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

I then zoom in on girls[*] to show that social media use does not just correlate with mental illness; it causes it,

in the late 1970s, many of my fellow students smoked cigarettes, which they could easily buy from vending machines. Eventually, America banned those machines, inconveniencing adult smokers, who then had to purchase cigarettes from a store clerk who could verify their age.[18]

This is such a good analogy. We accept all sorts of inconveniences to protect children. What makes tech different?

As evidence mounts that phone-based childhood is making our children mentally unhealthy, socially isolated, and deeply unhappy, are we okay with that trade-off? Or will we eventually realize, as we did in the 20th century, that we sometimes need to protect children from harm even when it inconveniences adults?

Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development. It is in unsupervised, child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair.

By 2014, nearly a third of teen girls were spending over 20 hours a week on social media sites. That’s half of a full-time job—creating content for the platform and consuming content created by others. That is time no longer available for interacting with friends in person. The work is often joyless, yet many feel compelled to do it, lest they “miss out” on something or be excluded.[22]

Free play is as essential for developing social skills, like conflict resolution, as it is for developing physical skills. But play-based childhoods were replaced by phone-based childhoods as children and adolescents moved their social lives and free time onto internet-connected devices.

I am often asked why I urge parents to be more vigilant and restrictive about their children’s online activities when I’ve been talking for years about how parents need to stop over-supervising their children and start giving them independence. Can’t children just as well become antifragile online? Don’t they experience setbacks, stressors, and challenges there? I see few indications that a phone-based childhood develops antifragility. Human childhood evolved in the real world, and children’s minds are “expecting” the challenges of the real world, which is embodied, synchronous, and one-to-one or one-to-several, within communities that endure. For physical development they need physical play and physical risk-taking. Virtual battles in a video game confer little or no physical benefit. For social development they need to learn the art of friendship, which is embodied; friends do things together, and as children they touch, hug, and wrestle. Mistakes are low cost, and can be rectified in real time. Moreover, there are clear embodied signals of this rectification, such as an apology with an appropriate facial expression.

We should all be aghast that the average American elementary school student gets only 27 minutes of recess a day.[19] In maximum-security federal prisons in the United States, inmates are guaranteed two hours of outdoor time per day.

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 These reforms are foundational because they solve multiple collective action problems.