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

by Jonathan Haidt

By designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.

While the reward-seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, the frontal cortex—essential for self-control, delay of gratification, and resistance to temptation—is not up to full capacity until the mid-20s, and preteens are at a particularly vulnerable point in development.

They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviors that are essential for successful human development.

I propose that we view the late 1980s as the beginning of the transition from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood,” a transition that was not complete until the mid-2010s, when most adolescents had their own smartphone.

As the transition from play-based to phone-based childhood proceeded, many children and adolescents were perfectly happy to stay indoors and play online, but in the process they lost exposure to the kinds of challenging physical and social experiences that all young mammals need to develop basic competencies, overcome innate childhood fears, and prepare to rely less on their parents.

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.

No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children’s entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (roughly age 14). No social media before 16. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers. Phone-free schools. In all schools from elementary through high school, students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked pouches during the school day. That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

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. As I’ll show in later chapters, this is what the Great Rewiring did to Gen Z.

Play is the work of childhood,[5] and all young mammals have the same job: Wire up your brain by playing vigorously and often. 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]

As the Stoics and Buddhists taught long ago, happiness cannot be reached by eliminating all “triggers” from life; rather, happiness comes from learning to deprive external events of the power to trigger negative emotions in you.

Sandseter and Kennair define risky play as “thrilling and exciting forms of play that involve a risk of physical injury.” (In a 2023 paper, expanding on their original work, they add that risky play also requires elements of uncertainty.[17]) They note that such play usually takes place outdoors, during free-play time rather than during activities organized by adults. Children choose to do activities that often lead to relatively harmless injuries, particularly bruises and cuts.

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

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.

All children are by nature antifragile. Just as the immune system must be exposed to germs, and trees must be exposed to wind, children require exposure to setbacks, failures, shocks, and stumbles in order to develop strength and self-reliance. Overprotection interferes with this development and renders young people more likely to be fragile and fearful as adults.

Heightened susceptibility to stress in adolescence is a specific example of the fact that puberty makes the brain more malleable, or “plastic.” This makes adolescence both a time of risk (because the brain’s plasticity increases the chances that exposure to a stressful experience will cause harm) but also a window of opportunity for advancing adolescents’ health and well-being (because the same brain plasticity makes adolescence a time when interventions to improve mental health may be more effective).[4] Puberty is therefore a period when we should be particularly concerned about what our children are experiencing.

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 that their experience-expectant brains most need.

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

And no matter how hard it is for an adult to stay committed to one mental road, it is far harder for an adolescent, who has an immature frontal cortex and therefore limited ability to say no to off-ramps.

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? It appears so.[49]

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.

There is a clear, consistent, and sizable link[7] between heavy social media use and mental illness for girls,[8] but that relationship gets buried or minimized in studies and literature reviews that look at all digital activities for all teens.[9] Journalists who report that the evidence of harm is weak are usually referring to such studies.[10]

Sexual predation and rampant sexualization mean that girls and young women must be warier, online, than most boys and young men. They are forced to spend more of their virtual lives in defend mode, which may be part of the reason that their anxiety levels went up more sharply in the early 2010s.

The third reason is that girls and women more readily share emotions. When everything moved online and girls became hyperconnected, girls with anxiety or depression might have influenced many other girls to develop anxiety and depression. Girls are also more vulnerable to “sociogenic” illnesses, which means illnesses caused by social influence rather than from a biological cause.

Boys get lower grades, they have higher rates of ADHD, they are more likely to be unable to read, and they are less likely to graduate from high school, in part because they are three times as likely as girls to be expelled or suspended along the way.[10] The gender disparities are often small at the upper end, among the wealthiest families, but they grow much larger as we move down the socioeconomic ladder.

The Great Rewiring of Childhood pulled young people out of real-world communities, including their own families, and created a new kind of childhood lived in multiple rapidly shifting networks. One inevitable result was anomie, or normlessness, because stable and binding moralities cannot form when everything is in flux, including the members of the network.

Though researchers have not found evidence that prayer works to change outcomes in the world, such as curing a child of cancer, DeSteno found that there is abundant evidence that keeping up certain spiritual practices improves well-being.

Self-transcendence is among the central features of spiritual experience, and it turns out that the loss of self has a neural signature. There is a set of linked structures in the brain that are more active whenever we are processing events from an egocentric point of view—thinking about what I want, what I need to do next, or what other people think of me. These brain structures are so often active together that they are collectively called the default mode network (DMN), meaning it is what the brain is usually doing, except in the special times when it is not.[17]

When the DMN is quieter, we are better able to deeply connect to something beyond ourselves. What does social media do to the DMN? A social media “platform” is, almost by definition, a place that is all about you. You stand on the platform and post content to influence how others perceive you. It is almost perfectly designed to crank up the DMN to maximum and pin it there. That’s not healthy for any of us, and it’s even worse for adolescents.[20]

The sacred is the realm of the collective. Groups of individuals become a cohesive community when they engage in rituals that move them in and out of the realm of the sacred together. The virtual world, in contrast, gives no structure to time or space and is entirely profane. This is one reason why virtual communities are not usually as satisfying or meaning-giving as real-world communities.

When governments, tech companies, schools, and parents work in complementary ways, they can collectively solve hard problems, including improving the mental health of young people.

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.

It’s the natural outcome of being present and seeing a child who’s frustrated or taking a small risk or behaving badly. That is why it is so important that we carve out some time when kids are not with a parent, teacher, or coach. That’s pretty much the only time they will be forced to function on their own and realize how much they are capable of.

Human childhood evolved in savannas and forests, alongside streams and lakes. When you put children into natural settings, they instinctively explore and spontaneously invent games. Abundant research shows that time in natural settings benefits children’s social, cognitive, and emotional development,[31] and these benefits matter even more as young people are increasingly ensconced in the virtual world and as their anxiety levels continue to rise.

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.

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.

But one kind of screen time may be valuable in moderation: interacting with family members or friends via FaceTime, Zoom, or other video platforms. A key insight gained from research on screens and young children is that active, synchronous virtual interactions with other humans—what most of us call a video chat—can foster language learning and bonding, while passive, asynchronous viewing of a prerecorded video yields minimal benefits and in some cases even backfires and disrupts language learning, particularly for those under 2 years old.[6]

You have to let go online eventually. But if you can keep the quantity of online time lower and the quality higher in this long period of childhood and early adolescence (ages 6–13), you’ll make room for more real-world engagement, and you’ll buy time for your child’s brain to develop better self-control and less fragmented attention.

In part 4, I offered dozens of suggestions, but the four foundational reforms are: No smartphones before high school No social media before 16 Phone-free schools Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence

If you’re a parent, connect with other parents who value play-based childhood and more childhood independence. There are many excellent organizations that bring parents together around this cause, including Let Grow, Outsideplay, and Fairplay.[5]