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

by Jonathan Haidt

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.

They are embodied, meaning that we use our bodies to communicate, we are conscious of the bodies of others, and we respond to the bodies of others both consciously and unconsciously. They are synchronous, which means they are happening at the same time, with subtle cues about timing and turn taking. They involve primarily one-to-one or one-to-several communication, with only one interaction happening at a given moment. They take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen.

They are disembodied, meaning that no body is needed, just language. Partners could be (and already are) artificial intelligences (AIs). They are heavily asynchronous, happening via text-based posts and comments. (A video call is different; it is synchronous.) They involve a substantial number of one-to-many communications, broadcasting to a potentially vast audience. Multiple interactions can be happening in parallel. They take place within communities that have a low bar for entry and exit, so people can block others or just quit when they are not pleased. Communities tend to be short-lived, and relationships are often disposable.

Here is Epictetus, in the first century CE, lamenting the human tendency to let others control our emotions: If your body was turned over to just anyone, you would doubtless take exception. Why aren’t you ashamed that you have made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you, so that it automatically becomes confused and upset?[19]

Marcus Aurelius’s advice to himself, in the second century CE: 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]

These “almost constantly” numbers are startling and may be the key to explaining the sudden collapse of adolescent mental health. 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. As the MIT professor Sherry Turkle wrote in 2015 about life with smartphones, “We are forever elsewhere.”[33] This is a profound transformation of human consciousness and relationships, and it occurred, for American teens, between 2010 and 2015. This is the birth of the phone-based childhood. It marks the definitive end of the play-based childhood.

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

A key feature of free play is that mistakes are generally not very costly. Everyone is clumsy at first, and everyone makes mistakes every day. Gradually, from trial and error, and with direct feedback from playmates, elementary school students become ready to take on the greater social complexity of middle school. It’s not homework that gets them ready, nor is it classes on handling their emotions. Such adult-led lessons may provide useful information, but information doesn’t do much to shape a developing brain. Play does. This relates to a key CBT insight: 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.

Children are intrinsically motivated to acquire these skills because they want to be included in the playgroup and keep the fun going.

Work-based childhood was widespread during the Industrial Revolution, which is why, eventually, the 1959 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child named play as a basic human right: “The child shall have full opportunity for play and recreation, which should be directed to the same purposes as education.”[11]

The reduction is so severe that we might refer to smartphones and tablets in the hands of children as experience blockers.

The value of conformity is obvious: Doing whatever most people are doing is the safest strategy across a wide range of environments. It’s particularly valuable when you are a newcomer to an existing society: When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conformity engines ever invented. They can shape an adolescent’s mental models of acceptable behavior in a matter of hours, whereas parents can struggle unsuccessfully for years to get their children to sit up straight or stop whining. Parents don’t get to use the power of conformity bias, so they are often no match for the socializing power of social media.[24]

Detect prestige and then copy the prestigious. The major work on prestige bias was done by the evolutionary anthropologist Joe Henrich,[25] who was a student of Rob Boyd’s. Henrich noted that the social hierarchies of nonhuman primates are based on dominance—the ability, ultimately, to inflict violence on others. But humans have an alternative ranking system based on prestige, which is willingly conferred by people to those they see as having achieved excellence in a valued domain of activity, such as hunting or storytelling back in ancient times.

People can perceive excellence for themselves, but it’s more efficient to rely on the judgments of others.

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. Instead, beginning in the early 2010s, millions of Gen Z girls collectively aimed their most powerful learning systems at a small number of young women whose main excellence seems to be amassing followers to influence. At the same time, many Gen Z boys aimed their social learning systems at popular male influencers who offered them visions of masculinity that were also quite extreme and potentially inapplicable to their daily lives.

Human childhood is very different from that of any other animal. Children’s brains grow to 90% of full size by age 5, but then take a long time to configure themselves. This slow-growth childhood is an adaptation for cultural learning. Childhood is an apprenticeship for learning the skills needed for success in one’s culture.

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.

Children learn through play to connect, synchronize, and take turns. They enjoy attunement and need enormous quantities of it. Attunement and synchrony bond pairs, groups, and whole communities. Social media, in contrast, is mostly asynchronous and performative. It inh...

Children are born with two innate learning programs that help them to acquire their local culture. Conformist bias motivates them to copy whatever seems to be most common. Prestige bias motivates them to copy whoever seems to be the most accomplished and prestigious. Social media platforms, which are engineered for engagement, hijack social learning and drown out the culture of one’s family and local community while locking children’s eyes onto influencers of questionable value.

Social learning occurs throughout childhood, but there may be a sensitive period for cultural learning that spans roughly ages 9 to 15. Lessons learned and identities formed in these years are likely to imprint, or stick, more than at other ages. These are the crucial sensitive years of puberty. Unfortunately, they are also the years in which most adolescents in developed countries get their own phones and move their social lives online.

We decided that the real world was so full of dangers that children should not be allowed to explore it without adult supervision, even though the risks to children from crime, violence, drunk drivers, and most other sources have dropped steeply since the 1990s.[1]

At the same time, it seemed like too much of a bother to design and require age-appropriate guardrails for kids online, so we left children free to wander through the Wild West of the virtual world, where threats to children abounded.

Two Basic Mindsets Discover mode (BAS) Scan for opportunities Kid in a candy shop Think for yourself Let me grow! Defend mode (BIS) Scan for dangers Scarcity mindset Cling to your team Keep me safe! Figure 3.1. Discover mode versus defend mode, for a student arriving at a university.

It’s the same dynamic for what has been called the psychological immune system[12]—the ability of a child to handle, process, and get past frustrations, minor accidents, teasing, exclusion, perceived injustices, and normal conflicts without falling prey to hours or days of inner turmoil. There is no way to live with other humans without conflicts and deprivations. 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. In fact, the best parenting book[13] that my wife and I read when our children were toddlers urged us to look for opportunities to frustrate our children every day by laying out and enforcing the contingencies of life: If you want to watch Teletubbies, you must first put away your toys. If you persist in doing that, you’ll get a time-out. Yes, your sister got something you didn’t, and that happens sometimes.

Sandseter and Kennair analyzed the kinds of risks that children seek out when adults give them some freedom, and they found six: heights (such as climbing trees or playground structures), high speed (such as swinging, or going down fast slides), dangerous tools (such as hammers and drills), dangerous elements (such as experimenting with fire), rough-and-tumble play (such as wrestling), and disappearing (hiding, wandering away, potentially getting lost or separated). These are the major types of thrills that children need. They’ll get them for themselves unless adults stop them—which we did in the 1990s. Note that video games offer none of these risks, even though games such as Fortnite show avatars doing all of them.[19] We are embodied creatures; children should learn how to manage their bodies in the physical world before they start spending large amounts of time in the virtual world.

Our goal in designing the places children play, she says, should be to “keep them as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.”[27]

We are misallocating our protective efforts. We should be giving children more of the practice they need in the real world and delaying their entry into the online world, where the benefits are fewer and the guardrails nearly nonexistent.

Once a child gets online, there is never a threshold age at which she is granted more autonomy or more rights. On the internet, everyone is the same age, which is no particular age. This is a major reason why a phone-based adolescence is badly mismatched with the needs of adolescents.

A country that is large, secular, and diverse by race, religion, and politics may not be able to construct shared rites of passage that are full of moral guidance, like the Apache sunrise ceremony. Yet despite our differences, we all want our children to become socially competent and mentally healthy adults who are able to manage their own affairs, earn a living, and form stable romantic bonds. If we can agree on that much, then might we be able to agree on norms that lay out some of the steps on that path? Importantly, these would mostly be norms, not laws, which any parent could choose to follow or ignore. Engaging in commonly held norm-based rituals and sharing milestones might be more effective than practices that each family invents for itself.

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. These numbers vary somewhat by social class (more use in lower-income families than in high-income families), race (more use in Black and Latino families than in white and Asian families[13]), and sexual minority status (more use among LGBTQ youth; see more detail in this endnote[14]).

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.

“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” [44]

But even when students don’t check their phones, the mere presence of a phone damages their ability to think. In one study, researchers brought college students into the lab and randomly assigned them to (1) leave their bag and phone out in the entry room of the lab, (2) keep their phone with them in their pocket or bag, or (3) put their phone on their desk next to them. They then had the students complete tasks that tested their fluid intelligence and working memory capacity, such as by solving math problems while also remembering a string of letters. They found that performance was best when phones were left in the other room, and worst when phones were visible, with pocketed phones in between. The effect was bigger for heavy users. The article was titled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” [48]

Lembke says that “the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.”[57] Dysphoria is the opposite of euphoria; it refers to a generalized feeling of discomfort or unease. This is basically what many teens say they feel—and what parents and clinicians observe—when kids who are heavy users of social media or video games are separated from their phones and game consoles involuntarily. Symptoms of sadness, anxiety, and irritability are listed as the signs of withdrawal for those diagnosed with internet gaming disorder.[58]

Certainly, these digital platforms offer fun and entertainment, as television did for previous generations. They also confer some unique benefits for specific groups such as sexual minority youth and those with autism—where some virtual communities can help soften the pain of social exclusion in the real world.[65]

However, unlike the extensive evidence of harm found in correlational, longitudinal, and experimental studies, there is very little evidence showing benefits to adolescent mental health from long-term or heavy social media use.[66] There was no wave of mental health and happiness breaking out around the world in 2013, as young people embraced Instagram. Teens are certainly right when they say that social media gives them a connection with their friends, but as we’ve seen in their reports of increasing loneliness and isolation, that connection does not seem to be as good as what it replaced.

The first foundational harm is social deprivation. When American adolescents moved onto smartphones, time with friends in face-to-face settings plummeted immediately, from 122 minutes per day in 2012 down to 67 minutes per day in 2019. Time with friends dropped further because of COVID restrictions, but Gen Z was already socially distanced before COVID restrictions were put in place.

The third fundamental harm is attention fragmentation. Attention is the ability to stay on one mental road while many off-ramps beckon. Staying on a road, staying on a task, is a feature of maturity and a sign of good executive function. But smartphones are kryptonite for attention. Many adolescents get hundreds of notifications per day, meaning that they rarely have five or 10 minutes to think without an interruption.

A 2017 study in the U.K. asked teens to rate the effects of the most popular social media platforms on different parts of their well-being, including anxiety, loneliness, body image, and sleep. Teens rated Instagram as the worst of the five apps, followed by Snapchat. YouTube was the only platform that received a positive overall score.[25]

The visually oriented platforms all used the business model developed by Facebook: Maximize time spent on the platform in order to maximize the extraction of data and the value of the user to advertisers. Figure 6.3 shows the percentage of American high school students who spent more than 40 hours a week using social media platforms. That’s like working a full-time job while also being a full-time student. By 2015, one in seven American girls had reached this astronomical level. The survey question was only added in 2013. If we had the data going back to 2010, when few teens had smartphones, the numbers would likely have been close to zero. It was almost impossible for teens to spend 40 hours a week on social media before they could carry the internet with them in their pockets.[26]

Reason #1: Girls Are More Affected by Visual Social Comparison and Perfectionism The 2021 song “Jealousy, Jealousy” by Olivia Rodrigo sums up what it’s like for many girls to scroll through social media today. The song begins, I kinda wanna throw my phone across the room ’Cause all I see are girls too good to be true.

Reason #2: Girls’ Aggression Is More Relational Boys were long thought to be more aggressive than girls, and if we look only at violence and physical threats, they are.[45] Boys are also more interested in watching stories and movies about sports, fighting, war, and violence, all of which appeal to agency interests and motivations. Traditionally, boys have negotiated who is high and who is low in social status based in part on who could dominate whom if it came to a fight, or who can hurl an insult at whom without fear of violent reprisal. But because girls have stronger communion motives, the way to really hurt another girl is to hit her in her relationships. You spread gossip, turn her friends against her, and lower her value as a friend to other girls. Researchers have found that when you look at “indirect aggression” (which includes damaging other people’s relationships or reputations), girls are higher than boys—but only in late childhood and adolescence.[46] A girl who feels her value sinking is a girl experiencing rising anxiety. If her sociometer drop is sharp enough, she may become depressed and consider suicide. For depressed or ostracized teens, physical death offers the end of pain, whereas social death is a living hell.

All of it takes place in a virtual world that parents and teachers can rarely access or understand. Additionally, as smartphones accompany adolescents to school, to the bathroom, and to bed, so too can their bullies.

Social media has magnified the reach and effect of relational bullying, placing immense pressure on girls to monitor their words and actions. They are aware that any misstep can swiftly go viral and leave a permanent mark. Social media fuels the insecurity of adolescence, already a period where there is immense concern about the possibility of ostracism, and has thus turned a generation of girls away from discover mode and toward defend mode.

Freya India, a Gen Z British woman who writes about girls and mental health, wrote an essay titled “Social Media’s Not Just Making Girls Depressed, It’s Making Us Bitchy Too.” In the essay she wrote, From anonymous Instagram hate pages to full-blown teenage cancel culture campaigns, today’s girls can drag each other down in all kinds of creative ways. Then there’s passive aggression, today personified by the subtweet, the “soft block” (where you block and then unblock someone in quick succession, so they no longer follow you), the read receipt; even a public tag in an unflattering photo.[51]

Reason #3: Girls More Easily Share Emotions and Disorders We all know that our close friends can affect our moods. But did you know that your friends’ friends affect you too? The sociologist Nicholas Christakis and the political scientist James Fowler analyzed data from a long-running survey of the residents in Framingham, Massachusetts, called the Framingham Heart Study.[53] The study focused on physical health, but Christakis and Fowler were able to use items in the survey to study the way emotions moved through the community over time. They found that happiness tends to occur in clusters. This was not just because happy people seek each other out. Rather, when one person became happier, it increased the odds that their existing friends would become happier too. Amazingly, it also had an influence on their friends’ friends, and sometimes even on their friends’ friends’ friends. Happiness is contagious; it spreads through social networks.

Reason #4: Girls Are More Subject to Predation and Harassment You know those stories about middle-aged women who befriend adolescent boys on gaming platforms and then send them money and ask for pictures of their penises as a prelude to meeting for sex? Neither do I. Women’s sexuality, in its many variations, is rarely predatory in that way.

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] And the data shows that we now live in a world of floundering young men.[12]

As data speeds increased, so did the availability of hardcore pornographic videos. Perhaps as much as 40% of all internet traffic in the late 1990s was porn.[34]