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

by Jonathan Haidt

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and—as I will show—unsuitable for children and adolescents.

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.

online social networks, which can be useful for helping adults achieve their goals, may not be effective substitutes for real-world communities within which children have been rooted, shaped, and raised for hundreds of thousands of years.

IMO the shift of ANY community from real-world to online is detrimental, regardless of age. Online communities are best when they bring together people who cannot or would not physically meet (in the real world)

Now, as I write in 2023, there’s a lot more research—experimental as well as correlational—showing that social media harms adolescents, especially girls going through puberty.

I don't disagree, athough phones and social media are not synonymous

there are four reforms that are so important, and in which I have such a high degree of confidence, that I’m going to call them foundational. They would provide a foundation for healthier childhood in the digital age.

(The four reforms are the next four highlights)

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).

Proposed reform #1. Why give ANY phone?

No social media before 16.

Proposed reform #2

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.

Proposed reform #3

Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.

Proposed reform #4

If most of the parents and schools in a community were to enact all four, I believe they would see substantial improvements in adolescent mental health within two years.

And this belief is based on...?

A 2015 report by Pew Research[31] confirms these high numbers: One out of every four teens said that they were online “almost constantly.” By 2022, that number had nearly doubled, to 46%.[32]

These extraordinarily high rates suggest that even when members of Gen Z are not on their devices and appear to be doing something in the real world, such as sitting in class, eating a meal, or talking with you, a substantial portion of their attention is monitoring or worrying (being anxious) about events in the social metaverse.

This is something to consider from a school perspective: Even if the phones are not physically in school, kids can still be distracted by them.

With so many new and exciting virtual activities, many adolescents (and adults) lost the ability to be fully present with the people around them, which changed social life for everyone, even for the small minority that did not use these platforms. That is why I refer to the period from 2010 to 2015 as the Great Rewiring of Childhood.

The only plausible theory I have found that can explain the international decline in teen mental health is the sudden and massive change in the technology that teens were using to connect with each other.[60]

Was tech adoption (social media, smartphones, etc.) on the same timeline in all of these countries?

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.

How does this square with concerns around bullying? Clearly there is a line between normal/healthy sorting things out vs. true bullying, but parents may be too quick to label the former as the latter.

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

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.

Thirteen-year-olds should not be scrolling through endless posts from influencers and other strangers when their brains are in such an open state, searching for exemplars to lock onto. They should be playing, synchronizing, and hanging out with their friends in person while leaving some room in the input streams to their eyes and ears for social learning from their parents, teachers, and other role models in their communities.

Discover mode fosters learning and growth. If we want to help young people thrive—at home, in school, and in the workplace—shifting them into discover mode may be the most effective change we can make.

perhaps the most important change in the 1980s was the rising fear among parents that everyone and everything was a threat to their children.

Could also explain lack of trust in schools

This is the world in which Gen Z was raised. It was a world in which adults, schools, and other institutions worked together to teach children that the world is dangerous, and to prevent them from experiencing the risks, conflicts, and thrills that their experience-expectant brains needed to overcome anxiety and set their default mental state to discover mode.[47]

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.

our extremely new secular societies may be losing something important as we abandon public and communally marked rites of passage. A human child doesn’t morph into a culturally functional adult solely through biological maturation. Children benefit from role models (for cultural learning), challenges (to stimulate antifragility), public recognition of each new status (to change their social identity), and mentors who are not their parents as they mature into competent, flourishing adults.

School can play an important role in this transformation

But in the new virtual world, it almost never mattered how old you were. As soon as children could use a web browser, they had virtually unlimited access to everything on the web. And once teens moved from basic phones to smartphones, in the early 2010s, they could experience everything all day long.

I use the term “phone-based” in an expansive sense to include all internet-connected devices.

But for the youngest age group there is no bend at 2019. The decline caused by the first year of COVID restrictions was no bigger than the decline that occurred the year before COVID arrived.

(The decline referenced is a decline in the amount of time spent with friends)

There is hardly a sense of community on campus and it’s not hard to see. Oftentimes I’ll arrive early to a lecture to find a room of 30+ students sitting together in complete silence, absorbed in their smartphones, afraid to speak and be heard by their peers.

This never-ending stream of interruptions—this constant fragmentation of attention—takes a toll on adolescents’ ability to think and may leave permanent marks in their rapidly reconfiguring brains. Many studies find that students with access to their phones use them in class and pay far less attention to their teachers.[46] People can’t really multitask; all we can do is shift attention back and forth between tasks while wasting a lot of it on each shift.[47] But even when students don’t check their phones, the mere presence of a phone damages their ability to think.

These relationships can afford opportunities to have positive interactions with more diverse peer groups than are available to them offline and can provide important social support to youth.

Key here is that the benefits occur when online social interactions are in addition to offline, rather than replacing offline

Digital substitutions for real-world social engagement reduce the drive to be social but don’t satisfy emotional needs.