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.

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.

Children need a great deal of free play to thrive. It’s an imperative that’s evident across all mammal species. The small-scale challenges and setbacks that happen during play are like an inoculation that prepares children to face much larger challenges later.

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.[6]

Play with some degree of physical risk is essential because it teaches children how to look after themselves and each other.[9]

Social learning occurs throughout childhood, but there may be a sensitive period for cultural learning that spans roughly ages 9 to 15. Lessons learned and identities formed in these years are likely to imprint, or stick, more than at other ages.

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 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.

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.

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.

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]

We should be giving children more of the practice they need in the real world and delaying their entry into the online world, where the benefits are fewer and the guardrails nearly nonexistent.

American parents have lost so much trust in their fellow citizens and their own children that many now endorse the near-total elimination of freedom from childhood.

Every child needs at least one adult who serves as a “secure base.”

But while caterpillars will turn into butterflies with little input from the outside world, the human transition from child to adult depends in part on getting the right kinds of experiences at the right time to guide the rapid rewiring of the adolescent brain.

Heightened susceptibility to stress in adolescence is a specific example of the fact that puberty makes the brain more malleable, or “plastic.” This makes adolescence both a time of risk (because the brain’s plasticity increases the chances that exposure to a stressful experience will cause harm) but also a window of opportunity for advancing adolescents’ health and well-being (because the same brain plasticity makes adolescence a time when interventions to improve mental health may be more effective).[4]

Children benefit from role models (for cultural learning), challenges (to stimulate antifragility), public recognition of each new status (to change their social identity), and mentors who are not their parents as they mature into competent, flourishing adults.

Despite the pain and humiliation required for entry, many young people are willing to participate in these rites for the opportunity to join a binding social group and to transition away from childhood’s parental dependency and into peer-oriented young adulthood.

Once we had a new generation hooked on smartphones (and other screens) before the start of puberty, there was little space left in the stream of information entering their eyes and ears for guidance from mentors in their real-world communities during puberty.

We need to be careful about which kids have access to which products, at which ages, and on which devices.

Girls who say that they spend five or more hours each weekday on social media are three times as likely to be depressed as those who report no social media time.

As traditionally “manly” skills and attributes became less valued, economically and culturally, and as the culture of safetyism grew, the virtual world stepped in to fulfill these needs directly, though not in a way that promoted skills needed for the transition to adulthood.

Boys thrive when they have a stable group of reliable friends, and they create their strongest and most durable friendships from being on the same team or in a stable pack, facing risks or rival teams. Virtual packs create weaker bonds, although today’s increasingly lonely boys cling to them and value them because that’s all they have.

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]

Students would be healthier, happier, and smarter overall, with lower rates of injury and anxiety, if schools could loosen the reins and let children play in a more natural way.

Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it’s to give them the toys. . . . We can’t make children learn, but we can let them learn.