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

by Jonathan Haidt

Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development. It is in unsupervised, child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair.

Think of the effect of vovid

Discover mode fosters learning and growth. If we want to help young people thrive—at home, in school, and in the workplace—shifting them into discover mode may be the most effective change we can make.

This altered cell structure is called reaction wood, or sometimes stress wood. Trees that are exposed to strong winds early in life become trees that can withstand even stronger winds when full grown. Conversely, trees that are raised in a protected greenhouse sometimes fall over from their own weight before they reach maturity.

Taleb coined the word “antifragile” to describe things that actually need to get knocked over now and then in order to become strong. I used the word “things,” but there are very few inanimate objects that are antifragile. Rather, antifragility is a common property of complex systems that were designed (by evolution, and sometimes by people) to function in a world that is unpredictable.[11] The ultimate antifragile system is the immune system, which requires early exposure to dirt, parasites, and bacteria in order to set itself up in childhood.

Our goal in designing the places children play, she says, should be to “keep them as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.”[27]

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]

the human brain reaches 90% of its adult size by age 5, and it has far more neurons and synapses at that moment than it will have in its adult form.

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.

“there is an inverted U-shaped pattern in the relationship between stress and well-being. A little stress is beneficial to development, but a lot of stress, acute or chronic, is detrimental.”

Age 6: The age of family responsibility. Children are formally recognized as important contributors to the household, not just as dependents. As an example, they can be given a small list of chores and a small weekly allowance that is contingent upon their performance of those chores.[19]

Age 8: The age of local freedom. Children gain the freedom to play and hang out in groups without adult supervision. They should show that they can take care of each other, and they begin running local errands, if there are stores within a short walk or bike ride. They should not be given adult cell phones, but they could be given a phone or watch designed for children that would allow them to call or text a small number of people (such as their parents and siblings).

Age 10: The age of roaming. Preteens gain the freedom to roam more widely, perhaps equivalent to what their parents were allowed to do at the age of 8 or 9. They should show good judgment and do more to help their families. Consistent with their increased mobility and responsibility, a flip phone or other basic phone with few apps and no internet access might be given as a birthday present. They should not have most...

Age 12: The age of apprenticeship. At 12, which is around the age that many societies begin rites of initiation, adolescents should begin finding more adult mentors and role models beyond their parents. Adolescents should be encouraged to start earning their own money by doing chores for neighbors or relatives, such as raking leaves or working as a mother’s helper for a neighbor with an infant or to...

Age 14: The beginning of high school. The 14th birthday comes around the time that high school begins, and this is a major transition during which independence increases along with academic pressure, time pressure, and social pressure. Activities such as working for pay and joining an athletic team are good ways to discover that hard work leads to tangible and pleasurable rewards. 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]

Age 16: The beginning of internet adulthood. This should be a big year of independence, conditional on showing a history of responsibility and growth since the previous step. 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. I believe the age should be raised to 16 and enforced. The 16th birthday would become a major milestone at which we say to teens, “You can now get a driver’s license, and you can now sign certain kinds of contracts without any legal requirement for parental consent. You can now open social media accounts as well.” (There are good arguments for waiting until 18, but I think 16 would be the right minimum age to be established by law.)

Age 18: The beginning of legal adulthood. This birthday would retain all of its legal significance including the beginning of voting, eligibility for military service, and the ability to sign contracts and make life decisions. Because this birthday falls near high school graduation in the United States, it should be treated in van Gennep’s terms as both a s...

The Four Foundational Harms: Social Deprivation, Sleep Deprivation, Attention Fragmentation, and Addiction

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

First and foremost, in 2009, Facebook introduced the “like” button and Twitter introduced the “retweet” button. Both of these innovations were then widely copied by other platforms, making viral content dissemination possible. These innovations quantified the success of every post and incentivized users to craft each post for maximum spread, which sometimes meant making more extreme statements or expressing more anger and disgust.[8] At the same time, Facebook began using algorithmically curated news feeds, which motivated other platforms to join the race and curate content that would most successfully hook users. Push notifications were released in 2009, pinging users with notifications throughout the day. The app store brought new advertising-driven platforms to smartphones. Front-facing cameras (2010) made it easier to take photos and videos of oneself, and the rapid spread of high-speed internet (reaching 61% of American homes by January 2010[9]) made it easier for everyone to consume everything quickly.

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. Even users who don’t actively post are affected by the incentive structures these apps have designed.[10]

The figure shows the daily average number of minutes that people in different age brackets spend with their friends. Not surprisingly, the youngest group (ages 15–24) spends more time with friends, compared with the older groups, who are more likely to be employed and married. The difference was very large in the early 2000s, but it was declining, and the decline accelerated after 2013. The data for 2020 was collected after the COVID epidemic arrived, which explains why the lines bend downward in that last year for the two older groups. But for the youngest age group there is no bend at 2019. The decline caused by the first year of COVID restrictions was no bigger than the decline that occurred the year before COVID arrived.

A 2014 survey of children ages 6–12, conducted by Highlights magazine, found that 62% of children reported that their parents were “often distracted” when the child tried to talk with them.[23] When they were asked the reasons why their parents were distracted, cell phones were the top response.

“heavy use of screen media was associated with shorter sleep duration, longer sleep latency, and more mid-sleep awakenings.”[37] The sleep disturbances were greatest for those who were on social media or who were surfing the internet in bed.[38]

“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Lembke says that “the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.”[57] Dysphoria is the opposite of euphoria; it refers to a generalized feeling of discomfort or unease. This is basically what many teens say they feel—and what parents and clinicians observe—when kids who are heavy users of social media or video games are separated from their phones and game consoles involuntarily. Symptoms of sadness, anxiety, and irritability are listed as the signs of withdrawal for those diagnosed with internet gaming disorder.[58]

Around 2013, psychiatric wards in the United States and other Anglo countries began to fill disproportionately with girls.[3]

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.

roll-out of Facebook at a college increased symptoms of poor mental health, especially depression, and led to increased utilization of mental healthcare services. We also find that, according to the students’ reports, the decline in mental health translated into worse academic performance. Additional evidence on mechanisms suggests the results are due to Facebook fostering unfavorable social comparisons.[20]

I have found five studies that looked at the rollout of high-speed internet around the world, and all five found evidence of damage to mental health. It’s hard to have a phone-based childhood when data speeds are low. For example, what happened in Spain as fiber-optic cables were laid and high-speed internet came to different regions at different times? A 2022 study analyzed “the effect of access to high-speed Internet on hospital discharge diagnoses of behavioral and mental health cases among adolescents.” The conclusion: We find a positive and significant impact on girls but not on boys. Exploring the mechanism behind these effects, we show that [the arrival of high-speed internet] increases addictive Internet use and significantly decreases time spent sleeping, doing homework, and socializing with family and friends. Girls again power all these effects.[21]

Figure 6.3 shows the percentage of American high school students who spent more than 40 hours a week using social media platforms. That’s like working a full-time job while also being a full-time student. By 2015, one in seven American girls had reached this astronomical level.

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

Teens are particularly vulnerable to insecurity because their bodies and their social lives are changing so rapidly as they leave childhood. They struggle to figure out where they fit in the new prestige order for their sex. Nearly all adolescents care how they look, especially as they begin to develop romantic interests. All know that they will be chosen or passed over based in part on their appearance. But for adolescent girls, the stakes are higher because a girl’s social standing is usually more closely tied to her beauty and sex appeal than is the case for boys. 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.

These tuning apps gave girls the ability to present themselves with perfect skin, fuller lips, bigger eyes, and a narrower waist (in addition to showcasing the most “perfect” parts of their lives).[38] Snapchat offered similar features through its filters, first released in 2015, many of which gave users full lips, petite noses, and doe eyes at the touch of a button. You can see sociometers plunging in figure 6.5, which shows the percentage of American high school seniors who said they were satisfied or completely satisfied when asked the question “how satisfied are you with yourself?” The plunge happened for boys too, and I’ll discuss how their lives changed in the next chapter.

Researchers in France exposed young women either to media photographs of very thin women or to media photographs of average-sized women.[41] They found that the young women exposed to images of very thin women became more anxious about their own body and appearance. But here’s the surprising thing: The images were flashed on a screen for just 20 milliseconds, too fast for the women to become consciously aware of what they had seen. The authors conclude that “social comparison takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluations.” This means that the frequent reminders girls give each other that social media is not reality are likely to have only a limited effect, because 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.

Researchers for the Center for Countering Digital Hate created a dozen fake accounts on TikTok, registered to 13-year-old girls, and found that TikTok’s algorithm served them tens of thousands of weight-loss videos within a few weeks of joining the platform.[43] The videos included many emaciated young women urging their followers to try extreme diets such as the “corpse bride” diet or the water-only diet.

According to one major U.S. survey, these high rates of cyberbullying have persisted (though have not increased) between 2011 and 2019. Throughout the period, approximately one in 10 high school boys and one in five high school girls experienced cyberbullying each year.[49] In other words, the move online made bullying and harassment a larger part of daily life for girls. While the percentage of teens who reported being cyberbullied each year might not have risen during the 2010s, the ways in which students could perpetrate and experience relational aggression has changed as teens joined new platforms that offered new ways to spread rumors and mount attacks. Social media makes it easy for anyone, of any age, to set up multiple anonymous profiles, which can be used for trolling and reputational destruction. All of it takes place in a virtual world that parents and teachers can rarely access or understand. Additionally, as smartphones accompany adolescents to school, to the bathroom, and to bed, so too can their bullies.

Social media has magnified the reach and effect of relational bullying, placing immense pressure on girls to monitor their words and actions. They are aware that any misstep can swiftly go viral and leave a permanent mark. Social media fuels the insecurity of adolescence, already a period where there is immense concern about the possibility of ostracism, and has thus turned a generation of girls away from discover mode and toward defend mode.

When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%. When a man became depressed, it had no measurable effect on his friends. The authors surmise that the difference is due to the fact that women are more emotionally expressive and more effective at communicating mood states within friendship pairs. When men get together, in contrast, they are more likely to do things together rather than talk about what they are feeling.

Much of the adolescent mental illness epidemic may be the direct result of the anxiety variant spreading by two distinct psychological processes. First, there is simple emotional contagion, as described by Fowler and Christakis. People pick up emotions from others, and emotional contagion is especially strong among girls. Second, there is “prestige bias,” which is the social learning rule I described in chapter 2: Don’t just copy anyone; first find out who the most prestigious people are, then copy them. But on social media, the way to gain followers and likes is to be more extreme, so those who present with more extreme symptoms are likely to rise fastest, making them the models that everyone else locks onto for social learning. This process is sometimes known as audience capture—a process in which people get trained by their audiences to become more extreme versions of whatever it is the audience wants to see.[59] And if one finds oneself in a network in which most others have adopted some behavior, then the other social learning process kicks in too: conformity bias.

encapsulated the trend this way: “All of a sudden, all of my adolescent patients think that they have [DID]. . . . And they don’t.”[67]

But brushes with sexual predators are a larger part of internet life for girls than they are for boys, requiring greater reliance on defend mode.[77]

But the predation and exploitation also come from their male classmates. Sales described how nude photographs function as a kind of currency in many middle and high schools.

Girls on social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat are exposed to the direct messages of adult men who seek them out, and also to school cultures in which photos of their naked bodies become a currency for social prestige among boys, a currency that girls pay for with shame. 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.

This is the great irony of social media: the more you immerse yourself in it, the more lonely and depressed you become. This is true both at the individual level and at the collective level. When teens as a whole cut back on hanging out and doing things together in the real world, their culture changed. Their communion needs were left unsatisfied—even for those few teens who were not on social media.

After considering the four reasons that girls are particularly vulnerable, we can see why social media is a trap that ensnares more girls than boys. The lure is the promise of connecting with friends—enticing for girls who have strong needs for communion—but the reality is that girls are plunged into a strange new world in which our ancient evolved programming for real-world communities misfires continuously. Girls in virtual networks are subjected to hundreds of times more social comparison than girls had experienced for all of human evolution. They are exposed to more cruelty and bullying because social media platforms incentivize and facilitate relational aggression. Their openness and willingness to share emotions with other girls exposes them to depression and other disorders. The twisted incentive structures of social media reward the most extreme presentations of symptoms. And finally, the progress that many societies have made to reduce sexual violence and harassment in the real world is being counteracted by the facilitation of harassment and exploitation by companies that put profits above the privacy and safety of their users.

Boys show evidence of pulling away from engagement with the real world well before the mental health declines of the 2010s. For boys, their time spent with friends started declining in the early 2000s, with an acceleration after 2010. Girls’ rates were flatter until 2011, with a decline after that. Consider also the response to this statement: “People like me don’t have much of a chance for a successful life.” Only 5% of American girls used to agree with that statement back in the 1970s, and there was essentially no change until the early 2010s, as you can see in Figure 7.1. But for boys, the story is different. Their rates of agreement rose slowly, from the late 1970s through the 2000s, and then rose more quickly in the early 2010s.

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]

Reeves’s book helps us see the structural factors that have made it harder for boys to succeed. He describes factors such as an economy that no longer rewards physical strength, an educational system that prizes the ability to sit still and listen, and a decline in the availability of positive male role models, including fathers. After listing several such factors, Reeves adds, “The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges.”[13]

Many boys got lost in cyberspace, which made them more fragile, fearful, and risk averse on Earth. Beginning in the late 2000s and early 2010s, American boys’ rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide began rising.[14] Boys across the Western world began showing concerning declines in their mental health.[15] By 2015, a staggering number of them said that they had no close friends, that they were lonely, and that there was no meaning or direction to their lives.[16]

Young men in their late 20s are more likely to live with their parents (27% of them, in 2018), compared with young women (17%).[17]