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.

A few of these companies are behaving like the tobacco and vaping industries, which designed their products to be highly addictive and then skirted laws limiting marketing to minors.

We can also compare them to the oil companies that fought against the banning of leaded gasoline.

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.

A fourth trend began just a few years later, and it hit girls much harder than boys: the increased prevalence of posting images of oneself, after smartphones added front-facing cameras (2010) and Facebook acquired Instagram (2012), boosting its popularity. This greatly expanded the number of adolescents posting carefully curated photos and videos of their lives for their peers and strangers, not just to see, but to judge.

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.

Gen Z teens got sucked into spending many hours of each day scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances, and distant influencers. They watched increasing quantities of user-generated videos and streamed entertainment, offered to them by autoplay and algorithms that were designed to keep them online as long as possible.

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 Anxious Generation is a book about how to reclaim human life for human beings in all generations.

Anxiety is related to fear, but is not the same thing. 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.”[12] Both can be healthy responses to reality, but when excessive, they can become disorders.

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

Collective anxiety can bind people together and motivate them to take action, and collective action is thrilling, especially when it is carried out in person.

Threats and risks have always haunted the future, but the ways that young people are responding, with activism carried out mostly in the virtual world, seem to be affecting them very differently compared to previous generations, whose activism was carried out mostly in the real world.

If world events played a role in the current mental health crisis, it’s not because world events suddenly got worse around 2012; it’s because world events were suddenly being pumped into adolescents’ brains through their phones, not as news stories, but as social media posts in which other young people expressed their emotions about a collapsing world, emotions that are contagious on social media.

Culture, which includes tool making, profoundly reshaped our evolutionary path. To give just one example: As we began using fire to cook our food, our jaws and guts reduced in size because cooked foods are so much easier to chew and digest. Our brains grew larger because the race for survival was won no longer by the fastest or strongest but by those most adept at learning.

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.

Developmental psychologists refer to these sorts of interactions as serve-and-return, conveying the idea that social interactions are often like a game of tennis or ping-pong: You take turns, it’s fun, there’s unpredictability, and timing is essential.

According to Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson, two of the leading scholars of gene-culture coevolution,[23] there are several “strategies” that won out over thousands of generations and became part of our evolved propensity for culture. The two that are most relevant for our discussion of social media are conformist bias and prestige bias.

Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conformity engines ever invented.

Sean Parker, one of the early leaders of Facebook, admitted in a 2017 interview that the goal of Facebook’s and Instagram’s founders was to create “a social-validation feedback loop . . .

Children can learn multiple languages easily, but this ability drops off sharply during the first few years of puberty.[32] When a family moves to a new country, the kids who are 12 or younger will quickly become native speakers with no accent, while those who are 14 or older will probably be asked, for the rest of their lives, “Where are you from?”

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.

To take one example of our shortsightedness, a powerful fear for many parents is that their child will fall into the hands of a sexual predator. But sex criminals nowadays spend most of their time in the virtual world because the internet makes it so much easier to communicate with children and to find and circulate sexual and violent videos involving children.

I was ten years old when I watched porn for the first time. I found myself on Pornhub, which I stumbled across by accident and returned to out of curiosity. The website has no age verification, no ID requirement, not even a prompt asking me if I was over 18. The site is easy to find, impossible to avoid, and has become a frequent rite of passage for kids my age. Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily. She was attentive, nearly a helicopter parent, but I found online porn anyway. So did my friends.

many of the trees they planted to create a rain-forest ecosystem grew rapidly but then fell over before reaching maturity. The designers had not realized that young trees need wind to grow properly. When the wind blows, it bends the tree, which tugs at the roots on the windward side and compresses the wood on the other side. In response, the root system expands to provide a firmer anchor where it is needed, and the compressed wood cells change their structure to become stronger and firmer.

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. Parents who try to raise their children in a bubble of perfect hygiene are harming their children by blocking the development of their antifragile immune systems.

Researchers who study children at play have concluded that the risk of minor injuries should be a feature, not a bug, in playground design.

Of course, the online world is not nearly as dangerous as Mars, but it shares the property that small mistakes can bring enormous costs. Children did not evolve to handle the virality, anonymity, instability, and potential for large-scale public shaming of the virtual world. Even adults have trouble with it.

The school offers similarly inane lists of instructions and prohibitions to help children play other games. In the rules for playing touch football, the sign says football can only be played if an adult is supervising and refereeing the game. The administrators seem to be committed to preventing the sorts of conflicts that are inherent in human interaction, and that would teach children how to manage their own affairs, resolve differences, and prepare for life in a democratic society.

All children are by nature antifragile. Just as the immune system must be exposed to germs, and trees must be exposed to wind, children require exposure to setbacks, failures, shocks, and stumbles in order to develop strength and self-reliance. Overprotection interferes with this development and renders young people more likely to be fragile and fearful as adults.

Kids must have a great deal of free play to develop, and they benefit from risky physical play, which has anti-phobic effects.

the human brain reaches 90% of its adult size by age 5, and it has far more neurons and synapses at that moment than it will have in its adult form. Subsequent brain development, therefore, is not about overall growth but about the selective pruning of neurons and synapses, leaving only the ones that have been frequently used.

activities that repeatedly activate a constellation of neurons cause those neurons to connect more closely. If a child goes through puberty doing a lot of archery, or painting, or video games, or social media, those activities will cause lasting structural changes in the brain, especially if they are rewarding.

you try to draw your name in very wet cement, it will disappear quickly. If you wait until the cement is dry, you’ll leave no mark. But if you can catch it while it’s in the transition between wet and dry, your name will last forever.[2] Because pruning and myelination speed up at the start of puberty, changes in children’s experiences during those years can have large and lasting effects.[3]

As an initial proposal, to start a conversation, I suggest that we focus on even-year birthdays from ages 6 to 18. We might make a big deal out of those birthdays by linking them to new freedoms, new responsibilities, and significant increases in allowance.

Thorndike described the cat’s learning like this: “The one impulse, out of many accidental ones, which leads to pleasure, becomes strengthened and stamped in.” He said that 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.”

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of . . . life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”[16]

Alexis is now 21. She has regained control of her life and works as an emergency medical technician, though she still struggles with eating disorders.

I spoke with Alexis and her mother after reading the lawsuit her parents filed against Meta for the dangerous product it offered to their daughter, without their permission.

The social psychologist Susan Fiske says that humans are “comparison machines.”[35] Mark Leary, another social psychologist, describes the machinery in more detail: It’s as if we all have a “sociometer” in our brains—a gauge that runs from 0 to 100, telling us where we stand in the local prestige rankings, moment by moment. When the needle drops, it triggers an alarm—anxiety—that motivates us to change our behavior and get the needle back up.[36]

There were two interesting twists in their findings. The first was that bad was stronger than good, as is almost always the case in psychology.[55] Depression was significantly more contagious than happiness or good mental health. The second twist was that depression spread only from women. When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%. When a man became depressed, it had no measurable effect on his friends.

The authors surmise that the difference is due to the fact that women are more emotionally expressive and more effective at communicating mood states within friendship pairs.

When men get together, in contrast, they are more likely to do things together rather than talk ...

The clinical psychologist Lisa Damour says that regarding friendship for girls, “quality trumps quantity.” The happiest girls “aren’t the ones who have the most friendships but the ones who have strong, supportive friendships, even if that means having a single terrific friend.”[82] (She notes that this is true for boys as well.)

Two major categories of motivations are agency (the desire to stand out and have an effect on the world) and communion (the desire to connect and develop a sense of belonging). Boys and girls both want each of these, but there is a gender difference that emerges early in children’s play: Boys choose more agency activities; girls choose more communion activities.

These young people are called hikikomori, a Japanese term that means “pulling inward.”[21] They live like hermits, emerging from their caves mostly at odd hours when they are less likely to see anyone, including family members. In some families, parents leave food for them by their doors. They calm their anxieties by staying inside, but the longer they stay in, the less competent they become in the outside world, fueling their anxiety

The problem is not just that modern pornography amplifies the risk for porn addiction, but that heavy porn use can lead boys to choose the easy option for sexual satisfaction (by watching porn) rather than trying to engage in the more uncertain and risky dating world. Additionally, there is evidence that heavy use can disrupt boys’ and young men’s romantic and sexual relationships. For example, several studies indicate that after watching porn, heterosexual men find real women less attractive, including their own partners.[39]

If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.[25]

You see a photo of Victoria Falls, taken from a drone that gives you a better view than you could ever get in person, and yet, because the entire image is displayed on a screen the size of your hand, and because you did no work to get to the falls, it’s just not going to trigger as much awe as you’d get from hiking up to a much smaller waterfall yourself.

At the Ohio school, social emotional learning is taught by adults as yet one more structured curriculum. Free play at the Central Academy of the Arts, in contrast, brought rapid learning because it is nature’s way of teaching these same skills as a side effect of kids doing what they most want to do: Play with each other.