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

by Jonathan Haidt

What emerged on campus as emotional safety, in contrast, was a much broader concept that came to mean this: I should not have to experience negative emotions because of what someone else said or did. I have a right not to be “triggered.”

“We’ve created a safe, nonjudgmental environment that will leave your child ill-prepared for real ...

We used the term “safetyism” to refer to “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.

‘Safety’ trumps everything else, no matter how unlikely or trivial the potential danger.”[52]

seem to be committed to preventing the sorts of conflicts that are inherent in human interaction, and that would teach children how to manage their own affairs, resolve differences, and prepare for life in a democratic society.

Every child needs at least one adult who serves as a “secure base.” Usually it is the mother, but it can just as well be the father, grandparent, or nanny, or any adult who is reliably available for comfort and protection.

They need to spend a lot of time in discover mode, because that’s where the learning and neural fine-tuning take place.

As the child develops she is able to internalize the secure base. She doesn’t need the parent’s physical presence to feel that she has support, so she learns to face adversity by herself.

children who are kept on home base, prevented from making those off-base excursions that are so helpful for developing their antifragile nature, don’t get to spend as much time in the growth zone. They may therefore spend more of their lives in defend mode, remaining more dependent on a parent’s physical presence, which reinforces parental overprotection in a vicious cycle.

I have sketched out how things work in theory. In practice, everything about raising children is messy, hard to control, and harder to predict. Children raised in loving homes that support autonomy, play, and growth may still develop anxiety disorders; children raised in overprotective homes usually turn out fine. There is no one right way to be a parent; there is no blueprint for building a perfect child.

bear in mind some general features of human childhood: Kids are antifragile and therefore they benefit from risky play, along with a secure base, which helps to shift them over toward discover mode. A play-based childh...

The worship of “safety” above all else is called safetyism. It is dangerous because it makes it harder for children to learn to care for themselves and to deal with risk, conflict, and frustration.

Children are most likely to thrive when they have a play-based childhood in the real world. They are less likely to thrive when fearful parenting and a phone-based childhood deprive them of opportunities for growth.

the human brain reaches 90% of its adult size by age 5, and it has far more neurons and synapses at that moment than it will have in its adult form. Subsequent brain development, therefore, is not about overall growth but about the selective pruning of neurons and synapses, leaving only the ones that have been frequently used.

Brain researchers say, “Neurons that fire together, wire together,”[1] meaning that activities that repeatedly activate a constellation of neurons cause those neurons to connect more closely.

If a child goes through puberty doing a lot of archery, or painting, or video games, or social media, those activities will cause lasting structural changes in the brain, especially if they are rewarding. This is how cultural experience changes the brain, producing a young adult who feels American inste...

These slow processes of pruning and myelination are related to the great trade-off of human brain development: The young child’s brain has enormous potential (it can develop in many ways) but lower ability (it doesn’t do most things as well as an adult brain). However, as pruning and myelination proceed, the child’s brain becomes more efficient as it locks down into its adult configuration.

This makes adolescence both a time of risk (because the brain’s plasticity increases the chances that exposure to a stressful experience will cause harm) but also a window of opportunity for advancing adolescents’ health and well-being (because the same brain plasticity makes adolescence a time when interventions to improve mental health may be more effective).[4]

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

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.

Safetyism is an experience blocker. It prevents children from getting the quantity and variety of real-world experiences and challenges that they need.

In fact, smartphones and other digital devices bring so many interesting experiences to children and adolescents that they cause a serious problem: They reduce interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience.

Are screen-based experiences less valuable than real-life flesh-and-blood experiences? When we’re talking about children whose brains evolved to expect certain kinds of experiences at certain ages, yes. A resounding yes.

Communicating by text supplemented by emojis is not going to develop the parts of the brain that are “expecting” to get tuned up during conversations supplemented by facial expressions, changing vocal tones, direct eye contact, and body language.

four foundational harms of the new phone-based childhood that damage boys and girls of all ages: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.

For depressed or ostracized teens, physical death offers the end of pain, whereas social death is a living hell.

When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%. When a man became depressed, it had no measurable effect on his friends.

Unlike free play in the real world, most video games give no practice in the skills of self-governance.

The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.[25]

the “eight wonders of life.” They are moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spiritual and religious awe, life and death, and epiphanies

The great evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson said that humans are “biophilic,” by which he meant that humans have “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.”[33]

As for our children, if we want awe and natural beauty to play a larger role in their lives, we need to make deliberate efforts to bring them or send them to beautiful natural areas.

human beings move up and down between two levels: the profane and the sacred. The profane is our ordinary self-focused consciousness. The sacred is the realm of the collective. Groups of individuals become a cohesive community when they engage in rituals that move them in and out of the realm of the sacred together. The virtual world, in contrast, gives no structure to time or space and is entirely profane. This is one reason why virtual communities are not usually as satisfying or meaning-giving as real-world communities.

I’ll make the case that all schools, from elementary through high school, should go phone-free to improve not only mental health but academic outcomes as well.

schools in the United States are starving children of playtime in order to make ever more room for academic training and test preparation, which backfires because play-deprived kids become anxious and unfocused. Ultimately, they learn less.

(Some parents object that they need to be able to reach their children immediately in case of an emergency, such as a school shooting. As a parent I understand this desire. But a school in which most students are calling or texting their parents during an emergency is likely to be less safe than a school in which only the adults have phones and the students are listening to the adults and paying attention to their surroundings.[6]

going phone-free and giving a lot more unstructured free play.

We shouldn’t blame parents for “helicoptering.” We should blame—and change—a culture that tells parents that they must helicopter. Some schools won’t let kids get off the school bus unless there’s an adult waiting

Could elementary schools in the United States follow Swanson’s example? Right now, few could. At many schools, the threats of lawsuits and parental protests are too great. The fear that this will take away from test prep is too high. That’s why this is a collective action problem: Students would be healthier, happier, and smarter overall, with lower rates of injury and anxiety, if schools could loosen the reins and let children play in a more natural way. But we can’t get there unless schools, parents, and governments can find a way to work together.

There is a Polynesian expression: “Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.” Sometimes what you are looking for is right there, underfoot, and it is better than anything you could find by looking farther away. I suggested two potential whales that schools can implement right away, with little or no additional money: going phone-free, and becoming more play-full.

The simple addition of a Let Grow Play Club—an afternoon option in K–8 schools of playing on the school playground, with no phones, plenty of loose parts, and minimal adult supervision—may teach social skills and reduce anxiety better than any educational program, because free play is nature’s way of accomplishing these goals.

A key insight gained from research on screens and young children is that active, synchronous virtual interactions with other humans—what most of us call a video chat—can foster language learning and bonding, while passive, asynchronous viewing of a prerecorded video yields minimal benefits and in some cases even backfires and disrupts language learning, particularly for those under 2 years old.[6]