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. The most intense period of this rewiring was 2010 to 2015, although the story I will tell begins with the rise of fearful and overprotective parenting in the 1980s and continues through the COVID pandemic to the present day.

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.

This book tells the story of what happened to the generation born after 1995,[9] popularly known as Gen Z, the generation that follows the millennials (born 1981 to 1995). Some marketers tell us that Gen Z ends with the birth year 2010 or so, and they offer the name Gen Alpha for the children born after that, but I don’t think that Gen Z—the anxious generation—will have an end date until we change the conditions of childhood that are making young people so anxious.

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. This was now necessary to gain acceptance from peers, which is the oxygen of adolescence, and to avoid online shaming, which is the nightmare of adolescence.

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.

There’s a second plotline here: the well-intentioned and disastrous shift toward overprotecting children and restricting their autonomy in the real world.

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. Virtual interactions with peers do not fully compensate for these experiential losses. Moreover, those whose playtime and social lives moved online found themselves increasingly wandering through adult spaces, consuming adult content, and interacting with adults in ways that are often harmful to minors. So even while parents worked to eliminate risk and freedom in the real world, they generally, and often unknowingly, granted full independence in the virtual world, in part because most found it difficult to understand what was going on there, let alone know what to restrict or how to restrict it.

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.

When I talk about the “real world,” I am referring to relationships and social interactions characterized by four features that have been typical for millions of years: They are embodied, meaning that we use our bodies to communicate, we are conscious of the bodies of others, and we respond to the bodies of others both consciously and unconsciously. They are synchronous, which means they are happening at the same time, with subtle cues about timing and turn taking. They involve primarily one-to-one or one-to-several communication, with only one interaction happening at a given moment. They take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen.

They take place within communities that have a low bar for entry and exit, so people can block others or just quit when they are not pleased. Communities tend to be short-lived, and relationships are often disposable.

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.

a phone-based life changes us all—children, adolescents, and adults—by bringing us “down” on what I can only describe as a spiritual dimension.

If your body was turned over to just anyone, you would doubtless take exception. Why aren’t you ashamed that you have made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you, so that it automatically becomes confused and upset?

Marcus Aurelius’s advice to himself, in the second century CE: Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.[20]

Major Depression Among Teens Figure 1.1. Percent of U.S. teens (ages 12–17) who had at least one major depressive episode in the past year, by self-report based on a symptom checklist. This was figure 7.1 in The Coddling of the American Mind, now updated with data beyond 2016. (Source: U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health.)

The increase for girls was much larger than the increase for boys in absolute terms (the number of additional cases since 2010), and a hockey stick shape jumps out more clearly. However, boys started at a lower level than girls, so in relative terms (the percent change since 2010, which I’ll always use as the baseline), the increases were similar for both sexes—roughly 150%. In other words, depression became roughly two and a half times more prevalent. The increases happened across all races and social classes.

the rise is concentrated in disorders related to anxiety and depression, which are classed together in the psychiatric category known as internalizing disorders. These are disorders in which a person feels strong distress and experiences the symptoms inwardly. The person with an internalizing disorder feels emotions such as anxiety, fear, sadness, and hopelessness. They ruminate. They often withdraw from social engagement.

In contrast, externalizing disorders are those in which a person feels distress and turns the symptoms and responses outward, aimed at other people. These conditions include conduct disorder, difficulty with anger management, and tendencies toward violence and excessive risk-taking. Across ages, cultures, and countries, girls and women suffer higher rates of internalizing disorders, while boys and men suffer from higher rates of externalizing disorders.[6] That said, both sexes suffer from both, and both sexes have been experiencing more internalizing disorders and fewer externalizing disorders since the early 2010s.

In fact, quick responses to threats are so important that the brains of mammals can trigger a fear response before information from the eyes has even made it to the visual centers in the back of the brain for full processing.

But when our alarm bell is on a hair trigger so that it is frequently activated by ordinary events—including many that pose no real threat—it keeps us in a perpetual state of distress. This is when ordinary, healthy, temporary anxiety turns into an anxiety disorder.

Anxiety affects the mind and body in multiple ways. For many, anxiety is felt in the body as tension or tightness and as discomfort in the abdomen and chest cavity.[16] Emotionally, anxiety is experienced as dread, worry, and, after a while, exhaustion. Cognitively, it often becomes difficult to think clearly, pulling people into states of unproductive rumination and provoking cognitive distortions that are the focus of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), such as catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, and black-and-white thinking. For those with anxiety disorders, these distorted thinking patterns often elicit uncomfortable physical symptoms, which then induce feelings of fear and worry, which then trigger more anxious thinking, perpetuating a vicious cycle.

People are more likely to become depressed when they become (or feel) more socially disconnected, and depression then makes people less interested and able to seek out social connection.

Whether she used filters or not, the reflection each girl saw in the mirror got less and less attractive relative to the girls she saw on her phone.

But evolution didn’t just lengthen childhood to make learning possible. It also installed three strong motivations to do things that make learning easy and likely: motivations for free play, attunement, and social learning.

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.

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

a key CBT insight: Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development.

It’s as if we gave our infants iPads loaded with movies about walking, but the movies were so engrossing that kids never put in the time or effort to practice walking.

Rather, every public action is, to some degree, strategic. It is, in Peter Gray’s phrase, “consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.” Even for kids who never post anything, spending time on social media sites can still be harmful because of the chronic social comparison, the unachievable beauty standards, and the enormous amount of time taken away from everything else in life.

Synchronous, face-to-face, physical interactions and rituals are a deep, ancient, and underappreciated part of human evolution. Adults enjoy them, and children need them for healthy development. Yet the major social media platforms draw children into endless hours of asynchronous interaction, which can become more like work than play.

there are several “strategies” that won out over thousands of generations and became part of our evolved propensity for culture. The two that are most relevant for our discussion of social media are conformist bias and prestige bias

The value of conformity is obvious: Doing whatever most people are doing is the safest strategy across a wide range of environments.

We sometimes call this peer pressure, but it can be quite strong even when nobody is exerting pressure of any kind. It may be more accurate to call it conformity attraction.

In a real-life social setting, it takes a while—often weeks—to get a good sense for what the most common behaviors are, because you need to observe multiple groups in multiple settings. But on a social media platform, a child can scroll through a thousand data points in one hour (at three seconds per post), each one accompanied by numerical evidence (likes) and comments that show whether the post was a success or a failure. Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conformity engines ever invented

But there’s an important learning strategy that goes beyond copying the majority: Detect prestige and then copy the prestigious.

Henrich noted that the social hierarchies of nonhuman primates are based on dominance—the ability, ultimately, to inflict violence on others. But humans have an alternative ranking system based on prestige, which is willingly conferred by people to those they see as having achieved excellence in a valued domain of activity, such as hunting or storytelling back in ancient times.

Henrich argues that the reason people become so deferential (starstruck) toward prestigious people is that they are motivated to get close to prestigious people in order to maximize their own learning and raise their own prestige by association. Prestigious people, in turn, will allow some supplicants to get close to them because having a retinue (a group of devoted attendants and followers) is a reliable signal to the community of their high standing in the prestige rankings.

Platform designers in Silicon Valley directly targeted this psychological system when they quantified and displayed the success of every post (likes, shares, retweets, comments) and every user, whose followers are literally called followers.

Sean Parker, one of the early leaders of Facebook, admitted in a 2017 interview that the goal of Facebook’s and Instagram’s founders was to create “a social-validation feedback loop . . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up w...

Healthy brain development depends on getting the right experiences at the right age and in the right order.

The sequential introduction of age-appropriate experiences, tuned to sensitive periods and shared with same-age peers, had been the norm during the era of play-based childhood. But in a phone-based childhood, children are plunged into a whirlpool of adult content and experiences that arrive in no particular order. Identity, selfhood, emotions, and relationships will all be different if they develop online rather than in real life.

For girls, the worst years for using social media were 11 to 13; for boys, it was 14 to 15.[36] These results offer clear evidence that 13, which is the current (and unenforced) minimum age for opening an account on social media platforms, is too low.

Childhood is an apprenticeship for learning the skills needed for success in one’s culture.

we are overprotecting our children in the real world while underprotecting them online. If we really want to keep our children safe, we should delay their entry into the virtual world and send them out to play in the real world instead.

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. Parents who try to raise their children in a bubble of perfect hygiene are harming their children by blocking the development of their antifragile immune systems.

It’s the same dynamic for what has been called the psychological immune system[12]—the ability of a child to handle, process, and get past frustrations, minor accidents, teasing, exclusion, perceived injustices, and normal conflicts without falling prey to hours or days of inner turmoil.

Sandseter and Kennair analyzed the kinds of risks that children seek out when adults give them some freedom, and they found six: heights (such as climbing trees or playground structures), high speed (such as swinging, or going down fast slides), dangerous tools (such as hammers and drills), dangerous elements (such as experimenting with fire), rough-and-tumble play (such as wrestling), and disappearing (hiding, wandering away, potentially getting lost or separated). These are the major types of thrills that children need.

Unfortunately, playground spinners are rare nowadays, because they carry some risk, and therefore in a litigious country like the United States they carry some risk of a lawsuit against whoever is responsible for the playground. You can see the decimation of risky play since the 1990s in most American playgrounds. Figure 3.6 shows the most common kind of structure in the playgrounds my children used in New York City in the early 2010s. It’s hard to hurt yourself on these things, which means children don’t learn much about how to not get hurt.

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 my dog, Wilma, only the kids themselves can calibrate the level of risk they are ready for at each moment as they tune up their experience-expectant brains. 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.