The Anxious Generation

 

Jonathan Haidt, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Chidhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” Penguin, 2024, 295 pp.

Everyone who has children or grandchildren must read this book.

 

Author’s summary of book:

I begin The Anxious Generation by examining adolescent mental health trends. What happened to young people in the early 2010s that triggered the surge of anxiety and depression around 2012?

What happened to young people in the early 2010s?

The Anxious Generation offers an explanation by telling two stories. The first is about the decline of the play-based childhood, which began in the 1980s and accelerated in the ‘90s. All mammals need free play, and lots of it, to wire up their brains during childhood to prepare them for adulthood. But many parents in Anglo countries began to reduce children’s access to unsupervised outdoor free play out of media-fueled fears for their safety, even though the “real world” was becoming increasingly safe in the 1990s. The loss of free play and the rise of continual adult supervision deprived children of what they needed most to overcome the normal fears and anxieties of childhood: the chance to explore, test and expand their limits, build close friendships through shared adventure, and learn how to judge risks for themselves.

The second story is about the rise of the phone-based childhood, which began in the late 2000s and accelerated in the early 2010s. This was precisely the period during which adolescents traded in their flip phones for smartphones, which were loaded with social media platforms supported by the new high-speed internet and unlimited data plans.

The confluence of these two stories in the years between 2010 and 2015 is what I call the “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” Few of us understood what was happening in children’s virtual worlds and we lacked the knowledge to protect them from tech companies that had designed their products to be addictive. 

* * * * *

The book is split into four parts:

 

The Tidal Wave: In this section, I show the basic statistics on the mental health of young people.

The Decline of the Play-Based Childhood: In this section, I discuss the nature of childhood and how we messed it up by depriving children of play and role-models, damaging attachment systems, and erasing any clear path from childhood to adulthood.

The Rise of the Phone-Based Childhood: In this section, I discuss the harms that result from the new phone-based childhood, with a chapter devoted to harms to girls, a chapter on harm to boys, and a chapter on the “spiritual degradation” that is happening to all of us––including adults––from our new phone-based lives.

Collective Actions for Better Childhood: In this final section, I explain what we must do to reverse the damage. I explain how parents, school, governments, tech companies, and young people are trapped in “collective action problems” and how these can be resolved when individuals organize and act together.

As a parent of two adolescents myself, I worked especially hard to offer useful and non-obvious advice to other parents. My most important suggestions:

Give children far more time playing with other children. This play should ideally be outdoors, in mixed age groups, with little or no adult supervision (which is the way most parents grew up, at least until the 1980s).

Look for more ways to embed children in stable real-world communities.  Online networks are not nearly as binding or satisfying.

Don’t give a smartphone as the first phone. Give a phone or watch that is specialized for communication, not for internet-based apps.

Don’t give a smartphone until high school.  This is easy to do, if many of your child’s friends’ parents are doing the same thing.

Delay the opening of accounts on nearly all social media platforms until the beginning of high school (at least). This will become easier to do if we can support legislators who are trying to raise the age of “internet adulthood” from today’s 13 (with no verification) to 16 (with mandatory age verification).

In The Anxious Generation, I explain the major causes of the international epidemic of mental illness that hit adolescents in the early 2010s, and I offer a path forward for parents, teachers, friends, and relatives who want to help improve the mental health of children and adolescents. Change is possible, if we can act together.

My Notes:

Pg. 7: The author proposes that we view the 1980s as the beginning of the transition from a ‘play-based childhood’ to a ‘phone-based childhood,” a transition that was not complete until the mid-2010s, when most adolescents had their own smartphone.  Phone-based is used broadly to include all of the internet-connected personal electronics that came to fill young people’s time, including laptop computers, tablets, internet-connected video game consoles, and, most importantly, smartphones with millions of apps.

Pg. 9:  The author’s central claim in this book is that two trends began in 1995 to dominate the raising of children: overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world.

Pg. 15:  Four foundational reforms for a healthier childhood in the digital age:

1.     No smartphones before age 14.  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. 

2.    No social media before the age of 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.

3.    Phone free schools.  In all schools from elementary through high school, students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked pouches during the school day.  That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers.

4.    Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.  That’s the way children natrurally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

Pg. 63:  Language learning is the clearest case illustrating ‘a critical period.’  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?”

Pg. 65f:  Summary of Chapter 2:

*Human childhood is very different from that of any other animal.  Children’s brains grow to 90% of full size by age 5, but then take a long time to configure themselves.  This slow-growth childhood is an adaptation for cultural learning.  Childhood is an apprenticeship for learning the skills needed for success in one’s culture.

*Free play is as essential for developing social skills, like conflict resolution, as it is for developing physical skills.  But play-based childhoods were replaced by phone-based childhoods as children and adolescents moved their social lives and free time onto internet-connected devices.

*Children learn through play to connect, synchronize, and take turns.  They enjoy attunement and need enormous quantities of it.  Attunement and synchrony bond pairs, groups, and whole communities.  Social media, in contrast, is mostly asynchronous and performative.  It inhibits attunement and leaves heavy users starving for social connection.

*Children are born with two innate learning programs that help them to acquire their local culture.  Conformist bias motivates them to copy whatever seems to be most common.  Prestige bias motivates them to copy whoever seems to be the most accomplished and prestigious.  Social media platforms, which are engineered for engagement, hijack social learning and drown out the culture of one’s family and local community while locking children’s eyes onto influencers of questionable value.

*Social learning occurs throughout childhood, but there may be a sensitive period for cultural learning that spans roughly ages 9 to 15.  Lessons learned and identities formed in these years are likely to imprint, or stick, more than at other ages.  These are the crucial sensitive years of puberty.  Unfortunately, they are also the years in which most adolescents in developed countries get their own phones and move their social lives online.

Pg. 93f:  Chapter 3 Summary:

*The human brain contains two subsystems that put it into two common modes: discover mode (for approaching opportunities) and defend mode (for defending against threats). Young people born after 1995 are more likely to be stuck in defend mode, compared to those born earlier.  They are on permanent alert for threats, rather than being hungry for new experiences.  They are anxious.

*All children are by nature antifragile.  Just as the immune system must be exposed to germs, and trees must be exposed to wind, children require exposure to setbacks, failures, shocks, and stumbles in order to develop strength and self-reliance.  Overprotection interferes with this development and renders young people more likely to be fragile and fearful as adults.

*Kids must have a great deal of free play to develop, and they benefit from risky physical play, which has anti-phobic effects.  Kids seek out the level of risk and thrill that they are ready for, in order to master their fears and develop competencies. N Risk-taking online may not have comparable anti-phobic effects.

*In the 1980s and especially the 1990s, parents in Anglo countries became more fearful for many reasons, including changes in the media ecosystem and news cycle.  They lost trust in each other, they started spending far more time supervising their own children, and they did more parenting in defend mode, seeing risks and threats everywhere.

*The worship of “safety” above all else is called safetyism.  It is dangerous because it makes it harder for children to learn to care for themselves and to deal with risk, conflict, and frustration.

*The attachment system evolved to help young mammals learn the skills they’ll need to reach adulthood while retreating to their ‘secure base” when they feel threatened.  Fearful parenting keeps children on home base too much, preventing them from having the experiences they need to grow strong and to develop a secure attachment style.

*Children are most likely to thrive when they have a play-based childhood in the real world.  They are less likely to thrive when fearful parenting and a phone-based childhood deprive them of opportunities for growth.

Pg. 171:  Two major categories of motivations are agency (the desire to stand out and have an effect on the world) and communion (the desire to connect and develop a sense of belonging).  Boys and girls both want each of these, but there is a gender difference that emerges early in children’s play.  Boys choose more agency activities; girls choose more communion activities.  Social media appeals to the desire for communion, but it often ends up frustrating it.

Pg. 177:  In 1972, women earned only 42% of bachelor’s degrees.  By 1982, women were just as likely as men to graduate from college.  But for the next 20 years women’s enrollment rose rapidly while men’s did not, so that by 2019 the gap had reversed.  Women earned 59% of bachelor’s degrees, while men earned just 41%.  It’s not just college completion, at every level of education, from kindergarten through PhD, girls are leaving boys in the dust.

Pg. 191:  It seems about 7% of adolescent boys are suffering substantial impairment in the real world (school, work, relationships) because of their heavy engagement with video games.  That is one out of every 13 boys.