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

by Jonathan Haidt

In Sum Governments at all levels need to change policies that are harming adolescent mental health and support policies that would improve it. In the United States, governments at the state and local level are partly responsible for the overprotection of children in the real world (via vast overreach of vague neglect laws), and the federal government is partly responsible for the underprotection of children in the virtual world (by passing an ineffective law in 1998 and failing to update it as the dangers of life online became more apparent). To correct underprotection online, national and federal governments should enact laws of the sort first passed in the U.K., which require companies to treat minors differently than adults, with an extra duty of care. National governments should also raise the age of internet adulthood to 16. Tech companies can be a major part of the solution by developing better age verification features, and by adding features that allow parents to designate their children’s phones and computers as ones that should not be served by sites with minimum ages until they are old enough. Such a feature would help to dissolve multiple collective action problems for parents, kids, and platforms. To correct overprotection in the real world, state and local governments should narrow neglect laws and give parents confidence that they can give their children some unsupervised time without risking arrest or state intervention in their family life. State and local...