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

by Jonathan Haidt

By designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale. The most intense period of this rewiring was 2010 to 2015, although the story I will tell begins with the rise of fearful and overprotective parenting in the 1980s and continues through the COVID pandemic to the present day.

While the reward-seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, the frontal cortex—essential for self-control, delay of gratification, and resistance to temptation—is not up to full capacity until the mid-20s, and preteens are at a particularly vulnerable point in development. As they begin puberty, they are often socially insecure, easily swayed by peer pressure, and easily lured by any activity that seems to offer social validation.

The costs of using social media, in particular, are high for adolescents, compared with adults, while the benefits are minimal. Let children grow up on Earth first, before sending them to Mars.

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and—as I will show—unsuitable for children and adolescents.

They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviors that are essential for successful human development.

The members of Gen Z are, therefore, the test subjects for a radical new way of growing up, far from the real-world interactions of small communities in which humans evolved. Call it the Great Rewiring of Childhood. It’s as if they became the first generation to grow up on Mars.

The Great Rewiring is not just about changes in the technologies that shape children’s days and minds. There’s a second plotline here: the well-intentioned and disastrous shift toward overprotecting children and restricting their autonomy in the real world.

My central claim in this book is that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.

“real world,” I am referring to relationships and social interactions characterized by four features that have been typical for millions of years: They are embodied, meaning that we use our bodies to communicate, we are conscious of the bodies of others, and we respond to the bodies of others both consciously and unconsciously. They are synchronous, which means they are happening at the same time, with subtle cues about timing and turn taking. They involve primarily one-to-one or one-to-several communication, with only one interaction happening at a given moment. They take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen.

“virtual world,” I am referring to relationships and interactions characterized by four features that have been typical for just a few decades: They are disembodied, meaning that no body is needed, just language. Partners could be (and already are) artificial intelligences (AIs). They are heavily asynchronous, happening via text-based posts and comments. (A video call is different; it is synchronous.) They involve a substantial number of one-to-many communications, broadcasting to a potentially vast audience. Multiple interactions can be happening in parallel. They take place within communities that have a low bar for entry and exit, so people can block others or just quit when they are not pleased. Communities tend to be short-lived, and relationships are often disposable.

The key factor is the commitment required to make relationships work. 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.

when children are raised in multiple mutating networks where they don’t need to use their real names and they can quit with the click of a button, they are less likely to learn such skills.

Soon after teens got iPhones, they started getting more depressed. The heaviest users were also the most depressed, while those who spent more time in face-to-face activities, such as on sports teams and in religious communities, were the healthiest.[15] But given that correlation is not proof of causation, we cautioned parents not to take drastic action on the basis of existing research.

They would provide a foundation for healthier childhood in the digital age. They are: No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children’s entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (roughly age 14). No social media before 16. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers. Phone-free schools. In all schools from elementary through high school, students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked pouches during the school day. That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.

Fear is an alarm bell connected to a rapid response system. Once the threat is over, the alarm stops ringing, stress hormones stop flowing, and the feeling of fear subsides.

While fear triggers the full response system at the moment of danger, anxiety triggers parts of the same system when a threat is merely perceived as possible. It is healthy to be anxious and on alert when one is in a situation where there really could be dangers lurking. But when our alarm bell is on a hair trigger so that it is frequently activated by ordinary events—including many that pose no real threat—it keeps us in a perpetual state of distress. This is when ordinary, healthy, temporary anxiety turns into an anxiety disorder.

It is also important to note that our alarm bell did not just evolve as a response to physical threats. Our evolutionary advantage came from our larger brains and our capacity to form strong social groups, thus making us particularly attuned to social threats such as being shunned or shamed. People—and particularly adolesc...

The main psychiatric category here is called major depressive disorder (MDD). Its two key symptoms are depressed mood (feeling sad, empty, hopeless) and a loss of interest or pleasure in most or all activities.

“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses of this world,” said Hamlet,[18] immediately after lamenting God’s prohibition against “self-slaughter.”

People are more likely to become depressed when they become (or feel) more socially disconnected, and depression then makes people less interested and able to seek out social connection. As with anxiety, there is a vicious circle.

With so many new and exciting virtual activities, many adolescents (and adults) lost the ability to be fully present with the people around them, which changed social life for everyone, even for the small minority that did not use these platforms. That is why I refer to the period from 2010 to 2015 as the Great Rewiring of Childhood. Social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity, and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast, for adolescents, over the course of just five years. The daily life, consciousness, and social relationships of 13-year-olds with iPhones in 2013 (who were born in 2000) were profoundly different from those of 13-year-olds with flip phones in 2007 (who were born in 1994).

There is just no way to pin the surge of adolescent anxiety and depression on any economic event or trend that I can find. Also, it’s hard to see why an economic crisis would have harmed girls more than boys, and preteen girls more than everyone else.

People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.

Collective anxiety can bind people together and motivate them to take action, and collective action is thrilling, especially when it is carried out in person. Among previous generations, researchers often found that those engaged in political activism were happier and more energized than average. “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.

reports of feeling lonely and friendless at school increased, in all regions except for Asia. Across the Western world, it seems that as soon as teens began carrying smartphones to school and using social media regularly, including during breaks between classes, they found it harder to connect with their fellow students. They were “forever elsewhere.”

Children born in the late 1990s were the first generation in history who went through puberty in the virtual world. It’s as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s, in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.

Between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities. This Great Rewiring of Childhood, I argue, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

The first generation of Americans who went through puberty with smartphones (and the entire internet) in their hands became more anxious, depressed, self-harming, and suicidal. We now call that generation Gen Z, in contrast to the millennial generation, which had largely finished puberty when the Great Rewiring began in 2010.

The tidal wave of anxiety, depression, and self-harm hit girls harder than boys, and it hit p...

No other theory has been able to explain why rates of anxiety and depression surged among adolescents in so many countries at the same time and in the same way. Other factors, of course, contribute to poor mental health, but the unprecedented rise between 2010 and 2015 cannot be explained by the global financial crisis, nor by any set of events that happened in the United States or in any other particular country.

In 2007, teens and many preteens were busy tapping out short texts on their phones, but texting in those days was cumbersome (press the 7 key four times to make an s). Most of their texts were with one person at a time, and most used their basic phones to arrange ways to meet up in person. Nobody wanted to spend three consecutive hours texting. After the Great Rewiring, however, it became common for adolescents to spend most of their waking hours interacting with a smartphone, consuming content from strangers as well as friends, playing mobile games, watching videos, and posting on social media. By 2015, adolescents had a lot less time and motivation to get together in person.

Here’s a strange fact about human beings: Our kids grow fast, then slow, then fast.

But human children wait. They grow rapidly for the first two years, slow down for the next seven to 10, and then undergo a rapid growth spurt during puberty before coming to a halt a few years later. Intriguingly, a child’s brain is already 90% of its full size by around age 5.

Culture, which includes tool making, profoundly reshaped our evolutionary path. To give just one example: As we began using fire to cook our food, our jaws and guts reduced in size because cooked foods are so much easier to chew and digest. Our brains grew larger because the race for survival was won no longer by the fastest or strongest but by those most adept at learning. Our planet-changing trait was the ability to learn from each other and tap into the common pool of knowledge our ancestors and community had stored. Chimpanzees do very little of this.[4] Human childhood extended to give children time to learn.

The brain doesn’t grow much in size during late childhood, but it is busy making new connections and losing old ones. As children seek out experiences and practice a range of skills, the neurons and synapses that are used infrequently fade away, while frequent connections solidify and quicken. 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.

But evolution didn’t just lengthen childhood to make learning possible. It also installed three strong motivations to do things that make learning easy and likely: motivations for free play, attunement, and social learning. In the days of play-based childhood, the norm was that when school let out, children were out playing with each other, unsupervised, in ways that let them satisfy these motives. But in the transition to phone-based childhood, the designers of smartphones, video game systems, social media, and other addictive technologies lured kids into the virtual world, where they no longer got the full benefit of acting on these three motivations.

In play, young mammals learn the skills they will need to be successful as adults, and they learn in the way that neurons like best: from repeated activity with feedback from success and failure in a low-stakes environment.

Human toddlers clumsily run around and climb up, over, or into anything they can, until they become skilled at moving around a complex natural environment. With those basic skills mastered, they move on to more advanced multiplayer predator-prey games, such as tag, hide-and-seek, and sharks and minnows. As they get older still, verbal play—as in gossip, teasing, and joking around—gives them an advanced course in nuance, nonverbal cues, and instantaneous relationship repair when something they said fails to produce the desired response. Over time, they develop the social skills necessary for life in a democratic society, including self-governance, joint decision making, and accepting the outcome when you lose a contest.

A key feature of free play is that mistakes are generally not very costly. Everyone is clumsy at first, and everyone makes mistakes every day. Gradually, from trial and error, and with direct feedback from playmates, elementary school students become ready to take on the greater social complexity of middle school.

key feature of free play is that mistakes are generally not very costly. Everyone is clumsy at first, and everyone makes mistakes every day. Gradually, from trial and error, and with direct feedback from playmates, elementary school students become ready to take on the greater social complexity of middle school.

Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development.

It is in unsupervised, child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair. Children are intrinsically motivated to acquire these skills because they want to be included in the playgroup and keep the fun going.

A play-based childhood is one in which kids spend the majority of their free time playing with friends in the real world as I defined it in the introduction: embodied, synchronous, one-to-one or one-to-several, and in groups or communities where there is some cost to join or leave so people invest in relationships.

Work-based childhood was widespread during the Industrial Revolution, which is why, eventually, the 1959 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child named play as a basic human right: “The child shall have full opportunity for play and recreation, which should be directed to the same purposes as education.”

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.” Even for kids who never post anything, spending time on social media sites can still be harmful because of the chronic social comparison, the unachievable beauty standards, and the enormous amount of time taken away from everything else in life.

Human children are wired to connect, in part by tuning and synchronizing their movements and emotions with others. Even before they can control their arms and legs, they engage adults in games of turn taking and shared emotion. Children respond with the most heart-opening peals of laughter when adults—who are themselves built to respond to cuteness with caretaking[14]—do whatever they can to make the baby laugh. This creates a mutually reinforcing feedback loop. Infants in the first weeks of life have enough muscular control to mimic a few facial expressions, and the many rounds of mutual gazing and face making are important means of fostering attachment between parents and children.

Synchronous, face-to-face, physical interactions and rituals are a deep, ancient, and underappreciated part of human evolution. Adults enjoy them, and children need them for healthy development. Yet the major social media platforms draw children into endless hours of asynchronous interaction, which can become more like work than play.

The value of conformity is obvious: Doing whatever most people are doing is the safest strategy across a wide range of environments. It’s particularly valuable when you are a newcomer to an existing society: When in Rome, do as the Romans do. So when a child starts at a new school, she is particularly likely to do whatever it is that most children seem to be doing. We sometimes call this peer pressure, but it can be quite strong even when nobody is exerting pressure of any kind. It may be more accurate to call it conformity attraction.

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. Parents don’t get to use the power of conformity bias, so they are often no match for the socializing power of social media.