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

by Jonathan Haidt

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.

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.

No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children’s entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (roughly age 14). No social media before 16. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers.

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.

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.”

environmental degradation, overpopulation, and ruinous national debt. People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.

They grow rapidly for the first two years, slow down for the next seven to 10, and then undergo a rapid growth spurt during puberty before coming to a halt a few years later. Intriguingly, a child’s brain is already 90% of its full size by around age 5.

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.

These interactions generally have the contrasting features of the virtual world: disembodied, asynchronous, one-to-many, and done either alone or in virtual groups that are easy to join and easy to leave.

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

Life on the platforms forces young people to become their own brand managers, always thinking ahead about the social consequences of each photo, video, comment, and emoji they choose. Each action is not necessarily done “for its own sake.” Rather, every public action is, to some degree, strategic. It is, in Peter Gray’s phrase, “consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.”

Human children are wired to connect, in part by tuning and synchronizing their movements and emotions with others.

Smartphones can disrupt this essential face-to-face interaction. Pew Research has found that 17% of American parents report they are often distracted by their phone when spending time with their child, with another 52% saying they are sometimes distracted.

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.

In fact, brain development in mammals and birds is sometimes called “experience-expectant development”[28] because specific parts of the brain show increased malleability during periods of life when the animal is likely to have a specific kind of experience. The clearest example is the existence of “critical periods,” which are windows of time in which a young animal must learn something, or it will be hard if not impossible to learn later. Ducks, geese, and many other water- or ground-dwelling birds have an evolved learning mechanism called imprinting that tells the babies which adult they must follow. They will follow whatever mother-sized object moves in their field of vision a set number of hours after hatching.

Humans have few true “critical periods” with hard time limits, but we do seem to have several “sensitive periods,” which are defined as periods in which it is very easy to learn something or acquire a skill, and outside of which it is more difficult.

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?”

humans (and other highly sociable mammals, such as dogs), the default setting is a major contributor to their individual personality. People (and dogs) who go through life in discover mode (except when directly threatened) are happier, more sociable, and more eager for new experiences. Conversely, people (and dogs) who are chronically in defend mode are more defensive and anxious, and they have only rare moments of perceived safety. They tend to see new situations, people, and ideas as potential threats, rather than as opportunities.

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!

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

Kids are antifragile and therefore they benefit from risky play, along with a secure base, which helps to shift them over toward discover mode. A play-based childhood is more likely to do that than a phone-based childhood.

the human brain reaches 90% of its adult size by age 5,

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.

A second kind of brain change that occurs during childhood is called myelination, which refers to the coating of the axons of neurons with an insulating sheath of a fatty material, which makes transmission faster across the long-distance connections in those constellations of neurons. These slow processes of pruning and myelination are related to the great trade-off of human brain development: The young child’s brain has enormous potential (it can develop in many ways) but lower ability (it doesn’t do most things as well as an adult brain).

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,

rites of passage around the world take the child through the same three phases. First, there is a separation phase in which young adolescents are removed from their parents and their childhood habits. Then there is a transition phase, led by adults other than the parents who guide the adolescent through challenges and sometimes ordeals. Finally, there is a reincorporation phase that is usually a joyous celebration by the community (including the parents), welcoming the adolescent as a new member of adult society, even though he or she will often receive years of further instruction and support.

In societies that experienced frequent armed conflict with neighboring groups, a warrior ethos usually developed among men, and the transition phase often included a requirement to undergo physical pain, including body piercings or circumcision, to test and then publicly validate one’s manhood. In many Indigenous North American societies, such as the Blackfoot in the Great Plains, the transition phase involved a vision quest in which the boy had to go out alone to a sacred site, chosen by the elders, where he fasted for four days while praying to the spirits for a vision or revelation of his purpose in life and the role he was to play in his community.[10]

Despite the pain and humiliation required for entry, many young people are willing to participate in these rites for the opportunity to join a binding social group and to transition away from childhood’s parental dependency and into peer-oriented young adulthood. This suggests that there may be a deep need among many adolescents for belonging and for the rites and rituals that create and express that belonging. Can we use that knowledge to improve adolescents’ transitions to adulthood?

Age 6: The age of family responsibility.

Age 8: The age of local freedom. Children gain the freedom to play and hang out in groups without

Age 10: The age of roaming.

Age 12: The age of apprenticeship.

Age 14: The beginning of high school.

Age 16: The beginning of internet adulthood.

Age 18: The beginning of legal adulthood.

It’s painful to be ignored, at any age. Just imagine being a teen trying to develop a sense of who you are and where you fit, while everyone you meet tells you, indirectly: You’re not as important as the people on my phone.

In 1890, the great American psychologist William James described attention as “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. . . . It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” [43] 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.

People can’t really multitask; all we can do is shift attention back and forth between tasks while wasting a lot of it on each shift.[47]

Now we know that when an action is followed by a good outcome (such as gaining food, or relieving pain, or just achieving a goal), certain brain circuits involved with learning release a bit of dopamine—the neurotransmitter most centrally involved in feelings of pleasure and pain. The release of dopamine feels good; we register it in our consciousness. But it’s not a passive reward that satisfies us and reduces our craving. Rather, dopamine circuits are centrally involved in wanting, as in “that felt great, I want more!” When you eat a potato chip, you get a small hit of dopamine, which is why you then want the second one even more than you wanted the first one.

The loop starts with an external trigger, such as a notification that someone commented on one of her posts. That’s step 1, the off-ramp inviting her to leave the path she was on. It appears on her phone and automatically triggers a desire to perform an action (step 2) that had previously been rewarded: touching the notification to bring up the Instagram app. The action then leads to a pleasurable event, but only sometimes, and this is step 3: a variable reward. Maybe she’ll find some expression of praise or friendship, maybe not. This is a key discovery of behaviorist psychology: It’s best not to reward a behavior every time the animal does what you want. If you reward an animal on a variable-ratio schedule (such as one time out of every 10 times, on average, but sometimes fewer, sometimes more), you create the strongest and most persistent behavior.

surge of dopamine in anticipation of the reward. It runs to the bar and starts pressing. But if the first few presses yield no reward, that does not dampen the rat’s enthusiasm. Rather, as the rat continues to press, dopamine levels will go up in anticipation of the reward, which must be coming at any moment! When the reward finally comes, it feels great, but the heightened levels of dopamine make the rat continue to press, in anticipation of the next reward, which will come . . . after some unknown number of presses, so just keep pressing! There is no off-ramp in an app with a bottomless feed; there is no signal to stop.

Humans can be offered ways to put a bit of themselves into the app so that it matters more to them. The girl has already filled out her profile, posted many photos

The girl no longer needs a push notification to call her over to Instagram. As she is rereading a difficult passage in her textbook, the thought pops up in her mind: “I wonder if anyone has liked the photo I posted 20 minutes ago?”

The teenage brain is usually about 80% mature. The remaining 20% rests in the frontal cortex. . . . At this time teens are highly dependent on their temporal lobe where emotions, memory and learning, and the reward system reign supreme.

Screenshot of an internal Facebook presentation, brought out by Frances Haugen. The caption says, “Teens’ decisions and behavior are mainly driven by emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward. While these all seem positive, they make teens very vulnerable at the elevated levels they operate on. Especially in the absence of a mature frontal cortex to help impose limits on the indulgence in these.” (Source: The Facebook Files, section

Unfortunately, when an addicted person’s brain adapts by counteracting the effect of the drug, the brain then enters a state of deficit when the user is not taking the drug. If dopamine release is pleasurable, dopamine deficit is unpleasant. Ordinary life becomes boring and even painful without the drug. Nothing feels good anymore, except the drug. The addicted person is in a state of withdrawal, which will go away only if she can stay off the drug long enough for her brain to return to its default state (usually a few weeks).

To which I respond: Yes, let’s imagine a world in which the only way that children and adolescents could connect was by telephone, text, Skype, Zoom, FaceTime, and email, or by going over to each other’s homes and talking or playing outside. And let’s imagine a world in which the only way they could find information was by using Google, Bing, Wikipedia, YouTube,[67] and the rest of the internet, including blogs, news sites, and the websites of the many nonprofit organizations devoted to their specific interests.[68]

Social media use is a cause of anxiety, depression, and other ailments, not just a correlate.