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

by Jonathan Haidt

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]

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. When parents, teachers, and coaches get involved, it becomes less free, less playful, and less beneficial. Adults usually can’t stop themselves from directing and protecting.

Smartphones can disrupt this essential face-to-face interaction. Pew Research has found that 17% of American parents report they are often distracted by their phone when spending time with their child, with another 52% saying they are sometimes distracted.[16] Although new technologies have long distracted parents from their children, smartphones are uniquely effective at interfering with the bond between parent and child. With notifications constantly pinging and interrupting, some parents attend to their smartphones more than to their children, even when they are playing together.

The work is often joyless, yet many feel compelled to do it, lest they “miss out” on something or be excluded.[22]

Eventually, for many, it becomes a mindless habit, something they turn to dozens of times each day. Such social labor creates shallow connections because it is asynchronous and public, unlike a face-to-face conversation, or a private phone call or video call. 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. Gen Z is learning to pick emojis instead.

Attention is a choice we make to stay on one task, one line of thinking, one mental road, even as attractive off-ramps beckon. When we fail to make that choice and allow ourselves to be frequently sidetracked, we end up in “the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state” that James said is the opposite of attention.

It was bad enough when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, when girls were exposed to airbrushed and later photoshopped models. But those were adult strangers; they were not a girl’s competition. So what happened when most girls in a school got Instagram and Snapchat accounts and started posting carefully edited highlight reels of their lives and using filters and editing apps to improve their virtual beauty and online brand? Many girls’ sociometers plunged, because most were now below what appeared to them to be the average. All around the developed world, an anxiety alarm went off in girls’ minds, at approximately the same time.

For example, in 1972, women earned only 42% of bachelor’s degrees. By 1982, women were just as likely as men to graduate from college. But for the next 20 years, women’s enrollment rose rapidly while men’s did not, so that by 2019 the gap had reversed: Women earned 59% of bachelor’s degrees, while men earned just 41%.[9] It’s not just college completion. Reeves shows that at every level of education, from kindergarten through PhD, girls are leaving boys in the dust. Boys get lower grades, they have higher rates of ADHD, they are more likely to be unable to read, and they are less likely to graduate from high school, in part because they are three times as likely as girls to be expelled or suspended along the way.[10] The gender disparities are often small at the upper end, among the wealthiest families, but they grow much larger as we move down the socioeconomic ladder. Is this a victory for girls and women? Only if you see life as a zero-sum battle between the sexes. In contrast, as Reeves puts it, “a world of floundering men is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women.”[11]

First, the rise of safetyism in the 1980s and 1990s hit boys harder than girls, because boys engage in more rough-and-tumble play and more risky play. When playtime was shortened, pulled indoors, and over-supervised, boys lost more than girls.

Imagine a childhood where all risk had been eliminated. Nobody ever felt the rush of adrenaline from climbing a tree when an adult had told them not to. Nobody ever experienced butterflies in their stomach as they mustered the courage to ask someone out. Picture a world where late-night outdoor adventures with friends were a thing of the past. In this childhood, there would be fewer bruises, broken bones, and broken hearts. It might sound like a safer world, but is it one you would want for your children?

One of the most widely noted traits of Gen Z is that they are not doing as much of the bad stuff that teenagers used to do. They drink less alcohol, have fewer car accidents, and get fewer speeding tickets. They have far fewer physical fights or unplanned pregnancies.[24] These are, of course, wonderful trends—nobody wants more car accidents. But because the rate of change for so many risky behaviors has been so rapid, I also look at these trends with concern. What if these changes came about not because Gen Z is getting wiser, but because they are withdrawing from the physical world? What if they are engaging in less risk-taking overall—healthy as well as unhealthy—and therefore learning less about how to manage risks in the real world?

Even brief sessions of mindfulness meditation—10 minutes each day—have been found to reduce irritability, negative emotions, and stress from external pressures.[12] In fact, mindfulness practices, originating in the spiritual realm, have now been routinely introduced into psychiatric and medical practice with growing empirical evidence to support their efficacy.[13]

The phone-based life makes it difficult for people to be fully present with others when they are with others, and to sit silently with themselves when they are alone. If we want to experience stillness and silence, and if we want to develop focus and a sense of unified consciousness, we must reduce the flow of stimulation into our eyes and ears. We must find ample opportunities to sit quietly, whether that is in meditation,[16] or by spending more time in nature, or just by looking out a car window and thinking on a long drive, rather than always listening to something, or (for children in the back seat) watching videos the whole way.

Awe causes “shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning.”[32] Yi-Mei experienced them all during her quiet walk through two parks.

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] This is why people travel to wondrous natural destinations. It’s why the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park the way it is, with fields, woods, lakes, and a small zoo where my children delighted in feeding sheep and goats. It’s why children love to explore the woods and turn over rocks, to see what they’ll find crawling underneath. This is also why spending time in beautiful natural settings reduces anxiety in those suffering from anxiety disorders.[34] It’s like coming back home.

If they encounter something beautiful, such as sunlight reflected on water, or cherry blossoms wafting on gentle spring breezes, their first instinct is to take a photograph or video, perhaps to post somewhere. Few are open to losing themselves in the moment as Yi-Mei did.

Most public schools in the United States say that they ban phones; 77% said so in a 2020 survey.[4] But that usually just means that the school forbids phone use during class time, so students must hide their phones in their laps or behind a book in order to use them. Even if such a ban were perfectly enforced by hypervigilant teachers patrolling each row of the classroom, it would mean that the moment class ended, most students would pull out their phones, check their texts and feeds, and ignore the students next to them. When students are allowed to keep their phones in their pockets, phone policing becomes a full-time job, and it is the last thing that teachers need added to their workload. Many of them eventually give up and tolerate open use.[5] As one middle school teacher wrote to me, “Give teachers a chance. Ban smartphones.”

Studies show that lower-income, Black, and Latino children put in more screen time and have less supervision of their electronic lives, on average, than children from wealthy families and white families. (Across the board, children in single-parent households have more unsupervised screentime.[11]

With his school’s blessing and help from Let Grow, Kevin started to incorporate more free play into students’ lives by making three changes: Longer recess with little adult intervention. Opening the school playground for half an hour before school starts, to give students time to play before class. Offering a “Play Club.” Anywhere from one to five days a week, a school stays open for mixed-age, “loose parts” free play (featuring things like balls, chalk, jump ropes), usually on the playground, or in the gym in bad weather. (But if the school can keep other rooms open, like an art room, great!) From 2:30 to 4:30 p.m.—your schedule may vary—instead of going home (often to a device or to an adult-led activity), children spend time together playing. It’s a no-phone zone! The kids are given nearly complete autonomy. There are only two rules: They can’t deliberately hurt anyone; and they can’t leave without telling the person in charge. This adult doesn’t organize any games or solve any spats. Like a lifeguard, adults intervene only in the case of an emergency. (Let Grow provides a free Play Club implementation guide on its website.) In the very first semester he made these changes, Kevin started noticing a shift in his students: Our students are happier, kinder, have fewer behavior problems, have made more friends, feel more in control of their day and their life in general, and in some cases have dramatically changed course from bullying behaviors and frequent office referrals...

Practice letting your kids out of your sight without them having a way to reach you. While you cook dinner for your friends, send your kids out with theirs to the grocery store to pick up more garlic (even if you don’t need it). It is only by letting your kids out of your sight, untethered, that you will come to see that this is doable, and rather great. (It is probably what you were doing by the time you were eight.) This kind of practice will help you feel more prepared to give them more independence and to hold off on giving them a phone because you’ll have seen for yourself that they can do fine without one. Just give the kids a note that they can show adults that says they have your permission to be out without you. You can print out such a card at LetGrow.org that says “I’m not lost or neglected!” and includes your phone number.[11] Encourage sleepovers, and don’t micromanage them, although if the friend brings a phone, hold on to it until the friend leaves, otherwise they’ll have a phone-based sleepover. Encourage walking to school in a group. This can begin as early as first grade if the walk is easy and there is an older child to be responsible. Safe Routes to School[12] is an organization that can help make sure there are stop signs, bike paths, crossing guards, and so on that allow kids to get to school. If school is too far to walk or ride a bicycle, consider “drive to five.” You drop kids off, with other kids, at a spot that is five minutes away from school. L...

In part 4, I offered dozens of suggestions, but the four foundational reforms are: No smartphones before high school No social media before 16 Phone-free schools Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence