The Anxious Generation
How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
The preeminent social scientist Jonathan Haidt has given us once again his nigh prophetic pronouncement on the mental health crisis that is choking the rising generation.
What has happened? In short, we have overprotected children in the real world and underprotected them in the virtual world, and now we reap the whirlwind.
To see what form that whirlwind has taken, and how rapidly it coalesced, see here a conveniently condensed PDF of all the charts in the book:
It may have occurred to you by now that a substantial portion of the rising generation, particularly those whose formative years took place from the mid 2010’s onward, are unable to do basic things like hold eye contact and carry a decent conversation. This is no built-in feature of adolescence though — smartphones, the insidious “experience blockers,” are to blame.
Haidt explains that our human connections in the real world share four distinct properties:
Embodied
Synchronous
One-to-one or one-to-several
They happen in communities with high bar for entry and exit
Connection in the virtual world inverts all of these. So when teens spend some eight odd hours a day on their devices, it trains them for the modus operandi of digital communication but not the real thing.
Then there are the four primary harms of smartphone usage:
Social deprivation
Sleep deprivation
Attention fragmentation
Addiction
These don’t need further commentary here. None are good.
At the end of the book he propose four basic but impactful measures we can take now:
No smartphones before high school
No social media before 16
Phone-free schools
Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence
Perhaps all of this has you saying to yourself “no duh.” I said it to myself from beginning to end. But what Haidt has done with this book is masterfully weave together all the most relevant research, under his reputable name, and skillfully articulated the case for immediate action. It is his (and my) hope that his book becomes a catalyst for change — a wake up call to all those who care. This book ought to be in the hands of every parent, legislator, and school administrator in the world.
Collective action is the only way forward, otherwise the corporations that harvest adolescent wellbeing in exchange for money will keep doing their thing.
This has been an ultra-high level view, but the full-length book is very much worth the time and attention. It is written accessibly, with empathy and passion for the well-being of all.
See the associated website here and resources for taking action here.
