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. As they begin puberty, they are often socially insecure, easily swayed by peer pressure, and easily lured by any activity that seems to offer social validation.

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.

close part 3 with reflections on how 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.

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

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?[19]

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]

“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses of this world,” said Hamlet,[18] immediately after lamenting God’s prohibition against “self-slaughter.”

opposite: Those who are politically active nowadays usually have worse mental health.[44]

Here’s a strange fact about human beings: Our kids grow fast, then slow, then fast. If you plot human growth curves against those of chimpanzees, you see that chimps grow at a steady pace until they reach sexual

This relates to a key CBT insight: 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.

Many experiments have now shown that synchronous movement has exactly these effects. In one study, small groups of college students were given headphones to wear and were asked to hold up a beer mug and sway along with the music that they heard. Half of the groups swayed in perfect harmony (because they were listening to the same music at the same time). Half were out of sync (because the music was delivered to their headphones that way). All groups then played a trust game in which a group makes the most money if they all cooperate across many rounds, but any one of them could earn more money by making the selfish choice on any single round. Groups that had moved in sync with each other trusted each other more, cooperated more, and made more money than those that had moved out of sync.[20]

Detect prestige and then copy the prestigious.

The major work on prestige bias was done by the evolutionary anthropologist Joe Henrich,[25] who was a student of Rob Boyd’s. 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.

In humans (and other highly sociable mammals, such as dogs), the default setting is a major contributor to their individual personality. People (and dogs) who go through life in discover mode (except when directly threatened) are happier, more sociable, and more eager for new experiences. Conversely, people (and dogs) who are chronically in defend mode are more defensive and anxious, and they have only rare moments of perceived safety. They tend to see new situations, people, and ideas as potential threats, rather than as opportunities.

Two Basic Mindsets Discover mode (BAS) Scan for opportunities Kid in a candy shop Think for yourself Let me grow! Defend mode (BIS) Scan for dangers Scarcity mindset Cling to your team Keep me safe!

In fact, kids who fall out of trees often turn into the adults who are least afraid of climbing trees.

Children need to swing and then jump off the swing. They need to explore forests and junkyards in search of novelty and adventure. They need to shriek with their friends while watching a horror movie or riding a roller coaster. In the process they develop a broad set of competences, including the ability to judge risk for themselves, take appropriate action when faced with risks, and learn that when things go wrong, even if they get hurt, they can usually handle it without calling in an adult.

We are embodied creatures; children should learn how to manage their bodies in the physical world before they start spending large amounts of time in the virtual world.

Children’s calendars must be filled with activities that the parents believe are enriching, such as learning Mandarin, or extra math training, even when such activities reduce autonomy and leave less room for free play.

Those after-school hours were probably more valuable for social development and mental health than anything that happened in school

Across cultures and throughout history, mothers and fathers have acted on the assumption that if their children got into trouble, other adults—often strangers—would help out. In many societies adults feel duty-bound to reprimand other people’s children who misbehave in public.

“The idea that responsible parenting means the continual supervision of children is a peculiarly Anglo-American one.”[43] He noted that children in Europe, from Italy to Scandinavia, and in many other parts of the world, enjoyed far greater freedom to play and explore the outside world than did children in the U.K. and the United States.

Every child needs at least one adult who serves as a “secure base.” Usually it is the mother, but it can just as well be the father, grandparent, or nanny, or any adult who is reliably available for comfort and protection. If safety was the child’s only goal, he’d stay “on base” for all of childhood. There’d be no need for a complicated regulatory system. But as soon as children can crawl, they want to crawl over to things they can touch, suck on, or otherwise explore. They need to spend a lot of time in discover mode, because that’s where the learning and neural fine-tuning take place. But inevitably, something goes wrong. The child falls and bangs his head; a cat hisses at him; a stranger approaches. At that point defend mode activates and the child scurries back to base or starts crying, which is the child’s way of calling for the base to come to him.

wrote to him to ask if he agrees that children are antifragile and need exposure to short-term stressors—such as being excluded from a playgroup on one day—in order to develop resilience and emotional strength. He agreed that children are antifragile, and he added two qualifications to his statement about stressful experiences.

marriage (to publicly declare a new social unit),

In many Indigenous North American societies, such as the Blackfoot in the Great Plains, the transition phase involved a vision quest in which the boy had to go out alone to a sacred site, chosen by the elders, where he fasted for four days while praying to the spirits for a vision or revelation of his purpose in life and the role he was to play in his community.[10]

Think of the initiation rites that young men develop for entry into a college fraternity, secret society, or street gang.[13] When boys and young men have the freedom to create their own rituals, it often looks as though at least one of them took that intro to anthropology class. They spontaneously create rituals of separation, transition, and incorporation (into peer groups) that we outsiders lump together as “hazing.”

even when teens are within a few feet of their friends, their phone-based childhoods damage the quality of their time together.

“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.

The clinical psychologist Lisa Damour says that regarding friendship for girls, “quality trumps quantity.” The happiest girls “aren’t the ones who have the most friendships but the ones who have strong, supportive friendships, even if that means having a single terrific friend.”[82]

Unlike online pornography, researchers have found that a number of benefits accrue to adolescents who play video games. Some research has demonstrated that video game use is associated with increased cognitive and intellectual functioning, such as improved working memory, response inhibition, and even school competence.[48]

The Hebrew word for holiness (kadosh) literally means “set apart,” or “separated.”

The Buddha followed the “eightfold noble path” to enlightenment. The eighth element, interacting with all the others, is samadhi, often translated as “meditative absorption.” Without training, the mind flits around like a jumping monkey. With our multiscreen, multitasking lives, the monkey jumps even more frantically,

The Buddha described samadhi as a state of “mental unity.” He said, “When you gain samadhi, the mind is not scattered, just as those who protect themselves from floods guard the levee.”[14]

Bedevilments arising in the mind are ideas of self and others, ideas of glory and ignominy, ideas of gain and loss, ideas of right and wrong, ideas of profit and honor, ideas of superiority. These are dust on the pedestal of the spirit, preventing freedom.

Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.[23]

The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart; If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.[25]

If they encounter something beautiful, such as sunlight reflected on water, or cherry blossoms wafting on gentle spring breezes, their first instinct is to take a photograph or video, perhaps to post somewhere. Few are open to losing themselves in the moment as Yi-Mei did.

Humanity went through a long period of what is known as multilevel selection in which groups competed with groups, while at the same time individuals competed with individuals within each group. The most cohesive groups won, and humans evolved—by both biological and cultural evolution—an adaptation that made their groups even more cohesive: religiosity (including both the fear and the love of gods).

And here is Marcus Aurelius: “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.”[38]

He said that he, Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin Systrom (cofounder of Instagram), and others “understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.” He also said, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

In an attention economy, there’s only so much attention and the advertising business model always wants more. So, it becomes a race to the bottom of the brainstem. . . . It starts small. First to get your attention, I add slot machine “pull to refresh” rewards which create little addictions. I remove stopping cues for “infinite scroll” so your mind forgets when to do something else. But then that’s not enough. As attention gets more competitive, we have to crawl deeper down the brainstem to your identity and get you addicted to getting attention from other people. By adding the number of followers and likes, technology hacks our social validation and now people are obsessed with the constant feedback they get from others. This helped fuel a mental health crisis for teenagers.[5]