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

by Jonathan Haidt

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

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, whereas parents can struggle unsuccessfully for years to get their children to sit up straight or stop whining.

Our kids can do so much more than we let them. Our culture of fear has kept this truth from us. They are like racehorses stuck in the stable. It’s time to let them out.

A free-range childhood is more likely to produce confident, competent young adults, with lower levels of anxiety, than is a childhood ruled by safetyism, fear, and constant adult supervision.

No smartphones before high school No social media before 16 Phone-free schools Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence