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.

The costs of using social media, in particular, are high for adolescents, compared with adults, while the benefits are minimal.

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.

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.

Soon after teens got iPhones, they started getting more depressed. The heaviest users were also the most depressed, while those who spent more time in face-to-face activities, such as on sports teams and in religious communities, were the healthiest.

No smartphones before high school.

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.

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]

The diagnostic manual of psychiatry (DSM-5-TR) defines fear as “the emotional response to real or perceived imminent threat, whereas anxiety is anticipation of future threat.”

For many, anxiety is felt in the body as tension or tightness and as discomfort in the abdomen and chest cavity.

I’ll be paying close attention to friendship and social relationships in this book. We’ll see that a play-based childhood strengthens them, while a phone-based childhood weakens them.

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

But evolution didn’t just lengthen childhood to make learning possible. It also installed three strong motivations to do things that make learning easy and likely: motivations for free play, attunement, and social learning.

Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist at Boston College and a leading play researcher, says that “play requires suppression of the drive to dominate and enables the formation of long-lasting cooperative bonds.”

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

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.

Surveys show that unstructured time with friends plummeted in the exact years that adolescents moved from basic phones to smartphones—the early 2010s.

The European explorers of the 16th and 17th centuries found that on every continent, communities performed rituals in which everyone moved together to drumming, chanting, or beat-heavy music.

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.

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]

A team led by the psychologist Amy Orben analyzed two large British data sets and found that the negative correlation between social media use and satisfaction with life was larger for those in the 10–15 age group than for those in the 16–21 age group, or any other age bracket.[35]

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

we are overprotecting our children in the real world while underprotecting them online.

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.

As the Stoics and Buddhists taught long ago, 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.

Children are intrinsically antifragile, which is why overprotected children are more likely to become adolescents who are stuck in defend mode.

But the harms of eliminating all risky outdoor play are substantial.

Like young trees exposed to wind, children who are routinely exposed to small risks grow up to become adults who can handle much larger risks without panicking. Conversely, children who are raised in a protected greenhouse sometimes become incapacitated by anxiety before they reach maturity.

Furedi says that there is one factor above all others that created the conditions for the 1990s turn to paranoid parenting: “the breakdown of adult solidarity.”

Their tragic side effect, however, was a generalized sense that no adults could be trusted to be alone with children.

the term “stranger danger” first appeared in English-language books in the early 1980s; then its frequency leveled off until the mid-1990s, after which it rose rapidly.

There is also an important concept called psychological safety, which refers to the shared belief in a group that members won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up, so people are willing to take risks in sharing ideas and debating them.[50]

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.”

adolescence is not necessarily an especially stressful time. Rather, it is a time when the brain is more vulnerable to the effects of sustained stressors, which can tilt the adolescent into mental disorders

Safetyism is an experience blocker.

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.

Early puberty is a period of rapid brain rewiring, second only to the first few years of life.

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.”

By the early 2010s, social “networking” systems that had been structured (for the most part) to connect people turned into social media “platforms” redesigned (for the most part) in such a way that they encouraged one-to-many public performances in search of validation, not just from friends but from strangers.

Putting it all together, the Great Rewiring and the dawn of the phone-based childhood seem to have added two to three hours of additional screen-based activity, on average, to a child’s day, compared with life before the smartphone.

teens who spend more time using social media are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and other disorders, while teens who spend more time with groups of young people (such as playing team sports or participating in religious communities) have better mental health.

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; they are alternatives that consume so much time that they reduce the amount of time teens spend together.

In 1890, the great American psychologist William James described attention as “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. . . . It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” [43] Attention is a choice we make to stay on one task, one line of thinking, one mental road, even as attractive off-ramps beckon.

One of the main skills that adolescents are expected to develop as they advance through middle school and high school is “executive function,” which refers to the child’s growing ability to make plans and then do the things necessary to execute those plans.

When we gave children and adolescents smartphones in the early 2010s, we gave companies the ability to apply variable-ratio reinforcement schedules all day long, training them like rats during their most sensitive years of brain rewiring.

The advisory warned that social media poses “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”