'The Anxious Generation': Things Are Worse Than We Realized
My thoughts on Jonathan Haidt's impressive new book
In his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, NYU professor Jonathan Haidt talks about a classic psychology study where participants were brought into rooms to discuss problems with urban life. While they sat filling out questionnaires, the rooms filled with smoke. The real experiment was to see how people would react to an emergency. The researchers found that, in larger groups, people waited to see what everyone else was doing before taking action. If no one moved, neither did they. Solitary participants were far more likely to seek help.
The conclusion: People wait to take their cues from others to determine whether something is an emergency.
This is a great analogy for the current situation with kids and digital media. Haidt writes, “The diffusion of digital technology into children’s lives has been like smoke pouring into our homes. We all see that something strange is happening, but we don’t understand it. We fear that the smoke is having bad effects on our children, but when we look around, nobody is doing much about it.”
I suspect that many parents have had a little voice in the back of their heads for years, saying, “This doesn’t seem right.” But because everyone else is propping up iPads on infant car seats, giving kids smartphones in grade 5, and letting teens post selfies and play video games for 8+ hours a day, then it must be OK. After all, parenting is hard and confusing, and humans have always looked to others to determine what is normal behaviour.
Haidt’s hefty new book, which just came out in late March 2024, is the smoke alarm going off at full volume. It is a wake-up call like no other I’ve ever read. The Anxious Generation presents the most comprehensive, data-backed, and up-to-date argument for the fact that the introduction of smartphones (and all associated digital media) between 2010 and 2015 is to blame for children’s spiking rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide—what he describes as “a surge in suffering.”
An identical pattern has been found across major Anglo and Nordic countries during the same period and cannot be explained by other factors, such as financial crises, school shootings, politics, or climate change.
Goodbye, Play. Hello, Phones.
The book contends that the replacement of a “play-based childhood” by a “phone-based” one has fundamentally changed kids’ experiences of growing up. By replacing free independent play with sedentary handheld devices, we have created a completely foreign environment for kids to inhabit, one to which they have not yet evolutionarily adapted; and so, it’s not surprising that they’re failing to thrive.
Kids desperately need active play with other children to learn social and language skills, to develop physical ability, to enjoy a feeling of connection to others—and they need a ton of it. “Childhood is an apprenticeship for learning the skills needed for success in one’s culture,” Haidt writes. But that experience is being stunted by parents who have become (irrationally) scared of the real world and prefer to keep their kids close and indoors, on devices that they perceive (incorrectly) to be safer. This “overprotection in the real world, underprotection in the virtual one” has devastating consequences for development.
Haidt lays out four foundational harms of the phone-based childhood that explain why mental health deteriorated with the uptake of smartphones. These are:
Social deprivation: U.S. teens spend far less time in person with friends.
Sleep deprivation: Sleep quantity and quality have plummeted.
Attention fragmentation: Teens get hundreds of notifications daily, which destroys their ability to stay on task.
Addiction: Teens are compelled to use phones in ways that resemble slot machine gamblers, with profound consequences to their well-being and relationships.
Girls vs. Boys
The phone-based childhood is affecting girls and boys differently.
Girls are being shattered by social media, particularly if they start using it before and during puberty (11-13 is the most vulnerable period, but it never stops being dangerous). Girls are uniquely vulnerable to the design of platforms like Instagram because they are (1) more affected by visual comparison and their social standing has always been more tied to looks than it has been for boys; (2) their aggression is more relational, and these platforms give them an easy way to be mean; (3) they share emotions more readily, and emotions are contagious among girl groups; (4) girls are more subject to predation and often spend their online time in “defend” mode.
Boys have taken a different trajectory, but it’s still bad. They have pulled away from engaging in the real world, replacing it with video games and pornography, which has huge social repercussions. Haidt argues that boys have been in decline since the 1970s, with many males feeling purposeless and adrift in a society that often feels inhospitable to them. The digital world brought opportunities to "do the agency-building activities they craved, such as exploring, competing, playing at war, mastering skills,” but it has come at the cost of feeling profoundly lonely and disconnected and failing to develop real-life skills.
I was especially fascinated by the graph on Hospital Admissions for Unintentional Injuries. Teenage boys used to be the most at-risk group for things like broken arms and wrists, but now they’re at lower risk of injury than middle-aged men. Why? They’re no longer doing things that could lead to a fall, like riding bikes over ramps and climbing trees. They’re tucked away in their rooms, playing video games. It’s a terrible trade-off.
The Solution
Haidt does a great job of laying out an action plan, which I appreciated after so much depressing information. He divides responsibilities among government and tech companies, schools, and parents. But to summarize for an easy takeaway, it comes down to four central things. If these were implemented right away, Haidt maintains that communities would see a significant improvement in kids’ well-being within two years.
No smartphones before high school
No social media before 16
No phones in schools
More free independent play
To be clear, the first two are minimums. Grade 9 is still awfully early to get phones, and boys are most susceptible to negative effects at age 14-15, which is right when they’re starting high school. I think it’s better to wait even longer.
Reflection
I finished the book with a surge of sadness mixed with outrage. As I closed it, I said to my husband, “I’m ready to wage war.” But I also felt deep grief at what we’ve done (and continue to do) societally to children. I fear we will look back someday in horror at what we took away from them and replaced it with. The thought makes me queasy.
I appreciated the chapter called “Spiritual Elevation and Degradation,” which was a curious philosophical dive into what we lose when we let phones take over our lives, and what ancient practices have taught us about what it means to live a good life. Phones don’t offer true value. Haidt, an atheist, wrote:
“There is an emptiness in us all that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage. That has been true since the beginning of the age of mass media, but the garbage pump got 100 times more powerful in the 2010s.”
Where I felt the book lacked was in his discussion of parental behaviour—and that’s where it gets tricky. Perhaps he tiptoed around it because he wanted to avoid the landmine label of “parent shaming,” but it’s important to emphasize that, in light of this crisis, parents need to act differently. They are responsible for shaping children’s lives. Children can’t do it themselves. Just like a food diet, a child’s “digital diet” is at the mercy of the parent’s choices and example. I touched on this topic in my post, “It’s the Adults, Not the Kids,” and I maintain that the issue needs to be confronted, as uncomfortable as it is.
The Anxious Generation is a must-read for any parent concerned about digital media. I will be recommending it to everyone. Learn more about Haidt’s work on his Substack, After Babel.
More Posts on Books & Reading:
On Reading More Books
Books I Enjoyed This Year (2023)
This Is What It’s Like to Record an Audiobook
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I teach at a university, and the class I teach relevant to this comment is an introductory class to environmental science. I took the class to the school's arboretum today and gave them 10 questions to answer about what they could find in the woods. I let them use apps, like iNaturalist and Merlin, but I sensed a problem when I watched them work. They could use the apps, but they did not know how to look. They look through their phones, they don't use the phone as a tool. They don't see or use their own senses directly. Of course, the problem is variable, and one student just wandered around happily after class looking at flowers. He was the only one who did not leave before the class was officially over. Now, at home, I saw your post. I copied it, made a .pdf document of it and posted it to my class. Perhaps one student might read Haidt's work, and hopefully many of them will read yours. You are touching on a problem that manifests itself as "The Sound of Silence" before class starts, and I am afraid "They do not know that silence like a cancer grows." Thanks for the review.
Wow definitely picking up a copy of this! Thanks for sharing your thoughts!