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.

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and—as I will show—unsuitable for children and adolescents.

Children need a great deal of free play to thrive. It’s an imperative that’s evident across all mammal species.

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.

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.

No smartphones before high school.

Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

Play is the work of childhood,[5]

“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] Physical play, outdoors and with other children of mixed ages, is the healthiest, most natural, most beneficial sort of play.

Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development.

smartphones are uniquely effective at interfering with the bond between parent and child.

Attunement practice is as essential for social development as movement and exercise are for physical development.

Attunement forms the foundations for later emotional self-regulation.

For girls, the worst years for using social media were 11 to 13;

Well-intentioned parents who try to raise their children in a bubble of satisfaction, protected from frustration, consequences, and negative emotions, may be harming their children. They may be blocking the development of competence, self-control, frustration tolerance, and emotional self-management.

Brussoni guided me to research showing that the risk of injury per hour of physical play is lower than the risk per hour of playing adult-guided sports, while conferring many more developmental benefits (because the children must make all choices, set and enforce rules, and resolve all disputes).[25] Brussoni is on a campaign to encourage risky outdoor play because in the long run it produces the healthiest children.[26]

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.

for children in elementary and middle school up through the 1980s was that after school and on the weekends, kids were on their own to play in their neighborhoods in mixed-age groups, seek thrills, have adventures, work out conflicts, engage in antiphobic risk-taking, develop their intrinsic antifragility, enjoy being in discover mode together—and come home when the streetlights came on. Those after-school hours were probably more valuable for social development and mental health than anything that happened in school (other than recess).

When a conversation partner pulls out a phone,[21] or when a phone is merely visible[22] (not even your own phone), the quality and intimacy of a social interaction is reduced.

Skills essential for executive function include self-control, focus, and the ability to resist off-ramps. A phone-based childhood is likely to interfere with the development of executive function.[52]

parents can support each other when they stick together. The group Wait Until 8th is a wonderful example of such coordination: Parents sign a pledge when their child is in elementary school that they will not give their child a smartphone until eighth grade. The pledge becomes binding only when 10 families with kids in that school and grade sign the pledge, which guarantees that those children will have others to play with and will not feel that they are the “only ones” excluded.

A community can come to see a personal decision in moral terms and express its revulsion or condemnation, as has happened toward drunk driving (fortunately) or toward a mother who lets her 9-year-old son ride the subway without an adult chaperone (unfortunately).[1] We can reverse the negative moralization of childhood autonomy and come to see 9-year-olds walking around without chaperones as perfectly normal, which it was until very recently.

Lenore is the author of the 2009 book Free-Range Kids,[2] which my wife and I read in 2012. It changed the way we raised our children. We gave them independence earlier, which in turn gave them more confidence in themselves, which in turn gave us more confidence in them.

When platforms offer access to information or services for free, it’s usually because the users are the product.

Younger users are particularly valuable because the habits they form early often stick with them for life, so companies need younger users to ensure robust future usage of their products.

Meta has long been trying to study and attract preteens, and has even considered how to reach children as young as 4.[8] (The same race to the bottom occurred with tobacco companies targeting their ads to adolescents, and denying it.)

all schools, from elementary through high school, should go phone-free to improve not only mental health but academic outcomes as well.

This case and many others like it frighten parents into over-supervising their children. Governments are literally criminalizing the play-based childhoods that were the norm before the 1990s.

Stop Punishing Parents for Giving Children Real-World Freedom

Just because some passerby wouldn’t let her nine-year-old play outside doesn’t mean the state should be able to investigate anyone who does.

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.”

schools in the United States are starving children of playtime in order to make ever more room for academic training and test preparation, which backfires because play-deprived kids become anxious and unfocused.

Cities and towns can do more to be sure that they have good sidewalks, crosswalks, and traffic lights. They can install traffic calming measures, and they can change their zoning to allow more mixed-use development.

When commercial, recreational, and residential establishments are more mashed up together, there is more activity on the street and more places that children can get to on foot or by bike.

But when the only way for a kid to get to a shop, park, or friend’s house is by “parent taxi,” more kids w...

In our era of declining community and rising loneliness, cities and towns should make it easy for local residents to block off streets for block parties and other social reasons too, including Play Streets (streets closed to traffic, part time, so kids can play with each other, like old times).[38]

To address the widespread anxiety in this generation, there are two whales—two big things that schools could do using mostly resources they already have. These are phone-free schools and more free play.

Unstructured free play addresses—head-on—making friends, learning empathy, learning emotional regulation, learning interpersonal skills, and greatly empowers students by helping them find a healthy place in their school community—all while teaching them life’s most important skills like creativity, innovation, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, self-direction, perseverance, and social skills.

When we give trust to kids, they soar. Trusting our kids to start venturing out into the world may be the most transformative thing adults can do. But it is difficult for most parents to do this on their own. If your daughter goes to the park and there are no other kids there, she’ll come right home.

Re-normalizing childhood independence requires collective action, and collective action is most easily facilitated by local schools.

Europeans have led the world in designing what are known as adventure playgrounds, which are designed for imaginative play.

Students would be healthier, happier, and smarter overall, with lower rates of injury and anxiety, if schools could loosen the reins and let children play in a more natural way. But we can’t get there unless schools, parents, and governments can find a way to work together.

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.

In this book I have argued that we have vastly and needlessly overprotected our children in the real world.

At the same time, we have underprotected our children in the virtual world by leaving them to their own devices

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.

Many of the best adventures are going to happen with other children, in free play. And 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.

what you do often matters far more than what you say, so watch your own phone habits. Be a good role model who is not giving continuous partial attention to both the phone and the child.