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

by Jonathan Haidt

Focus more on maximizing in-person activity and sleep than on total screen hours.

If your children are spending a lot of time in person with friends, such as on sports teams or in unstructured play or hangouts, if they are getting plenty of sleep, and if they show no signs of addiction or problematic use on any devices, then you may be able to loosen up on the screen-time limit. Likewise, playing video games with a friend, in person and in moderation, is better than playing alone in one’s room.

Provide clear structure to the day and the week.

structuring time and space is a precondition for rituals and other communal activities, which strengthen the feeling of belonging in a community—even one as small as a two-person family.

Consider taking a “digital Sabbath” every week: a full day where no screen devices are used. Consider taking a screen-free week every year, perhaps on a vacation in a beautiful natural setting.

Look for signs of addiction or problematic use.

video games in moderation do not seem to be harmful for most children, and yet there is a large subgroup of children and adolescents (in the ballpark of 7%) who end up either truly addicted or else showing signs of what is called problematic use, which means that the activity is interfering with other areas of functioning.

Pornography, social media, and video games are the three categories of activity most likely to lead to problematic use among adolescents, and years of problematic use may cause lasting changes,

Delay the opening of social media accounts until 16. Let your children get well into puberty, past the most vulnerable early years, before letting them plug into powerful socializing agents like TikTok or Instagram.

Talk with your preteen about the risks, and listen to their thoughts

Adolescents have nearly all begun puberty by the time they start high school, and this is the period when rates of depression and anxiety start to rise more steeply. In earlier chapters, I made the case that helping young people feel useful and connected to real-world communities is pivotal to their social and emotional development, so it is important that adolescents take on some adult-level challenges and responsibilities. Finding non-parental role models also becomes more valuable during this period.

Increase their mobility. Let your teens master the transportation modes that make sense for where you live: bicycles, buses, subways, trains, whatever. As they grow, so should the boundaries of their world. Encourage them to get their driver’s licenses as soon as they are eligible, and give them driving lessons and encouragement to use the car, if you have one.

Rely more on your teen at home.

Encourage your teen to find a part-time job.

Find ways for them to nurture and lead.

Consider a high school exchange program

“Everyone, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of others, whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own.”[26] Yes, even in medieval Britain, people realized this experience would broaden a kid’s world. It can also be easier for a kid to listen to someone other than Mom or Dad.

Bigger thrills in nature. Let your teens go on bigger, longer adventures, with their friends or with a group: backpacking, rock climbing, canoeing, hiking, swimming—trips that get them out into nature and inspire real-world thrills, wonder, and competence.

Take a gap year after high school. Many young people go directly to college without any sense of what else is out there. How are they supposed to know what they want to do with their lives—or even whether college is their best option? Let young adults discover more about their interests and about the world. They can get a job and save up money. Travel. Volunteer. They are not damaging their college prospects. They are improving their chances of finding a path they want to pursue, and they are improving their competence at following any path.

A gap year is intended not to postpone a young person’s transition to adulthood but rather to accelerate it. It’s a year to build skills, responsibility, and independence.

Around 2012, when adolescents started getting smartphones—and when those anxiety graphs shot upward—something else happened: Their parents got smartphones too. Those smartphones gave parents a new superpower that they did not have in the era of flip phones: the ability to track their children’s movements at every moment. Lenore pointed out to me that this could be part of the reason for increased anxiety and decreased confidence.

Whether we think of the phone as “the world’s longest umbilical cord” or as an “invisible fence,” childhood autonomy plummeted when kids started carrying them. Even if a parent rarely looks at the tracker, and even if a kid never summons Mom to come get him because his bike chain broke, the fact that this is always possible makes it more difficult for children and adolescents to feel that they are on their own, trusted and competent. And it makes it more difficult for parents to let go.

Being a parent is always a challenge, and it has become far more challenging in our era of rapid social and technological change. However, there is a lot that parents can do to become better “gardeners”—those who create a space in which their children can learn and grow—in contrast to “carpenters” who try to mold and shape their children directly.

If you do one thing to be a better gardener in the real world, it should be to give your children far more unsupervised free play, of the sort you probably enjoyed at that age. That means giving them a longer and better play-based childhood, with ever-growing independence and responsibility.

If you do one thing to be a better gardener in the virtual world, it should be to delay your children’s full entry into the phone-based childhood by delaying when you give them their first smartphone (or any “smart” device). Give only basic phones before the start of high school, and try to coordinate with other parents so that your children do not feel that they are the only ones without smartphones in middle school.

There are many other ways to increase your children’s engagement with the real world and embeddedness in communities, including sending them to a technology-free sleepaway camp, going camping, and helping them find additional settings in which they can hang out with other children who are not carrying smartphones.

As your children get older, increase their mobility and encourage them to find part-time jobs and ways to learn from other adults. Consider an exchange program, a summer wilderness program, and a gap year.

A free-range childhood is more likely to produce confident, competent young adults, with lower levels of anxiety, than is a childhood ruled by safetyism, fear, and constant adult supervision. The biggest obstacle is the parents’ own anxiety about letting a child out of sight, unchaperoned by an adult. This takes practice, but the ultimate pleasure of being able to trust your child outweighs the temporary anxieties of letting go.

Your actions as a parent can contribute to solving the collective action problem. If you delay giving your child a smartphone, it makes it easier for other parents to do so. If you give your child more independence, it makes it easier for other parents to do so too. If you do it together, with other families, it will make it easier still, and more fun.

The diffusion of digital technology into children’s lives has been like smoke pouring into our homes. We all see that something strange is happening, but we don’t understand it. We fear that the smoke is having bad effects on our children, but when we look around, nobody is doing much about it. The most important lesson here is to speak up. If you think the phone-based childhood is bad for children and you want to see a return to play-based childhood, say so. Most people share your suspicion, but they are not sure what to do about it. Speak to your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, your social media followers, and your political representatives.

Humanity evolved on Earth. Childhood evolved for physical playfulness and exploration. Children thrive when they are rooted in real-world communities, not in disembodied virtual networks. Growing up in the virtual world promotes anxiety, anomie, and loneliness. The Great Rewiring of Childhood, from play-based to phone-based, has been a catastrophic failure. It’s time to end the experiment. Let’s bring our children home.