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

by Jonathan Haidt

No company could ever take our children away and endanger them without our consent, or they would face massive liabilities. Right?

Social media companies are making products that are useful for adults, helping them to find information, jobs, friends, love, and sex; making shopping and political organizing more efficient; and making life easier in a thousand ways. Most of us would be happy to live in a world with no tobacco, but social media is far more valuable, helpful, and even beloved by many adults. Some adults have problems with addiction to social media and other online activities, but as with tobacco, alcohol, or gambling we generally leave it up to them to make their own decisions. The same is not true for minors.

We don’t let preteens buy tobacco or alcohol, or enter casinos. The costs of using social media, in particular, are high for adolescents, compared with adults, while the benefits are minimal. Let children grow up on Earth first, before sending them to Mars.

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. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness—perpetually—to managing what became their online brand. This

was now necessary to gain acceptance from peers, which is the oxygen of adolescence, and to avoid online shaming, which is the nightmare of adolescence. 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. 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.

As the transition from play-based to phone-based childhood proceeded, many children and adolescents were perfectly happy to stay indoors and play online, but in the process they lost exposure to the kinds of challenging physical and social experiences that all young mammals need to develop basic competencies, overcome innate childhood fears, and prepare to rely less on their parents. Virtual interactions with peers do not fully compensate for these experiential losses. Moreover, those whose playtime and social lives moved online found themselves increasingly wandering through adult spaces, consuming adult content, and interacting with adults in ways that are often harmful to minors. So even while parents worked to eliminate risk and freedom in the real world, they generally, and often unknowingly, granted full independence in the virtual world, in part because most found it

difficult to understand what was going on there, let alone know what to restrict or how to restrict it. 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.

The key factor is the commitment required to make relationships work. When people are raised in a community that they cannot easily escape, they do what our ancestors have done for millions of years: They learn how to manage relationships, and how to manage themselves and their emotions in order to keep those precious relationships going. There are certainly many online communities that have found ways to create strong interpersonal commitments and a feeling of belonging, but in general, when children are raised in multiple mutating networks where they don’t need to use their real names and they can quit with the click of a button, they are less likely to learn such skills.

This book has four parts. THEY explain the mental health trends among adolescents since 2010 (part 1); the nature of childhood and how we messed it up (part 2); the harms that result

from the new phone-based childhood (part 3); and what we must do now to reverse the damage in our families, schools, and societies (part 4). Change is possible, if we can act together.

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?

An important feature of depression for this book is its link to social relationships. People are more likely to become depressed when they become (or feel) more socially disconnected, and depression then makes people less interested and able to seek out social connection. As with anxiety, there is a vicious circle. So I’ll be paying close attention to friendship and social relationships in this book. We’ll see that a play-based childhood strengthens them, while a phone-based childhood weakens them.

As children seek out experiences and practice a range of skills, the neurons and synapses that are used infrequently fade away, while frequent connections solidify and quicken. In other words, evolution has provided humans an extended childhood that allows for a long period of learning the accumulated knowledge of one’s society—a kind of cultural apprenticeship, during adolescence, before one is seen and treated as an adult.

Play is the work of childhood,[5] and all young mammals have the same job: Wire up your brain by playing vigorously and often. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and come out socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

Physical play, outdoors and with other children of mixed ages, is the healthiest, most natural, most beneficial sort of play. Play with some degree of physical risk is essential because it teaches children how to look after themselves and each other.

When parents, teachers, and coaches get involved, it becomes less free, less playful, and less beneficial. Adults usually can’t stop themselves from directing and protecting.

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.

It’s as if we gave our infants iPads loaded with movies about walking, but the movies were so engrossing that kids never put in the time or effort to practice walking.

The way young people use social media is generally not much like free play.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You learn how to handle your body and how to keep yourself and others safe. Researchers who study children at play have concluded that the risk of minor injuries should be a feature, not a bug, in playground design.

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

Like young trees exposed to wind, children who are routinely exposed to small risks grow up to become adults who can handle much larger risks without panicking. Conversely, children who are raised in a protected greenhouse sometimes become incapacitated by anxiety before they reach maturity.

Fears of abduction and sex criminals had been rising since the 1980s, but even still, the general pattern for children in elementary and middle school up through the 1980s was that after school and on the weekends, kids were on their own to play in their neighborhoods in mixed-age groups, seek thrills, have adventures, work out conflicts, engage in antiphobic risk-taking, develop their intrinsic antifragility, enjoy being in discover mode together—and come home when the streetlights came on. Those after-school hours were probably more valuable for social development and mental health than anything that happened in school (other than recess).

What emerged on campus as emotional safety, in contrast, was a much broader concept that came to mean this: I should not have to experience negative emotions because of what someone else said or did. I have a right not to be “triggered.”

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.

In his textbook on adolescence, the developmental psychologist Laurence Steinberg notes that adolescence is not necessarily an especially stressful time. Rather, it is a time when the brain is more vulnerable to the effects of sustained stressors, which can tilt the adolescent into mental disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, depression, eating disorders,

and substance abuse.

Safetyism was imposed on the millennials beginning slowly in the 1980s and then more quickly in the 1990s.[5] The rapid deterioration of mental health, however, did not begin until the early 2010s and was concentrated in Gen Z, not among millennials.[6] It was not until the addition of the second experience blocker—the smartphone—that rates began to rise.

Are screen-based experiences less valuable than real-life flesh-and-blood experiences? When we’re talking about children whose brains evolved to expect certain kinds of experiences at certain ages, yes. A resounding yes.

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.

In short, adults are doing a variety of things to Gen Z, often with good intentions, that prevent adolescents from experiencing a widely shared and socially validated progression from childhood dependency to adult independence. We interfered with their growth in the 1980s and 1990s when we blocked them from risky play and ramped up adult supervision and

monitoring. We gave them unfettered access to the internet instead, removing all age thresholds that used to mark the path to adulthood. A few years later, we gave their younger siblings smartphones in middle school. Once we had a new generation hooked on smartphones (and other screens) before the start of puberty, there was little space left in the stream of information entering their eyes and ears for guidance from mentors in their real-world communities during puberty. There was just an infinite river of digital experience, customized for each child to maximize clicks and ad revenue, to be consumed ...

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. We want children to feel that they are climbing a ladder with clearly labeled rungs, rather than just having an annual party with games, cake, and presents. It might look something like this:

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 2020, we began telling everyone to avoid proximity to any person outside their “bubble,” but members of Gen Z began socially distancing themselves as soon as they got their first smartphones.

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.[20] It makes sense. Children need face-to-face, synchronous, embodied, physical play. The healthiest play is outdoors and includes occasional physical risk-taking and thrilling adventure. Talking on FaceTime with close friends is good, like an old-fashioned phone call to which a visual channel has been added. In contrast, sitting alone in your bedroom consuming a bottomless feed

of other people’s content, or playing endless hours of video games with a shifting cast of friends and strangers, or posting your own content and waiting for other kids (or strangers) to like or comment is so far from what children need that these activities should not be considered healthy new forms of adolescent interaction; they are alternatives that consume so much time that they reduce the amount of time teens spend together.

Nicholas Carr, in his aptly titled 2010 book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, lamented his lost ability to stay on one path. Life on the internet changed how his brain sought out information, even when he was off-line trying to read a book. It reduced his ability to focus and reflect because he now craved a constant stream of stimulation: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

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.

We need to develop a more nuanced mental map of the digital landscape. Social media is not synonymous with the internet, smartphones are not equivalent to desktop computers or laptops, PacMan is not World of Warcraft, and the 2006 version of Facebook is not the 2024 version of TikTok. Almost all

of it is more harmful to preteens than to older teens. I’m not saying that 11-year-olds should be kept off the internet. I’m saying that the Great Rewiring of Childhood, in which the phone-based childhood replaced the play-based childhood, is the major cause of the international epidemic of adolescent mental illness. We need to be careful about which kids have access to which products, at which ages, and on which devices. Unfettered access to everything, everywhere, at any age has been a disaster, even if there are a few benefits.

Studies of time use routinely find that the average teen reports spending more than seven hours a day on screen-based leisure activities (not including school and homework).