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

by Jonathan Haidt

I therefore believe that the U.S. Congress should fix the mistakes it made in 1998 and raise the age of internet adulthood from 13 back to 16, as it was in the original draft of the bill, and then require companies to enforce it.

But if we drop the need for a universal solution and restrict our focus to helping parents who want the internet to have age gates that apply to their children, then a third approach becomes possible: Parents should have a way of marking their child’s phones, tablets, and laptops as devices belonging to a minor. That mark, which could be written either into the hardware or the software, would act like a sign that tells companies with age restrictions, “This person is underage; do not admit without parental consent.”

It would also allow sites to age gate specific features, such as the ability to upload videos or to be contacted by strangers. Note that with device-based verification, nobody else is inconvenienced. Adults who visit a site that uses age check don’t have to do anything or show anything, so the internet is unchanged for them, and there is no privacy threat whatsoever. Parents who want their children to open social media accounts or visit pornography websites can simply turn age check off.

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

Reasonable Childhood Independence laws clarify the meaning of neglect: Neglect is when a parent blatantly, willfully, or recklessly disregards a danger to a child so apparent that no reasonable person would allow the child to engage in that activity.

One study found that kids who can get to a playground by bike or foot are six times more likely to visit it than kids who need someone to drive them.[36] So scatter playgrounds throughout a neighborhood, and consider having a few of them be adventure playgrounds

One innovative and inexpensive way that European cities are helping kids (and parents) to be more sociable is by blocking off the street in front of a school for an hour before and after school.[37] On these temporarily car-free School Streets, parents mingle and kids play, even as congestion, pollution, and road danger go down.

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, pa...

In a labor market in which people move around frequently, companies have little incentive to take on untrained young people, invest in them, and then have them move elsewhere. Government-supported programs that subsidize pay for a period of time make it less expensive for companies to train young people, thereby increasing their value to the company or any future employer.[40]

So I would never say that we need internet-free schools or students. It’s the personal devices that students carry with them throughout the school day that have the worst cost-benefit ratio. Students’ phones are loaded with apps designed to catch the attention of young people, pinging them with notifications calling them out of class and into their virtual worlds. That’s what is most disruptive to learning and relationships.

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.

Re-normalizing childhood independence requires collective action, and collective action is most easily facilitated by local schools. When an entire class, school, or school district encourages parents to loosen the reins, the culture in that town or county shifts. Parents don’t feel guilty or weird about letting go. Hey, it’s homework, and all the other parents are doing it too. Pretty soon, you’ve got kids trick-or-treating on their own again, and going to the store, and getting themselves to school.

There are three big ways to improve recess: Give kids more of it, on better playgrounds, with fewer rules.

As a professor, I’m certainly in favor of reforms that increase academic performance, but the preoccupation with test scores caused the educational system to violate much of what we know about child development, the benefits of free play, and the value of time outdoors.

“Ironically, minimizing or eliminating recess may be counterproductive to academic achievement, as a growing body of evidence suggests that recess promotes not only physical health and social development but also cognitive performance.”[24]

That is why it is so important that we carve out some time when kids are not with a parent, teacher, or coach. That’s pretty much the only time they will be forced to function on their own and realize how much they are capable of.

Abundant research shows that time in natural settings benefits children’s social, cognitive, and emotional development,[31] and these benefits matter even more as young people are increasingly ensconced in the virtual world and as their anxiety levels continue to rise.

Kids will take on responsibility for their safety when they are actually responsible for their safety, rather than relying on the adult guardians hovering over them.[36]

Those schools would then be randomly assigned[43] into four experimental groups: (1) phone-free, (2) play-full (that is, Play Club plus extra recess), (3) phone-free plus play-full, and (4) the control condition, in which each school carries on with whatever it was doing before, but is asked not to change phone or recess policies.[44] In just two years, we’d find out whether these interventions work, whether one of them is stronger than the other, and whether there is an added benefit to combining them.

Gopnik says that a better way to think about child rearing is as a gardener. Your job is to “create a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish.”

But 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.

Providing children with responsibility around the house makes them feel like an essential part of the family, and giving them more responsibility as they grow could offer some protection against later feelings of uselessness.

A key insight gained from research on screens and young children is that active, synchronous virtual interactions with other humans—what most of us call a video chat—can foster language learning and bonding, while passive, asynchronous viewing of a prerecorded video yields minimal benefits and in some cases even backfires and disrupts language learning, particularly for those under 2 years old.[6]

Experience the anxiety a few times, taking conscious note that your worst fears did not occur, and you learn that your child is more capable than you had thought. Each time, the anxiety gets weaker.

The next year, when he was 13, he wanted to go to a particular night match by himself. Jayne and I were hesitant, but Max assured us that he could do it, and he really did know the subway system better than we did. So we conjured up an image of Lenore in our minds, and we said okay. Max had a fantastic time at the match, which ran past 11:00 p.m. No problem, he flowed with the boisterous crowd to the nearby subway afterward. The problem arose at the transfer station; the train Max needed for the last mile home was not running that night. Max was nervous, but he improvised. He walked upstairs from the subway station and hailed a yellow cab—which I had taught him how to do but he had never done on his own—and made it home safely at 1:00 a.m. From that day on he was a different person, with more confidence, and from that day on we treated him differently and gave him still more independence. Jayne and I would not have said yes to Max’s request had we not let him walk to school years earlier, and grown to trust him without tracking his blue dot at every moment.

One 13-year-old told Lenore that when she started doing more things on her own, including runs to the drugstore for her mom, and getting herself places without being driven, she started to realize just how much time her mom spent doing boring, thankless things like carpooling and sitting through freezing soccer games. Once she started empathizing with her mom—and helping out more—the two stopped fighting as much because, in a way, now they were on the same team.

Helping younger kids seems to turn on an empathy switch and a leadership gene.

Lenore saw this happen the first time her younger son went on a Boy Scout overnight camping trip, at the age of 11. He was beyond excited. He was also beyond unprepared: He forgot his sleeping bag. Oh, did he cry when he realized that; he thought he’d be sent home. Then an older Scout—a high school student—said, “Don’t worry! I always bring an extra sleeping bag for just this kind of situation!” Lenore’s son was grateful, and so was she when she heard the story. Lenore was even more grateful years later when she learned that in fact the older Scout had not brought an extra sleeping bag. He slept on the cold, hard ground. That’s how you become a leader.

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