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

by Jonathan Haidt

It’s as if American parents, particularly in the top quarter of the income distribution, began thinking of their (fewer) children as precious and delicate race cars, and they—the parents—are the pit crew working frantically to help their car win the race to get into a top college.[34]

A related factor is a declining sense of social cohesion throughout the late 20th century, which had many causes. When people no longer knew their neighbors, they no longer had “eyes on the street” from adults who could look out for kids.[38]

Furedi says that there is one factor above all others that created the conditions for the 1990s turn to paranoid parenting: “the breakdown of adult solidarity.”

But when adults step away and stop helping each other to raise children, parents find themselves on their own. Parenting becomes harder, more fear-ridden, and more time consuming,

“The idea that responsible parenting means the continual supervision of children is a peculiarly Anglo-American one.”[43]

This is the world in which Gen Z was raised. It was a world in which adults, schools, and other institutions worked together to teach children that the world is dangerous, and to prevent them from experiencing the risks, conflicts, and thrills that their experience-expectant brains needed to overcome anxiety and set their default mental state to discover mode.[47]

But in a psychologically safe group, members can disagree with each other and criticize each other’s ideas respectfully. That’s how ideas get vetted.

Every child needs at least one adult who serves as a “secure base.”

Kids seek out the level of risk and thrill that they are ready for, in order to master their fears and develop competencies.

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 did more parenting in defend mode, seeing risks and threats everywhere.

the human brain reaches 90% of its adult size by age

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.

that adolescence is not necessarily an especially stressful time. Rather, it is a time when the brain is more vulnerable to the effects of sustained stressors, which can tilt the adolescent into mental disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse.

“chronic stress,” meaning stress that lasts for days, weeks, or even years, is much worse than “acute stress,” which refers to stress that comes on quickly but does not last long,

Safetyism requires banning most independent activity during childhood, especially outdoor activities (such as playing touch football without an adult referee) because such activities could lead to bruised bodies and bruised feelings.

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.

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.

On the internet, everyone is the same age, which is no particular age. This is a major reason why a phone-based adolescence is badly mismatched with the needs of adolescents.

The beginning of high school would be a reasonable target for a national norm (not a law) about the minimum age at which teens get their first smartphone.[20]

The U.S. Congress should undo the mistake it made in 1998 when it made 13 the age at which children can sign contracts with corporations to open accounts and give away their data without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

Children do not turn into fully functioning adults on their own.

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.

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.

variable-ratio reinforcement schedule administered by the game designers, which is the most powerful way to take control of an animal’s behavior short of implanting electrodes in its brain.

animal learning is “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness.”[1]

By the early 2010s, our phones had transformed from Swiss Army knives, which we pulled out when we needed a tool, to platforms upon which companies competed to see who could hold on to eyeballs the longest.[5]

By the early 2010s, social “networking” systems that had been structured (for the most part) to connect people turned into social media “platforms” redesigned (for the most part) in such a way that they encouraged one-to-many public performances in search of validation, not just from friends but from strangers.

Children need face-to-face, synchronous, embodied, physical play. The healthiest play is outdoors and includes occasional physical risk-taking and thrilling adventure.

when your sleep is truncated or disturbed, you’re more likely to become depressed and develop behavioral problems. The effects were larger for girls.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron”

Attention is a choice we make to stay on one task, one line of thinking, one mental road, even as attractive off-ramps beckon.

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

A phone-based childhood is likely to interfere with the development of executive function.[52]

The release of dopamine feels good; we register it in our consciousness. But it’s not a passive reward that satisfies us and reduces our craving. Rather, dopamine circuits are centrally involved in wanting, as in “that felt great, I want more!”

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.

There is no off-ramp in an app with a bottomless feed; there is no signal to stop.

“the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.”[57]

“The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.”[60]

When we gave children and adolescents smartphones in the early 2010s, we gave companies the ability to apply variable-ratio reinforcement schedules all day long, training them like rats during their most sensitive years of brain rewiring.

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.

Girls who say that they spend five or more hours each weekday on social media are three times as likely to be depressed as those who report no social media time.

This meant that they made eye contact less frequently, laughed together less, and lost practice making conversation. Social media therefore harmed the social lives even of students who stayed away from it.

Girls spend more time on social media platforms,[27] and the platforms they are on are the worst for mental health.

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]

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.

Figure 6.5. The sociometer plunge of 2012. Percent of U.S. students (8th, 10th, and 12th grade) who said they were satisfied with themselves. (Source: Monitoring the Future.)

socially prescribed perfectionism, where a person feels that they must live up to very high expectations prescribed by others, or by society at large.[39]

“social comparison takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluations.”

the part of the brain that is doing the comparisons is not governed by the part of the brain that knows, consciously, that they are seeing only edited highlight reels.