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

by Jonathan Haidt

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.

In contrast, when I talk about the “virtual world,” I am referring to relationships and interactions characterized by four features that have been typical for just a few decades: They are disembodied, meaning that no body is needed, just language. Partners could be (and already are) artificial intelligences (AIs). They are heavily asynchronous, happening via text-based posts and comments. (A video call is different; it is synchronous.) They involve a substantial number of one-to-many communications, broadcasting to a potentially vast audience. Multiple interactions can be happening in parallel. 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.

No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children’s entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (roughly age 14). No social media before 16. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers. Phone-free schools. In all schools from elementary through high school, students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked pouches during the school day. That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

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.

The first clue is that 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.

People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless. As I’ll show in later chapters, this is what the Great Rewiring did to Gen Z.

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.

Children can only learn how to not get hurt in situations where it is possible to get hurt, such as wrestling with a friend, having a pretend sword fight, or negotiating with another child to enjoy a seesaw when a failed negotiation can lead to pain in one’s posterior, as well as embarrassment. When parents, teachers, and coaches get involved, it becomes less free, less playful, and less beneficial. Adults usually can’t stop themselves from directing and protecting.

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]

On social media platforms, the ancient link between excellence and prestige can be severed more easily than ever, so in following influencers who became famous for what they do in the virtual world, young people are often learning ways of talking, behaving, and emoting that may backfire in an office, family, or other real-world setting.

Putting this all together, we can now understand those sharp “elbows” in so many of the graphs in the previous chapter. Gen Z is the first generation to have gone through puberty hunched over smartphones and tablets, having fewer face-to-face conversations and shoulder-to-shoulder adventures with their friends. As childhood was rewired—especially between 2010 and 2015—adolescents became more anxious, depressed, and fragile. In this new phone-based childhood, free play, attunement, and local models for social learning are replaced by screen time, asynchronous interaction, and influencers chosen by algorithms. Children are, in a sense, deprived of childhood.

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. Stress wood is a perfect metaphor for children, who also need to experience frequent stressors in order to become strong adults.

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.

Well-intentioned parents who try to raise their children in a bubble of satisfaction, protected from frustration, consequences, and negative emotions, may be harming their children. They may be blocking the development of competence, self-control, frustration tolerance, and emotional self-management.

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

For most of the 20th century, the word “safety” referred almost exclusively to physical safety. It was only in the late 1980s that the term “emotional safety” began to show up at more than trace levels in Google’s Ngram viewer. From 1985 to 2010, at the start of the Great Rewiring, the term’s frequency rose rapidly and steadily, a 600% increase.[49]

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.

Puberty is therefore a period when we should be particularly concerned about what our children are experiencing. Physical conditions, including nutrition, sleep, and exercise, matter throughout all of childhood and adolescence. But because there is a sensitive period for cultural learning, and because it coincides with the accelerated rewiring of the brain that begins at the start of puberty, those first few years of puberty deserve special attention.

First, he noted that “chronic stress,” meaning stress that lasts for days, weeks, or even years, is much worse than “acute stress,” which refers to stress that comes on quickly but does not last long, such as an ordinary playground conflict. “Under chronic stress, it is much harder to adapt, recover, and get stronger from the challenge,” he wrote. His second qualification was that “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.”

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.

Smartphones are like the cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in other birds’ nests. The cuckoo egg hatches before the others, and the cuckoo hatchling promptly pushes the other eggs out of the nest in order to commandeer all of the food brought by the unsuspecting mother. Similarly, when a smartphone, tablet, or video game console lands in a child’s life, it will push out most other activities, at least partially. The child will spend many hours each day sitting enthralled and motionless (except for one finger) while ignoring everything beyond the screen. (Of course, the same might be true of the parents as well, as the family sits “alone together.”)

Evidence for the idea that children need rites of passage comes from the many cases where adolescents spontaneously construct initiation rites that are not supported by adults in the broader culture. In fact, anthropologists say that such rites come about precisely because of a society’s “failure to provide meaningful adolescent rites of passage ceremonies.”

Once a child gets online, there is never a threshold age at which she is granted more autonomy or more rights. On the internet, everyone is the same age, which is no particular age. This is a major reason why a phone-based adolescence is badly mismatched with the needs of adolescents.

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.”

So, when that salesman tells you that the product is free, you ask about the opportunity cost. How much time does the average child spend using the product? Around 40 hours a week for preteens like your daughter, he says. For teens aged 13 to 18, it’s closer to 50 hours per week. At that point, wouldn’t you walk out of the store?

That means around 16 hours per day—112 hours per week—in which they are not fully present in whatever is going on around them. This kind of continuous use, often involving two or three screens at the same time, was simply not possible before kids carried touch screens in their pockets. It has enormous implications for cognition, addiction, and the wearing smooth of paths in the brain, especially during the sensitive period of puberty.

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.

It’s painful to be ignored, at any age. Just imagine being a teen trying to develop a sense of who you are and where you fit, while everyone you meet tells you, indirectly: You’re not as important as the people on my phone. And now imagine being a young child. 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. Parents know that they are shortchanging their own children. A 2020 Pew survey found that 68% of parents said that they sometimes or often feel distracted by their phones when they are spending time with their children. Those numbers were higher for parents who were younger and who were college educated.[24]

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,

And no matter how hard it is for an adult to stay committed to one mental road, it is far harder for an adolescent, who has an immature frontal cortex and therefore limited ability to say no to off-ramps. James described children like this: “Sensitiveness to immediately exciting sensorial stimuli characterizes the attention of childhood and youth. . . . the child seem[s] to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice.” Overcoming this tendency to flit around is “the first thing which the teacher must overcome.” This is why it is so important that schools go phone-free for the entire school day by using phone lockers or lockable pouches.[45] Capturing the child’s attention with “immediately exciting

Many studies find that students with access to their phones use them in class and pay far less attention to their teachers.

appears so.[49] A Dutch longitudinal study found that young people who engaged in more problematic (addictive) social media use at one measurement time had stronger ADHD symptoms at the next measurement time.[50] Another study by a different group of Dutch researchers used a similar design and also found evidence suggesting that heavy media multitasking caused later attention problems, but they found this causal effect only among younger adolescents (ages 11–13), and it was especially strong for girls.[51]

At this point, after investment, the trigger for the next round of behavior may become internal. The girl no longer needs a push notification to call her over to Instagram. As she is rereading a difficult passage in her textbook, the thought pops up in her mind: “I wonder if anyone has liked the photo I posted 20 minutes ago?” An attractive off-ramp appears in consciousness (step 1). She tries to resist temptation and stick with her homework, but the mere thought of a possible reward triggers the release of a bit of dopamine, which makes her want to go to Instagram immediately. She feels a craving. She goes (step 2) and finds that nobody liked or commented on her post. She feels disappointment, but her dopamine-primed brain still craves a reward, so she starts looking through her other posts, or her direct messages, or anything that shows that she matters to someone else, or anything that provides easy entertainment, which she finds (step 3). She wanders down her feed, leaving comments for her friends along the way. Sure enough, a friend reciprocates by liking her last post. An hour later, she returns to her study of photosynthesis, depleted and less able to focus.