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

by Jonathan Haidt

Boys gravitated to watching YouTube videos, to using text-based platforms such as Reddit, and especially to playing online multiplayer video games. Girls became much heavier users of the new visually oriented platforms, primarily Instagram, followed by Snapchat, Pinterest, and Tumblr.[24]

The visually oriented platforms all used the business model developed by Facebook: Maximize time spent on the platform in order to maximize the extraction of data and the value of the user to advertisers.

Agency arises from striving to individuate and expand the self and involves qualities such as efficiency, competence, and assertiveness. Communion arises from striving to integrate the self in a larger social unit through caring for others and involves qualities such as benevolence, cooperativeness, and empathy.[29]

Girls are especially vulnerable to harm from constant social comparison because they suffer from higher rates of one kind of perfectionism: socially prescribed perfectionism,

authors conclude that “social comparison takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluations.” This means that the frequent reminders girls give each other that social media is not reality are likely to have only a limited effect, because the part of the brain that is doing the comparisons is not governed by the part of the brain that knows, consciously, that they are seeing only edited highlight reels.

a follow-up study, Christakis and Fowler teamed up with the psychiatrist James Rosenquist to see whether negative emotional states, such as depression, also spread in networks, using the same data set.[54]

Depression was significantly more contagious than happiness or good mental health.

When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%.

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 d...

Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, explains this transformation well: “What the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills: You need intelligence, you need an ability to sit still and focus, to communicate openly to be able to listen to people and to operate in a workplace that is much more fluid than it used to be. Those are things that women do extremely well.”[7] She notes that by 2009, “for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who continue to occupy around half of the nation’s jobs.”[8]

level of education, from kindergarten through PhD, girls are leaving boys in the dust. Boys get lower grades, they have higher rates of ADHD, they are more likely to be unable to read, and they are less likely to graduate from high school, in part because they are three times as likely as girls to be expelled or suspended along the way.[10] The gender disparities are often small at the upper end, among the wealthiest families, but they grow much larger as we move down the socioeconomic ladder.

First, the rise of safetyism in the 1980s and 1990s hit boys harder than girls, because boys engage in more rough-and-tumble play and more risky play. When playtime was shortened, pulled indoors, and over-supervised, boys lost more than girls. The second psychological effect is the result of boys taking up online multiplayer video games in the late 2000s and smartphones in the early 2010s, both of which pulled boys decisively away from face-to-face or shoulder-to-shoulder interaction.

When I began examining boys’ mental health trends for this book, I came across a striking finding. Throughout my research career, it has been common knowledge that as adolescents reach puberty, boys and girls exhibit distinct patterns in their mental health challenges. Girls typically exhibit higher rates of internalizing disorders like depression and anxiety, turning their emotions and suffering inward. Boys, on the other hand, tend to exhibit higher rates of externalizing disorders, turning their emotions outward and engaging in high risk or antisocial behavior that often affects others, such as drunk driving, violence, and drug abuse. 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,

fact, adolescent boys are now not much different from adolescent girls, or from men in their 50s and 60s.[29]

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.

do not find clear evidence that would support a blanket warning to parents to keep their boys entirely away from video games.[46] The situation is different from the many studies that link girls, social media, anxiety, and depression.[47]

First, video games can cause severe problems for a substantial subset of heavy users, like Chris, where the key is not just the quantity of play; it is the role that games have come to play in their lives.[51]

gamers can be divided into four groups: addicted, problematic, engaged, and casual.[54]

Addicted gamers include those who admit to suffering all four of the items on a questionnaire that asks about addiction symptoms: relapse, withdrawal, conflict, and gaming causing problems.

“problematic gamer” endorses just two or three of those four addiction

“engaged gamers” play for many hours, but do not endorse any of the addictive items. Prevalence estimates vary,[58]

Why, then, did boys’ mental health get worse in the 2010s, just as they attained unfettered access to everything, everywhere, all the time, for free? Maybe it’s because it’s not healthy for any human being to have unfettered access to everything, everywhere, all the time, for free.

Drawing on data that was just becoming available as governments began to keep statistics, he noted that in Europe the general rule was that the more tightly people are bound into a community that has the moral authority to restrain their desires, the less likely they are to kill themselves. A central concept

anomie, or normlessness—an absence of stable and widely shared norms and rules.

Durkheim was concerned that modernity, with its rapid and disorienting changes and its tendency to weaken the grip of traditional religions, fostered anomie and thus suicide. He wrote that when we feel the social order weakening or ...

Self-transcendence is among the central features of spiritual experience, and it turns out that the loss of self has a neural signature. There is a set of linked structures in the brain that are more active whenever we are processing events from an egocentric point of view—thinking about what I want, what I need to do next, or what other people think of me. These brain structures are so often active together that they are collectively called the default mode network (DMN), meaning it is what the brain is usually doing, except in the special times when it is not.[17]

Awe causes “shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning.”[32]

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.

These experiences are valuable. But as we’ve seen before, our phones drown us in quantity while reducing quality. You watch a morally elevating short video, feel moved, and then scroll to the next short video, in which someone is angry about something.

In a phone-based life, we are exposed to an extraordinary amount of content, much of it chosen by algorithms and pushed to us via notifications that interrupt whatever we were doing. It’s too much, and a lot of it pulls us downward on the divinity dimension. If we want to spend most of our lives above zero on that dimension, we need to take back control of our inputs. We need to take back control of our lives.

collective action problems (or sometimes social dilemmas). Preteens are

As more parents relent, pressure grows on the remaining kids and parents, until the community reaches a stable but unfortunate equilibrium: Everyone really does have a smartphone, everyone disappears into their phones, and the play-based childhood is over.

would anyone treat their customers that way? Because the users are not really the customers for most social media companies. When platforms offer access to information or services for free, it’s usually because the users are the product. Their attention is a precious substance that companies extract and sell to their paying customers—the advertisers.

about what other users are posting (which is hard for platforms to monitor and control[15]) but about design decisions that are 100% within the control of the

In the negotiations over the bill, a compromise was reached that the age would be lowered to 13. That decision had nothing to do with adolescent brain development or maturity; it was just a political compromise. Nonetheless, 13 became the de facto age of “internet adulthood” for the United States, which effectively made it the age of internet adulthood for the world.

We expect liquor stores to enforce age limits. We should expect the same from tech companies.

They are also just beyond what may be the most sensitive period for harm from social media (11–13 for girls, 14–15 for boys[22]).

of neglect: Neglect is when a parent blatantly, willfully, or recklessly disregards a danger to a child so apparent that no reasonable person would allow the child to engage in that activity. In other words, it is not neglect when you simply take your eyes off your children. This clarification protects parents who give their kids more independence for its own sake, as well as those who do so out of economic necessity, like Debra Harrell.

Gopnik says that parents began to think like carpenters who have a clear idea in mind of what they are trying to achieve. They look carefully at the materials they have to work with, and it is their job to assemble those materials into a finished product that can be judged by everyone against clear standards: Are the right angles perfect? Does the door work? Gopnik notes that “messiness and variability are a carpenter’s enemies; precision and control are her allies. Measure twice, cut once.”[1] Gopnik says that a better way to think about child rearing is as a gardener. Your job is to “create a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish.” It takes some work, but you don’t have to be a perfectionist. Weed the garden, water it, and then step back and the plants will do their thing, unpredictably and often with delightful surprises.

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

In this book I have argued that we have vastly and needlessly overprotected our children in the real world. In Gopnik’s terms: Many of us have adopted an overcontrolling carpenter mentality, which prevents our children from flourishing. At the same time, we have underprotected our children in the virtual world by leaving them to their own devices and failing to do much weeding. We let the internet and social media take over the garden.

Smartphones, tablets, computers, and televisions are not suitable for very young children. Compared with other objects and toys, these devices transmit intense and gripping sensory stimulation. At the same time, they encourage more passive behavior and information consumption, which can delay learning. This is why most authorities recommend against making screens a part of daily life in the first two years, and using them sparingly until the age of 6 or so.[5] The child’s brain is “expecting” to wire up in a three-dimensional, five-senses world of people and things.

For children 2–5, limit noneducational screen time to about one hour per weekday and 3 hours on the weekend days.

Turn off all screens during family meals and outings.[9]

1. AnxiousGeneration.com This is the main hub for resources related to The Anxious Generation. It has separate pages where I collect research and advice for parents, for schools, for Gen Z, and for readers interested in the spiritual practices I described in chapter 8. It will also have links to the next two resources.