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

by Jonathan Haidt

Many parents were relieved to find that a smartphone or tablet could keep a child happily engaged and quiet for hours. Was this safe? Nobody knew, but because everyone else was doing it, everyone just assumed that it must be okay.

social media companies, which inflicted their greatest damage on girls, and video game companies and pornography sites, which sank their hooks deepest into boys.[4]

social media use does not just correlate with mental illness; it causes it,

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.

Phone-free schools.

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

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

Collective anxiety can bind people together and motivate them to take action, and collective action is thrilling, especially when it is carried out in person.

“There is something about activism itself that is beneficial for well-being,” said Tim Kasser,

Yet more recent studies of young activists, including climate activists, find the opposite: Those who are politically active nowadays usually have worse mental health.[44]

Everything may seem broken, but that was just as true when I was growing up in the 1970s and when my parents were growing up in the 1930s. It is the story of humanity.

Human childhood extended to give children time to learn.

Play is the work of childhood,[5] and all young mammals have the same job: Wire up your brain by playing vigorously and often.

mammals want to play, need to play, and come out socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.[6]

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]

information doesn’t do much to shape a developing brain. Play does.

Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development.

“The child shall have full opportunity for play and recreation, which should be directed to the same purposes as education.”[11]

Even if the content on these sites could somehow be filtered effectively to remove obviously harmful material, the addictive design of these platforms reduces the time available for face-to-face play in the real world.

rituals were essential for fostering a sense of communion and belonging.

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,

happiness cannot be reached by eliminating all “triggers” from life; rather, happiness comes from learning to deprive external events of the power to trigger negative emotions in you.

Puberty is therefore a period when we should be particularly concerned about what our children are experiencing.

“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,

“Under chronic stress, it is much harder to adapt, recover, and get stronger from the challenge,”

The visually oriented platforms all used the business model developed by Facebook: Maximize time spent on the platform in order to maximize the extraction of data and the value of the user to advertisers.

Agency arises from striving to individuate and expand the self and involves qualities such as efficiency, competence, and assertiveness. Communion arises from striving to integrate the self in a larger social unit through caring for others and involves qualities such as benevolence, cooperativeness, and empathy.[29]

Part of defining the self comes from successfully integrating into groups; part of being attractive to groups is demonstrating one’s value as an individual with unique skills.[30]

When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%.

audience capture—a process in which people get trained by their audiences to become more extreme versions of whatever it is the audience wants to see.[59]

Sexual predation and rampant sexualization mean that girls and young women must be warier, online, than most boys and young men. They are forced to spend more of their virtual lives in defend mode, which may be part of the reason that their anxiety levels went up more sharply in the early 2010s.

Digital substitutions for real-world social engagement reduce the drive to be social but don’t satisfy emotional needs.

The happiest girls “aren’t the ones who have the most friendships but the ones who have strong, supportive friendships, even if that means having a single terrific friend.”[82] (She notes that this is true for boys as well.)

This is the great irony of social media: the more you immerse yourself in it, the more lonely and depressed you become.

“a world of floundering men is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women.”[11]

It is often said these days that “data is the new oil.” But so is attention.

several studies indicate that after watching porn, heterosexual men find real women less attractive, including their own partners.[39]

Porn separates the evolved lure (sexual pleasure) from its real-world reward (a sexual relationship),

I’m not saying that all pornography is harmful; I’m saying that immersing boys in an infinite playlist of hardcore porn videos during the sensitive period in which the sexual centers of their brains are being rewired is maybe not so good for their sexual and romantic development, or for their future partners.

after wading into one of the largest and most contentious areas of media research, I do not find clear evidence that would support a blanket warning to parents to keep their boys entirely away from video games.[46]

researchers have found that a number of benefits accrue to adolescents who play video games. Some research has demonstrated that video game use is associated with increased cognitive and intellectual functioning, such as improved working memory, response inhibition, and even school competence.[48]

video game use sometimes mitigated feelings of loneliness in the short run, but it put some users into a vicious cycle because they used gaming to distract themselves from feelings of loneliness. Over time they developed a reliance on the games instead of forming long-term friendships, and this resulted in long-term stress, anxiety, and depression symptoms.[52]

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.

Maybe it’s because it’s not healthy for any human being to have unfettered access to everything, everywhere, all the time, for free.

when we feel the social order weakening or dissolving, we don’t feel liberated; we feel lost and anxious:

Does the phone-based life generally pull us upward or downward

The strongest and most satisfying communities come into being when something lifts people out of the lower level so that they have powerful collective experiences. They all enter the realm of the sacred together, at the same time.

People who “break bread” together have a bond.[7] The simple act of eating together, especially from the same plate or serving dish, strengthens that bond and reduces the likelihood of conflict.

Research consistently shows that teens who play team sports are happier than those who don’t.[9]