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

by Jonathan Haidt

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.

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. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness—perpetually—to managing what became their online brand.

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.

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.

Phone-free schools.

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

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

The play researchers Brussoni, Sandseter and Kennair, and Peter Gray all help us see that antifragile children need play that involves some risk to develop competence and overcome their childhood anxieties.

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.

It is this rise of fearful parenting in the 1990s that led to the evaporation of unsupervised children from public spaces in the Anglosphere by the year 2000.

The mass movement from real world to virtual world started with the rise of fearful parenting and the gradual loss of play-based childhood. As overprotection and safetyism intensified in the 1990s, young people began engaging less in some of the major activities traditionally associated with teen development, activities that often required a car and permission to be out of the house, unsupervised.

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] A Dutch longitudinal study found that young people who engaged in more problematic (addictive) social media use at one measurement time had stronger ADHD symptoms at the next measurement time.[50]

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. The addiction researcher Anna Lembke says that the universal symptoms of withdrawal are “anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.” She and other researchers find that many adolescents have developed behavioral addictions that are very much like the way that people develop addictions to slot machine gambling, with profound consequences for their well-being, their social development, and their families.