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

by Jonathan Haidt

As the transition from play-based to phone-based childhood proceeded, many children and adolescents were perfectly happy to stay indoors and play online, but in the process they lost exposure to the kinds of challenging physical and social experiences that all young mammals need to develop basic competencies, overcome innate childhood fears, and prepare to rely less on their parents. Virtual interactions with peers do not fully compensate for these experiential losses.

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.

quick responses to threats are so important that the brains of mammals can trigger a fear response before information from the eyes has even made it to the visual centers in the back of the brain for full processing.

“There is something about activism itself that is beneficial for well-being,” said Tim Kasser, coauthor of a 2009 study on college students, activism, and flourishing.[43] Yet more recent studies of young activists, including climate activists, find the opposite: Those who are politically active nowadays usually have worse mental health.

Even if the content on these sites could somehow be filtered effectively to remove obviously harmful material, the addictive design of these platforms reduces the time available for face-to-face play in the real world. The reduction is so severe that we might refer to smartphones and tablets in the hands of children as experience blockers

Synchronous, face-to-face, physical interactions and rituals are a deep, ancient, and underappreciated part of human evolution.

Hogben’s essay is a succinct illustration of the principle that we are overprotecting our children in the real world while underprotecting them online

Our goal in designing the places children play, she says, should be to “keep them as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.”

Instead of gaining an experience of social mastery, a child is often left with a sense of social incompetence, loss of status, and anxiety about future social interactions.

In online interactions

the online world is not nearly as dangerous as Mars, but it shares the property that small mistakes can bring enormous costs. Children did not evolve to handle the virality, anonymity, instability, and potential for large-scale public shaming of the virtual world. Even adults have trouble with it.

when adults step away and stop helping each other to raise children, parents find themselves on their own. Parenting becomes harder, more fear-ridden, and more time consuming, especially for women, as we saw in figure 3.8.

This is the world in which Gen Z was raised. It was a world in which adults, schools, and other institutions worked together to teach children that the world is dangerous, and to prevent them from experiencing the risks, conflicts, and thrills that their experience-expectant brains needed to overcome anxiety and set their default mental state to discover mode.

If a child goes through puberty doing a lot of archery, or painting, or video games, or social media, those activities will cause lasting structural changes in the brain, especially if they are rewarding.

Same for drinking etc

In the real world, it often matters how old you are. But as life moved online, it mattered less and less.

Once a child gets online, there is never a threshold age at which she is granted more autonomy or more rights.

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.

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.

People can’t really multitask; all we can do is shift attention back and forth between tasks while wasting a lot of it on each shift.

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] The fact that these gender differences have decreased over time tells us that they result in part from cultural factors and forces. The fact that they emerge early in children’s play[32] and can be found in the gendered play patterns of other primates[33] tells us that there is probably a biological contribution as well.

“social comparison takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluations.”

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.

Girls on social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat are exposed to the direct messages of adult men who seek them out, and also to school cultures in which photos of their naked bodies become a currency for social prestige among boys, a currency that girls pay for with shame.

Reeves adds, “The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges.”[13]

the rise of safetyism in the 1980s and 1990s hit boys harder than girls, because boys engage in more rough-and-tumble play and more risky play. When playtime was shortened, pulled indoors, and over-supervised, boys lost more than girls.

Many boys got lost in cyberspace, which made them more fragile, fearful, and risk averse on Earth.

From the beginning of the digital age, the tech industry has found ever more compelling ways to help boys do the things they want to do, without having to take social and physical risks that were once needed to satisfy those desires.

Boys thrive when they have a stable group of reliable friends, and they create their strongest and most durable friendships from being on the same team or in a stable pack, facing risks or rival teams.

Though researchers have not found evidence that prayer works to change outcomes in the world, such as curing a child of cancer, DeSteno found that there is abundant evidence that keeping up certain spiritual practices improves well-being. The mechanism often involves reducing self-focus and selfishness, which prepares a person to merge with or be open to something beyond the self.

Durkheim called this state of energized communion “collective effervescence.”

Live music!

Strong communities don’t just magically appear whenever people congregate and communicate. 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. They all enter the realm of the sacred together, at the same time. When they return to the profane level, where they need to be most of the time to address the necessities of life, they have greater trust and affection for each other as a result of their time together in the sacred realm. They are also happier and have lower rates of suicide.

People who live only in networks, rather than communities, are less likely to thrive.

If we want to spend most of our lives above zero on that dimension, we need to take back control of our inputs. We need to take back control of our lives.

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. Gopnik urges us to embrace the messiness and unpredictability of raising children: