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

by Jonathan Haidt

Children need a great deal of free play to thrive. It’s an imperative that’s evident across all mammal species. The small-scale challenges and setbacks that happen during play are like an inoculation that prepares children to face much larger challenges later.

Unsupervised outdoor play declined at the same time that the personal computer became more common and more inviting as a place for spending free time.[*]

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.

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.

four foundational harms: sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.

It’s not just about smartphones and social media; it’s about a historic and unprecedented transformation of human childhood.

Here is Epictetus, in the first century CE, lamenting the human tendency to let others control our emotions: If your body was turned over to just anyone, you would doubtless take exception. Why aren’t you ashamed that you have made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you, so that it automatically becomes confused and upset?[19]

Marcus Aurelius’s advice to himself, in the second century CE: 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.[20]

fear as “the emotional response to real or perceived imminent threat, whereas anxiety is anticipation of future threat.”[12]

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.

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.

Sherry Turkle wrote in 2015 about life with smartphones, “We are forever elsewhere.”[33]

that their concern is legitimate, but I want to point out that impending threats to a nation or generation (as opposed to an individual) do not historically cause rates of mental illness to rise.

decades later, people who were teens during the start of the war show higher levels of trust and cooperation in lab experiments.[42]

Every generation grows up during a disaster or under the threat of an impending disaster, from the Great Depression and World War II through threats of nuclear annihilation, environmental degradation, overpopulation, and ruinous national debt.

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

If world events played a role in the current mental health crisis, it’s not because world events suddenly got worse around 2012; it’s because world events were suddenly being pumped into adolescents’ brains through their phones, not as news stories, but as social media posts in which other young people expressed their emotions about a collapsing world, emotions that are contagious on social media.

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

a child’s brain is already 90% of its full size by around age 5.[3]

Human childhood extended to give children time to learn.

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.

Play is the work of childhood,[5]

Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and come out socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.[6]

“play requires suppression of the drive to dominate and enables the formation of long-lasting cooperative bonds.”[7]

“free play” as “activity that is freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake, not consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.”[8]

Children can only learn how to not get hurt in situations where it is possible to get hurt, such as wrestling with a friend, having a pretend sword fight, or negotiating with another child to enjoy a seesaw when a failed negotiation can lead to pain in one’s posterior, as well as embarrassment.

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.

It’s as if we gave our infants iPads loaded with movies about walking, but the movies were so engrossing that kids never put in the time or effort to practice walking.

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.

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,

prestige, which is willingly conferred by people to those they see as having achieved excellence in a valued domain of activity, such as hunting or storytelling back in ancient times.

in following influencers who became famous for what they do in the virtual world, young people are often learning ways of talking, behaving, and emoting that may backfire in an office, family, or other real-world setting.

Healthy brain development depends on getting the right experiences at the right age and in the right order.

“sensitive periods,” which are defined as periods in which it is very easy to learn something or acquire a skill, and outside of which it is more difficult.[31]

Conformist bias motivates them to copy whatever seems to be most common. Prestige bias motivates them to copy whoever seems to be the most accomplished and prestigious.

we are overprotecting our children in the real world while underprotecting them online.

Unsupervised outdoor play teaches children how to handle risks and challenges of many kinds. By building physical, psychological, and social competence, it gives kids confidence that they can face new situations, which is an inoculation against anxiety.

Discover mode (BAS) Scan for opportunities Kid in a candy shop Think for yourself Let me grow! Defend mode (BIS) Scan for dangers Scarcity mindset Cling to your team Keep me safe!

Trees that are exposed to strong winds early in life become trees that can withstand even stronger winds when full grown.

“antifragile” to describe things that actually need to get knocked over now and then in order to become strong.

The ultimate antifragile system is the immune system, which requires early exposure to dirt, parasites, and bacteria in order to set itself up in childhood.

thrilling experiences have anti-phobic effects.[15]

Kids and puppies are thrill seekers. They are hungry for thrills, and they must get them if they are to overcome their childhood fears and wire up their brains so that discover mode becomes the default.

Sandseter and Kennair analyzed the kinds of risks that children seek out when adults give them some freedom, and they found six: heights (such as climbing trees or playground structures), high speed (such as swinging, or going down fast slides), dangerous tools (such as hammers and drills), dangerous elements (such as experimenting with fire), rough-and-tumble play (such as wrestling), and disappearing (hiding, wandering away, potentially getting lost or separated).

We are embodied creatures; children should learn how to manage their bodies in the physical world before they start spending large amounts of time in the virtual world.

Researchers who study children at play have concluded that the risk of minor injuries should be a feature, not a bug, in playground design.

Our goal in designing the places children play, she says, should be to “keep them as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.”[27]

Like young trees exposed to wind, children who are routinely exposed to small risks grow up to become adults who can handle much larger risks without panicking. Conversely, children who are raised in a protected greenhouse sometimes become incapacitated by anxiety before they reach maturity.

Children did not evolve to handle the virality, anonymity, instability, and potential for large-scale public shaming of the virtual world.