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

by Jonathan Haidt

In a real-life social setting, it takes a while—often weeks—to get a good sense for what the most common behaviors are, because you need to observe multiple groups in multiple settings. But on a social media platform, a child can scroll through a thousand data points in one hour (at three seconds per post), each one accompanied by numerical evidence (likes) and comments that show whether the post was a success or a failure.

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.

Language learning is the clearest case. 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?”

Criticl periods of bumn development areng as strict s geese ut still exist

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.

Our prestige bis for leRning now suffers becuse, for the first time, prestige hasbeen uncoupled from excellence

Social learning occurs throughout childhood, but there may be a sensitive period for cultural learning that spans roughly ages 9 to 15.

Social learningimprints at9-15.

in 2023, The Wall Street Journal ran an exposé that showed how “Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests.”[3]

Hogben’s essay is a succinct illustration of the principle that we are overprotecting our children in the real world while underprotecting them online. If we really want to keep our children safe, we should delay their entry into the virtual world and send them out to play in the real world instead.

Taleb coined the word “antifragile” to describe things that actually need to get knocked over now and then in order to become strong.

Antifragile. Needs opposition to cdreate ztrength.

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]

According to a 2015 report from the Pew Research Center, parents (on average) say children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard.

Safetyism is an experience blocker. When we make children’s safety a quasi-sacred value and don’t allow them to take any risks, we block them from overcoming anxiety, learning to manage risk, and learning to be self-governing, all of which are essential for becoming healthy and competent adults.

Of course, teens at the time might not have thought they were losing their friends; they thought they were just moving the friendship from real life to Instagram, Snapchat, and online video games. Isn’t that just as good? No. As Jean Twenge has shown, teens who spend more time using social media are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and other disorders, while teens who spend more time with groups of young people (such as playing team sports or participating in religious communities) have better mental health.

Researchers have long found that boys and men are more focused on agency strivings while girls and women are more focused on communion strivings.[31]

The reASON social media affects virls more than boys. This appears true cross culturally

Some portion of this increase surely reflects the “coming-out” of young people who were trans but either didn’t recognize it or were afraid of the social stigma that would attend the expression of their gender identity. Increasing freedom of gender expression and growing awareness of human variation are both forms of social progress. But the fact that gender dysphoria now often appears in social clusters (such as a group of close friends),[71] the fact that parents and those who transition back to their natal sex identify social media as a major source of information and encouragement,[72] and the fact that gender dysphoria is now being diagnosed among many adolescents who showed no signs of it as children[73] all indicate that social influence and sociogenic transmission may be at work as well.

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.”

Reeves’s book helps us see the structural factors that have made it harder for boys to succeed. He describes factors such as an economy that no longer rewards physical strength, an educational system that prizes the ability to sit still and listen, and a decline in the availability of positive male role models, including fathers. After listing several such factors, Reeves adds, “The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges.”[13]

But around 2010, something unprecedented started happening: Both sexes shifted rapidly toward the pattern traditionally associated with females. There has been a notable increase in agreement with items related to internalizing disorders (such as “I feel that I can’t do anything right”) for both sexes, with a sharper rise among girls as you can see in figure 7.2. At the same time, agreement with items related to externalizing disorders (such as “how often have you damaged school property on purpose?”) plummeted for both sexes, more sharply for boys. By 2017, boys’ responses looked like those from girls in the 1990s.

Something changed in the 21st century. Rates of injury began to drop slowly in the 2000s, for young men only. The drop then accelerated after 2012 (and began happening for girls as well). By 2019, adolescent boys were less likely to be injured than adolescent girls had been in 2010. In fact, adolescent boys are now not much different from adolescent girls, or from men in their 50s and 60s.[29] Further evidence of a change: A nationally representative study found that fall-related fractures (e.g., broken fingers and wrists) decreased slowly and steadily, among boys and girls, from 2001 to 2015, but there was one group that stood out—boys ages 10–14 showed a sharp drop after 2009. This suggests a sharp drop in doing things that could lead to a fall, such as riding bicycles over jump ramps, or climbing trees.[30]

Boys are at greater risk than girls of “failure to launch.” They are more likely to become young adults who are “Not in Education, Employment, or Training.” Some Japanese men developed an extreme form of lifelong withdrawal to their bedrooms; they are called hikikomori. In the early 2010s, American teen boys’ thinking patterns shifted from what they had traditionally been (higher rates of externalizing cognitions and behaviors than internalizing) to a pattern more commonly shown by girls (higher rates of internalizing). At the same time, boys also began to shun risk (more so than happened for girls).

So now I want to ask: Does the phone-based life generally pull us upward or downward on this vertical dimension? If it is downward, then there is a cost even for those who are not anxious or depressed. If it is downward, then there is spiritual harm, for adults as well as for adolescents, even for those who think that their mental health is fine. There would also be harm to society if more people are spending more time below zero on the z axis. We would perceive a general society-wide degradation that would be hard to put into words.

DeSteno found that there is abundant evidence that keeping up certain spiritual practices improves well-being.

This is one of the founding insights of sociology: Strong communities don’t just magically appear whenever people congregate and communicate. The strongest and most satisfying communities come into being when something lifts people out of the lower level so that they have powerful collective experiences. They all enter the realm of the sacred together, at the same time. When they return to the profane level, where they need to be most of the time to address the necessities of life, they have greater trust and affection for each other as a result of their time together in the sacred realm. They are also happier and have lower rates of suicide. In contrast, transient networks of disembodied users, interacting asynchronously, just can’t cohere the way human communities have from time immemorial. People who live only in networks, rather than communities, are less likely to thrive.

Including sports! Pep rallies seem to hold the same function as church

We could create healthier environments for ourselves and our children if we could reconnect with the rhythms of the calendar and of our communities. This might include taking part in regular religious services or joining other groups organized for a moral, charitable, or spiritual purpose. It could include establishing family rituals such as a digital Sabbath (one day per week with reduced or no digital technology, combined with enjoyable in-person activities) or marking holidays together consistently, ideally with other families.

Anyone who participated in a Zoom-based wedding, funeral, or religious service during the COVID pandemic knows how much is lost when rituals go virtual.

Must be embodied

You don’t need to become a monk or join a monastery; many ordinary people gain these benefits by taking a vow of silence for a day, a week, or more as they join with others on meditation retreats. Even brief sessions of mindfulness meditation—10 minutes each day—have been found to reduce irritability, negative emotions, and stress from external pressures.

What does social media do to the DMN? A social media “platform” is, almost by definition, a place that is all about you. You stand on the platform and post content to influence how others perceive you. It is almost perfectly designed to crank up the DMN to maximum and pin it there. That’s not healthy for any of us, and it’s even worse for adolescents.[20]

As Buddha put it: In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, Ancient and inexhaustible. You too shall pass away. Knowing this, how can you quarrel?[28]

Yet one of the hallmarks of the Great Rewiring is that children and adolescents now spend far less time outside, and when they are outside, they are often looking at or thinking about their phones. 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.

I now take my AirPods out of my ears when I’m walking in any park or natural setting. I no longer try to cram in as many audiobooks and podcasts, at 1.5 times normal speed, as my brain can receive. As for our children, if we want awe and natural beauty to play a larger role in their lives, we need to make deliberate efforts to bring them or send them to beautiful natural areas. Without phones.

First, Émile Durkheim showed that human beings move up and down between two levels: the profane and the sacred. The profane is our ordinary self-focused consciousness. The sacred is the realm of the collective. Groups of individuals become a cohesive community when they engage in rituals that move them in and out of the realm of the sacred together. The virtual world, in contrast, gives no structure to time or space and is entirely profane. This is one reason why virtual communities are not usually as satisfying or meaning-giving as real-world communities.

Second, religious rituals always involve bodily movement with symbolic significance, often carried out synchronously with others. Eating together has a special power to bond people together. The virtual world is, by definition, disembodied, and most of its activities are conducted asynchronously.

Third, many religions and spiritual practices use stillness, sil...

Sixth, the grandeur of nature is among the most universal and easily accessible routes to experiencing awe, an emotion that is closely linked to spiritual practices and progress.

Documents brought out by the whistleblower Frances Haugen show that Meta has long been trying to study and attract preteens, and has even considered how to reach children as young as 4.[8]

A phone “ban” limited to class time is nearly useless. This is why schools should go phone-free for the entirety of the school day.

This suggests that smartphones are exacerbating educational inequality by both social class and race. The “digital divide” is no longer that poor kids and racial minorities have less access to the internet, as was feared in the early 2000s; it is now that they have less protection from it.

Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it’s to give them the toys. . . . We can’t make children learn, but we can let them learn.

We should be gardners not carpenters

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 them to get their driver’s licenses as soon as they are eligible, and give them driving lessons and encouragement to use the car, if you have one.

Consider a high school exchange program.

Bigger thrills in nature. Let your teens go on bigger, longer adventures, with their friends or with a group: backpacking, rock climbing, canoeing, hiking, swimming—trips that get them out into nature and inspire real-world thrills, wonder, and competence. Consider programs that run a month or longer with organizations such as Outward Bound

Take a gap year after high school. Many young people go directly to college without any sense of what else is out there. How are they supposed to know what they want to do with their lives—or even whether college is their best option?

Lenore and I have debated the merits of tracking for years. Jayne and I began tracking our children as soon as we gave them phones, and we know it made it easier for us to let them out earlier to begin their free-range childhoods in New York City. But as I have heard Lenore describe the growing surveillance of children and the computer-assisted monitoring of their academic performance, sometimes with instant notification of grades and daily updates on classroom behavior, I have begun to feel creeped out. And even though tracking helped Jayne and me gain confidence in our kids when they were young, and it helps us now to manage family logistics, such as when everyone will get home for dinner, will we ever turn it off? Should we? I don’t know the answer.