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

by Jonathan Haidt

Parents discovered this truth early, as I did in 2008, when my two-year-old son mastered the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone.

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.

While the reward-seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, the frontal cortex—essential for self-control, delay of gratification, and resistance to temptation—is not up to full capacity until the mid-20s, and preteens are at a particularly vulnerable point in development.

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.

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.

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

While fear triggers the full response system at the moment of danger, anxiety triggers parts of the same system when a threat is merely perceived as possible. It is healthy to be anxious and on alert when one is in a situation where there really could be dangers lurking. But when our alarm bell is on a hair trigger so that it is frequently activated by ordinary events—including many that pose no real threat—it keeps us in a perpetual state of distress. This is when ordinary, healthy, temporary anxiety turns into an anxiety disorder.

The main psychiatric category here is called major depressive disorder (MDD). Its two key symptoms are depressed mood (feeling sad, empty, hopeless) and a loss of interest or pleasure in most or all activities.[17]

People experiencing a depressive disorder are likely to think about suicide because it feels like their current suffering will never end, and death is an end.

I know that adolescents with anxiety or depressive disorders can’t just “snap out of it” or decide to “toughen up.” These disorders are caused by a combination of genes (some people are more predisposed to them), thought patterns (which can be learned and unlearned), and social or environmental conditions.

According to a survey of U.S. parents conducted by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, by 2016, 79% of teens owned a smartphone, as did 28% of children between the ages of 8 and 12.[29]

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

the period from 2010 to 2015 as the Great Rewiring of Childhood.

People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.

Physical play, outdoors and with other children of mixed ages, is the healthiest, most natural, most beneficial sort of play.

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

A key feature of free play is that mistakes are generally not very costly. Everyone is clumsy at first, and everyone makes mistakes every day.

A play-based childhood is one in which kids spend the majority of their free time playing with friends in the real world as I defined it in the introduction: embodied, synchronous, one-to-one or one-to-several, and in groups or communities where there is some cost to join or leave so people invest in relationships.

These interactions generally have the contrasting features of the virtual world: disembodied, asynchronous, one-to-many, and done either alone or in virtual groups that are easy to join and easy to leave.

Even for kids who never post anything, spending time on social media sites can still be harmful because of the chronic social comparison, the unachievable beauty standards, and the enormous amount of time taken away from everything else in life.

As children get older, they go beyond turn taking to find joy in perfect synchrony, doing the same thing at the same time as their partner.

And the interactions are disembodied; they use almost no muscles, other than in the swiping and typing fingers. We are physical, embodied creatures who evolved to use our hands, facial expressions, and head movements as communication channels, responding in real time to the similar movements of our partners.

But on a social media platform, a child can scroll through a thousand data points in one hour (at three seconds per post), each one accompanied by numerical evidence (likes) and comments that show whether the post was a success or a failure.

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.

Taleb coined the word “antifragile” to describe things that actually need to get knocked over now and then in order to become strong.

Rather, antifragility is a common property of complex systems that were designed (by evolution, and sometimes by people) to function in a world that is unpredictable.[11]

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 childr...

The play researchers Brussoni, Sandseter and Kennair, and Peter Gray all help us see that antifragile children need play that involves some risk to develop competence and overcome their childhood anxieties.

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.

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.”)

Social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok don’t enforce their minimum age of 13.[18] Children are free to do as they please, and to play video games and exchange messages and photographs with unknown adults. 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.

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.”

But the explosion of smartphone-based apps such as Instagram in the exact years in which teens and preteens were moving from basic phones to smartphones marked a qualitative change in the nature of childhood.

By 2015, more than 70% of American teens carried a touch screen around with them,[6] and these screens became much better at holding their attention, even when they were with their friends. This is why I date the beginning of the phone-based childhood to the early 2010s.

Talking on FaceTime with close friends is good, like an old-fashioned phone call to which a visual channel has been added. In contrast, sitting alone in your bedroom consuming a bottomless feed of other people’s content, or playing endless hours of video games with a shifting cast of friends and strangers, or posting your own content and waiting for other kids (or strangers) to like or comment is so far from what children need that these activities should not be considered healthy new forms of adolescent interaction;

Smartphones grab our attention so powerfully that if they merely vibrate in our pockets for a tenth of a second, many of us will interrupt a face-to-face conversation, just in case the phone is bringing us an important update. We usually don’t tell the other person to stop talking; we just pull out our phone and spend some time pecking at it, leaving the other person to conclude, reasonably, that she is less important than the latest notification.

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.

For girls, there is a larger and more consistent relationship. The more time a girl spends on social media, the more likely she is to be depressed. 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.

Girls spend more time on social media platforms,[27] and the platforms they are on are the worst for mental health.

Girls are especially vulnerable to harm from constant social comparison because they suffer from higher rates of one kind of perfectionism: socially prescribed perfectionism, where a person feels that they must live up to very high expectations prescribed by others, or by society at large.[39]

“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. . . . This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” [44] The researchers also noted that “social comparison is worse” on Instagram than on rival apps. Snapchat’s filters “keep the focus on the face,” whereas Instagram “focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle.”

A girl who feels her value sinking is a girl experiencing rising anxiety. If her sociometer drop is sharp enough, she may become depressed and consider suicide. For depressed or ostracized teens, physical death offers the end of pain, whereas social death is a living hell.

According to one major U.S. survey, these high rates of cyberbullying have persisted (though have not increased) between 2011 and 2019. Throughout the period, approximately one in 10 high school boys and one in five high school girls experienced cyberbullying each year.[49] In other words, the move online made bullying and harassment a larger part of daily life for girls.

Girls on social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat are exposed to the direct messages of adult men who seek them out, and also to school cultures in which photos of their naked bodies become a currency for social prestige among boys, a currency that girls pay for with shame.

This is the great irony of social media: the more you immerse yourself in it, the more lonely and depressed you become. This is true both at the individual level and at the collective level. When teens as a whole cut back on hanging out and doing things together in the real world, their culture changed.

boys taking up online multiplayer video games in the late 2000s and smartphones in the early 2010s, both of which pulled boys decisively away from face-to-face or shoulder-to-shoulder interaction. At that point, I think we do see signs of a “mass psychological breakdown.” Or, at least, a mass psychological change.

Mirroring the trend seen among adolescent girls, boys’ status negotiations, as well as their social and entertainment lives, increasingly moved online. Boys wandered through a bazaar of different apps, including social media, online communities, streaming platforms, gaming, pornography, and, when they got a little older, gambling and dating apps.

The problem is not just that modern pornography amplifies the risk for porn addiction, but that heavy porn use can lead boys to choose the easy option for sexual satisfaction (by watching porn) rather than trying to engage in the more uncertain and risky dating world. Additionally, there is evidence that heavy use can disrupt boys’ and young men’s romantic and sexual relationships.

As generative AI personalities improve, and as they are implanted into ever-more-lifelike sex dolls and sex robots,[44] an increasing number of heterosexual men may find that a hikikomori lifestyle with a programmable mechanical girlfriend is preferable to the thousands of left swipes they get on dating apps, to say nothing of the social risk of approaching a girl or woman in real life and asking her out on a date.