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.

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.

Let children grow up on Earth first, before sending them to Mars.

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.

The small-scale challenges and setbacks that happen during play are like an inoculation that prepares children to face much larger challenges later.

As the transition from play-based to phone-based childhood proceeded, many children and adolescents were perfectly happy to stay indoors and play online, but in the process they lost exposure to the kinds of challenging physical and social experiences that all young mammals need to develop basic competencies, overcome innate childhood fears, and prepare to rely less on their parents. Virtual interactions with peers do not fully compensate for these experiential losses.

parents worked to eliminate risk and freedom in the real world, they generally, and often unknowingly, granted full independence in the virtual world,

My central claim in this book is that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.

relationships and social interactions characterized by four features that have been typical for millions of years: They are embodied, meaning that we use our bodies to communicate, we are conscious of the bodies of others, and we respond to the bodies of others both consciously and unconsciously. They are synchronous, which means they are happening at the same time, with subtle cues about timing and turn taking. They involve primarily one-to-one or one-to-several communication, with only one interaction happening at a given moment. They take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen.

“virtual world,” I am referring to relationships and interactions characterized by four features that have been typical for just a few decades: They are disembodied, meaning that no body is needed, just language. Partners could be (and already are) artificial intelligences (AIs). They are heavily asynchronous, happening via text-based posts and comments. (A video call is different; it is synchronous.) They involve a substantial number of one-to-many communications, broadcasting to a potentially vast audience. Multiple interactions can be happening in parallel. They take place within communities that have a low bar for entry and exit, so people can block others or just quit when they are not pleased. Communities tend to be short-lived, and relationships are often disposable.

The key factor is the commitment required to make relationships work. When people are raised in a community that they cannot easily escape, they do what our ancestors have done for millions of years: They learn how to manage relationships, and how to manage themselves and their emotions in order to keep those precious relationships going.

reverse the two big mistakes we’ve made: overprotecting children in the real world (where they need to learn from vast amounts of direct experience) and underprotecting them online (where they are particularly vulnerable during puberty).

foundation for healthier childhood in the digital age. They are: 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. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers. Phone-free schools. In all schools from elementary through high school, students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked pouches during the school day. That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.[20]

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.

People are more likely to become depressed when they become (or feel) more socially disconnected, and depression then makes people less interested and able to seek out social connection.

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.

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

Every generation grows up during a disaster or under the threat of an impending disaster, from the Great Depression and World War II through threats of nuclear annihilation, environmental degradation, overpopulation, and ruinous national debt.

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

Across the Western world, it seems that as soon as teens began carrying smartphones to school and using social media regularly, including during breaks between classes, they found it harder to connect with their fellow students. They were “forever elsewhere.”

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

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

Synchronous, face-to-face, physical interactions and rituals are a deep, ancient, and underappreciated part of human evolution.

According to Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson, two of the leading scholars of gene-culture coevolution,[23] there are several “strategies” that won out over thousands of generations and became part of our evolved propensity for culture. The two that are most relevant for our discussion of social media are conformist bias and prestige bias.

Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conformity engines ever invented.

Henrich argues that the reason people become so deferential (starstruck) toward prestigious people is that they are motivated to get close to prestigious people in order to maximize their own learning and raise their own prestige by association. Prestigious people, in turn, will allow some supplicants to get close to them because having a retinue (a group of devoted attendants and followers) is a reliable signal to the community of their high standing in the prestige rankings.

Prestige-based social media platforms have hacked one of the most important learning mechanisms for adolescents, diverting their time, attention, and copying behavior away from a variety of role models with whom they could develop a mentoring relationship that would help them succeed in their real-world communities.

Healthy brain development depends on getting the right experiences at the right age and in the right order.

The clearest example is the existence of “critical periods,” which are windows of time in which a young animal must learn something, or it will be hard if not impossible to learn later.

Humans have few true “critical periods” with hard time limits, but we do seem to have several “sensitive periods,” which are defined as periods in which it is very easy to learn something or acquire a skill, and outside of which it is more difficult.[31] Language learning is the clearest case.

For girls, the worst years for using social media were 11 to 13; for boys, it was 14 to 15.[36]

In this new phone-based childhood, free play, attunement, and local models for social learning are replaced by screen time, asynchronous interaction, and influencers chosen by algorithms.

Children are, in a sense, deprived of childhood.

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.

Unsupervised outdoor play teaches children how to handle risks and cha...

By building physical, psychological, and social competence, it gives kids confidence that they can face new situations, which...

a healthy human childhood with a lot of autonomy and unsupervised play in the real world sets children’s brains to operate mostly in “discover mode,” with a well-developed attachment syste...

modern overprotective parenting, it sets children’s brains to operate mostly in “defend mode,” with less secure attachment and reduce...

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

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.

It’s the same dynamic for what has been called 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. There is no way to live with other humans without conflicts and deprivations.

Sandseter and Kennair define risky play as “thrilling and exciting forms of play that involve a risk of physical injury.” (In a 2023 paper, expanding on their original work, they add that risky play also requires elements of uncertainty.[17]

Sandseter and Kennair analyzed the kinds of risks that children seek out when adults give them some freedom, and they found six: heights (such as climbing trees or playground structures), high speed (such as swinging, or going down fast slides), dangerous tools (such as hammers and drills), dangerous elements (such as experimenting with fire), rough-and-tumble play (such as wrestling), and disappearing (hiding, wandering away, potentially getting lost or separated).

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.

antifragile children need play that involves some risk to develop competence and overcome their childhood anxieties.

“concept creep,” [48] which refers to the expansion of psychological concepts in recent decades in two directions: downward (to apply to smaller or more trivial cases) and outward (to encompass new and conceptually unrelated phenomena).

in a psychologically safe group, members can disagree with each other and criticize each other’s ideas respectfully. That’s how ideas get vetted.