacy (which is the inner confidence that one can do what is needed to reach one’s goals), and difficulty adjusting to college.[14]

As children become more competent, they become increasingly more intrigued by some of the things that had frightened them. They may approach them, look to adults and older kids for guidance, learn to distinguish the dangerous situations from the less dangerous ones, and eventually master their fears. As they do so, their fear turns into thrill and triumph. You can see the transition on a young child’s face as he reaches out to touch a worm under a rock you just lifted up for him on a nature walk. You can see the mix of fear and fascination turning into a shriek of delight and disgust as he pulls his finger away, laughing. He did it! Now he’ll be less afraid the next time he encounters a worm.

Kids and puppies are thrill seekers. They are hungry for thrills, and they must get them if they are to overcome their childhood fears and wire up their brains so that discover mode becomes the default. Children need to swing and then jump off the swing. They need to explore forests and junkyards in search of novelty and adventure. They need to shriek with their friends while watching a horror movie or riding a roller coaster. In the process they develop a broad set of competences, including the ability to judge risk for themselves, take appropriate action when faced with risks, and learn that when things go wrong, even if they get hurt, they can usually handle it without calling in an adult.

Researchers who study children at play have concluded that the risk of minor injuries should be a feature, not a bug, in playground design.

Like young trees exposed to wind, children who are routinely exposed to small risks grow up to become adults who can handle much larger risks without panicking. Conversely, children who are raised in a protected greenhouse sometimes become incapacitated by anxiety before they reach maturity.

We used the term “safetyism” to refer to “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. ‘Safety’ trumps everything else, no matter how unlikely or trivial the potential danger.”[52]

This makes me think of certain people

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] As the child develops she is able to internalize the secure base. She doesn’t need the parent’s physical presence to feel that she has support, so she learns to face adversity by herself.

Puberty is therefore a period when we should be particularly concerned about what our children are experiencing. Physical conditions, including nutrition, sleep, and exercise, matter throughout all of childhood and adolescence. But because there is a sensitive period for cultural learning, and because it coincides with the accelerated rewiring of the brain that begins at the start of puberty, those first few years of puberty deserve special attention.

The fact that most societies used to have such rites suggests to me that our extremely new secular societies may be losing something important as we abandon public and communally marked rites of passage. A human child doesn’t morph into a culturally functional adult solely through biological maturation. Children benefit from role models (for cultural learning), challenges (to stimulate antifragility), public recognition of each new status (to change their social identity), and mentors who are not their parents as they mature into competent, flourishing adults. Evidence for the idea that children need rites of passage comes from the many cases where adolescents spontaneously construct initiation rites that are not supported by adults in the broader culture. In fact, anthropologists say that such rites come about precisely because of a society’s “failure to provide meaningful adolescent rites of passage ceremonies.”[12]

Age 6: The age of family responsibility. Children are formally recognized as important contributors to the household, not just as dependents. As an example, they can be given a small list of chores and a small weekly allowance that is contingent upon their performance of those chores.[19] Age 8: The age of local freedom. Children gain the freedom to play and hang out in groups without adult supervision. They should show that they can take care of each other, and they begin running local errands, if there are stores within a short walk or bike ride. They should not be given adult cell phones, but they could be given a phone or watch designed for children that would allow them to call or text a small number of people (such as their parents and siblings). Age 10: The age of roaming. Preteens gain the freedom to roam more widely, perhaps equivalent to what their parents were allowed to do at the age of 8 or 9. They should show good judgment and do more to help their families. Consistent with their increased mobility and responsibility, a flip phone or other basic phone with few apps and no internet access might be given as a birthday present. They should not have most afternoons filled with adult-led “enrichment” activities; they need time to hang out with friends in person. Age 12: The age of apprenticeship. At 12, which is around the age that many societies begin rites of initiation, adolescents should begin finding more adult mentors and role models beyond their parents. Ad...

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of . . . life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”[16]

When a conversation partner pulls out a phone,[21] or when a phone is merely visible[22] (not even your own phone), the quality and intimacy of a social interaction is reduced.

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.

There is no off-ramp in an app with a bottomless feed; there is no signal to stop.

At this point, after investment, the trigger for the next round of behavior may become internal. The girl no longer needs a push notification to call her over to Instagram. As she is rereading a difficult passage in her textbook, the thought pops up in her mind: “I wonder if anyone has liked the photo I posted 20 minutes ago?” An attractive off-ramp appears in consciousness (step 1). She tries to resist temptation and stick with her homework, but the mere thought of a possible reward triggers the release of a bit of dopamine, which makes her want to go to Instagram immediately. She feels a craving. She goes (step 2) and finds that nobody liked or commented on her post. She feels disappointment, but her dopamine-primed brain still craves a reward, so she starts looking through her other posts, or her direct messages, or anything that shows that she matters to someone else, or anything that provides easy entertainment, which she finds (step 3). She wanders down her feed, leaving comments for her friends along the way. Sure enough, a friend reciprocates by liking her last post. An hour later, she returns to her study of photosynthesis, depleted and less able to focus.

Social media is not synonymous with the internet, smartphones are not equivalent to desktop computers or laptops, PacMan is not World of Warcraft, and the 2006 version of Facebook is not the 2024 version of TikTok.

There is evidence that the fragmentation of attention in early adolescence caused by problematic use of social media and video games may interfere with the development of executive function.

Dopamine release is pleasurable, but it does not trigger a feeling of satisfaction. Rather, it makes you want more of whatever you did to trigger the release.