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

by Jonathan Haidt

In the 1980s and especially the 1990s, parents in Anglo countries became more fearful for many reasons, including changes in the media ecosystem and news cycle. They lost trust in each other, they started spending far more time supervising their own children, and they ...

The worship of “safety” above all else is called safetyism. It is dangerous because it makes it harder for children to learn to care for themselves and to...

The attachment system evolved to help young mammals learn the skills they’ll need to reach adulthood while retreating to their “secure base” when they feel threatened. Fearful parenting keeps children on home base too much, preventing them from having the experiences they need to grow strong and to develop a secure attachment style.

Children are most likely to thrive when they have a play-based childhood in the real world. They are less likely to thrive when fearful parenting and a phone-based childhood deprive them of opportunities for growth.

“Neurons that fire together, wire together,”[1] meaning that activities that repeatedly activate a constellation of neurons cause those neurons to connect more closely. 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. This is how cultural experience changes the brain, producing a young adult who feels American instead of Japanese, or who is habitually in discover mode as opposed to defend mode.

myelination, which refers to the coating of the axons of neurons with an insulating sheath of a fatty material, which makes transmission faster across the long-distance connections in those constellations of neurons. These slow processes of pruning and myelination are related to the great trade-off of human brain development: The young child’s brain has enormous potential (it can develop in many ways) but lower ability (it doesn’t do most things as well as an adult brain). However, as pruning and myelination proceed, the child’s brain becomes more efficient as it locks down into its adult configuration. This lockdown process happens in different parts of the brain at different times, and each lockdown is potentially the end of a sensitive period. It’s like cement hardening: If you try to draw your name in very wet cement, it will disappear quickly. If you wait until the cement is dry, you’ll leave no mark. But if you can catch it while it’s in the transition between wet and dry, your name will last forever.

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.

We need to consume a wide variety of foods to get all the necessary vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals. A child who eats only white foods (pasta, potatoes, chicken) will be nutrient deficient and at heightened risk of diseases such as scurvy (caused by a severe vitamin C deficiency). Similarly, humans are socially and culturally adaptable creatures who need a wide variety of social experiences to develop into flexible and socially skilled adults. Because children are antifragile, it is essential that those experiences involve some fear, conflict, and exclusion (though not too much). Safetyism is an experience blocker. It prevents children from getting the quantity and variety of real-world experiences and challenges that they need.

Are screen-based experiences less valuable than real-life flesh-and-blood experiences? When we’re talking about children whose brains evolved to expect certain kinds of experiences at certain ages, yes. A resounding yes. Communicating by text supplemented by emojis is not going to develop the parts of the brain that are “expecting” to get tuned up during conversations supplemented by facial expressions, changing vocal tones, direct eye contact, and body language. We can’t expect children and adolescents to develop adult-level real-world social skills when their social interactions are largely happening in the virtual world.[7] Synchronous video conversations are closer to real-life interactions but still lack the embodied experience.

In traditional societies, the rites for turning a boy into a man are different from the rites for turning a girl into a woman. Because the visible signs of puberty are less obvious, the timing is more flexible. In many societies, boys are initiated as a group—all the boys around a certain age, who will become tightly bonded to each other by their shared ordeal.

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.”

Think of the initiation rites that young men develop for entry into a college fraternity, secret society, or street gang.[13] When boys and young men have the freedom to create their own rituals, it often looks as though at least one of them took that intro to anthropology class. They spontaneously create rituals of separation, transition, and incorporation (into peer groups) that we outsiders lump together as “hazing.” But because boys and young men construct these rites with little or no guidance from elders, the rituals can become cruel and dangerous. The resulting culture can also be dangerous for women when these young men try to demonstrate their manhood to their brothers in ways that exploit or humiliate women. Girls construct rites of passage too, as when a college sorority inducts new members. These rites tend not to include as much physical pain as is demanded by boys, but there is often psychological pain related to beauty and sexuality. Initiates describe being rated, compared, and shamed for their physical features.[14] Despite the pain and humiliation required for entry, many young people are willing to participate in these rites for the opportunity to join a binding social group and to transition away from childhood’s parental dependency and into peer-oriented young adulthood. This suggests that there may be a deep need among many adolescents for belonging and for the rites and rituals that create and express that belonging. Can we use that knowledge to impr...

Early puberty is a period of rapid brain rewiring, second only to the first few years of life. Neural pruning and myelination are occurring at a very rapid rate, guided by the adolescent’s experiences. We should be concerned about those experiences and not let strangers and algorithms choose them.

Safetyism is an experience blocker. When we make children’s safety a quasi-sacred value and don’t allow them to take any risks, we block them from overcoming anxiety, learning to manage risk, and learning to be self-governing, all of which are essential for becoming healthy and competent adults.

Smartphones are a second kind of experience blocker. Once they enter a child’s life, they push out or reduce all other forms of non-phone-based experience, which is the kind t...

Rites of passage are the curated sets of experiences that human societies arrange to help adolescents make the transition to adulthood. Van Gennep noted that these rites usually have a separation phase...

Western societies have eliminated many rites of passage, and the digital world that opened up in the 1990s eventually buried most milestones and obscured the path to adulthood. Once children began spending much or most of their time online, the inputs to their developing brains became u...

A society that is large, diverse, and secular (such as the United States or the U.K.) might still agree to a set of milestones that mark stepwise increases in freedoms and responsibilities.

The Four Foundational Harms: Social Deprivation, Sleep Deprivation, Attention Fragmentation, and Addiction

In 2020, we began telling everyone to avoid proximity to any person outside their “bubble,” but members of Gen Z began socially distancing themselves as soon as they got their first smartphones.

The sharp drop of time with friends actually underestimates the social deprivation caused by the Great Rewiring because even when teens are within a few feet of their friends, their phone-based childhoods damage the quality of their time together. Smartphones grab our attention so powerfully that if they merely vibrate in our pockets for a tenth of a second, many of us will interrupt a face-to-face conversation, just in case the phone is bringing us an important update. We usually don’t tell the other person to stop talking; we just pull out our phone and spend some time pecking at it, leaving the other person to conclude, reasonably, that she is less important than the latest notification. 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. As screen-based technologies move out of our pockets and onto our wrists, and into headsets and goggles, our ability to pay full attention to others is likely to deteriorate further.

It’s painful to be ignored, at any age. Just imagine being a teen trying to develop a sense of who you are and where you fit, while everyone you meet tells you, indirectly: You’re not as important as the people on my phone. And now imagine being a young child.

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.

In other words, when your sleep is truncated or disturbed, you’re more likely to become depressed and develop behavioral problems. The effects were larger for girls. In short, children and adolescents need a lot of sleep to promote healthy brain development and good attention and mood the next day. When screens are allowed in bedrooms, however, many children will use them late into the night—especially if they have a small screen that can be used under the blanket. The screen-related decline of sleep is likely a contributor to the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that swept across many countries in the early 2010s.

In 1890, the great American psychologist William James described attention as “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. . . . It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” [43] Attention is a choice we make to stay on one task, one line of thinking, one mental road, even as attractive off-ramps beckon. When we fail to make that choice and allow ourselves to be frequently sidetracked, we end up in “the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state” that James said is the opposite of attention.

Life on the internet changed how his brain sought out information, even when he was off-line trying to read a book. It reduced his ability to focus and reflect because he now craved a constant stream of stimulation: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet

James described children like this: “Sensitiveness to immediately exciting sensorial stimuli characterizes the attention of childhood and youth. . . . the child seem[s] to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice.” Overcoming this tendency to flit around is “the first thing which the teacher must overcome.” This is why it is so important that schools go phone-free for the entire school day by using phone lockers or lockable pouches.

Capturing the child’s attention with “immediately exciting sensorial stimuli” is the goal of app designers, and they are very good at what they do.

“Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive

When adolescents have continuous access to a smartphone at that developmentally sensitive age, it may interfere with their maturing ability to focus. Studies show that adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are heavier users of smartphones and video games, and the commonsense assumption is that people with ADHD are more likely to seek out the stimulation of screens and the enhanced focus that can be found in video games. But does causation run in the reverse direction too? Can a phone-based childhood exacerbate existing ADHD symptoms?

The brain develops throughout childhood, with an acceleration of change during puberty. 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.

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 pressing. But if the first few presses yield no reward, that does not dampen the rat’s enthusiasm. Rather, as the rat continues to press, dopamine levels will go up in anticipation of the reward, which must be coming at any moment! When the reward finally comes, it feels great, but the heightened levels of dopamine make the rat continue to press, in anticipation of the next reward, which will come . . . after some unknown number of presses, so just keep pressing! There is no off-ramp in an app with a bottomless feed; there is no signal to stop.

Lembke says that “the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.”[57] Dysphoria is the opposite of euphoria; it refers to a generalized feeling of discomfort or unease. This is basically what many teens say they feel—and what parents and clinicians observe—when kids who are heavy users of social media or video games are separated from their phones and game consoles involuntarily. Symptoms of sadness, anxiety, and irritability are listed as the signs of withdrawal for those diagnosed with internet gaming disorder.

Lembke writes, “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.”[60] Her metaphor helps to explain why the transition from play-based childhood to phone-based childhood has been so devastating, and why the crisis showed up so suddenly in the early 2010s. Millennial adolescents in the 1990s and early 2000s had access to all kinds of addictive activities on their home computers, and some of them did get addicted. But they couldn’t take their computers with them everywhere they went. After the Great Rewiring, the next generation of adolescents could, and did.

Teens are certainly right when they say that social media gives them a connection with their friends, but as we’ve seen in their reports of increasing loneliness and isolation, that connection does not seem to be as good as what it replaced.

second reason why I am skeptical of claims about the benefits of social media for adolescents is that these claims often confuse social media with the larger internet.

A third reason for skepticism is that the same demographic groups that are widely said to benefit most from social media are also the most likely to have bad experiences on these platforms.

My fourth reason for skepticism is that these discussions of benefits rarely consider the age of the child. All of the benefits sound plausible for older teens, but do we really think that 12-year-olds need Instagram or TikTok to “connect” them with strangers instead of simply seeing their friends in person? I cannot see any justification for not enforcing the current minimum age of 13 for opening accounts on social media platforms.

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.

The third fundamental harm is attention fragmentation. Attention is the ability to stay on one mental road while many off-ramps beckon. Staying on a road, staying on a task, is a feature of maturity and a sign of good executive function. But smartphones are kryptonite for attention. Many adolescents get hundreds of notifications per day, meaning that they rarely have five or 10 minutes to think without an interruption.

The fourth fundamental harm is addiction. The behaviorists discovered that learning, for animals, is “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain.” The developers of the most successful social media apps used advanced behaviorist techniques to “hook” children into becoming heavy users of their products.

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. The addiction researcher Anna Lembke says that the universal symptoms of withdrawal are “anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.” She and other researchers find that many adolescents have developed behavioral addictions that are very much like the way that people develop addictions to slot machine gambling, with profound consequences for their well-being, their social development, and their families.

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.

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. For our purposes in this book it doesn’t matter where the difference comes from. What matters is that tech companies know about these differences and use them to hook their core audience. Social media offers new and easy ways to “connect.” Social media seems to satisfy communion needs, but in many ways it frustrates them.

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

Teens are particularly vulnerable to insecurity because their bodies and their social lives are changing so rapidly as they leave childhood. They struggle to figure out where they fit in the new prestige order for their sex. 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. Compared with boys, when girls go onto social media, they are subjected to more severe and constant judgments about their looks and their bodies, and they’re confronted with beauty standards that are further out of reach.

Reason #2: Girls’ Aggression Is More Relational

Boys were long thought to be more aggressive than girls, and if we look only at violence and physical threats, they are.[45] Boys are also more interested in watching stories and movies about sports, fighting, war, and violence, all of which appeal to agency interests and motivations. Traditionally, boys have negotiated who is high and who is low in social status based in part on who could dominate whom if it came to a fight, or who can hurl an insult at whom without fear of violent reprisal. But 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.