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

by Jonathan Haidt

In Sum Social media harms girls more than boys. Correlational studies show that heavy users of social media have higher rates of depression and other disorders than light users or nonusers. The correlation is larger and clearer for girls: Heavy users are three times as likely to be depressed as nonusers. Experimental studies show that social media use is a cause, not just a correlate, of anxiety and depression. When people are assigned to reduce or eliminate social media for three weeks or more, their mental health usually improves. Several “quasi-experiments” show that when Facebook came to campuses, or when high-speed internet came to regions and provinces, mental health declined, especially for girls and young women. Girls use social media a lot more than boys, and they prefer visually oriented platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, which are worse for social comparison than primarily text-based platforms such as Reddit. Two major categories of motivations are agency (the desire to stand out and have an effect on the world) and communion (the desire to connect and develop a sense of belonging). Boys and girls both want each of these, but there is a gender difference that emerges early in children’s play: Boys choose more agency activities; girls choose more communion activities. Social media appeals to the desire for communion, but it often ends up frustrating it. There are at least four reasons why social media harms girls more than boys. The first is that girls are m...