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.

we are overprotecting our children in the real world while underprotecting them online.

But resilient objects don’t get better from getting dropped; they merely don’t get worse. Taleb coined the word “antifragile” to describe things that actually need to get knocked over now and then in order to become strong.

Children are intrinsically antifragile, which is why overprotected children are more likely to become adolescents who are stuck in defend mode.

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.