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.

We can also compare them to the oil companies that fought against the banning of leaded gasoline. In the mid-20th century, evidence began to mount that the hundreds of thousands of tons of lead put into the atmosphere each year, just by drivers in the United States, were interfering with the brain development of tens of millions of children, impairing their cognitive development and increasing rates of antisocial behavior. Even still, the oil companies continued to produce, market, and sell it.[8]

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.

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.

by 2017 it had become clear that the rise of depression and anxiety was happening in many countries, to adolescents of all educational levels, social classes, and races. On average, people born in and after 1996 were different, psychologically, from those who had been born just a few years earlier.

As evidence mounts that phone-based childhood is making our children mentally unhealthy, socially isolated, and deeply unhappy, are we okay with that trade-off? Or will we eventually realize, as we did in the 20th century, that we sometimes need to protect children from harm even when it inconveniences adults?

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

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]

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]

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.

Over the next 10 years, there was no decline in teen mental health.[26] Millennial teens, who grew up playing in that first wave, were slightly happier, on average, than Gen X had been when they were teens.

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

“There is something about activism itself that is beneficial for well-being,” said Tim Kasser, coauthor of a 2009 study on college students, activism, and flourishing.[43] Yet more recent studies of young activists, including climate activists, find the opposite: Those who are politically active nowadays usually have worse mental health.[44] Threats and risks have always haunted the future, but the ways that young people are responding, with activism carried out mostly in the virtual world, seem to be affecting them very differently compared to previous generations, whose activism was carried out mostly in the real world.

Even if the content on these sites could somehow be filtered effectively to remove obviously harmful material, the addictive design of these platforms reduces the time available for face-to-face play in the real world. The reduction is so severe that we might refer to smartphones and tablets in the hands of children as experience blockers.

Although new technologies have long distracted parents from their children, smartphones are uniquely effective at interfering with the bond between parent and child.

So when a child starts at a new school, she is particularly likely to do whatever it is that most children seem to be doing. 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.

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. Parents don’t get to use the power of conformity bias, so they are often no match for the socializing power of social media.[24]

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 with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”[26]

Minoura noted that “during the sensitive period, a cultural meaning system for interpersonal relationships appears to become a salient part of self-identity to which they are emotionally attached.”[34]

They also examined a large longitudinal study to see if British teens who increased their social media use in one year would report worse mental health in the following year’s survey. For those in the peak years of puberty, which comes a bit earlier for girls, the answer was yes. For girls, the worst years for using social media were 11 to 13; for boys, it was 14 to 15.[36]

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. Such chronic wariness was adaptive in some ancient environments, and may still be today for children raised in unstable and violent settings. But being stuck in defend mode is an obstacle to learning and growth in the physically safe environments that surround most children in developed nations today.

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.

Kids and puppies are thrill seekers. They are hungry for thrills, and they must get them if they are to overcome their childhood fears and wire up their brains so that discover mode becomes the default.

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]

Psychological safety is among the best indicators of a healthy workplace culture. But in a psychologically safe group, members can disagree with each other and criticize each other’s ideas respectfully. That’s how ideas get vetted. What emerged on campus as emotional safety, in contrast, was a much broader concept that came to mean this: I should not have to experience negative emotions because of what someone else said or did. I have a right not to be “triggered.”

We used the term “safetyism” to refer to “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. ‘Safety’ trumps everything else, no matter how unlikely or trivial the potential danger.”[52]

The worship of “safety” above all else is called safetyism. It is dangerous because it makes it harder for children to learn to care for themselves and to deal with risk, conflict, and frustration.

adolescence is not necessarily an especially stressful time. Rather, it is a time when the brain is more vulnerable to the effects of sustained stressors, which can tilt the adolescent into mental disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse.

In fact, smartphones and other digital devices bring so many interesting experiences to children and adolescents that they cause a serious problem: They reduce interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience.

Pornography sites also welcome children, as long as they click a box to say that they are 18 or older. Porn sites will show them how to have anal sex long before they’ve had their first kiss.

A society that is large, diverse, and secular (such as the United States or the U.K.) might still agree to a set of milestones that mark stepwise increases in freedoms and responsibilities.

He said that animal learning is “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness.”[1] Keep that phrase in mind whenever you see anyone (including yourself) making repetitive motions on a touch screen, as if in a trance: “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain.”

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]

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. In 2020, we began telling everyone to avoid proximity to any person outside their “bubble,” but members of Gen Z began socially distancing themselves as soon as they got their first smartphones.

When a conversation partner pulls out a phone,[21] or when a phone is merely visible[22] (not even your own phone), the quality and intimacy of a social interaction is reduced.

Attention is a choice we make to stay on one task, one line of thinking, one mental road, even as attractive off-ramps beckon. When we fail to make that choice and allow ourselves to be frequently sidetracked, we end up in “the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state” that James said is the opposite of attention.

Nicholas Carr, in his aptly titled 2010 book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, lamented his lost ability to stay on one path. Life on the internet changed how his brain sought out information, even when he was off-line trying to read a book. It reduced his ability to focus and reflect because he now craved a constant stream of stimulation: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” [44]

People can’t really multitask; all we can do is shift attention back and forth between tasks while wasting a lot of it on each shift.[47]

The article was titled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.”

We know that Facebook intentionally hooked teens using behaviorist techniques thanks to the Facebook Files—the trove of internal documents and screenshots of presentations brought out by the whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021.

Increasingly in the 2010s, she began to treat teenagers who had digital addictions. Like people with heroin and cocaine addictions, those addicted to digital activities found that “nothing feels good anymore” when they were not doing their preferred activity.

I’m not saying that 11-year-olds should be kept off the internet. I’m saying that the Great Rewiring of Childhood, in which the phone-based childhood replaced the play-based childhood, is the major cause of the international epidemic of adolescent mental illness. We need to be careful about which kids have access to which products, at which ages, and on which devices. Unfettered access to everything, everywhere, at any age has been a disaster, even if there are a few benefits.

The sheer amount of time that adolescents spend with their phones is staggering, even compared with the high levels of screen time they had before the invention of the iPhone. Studies of time use routinely find that the average teen reports spending more than seven hours a day on screen-based leisure activities (not including school and homework).

When we put these four foundational harms together, they explain why mental health got so much worse so suddenly as soon as childhood became phone-based.

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.

Girls spend more time on social media platforms,[27] and the platforms they are on are the worst for mental health. So even if girls and boys were identical psychologically, we would expect to find larger increases in anxiety and depression among girls.

They found that happiness tends to occur in clusters. This was not just because happy people seek each other out. Rather, when one person became happier, it increased the odds that their existing friends would become happier too. Amazingly, it also had an influence on their friends’ friends, and sometimes even on their friends’ friends’ friends. Happiness is contagious; it spreads through social networks.

Depression was significantly more contagious than happiness or good mental health. The second twist was that depression spread only from women. 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.

Experimental studies show that social media use is a cause, not just a correlate, of anxiety and depression.

Is this a victory for girls and women? Only if you see life as a zero-sum battle between the sexes. In contrast, as Reeves puts it, “a world of floundering men is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women.”[11] And the data shows that we now live in a world of floundering young men.[12]