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

by Jonathan Haidt

Fourth, a defining feature of spirituality is self-transcendence. There is a network of brain structures (the default mode network) that becomes less active during moments of self-transcendence, as if it were the neural basis of profane consciousness. Social media keeps the focus on the self, self-presentation, branding, and social standing. It is almost perfectly designed to prevent self-transcendence.

Fifth, most religions urge us to be less judgmental, but social media encourages us to offer evaluations of others at a rate never before possible in human history. Religions advise us to be slower to anger and quicker to forgive, but social media encourages the opposite.

Sixth, the grandeur of nature is among the most universal and easily accessible routes to experiencing awe, an emotion that is closely linked to spiritual practices and progress. A simple walk in a natural setting can cause self-transcendence, especially if one pays close attention and is not attending to a phone. Awe in nature may be especially valuable for Gen Z because it counteracts the anxiety and self-consciousness caused by a phone-based childhood.

There is a “God-shaped hole” in every human heart. Or, at least, many people feel a yearning for meaning, connection, and spiritual elevation. A phone-based life often fills that hole with trivial and degrading content. The ancients advised ...

What is the right age of internet adulthood? Note that we are not talking about the age at which children can browse the web or watch videos on YouTube or TikTok. We’re talking only about the age at which a minor can enter into a contract with a company to use the company’s products. We’re talking about the age at which a child can open an account on YouTube or TikTok and begin uploading her own videos and getting her own highly customized feed, while giving her data to the company to use and sell as it says it will do in its terms of service.

So I’m not saying that the virtual world in its present form, with no guardrails, is safe for 16-year-olds. I’m just saying that if we’re going to write a minimum age into law and make it an enforceable national standard, then 13 is way too low and 16 is a more reasonable and achievable compromise. It would gain more political and social support than an effort to raise the age to 18. I would just add that 16- and 17-year-olds are still minors, and the protections in any version of an Age Appropriate Design Code should still apply to them. I therefore believe that the U.S. Congress should fix the mistakes it made in 1998 and raise the age of internet adulthood from 13 back to 16, as it was in the original draft of the bill, and then require companies to enforce it.

The Social Policy Report essay notes, “Parents who fail to provide their children opportunities for physical and cognitive stimulation through independent activities are potentially ‘neglecting’ their children in those dimensions.” So a lack of adult supervision should not be the touchstone for a neglect finding. In fact, maybe the state is engaging in neglect when it mandates overprotection.

Reasonable Childhood Independence laws clarify the meaning of neglect: Neglect is when a parent blatantly, willfully, or recklessly disregards a danger to a child so apparent that no reasonable person would allow the child to engage in that activity. In other words, it is not neglect when you simply take your eyes off your children. This clarification protects parents who give their kids more independence for its own sake, as well as those who do so out of economic necessity, like Debra Harrell.

The government’s job is to protect children from actual abuse, not from the everyday activities of childhood. States must revise their supervisory neglect laws. They must cease and desist all enforcement action against parents whose only offense is that they chose to give their children reasonable independence, appropriate for their age.

Governments at all levels need to change policies that are harming adolescent mental health and support policies that would improve it. In the United States, governments at the state and local level are partly responsible for the overprotection of children in the real world (via vast overreach of vague neglect laws), and the federal government is partly responsible for the underprotection of children in the virtual world (by passing an ineffective law in 1998 and failing to update it as the dangers of life online became more apparent).

Tech companies can be a major part of the solution by developing better age verification features, and by adding features that allow parents to designate their children’s phones and computers as ones that should not be served by sites with minimum ages until they are old enough. Such a feature would help to dissolve multiple collective action problems for parents, kids, and platforms.

To correct overprotection in the real world, state and local governments should narrow neglect laws and give parents confidence that they can give their children some unsupervised time without risking arrest or state intervention in their family life.

State and local governments should also encourage more free play and recess in schools. They should consider the needs of children in zoning and permitting, and they should invest in more vocational education and other programs that have been shown to h...

There is a Polynesian expression: “Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.” Sometimes it is better to do a big thing rather than many small things, and sometimes the big thing is unnoticed but right underfoot.

Smartphones and their apps are such powerful attention magnets that half of all teens say they are online “almost constantly.” Can anyone doubt that a school full of students using or thinking about their phones almost all the time—texting each other, scrolling through social media, and playing mobile games during class and lunchtime—is going to be a school with less learning, more drama, and a weaker sense of community and belonging?

Most public schools in the United States say that they ban phones; 77% said so in a 2020 survey.[4] But that usually just means that the school forbids phone use during class time, so students must hide their phones in their laps or behind a book in order to use them. Even if such a ban were perfectly enforced by hypervigilant teachers patrolling each row of the classroom, it would mean that the moment class ended, most students would pull out their phones, check their texts and feeds, and ignore the students next to them. When students are allowed to keep their phones in their pockets, phone policing becomes a full-time job, and it is the last thing that teachers need added to their workload. Many of them eventually give up and tolerate open use.[5] As one middle school teacher wrote to me, “Give teachers a chance. Ban smartphones.”

A phone “ban” limited to class time is nearly useless. This is why schools should go phone-free for the entirety of the school day. When students arrive, they put their phone into a dedicated phone locker or into a lockable phone pouch. At the end of the day, they retrieve their phones from the locker, or they access a device that unlocks the pouch. (Some parents object that they need to be able to reach their children immediately in case of an emergency, such as a school shooting. As a parent I understand this desire. But a school in which most students are calling or texting their parents during an emergency is li...

With his school’s blessing and help from Let Grow, Kevin started to incorporate more free play into students’ lives by making three changes: Longer recess with little adult intervention. Opening the school playground for half an hour before school starts, to give students time to play before class. Offering a “Play Club.” Anywhere from one to five days a week, a school stays open for mixed-age, “loose parts” free play (featuring things like balls, chalk, jump ropes), usually on the playground, or in the gym in bad weather. (But if the school can keep other rooms open, like an art room, great!) From 2:30 to 4:30 p.m.—your schedule may vary—instead of going home (often to a device or to an adult-led activity), children spend time together playing. It’s a no-phone zone! The kids are given nearly complete autonomy. There are only two rules: They can’t deliberately hurt anyone; and they can’t leave without telling the person in charge. This adult doesn’t organize any games or solve any spats. Like a lifeguard, adults intervene only in the case of an emergency. (Let Grow provides a free Play Club implementation guide on its website.)

Those are the two whales: going phone-free and giving a lot more unstructured free play. A school that is phone-free and play-full is investing in prevention. It is reducing overprotection in the real world, which helps kids to cultivate antifragility. At the same time, it is loosening the grip of the virtual world, thereby fostering better learning and relationships in the real world. A school that does neither is likely to struggle with high levels of student anxiety, and will need to spend large amounts of money to treat students’ growing distress.

Re-normalizing childhood independence requires collective action, and collective action is most easily facilitated by local schools. When an entire class, school, or school district encourages parents to loosen the reins, the culture in that town or county shifts. Parents don’t feel guilty or weird about letting go. Hey, it’s homework, and all the other parents are doing it too. Pretty soon, you’ve got kids trick-or-treating on their own again, and going to the store, and getting themselves to school.

Our kids can do so much more than we let them. Our culture of fear has kept this truth from us. They are like racehorses stuck in the stable. It’s time to let them out.

There are three big ways to improve recess: Give kids more of it, on better playgrounds, with fewer rules.

There is a Polynesian expression: “Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.” Sometimes what you are looking for is right there, underfoot, and it is better than anything you could find by looking farther away. I suggested two potential whales that schools can implement right away, with little or no additional money: going phone-free, and becoming more play-full.

Most schools say they ban phones, but that typically means only that students must not use their phones during class. This is an ineffective policy because it incentivizes students to hide their phone use during class and increase their phone use after class, which makes it harder for them to form friendships with the kids around them.

A better policy is to go phone-free for the entire school day. When students arrive, they should put their phones into a dedicated phone ...

Schools can become more play-full by improving recess in three ways: Give more of it, on better playgrounds (such as those incorporating loose parts and “junk,” and/or more natural elements), with fewer rules.

The Let Grow Project is another activity that seems to reduce anxiety. It is a homework assignment that asks children to “do something they have never done before, on their own,” after reaching agreement with their parents as to what that is. Doing projects increases children’s sense of competence while also increasing parents’ willingness to trust their children and grant them more autonomy.

When all the families in a neighborhood or town give their children more free play and independence, it solves the collective action problem: Parents are no longer afraid to give their children more unsupervised free play and independence, which children need to overcome normal childhood anxieties and develop into healthy young adults.

Schools can do more to reverse the growing disengagement of boys and their declining academic progress relative to girls. Offering more shop classes and more vocational and technical training and hiring more male teachers would each serve to re-engage boys. (As would offering better recess in the earlier years.)

In The Gardener and the Carpenter, the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik notes that the word “parenting” was essentially never used until the 1950s, and only became popular in the 1970s. For nearly all of human history, people grew up in environments where they observed many people caring for many children. There was plenty of local wisdom and no need for parenting experts. But in the 1970s, family life changed. Families grew smaller and more mobile; people spent more time working and going to school; parenthood was delayed, often into the 30s. New parents lost access to local wisdom and began to rely more on experts. As they did so, they found it easy to approach parenthood with the mindset that had led them to success in school and work: If I can just find the right training, I can do the job well, and I’ll produce a superior product.

Gopnik says that parents began to think like carpenters who have a clear idea in mind of what they are trying to achieve. They look carefully at the materials they have to work with, and it is their job to assemble those materials into a finished product that can be judged by everyone against clear standards: Are the right angles perfect? Does the door work? Gopnik notes that “messiness and variability are a carpenter’s enemies; precision and control are her allies. Measure twice, cut once.”

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: Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it’s to give them the toys. . . . We can’t make children learn, but we can let them learn.

In Gopnik’s terms: Many of us have adopted an overcontrolling carpenter mentality, which prevents our children from flourishing. At the same time, we have underprotected our children in the virtual world by leaving them to their own devices and failing to do much weeding. We let the internet and social media take over the garden. We have left young people to grow up in digital social networks rather than in communities where they can put down roots. Then we are surprised that our children are lonely, starving for real human connections.

In the early years, as long as the child has a “good enough” environment with good nutrition, loving adults, and time to play, there is a limit to what parents can do to create better-than-normal outcomes.[3] What young children need is a lot of time to interact with you, with other loving adults, with other kids, and with the real world.

attachment theory tells us that children need a secure base—a reliable and loving adult who will be there for them when needed. But the function of that base is to be a launching point for adventures off base, where the most valuable learning happens.

when that play includes kids of mixed ages, the learning is deepened because children learn best by trying something that is just a little beyond their current abilities—in other words, something a slightly older kid is doing. Older kids can also benefit from interacting with younger kids, taking on the role of a teacher or older sibling. So, the best thing you can do for your young children is to give them plenty of playtime, with some age diversity, and a secure loving base from which they set off to play.

As for your own interactions with your child, they don’t have to be “optimized.” You don’t have to make every second special or educational. It’s a relationship, not a class. But what you do often matters far more than what you say, so watch your own phone habits. Be a good role model who...

Also, trust young children’s deep desire to help out. Even at age 2 or 3, children can put the forks on the place mats or help load the washing machine. Providing children with responsibility around the house makes them feel like an essential part of the family, and giving them more responsibility as they grow could offer some protection against later feelings of uselessness. In fact, a rising number of adolescents now agree with the statement “My life is not very

Once basic skills have been mastered in early childhood, children need to head out and take on more advanced challenges, including social challenges. They begin to care more about social norms and about how their peers see them. Compared with the preschool years, shame and embarrassment become more common and painful.[10] Children and adolescents in this age range are going through sensitive periods for cultural learning and risk assessment.

It is during elementary school that children start applying the learning mechanisms I described in chapter 2 in full force: conformist bias (do what everyone else is doing) and prestige bias (copy the people whom everyone else looks up to). Because of children’s ravenous appetite for social learning, it is important for parents to think about who those healthy learning models will be, and how to get them into a child’s life.

Practice letting your kids out of your sight without them having a way to reach you.

Encourage sleepovers, and don’t micromanage them, although if the friend brings a phone, hold on to it until the friend leaves, otherwise they’ll have a phone-based sleepover.

Encourage walking to school in a group. This can begin as early as first grade if the walk is easy and there is an older child to be responsible.

After school is for free play. Try not to fill up most afternoons with adult-supervised “enrichment” activities.

Go camping. At campgrounds, kids are usually way more free range than at home, for a few reasons. First, they are away from their scheduled activities. Second, they’re living in a small space with their parents—the outdoors beckons! Third, kids at campsites are expected to run around with the other kids.

Find a sleepaway camp with no devices and no safetyism. Many summer camps offer children and adolescents the chance to be out in nature and away from their devices and the internet for a month or two. Under those conditions, young people attend fully to each other, forming friendships and engaging in slightly risky and exciting outdoor activities that may bond them together tightly. Avoid camps that are essentially summer school, with academic work and internet access, or camps that do not provide children with any communal responsibilities. Try to find a camp that embraces the values of independence and responsibility.

Form child-friendly neighborhoods and playborhoods. Even if your neighborhood feels empty today, that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. If you can find one other family to join you, you can take simple steps that will activate common desires among neighbors and reanimate a block or neighborhood. Organize a block party with some activities for children. Then turn the neighborhood into a “playborhood,”

The cure for such parental anxiety is exposure. Experience the anxiety a few times, taking conscious note that your worst fears did not occur, and you learn that your child is more capable than you had thought. Each time, the anxiety gets weaker.

The average 8-to-12-year-old spends between four and six hours a day on recreational screen activities, across multiple screens.[19] This is why most medical authorities and national health organizations recommend that parents place a limit on total recreational screen time for children in this age range.

Learn how to use parental controls and content filters on all the digital devices in your home. You want your children to become self-governing and self-controlled, with no parental controls or monitoring by the time they reach age 18, but that does not mean you should immediately give them full independence in the online world before their frontal cortex is up to the task.