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Summary
Summary
THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
From New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health--and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.
"Erudite, engaging, combative, crusading." -- New York Times Book Review
"Words that chill the parental heart... thanks to Mr. Haidt, we can glimpse the true horror of what happened not only in the U.S. but also elsewhere in the English-speaking world... lucid, memorable... galvanizing." -- Wall Street Journal
"[An] important new book...The shift in kids' energy and attention from the physical world to the virtual one, Haidt shows, has been catastrophic, especially for girls." --Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?
In The Anxious Generation , social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the "play-based childhood" began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the "phone-based childhood" in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this "great rewiring of childhood" has interfered with children's social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.
Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the "collective action problems" that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.
Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes--communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children--and ourselves--from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
At the start of the 2010s, rates of teenage mental illness took a sharp upward turn, and they have been rising ever since. Among US college students, diagnoses of depression and anxiety more than doubled between 2010 and 2018. More worrying still, in the decade to 2020 the number of emergency room visits for self-harm rose by 188% among teenage girls in the US and 48% among boys. The suicide rate for younger adolescents also increased, by 167% among girls and 91% among boys. A similar trend has been observed in the UK and many other western countries. The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes this mental health crisis has been driven by the mass adoption of smartphones, along with the advent of social media and addictive online gaming. He calls it "the Great Rewiring of Childhood". Children are spending ever less time socialising in person and ever more time glued to their screens, with girls most likely to be sucked into the self-esteem crushing vortex of social media, and boys more likely to become hooked on gaming and porn. Childhood is no longer "play-based", it's "phone-based". Haidt believes that parents have become overprotective in the offline world, delaying the age at which children are deemed safe to play unsupervised or run errands alone, but do too little to protect children from online dangers. We have allowed the young too much freedom to roam the internet, where they are at risk of being bullied and harassed or encountering harmful content, from graphic violence to sites that glorify suicide and self-harm. Haidt is a professor at New York University and frequently collaborates with the American psychologist Jean Twenge, who was one of the first to attribute rising rates of mental illness among gen Z (those born in the mid to late 1990s) to smartphones. Sceptics of this research sometimes argue that young people simply have more things to feel anxious and depressed about, between climate change, rising inequality, global conflict and political perma-crisis. But Haidt makes his case persuasively. Earlier generations have also grown up in the shadow of war and global instability, he points out, and collective crises don't typically produce individual psychological ones, perhaps because they often engender a sense of greater social solidarity and purpose. Instead, the evidence linking mental illness to smartphones and social media use is mounting. The British millennium cohort study, which followed 19,000 children born in 2000-02, found that, among girls especially, rates of depression rose in tandem with hours spent on social media. Girls who spent more than five hours a day on social media were three times more likely to become depressed than those who didn't use it at all. This study alone isn't enough to prove that social media causes depression (it's possible that depressed people spend more time online) - but there's more. Facebook was initially offered only to students at a small number of universities, so one study compared the mental health of students at institutions with Facebook with those who didn't yet have social media - and found that Facebook increased poor mental health on campus. Five other studies have demonstrated a link between the arrival of high-speed internet and rising rates of mental illness. So why might "phone-based" childhoods have this effect? Smartphones pull us away from our immediate surroundings and the people closest to us, rendering us, as the sociologist Sherry Turkle puts it, "forever elsewhere". Teens are not only the most compulsive smartphone users - one 2022 Pew Media report found that 46% of them are online "almost constantly" - but they are also the most vulnerable, partly because adolescence is a period of rapid social and emotional development. Smartphones are "experience blockers", Haidt writes: consider how many enriching activities were displaced when young people began spending hours a day online, chasing likes, following vapid influencers, substituting the richness of real-life friendship with shallow online communication. Social media encourages constant social comparison, and it can be unforgiving and cruel. These observations might sound old-fashioned, but they are also true. What middle-aged adult doesn't feel relief to have grown up before smartphones? Adolescence was hard enough without the threat of online humiliation, the possibility of quantifying, through engagement and follower numbers, exactly how much of a loser you are. One avenue Haidt doesn't explore, which feels like an omission, is that his critics might be partly right about teenagers feeling anxious and depressed in response to global events - or at least to coverage of them. Could the internet's 24-hour news cycle, its emotional fever-pitch and the sharing of graphic frontline footage, be contributing to a permanent sense of threat? It has certainly distorted our perspective on current affairs, amplifying people's sense of personal danger. As the Oxford climate scientist Hannah Ritchie observed in her recent book, Not the End of the World, death rates from natural disasters have fallen tenfold in the past century, but almost everyone thinks they have risen. It's also clear that today's defining crises, such as the pandemic and climate change, won't necessarily deepen social solidarity in an era of filter bubbles and "alternative facts". Haidt's theory that overprotective parents are contributing to the mental health crisis is much less substantiated than his research on phones. He argues that children are "antifragile": like saplings that need to be buffeted by winds in order to grow properly, they need to experience setbacks to develop resilience. Mollycoddled kids become defensive and insecure, Haidt writes, starting to view ideas as dangerous and demanding safety from beliefs they find challenging. This is an argument he advanced in his 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, co-written with Greg Lukianoff. In the years since, it has become painfully apparent that the groups most likely to treat ideas as dangerous are the ultra-conservatives who organise book bans - and most of these rightwing activists are old enough to have enjoyed free-range childhoods themselves. I actually agree with Haidt that children ought to be given greater freedom to play unsupervised, but he overstates his case. The Anxious Generation is nonetheless an urgent and essential read, and it ought to become a foundational text for the growing movement to keep smartphones out of schools, and young children off social media. As well as calling for school phone bans, Haidt argues that governments should legally assert that tech companies have a duty of care to young people, the age of internet adulthood should be raised to 16, and companies forced to institute proper age verification - all eminently sensible and long overdue interventions. I felt a gnawing anxiety as I read the book, thinking not only of my three young children, who I'd like to keep away from the badlands of social media for as long as possible, but also of the uncounted hours I have spent on my phone, mindlessly scrolling. "There's a God-shaped hole in every human heart," Haidt writes, paraphrasing the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. "If it doesn't get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage." Maybe we ought to start thinking more about all the things we didn't look at, all the people we didn't speak to, all the thoughts we didn't allow ourselves to finish, because we were glued to our stupid smartphones.
Kirkus Review
A pitched argument against the "firehose of addictive content" aimed at children via technology. Psychologist Haidt, author of The Righteous Mindand co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, turns to the disaffection of children rendered zombielike by their smartphones and social media. "The members of Gen Z are…the test subjects for a radical new way of growing up," he writes, their sensibilities formed by the instant gratifications and instant peer-pressure judgments delivered by online outlets. Before 2009, writes the author, social media use was largely harmless, mostly a means of keeping up with friends and family, without the toxicity inherent in being constantly subject to opinions given and received--a good way to get locked into "defend mode…on permanent alert for threats, rather than being hungry for new experiences." This corresponds to the shift, beginning in the 1980s, from what Haidt calls "play-based childhood" to "phone-based childhood," one effect of which is to remove children from the socialization they would otherwise have undergone simply by one-on-one play. It wasn't necessarily phones but overanxious parents who took down the sky-high monkey bars. However, coupled with the rapid rise of addictive technology, this drove children indoors and into anxieties and depressions of their own as their lives are "radically rewired." Haidt concludes by advocating a regime of free play and strictly monitored social media use, including not allowing children under high school age to have smartphones and forming parental associations that would essentially police for this kind of behavior. That program may seem draconian, especially to a 12- or 13-year-old, but Haidt argues persuasively that it's an essential defense against the assaults on mental health that social media inflict on unformed young minds. A strong case for tempering children's technological dependency in favor of fresh air and sunshine. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Portable telephones were originally celebrated as a way to stay connected to friends and family. But in the early 2010s, with the onset of smartphones and their easy access to the internet, children's brains were being effectively rewired, shifting from "play-based" to "phone-based." Parents, who worked to keep their children safe from outdoor play and predators, now allowed their kids to stroll unfettered through the internet. Excessive phone use can lead to social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. For young women, Haidt writes, it can lead to depression; for young men, it can lead to existing in their own separate realities. The author admits to some benefits of online use for children, including lower rates of injury and alcohol use and a measure of intellectual stimulation, but the pluses are overshadowed by the loss of social interactions and life experiences. Academic Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind, 2018) backs up his claims with scientific studies and graphics, and presents plans to limit the effects of smartphones by large tech companies, schools, and parents. This is a practical look at a vital topic.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Part 1 A Tidal Wave Chapter 1 THE SURGE OF SUFFERING When I talk with parents of adolescents, the conversation often turns to smartphones, social media, and video games. The stories parents tell me tend to fall into a few common patterns. One is the "constant conflict" story: Parents try to lay down rules and enforce limits, but there are just so many devices, so many arguments about why a rule needs to be relaxed, and so many ways around the rules, that family life has come to be dominated by disagreements about technology. Maintaining family rituals and basic human connections can feel like resisting an ever-risingtide, one that engulfs parents as well as children. For most of the parents I talk to, their stories don't center on any diagnosed mental illness. Instead, there is an underlying worry that something unnatural is going on, and that their children are missing something--really, almost everything--as their online hours accumulate. But sometimes the stories parents tell me are darker. Parents feel that they have lost their child. A mother I spoke with in Boston told me about the efforts she and her husband had made to keep their fourteen-year-old daughter, Emily, away from Instagram. They could see the damaging effects it was having on her. To curb her access, they tried various programs to monitor and limit the apps on her phone. However, family life devolved into a constant struggle in which Emily eventually found ways around the restrictions. In one distressing episode, she got into her mother's phone, disabled the monitoring software, and threatened to kill herself if her parents reinstalled it. Her mother told me: It feels like the only way to remove social media and the smartphone from her life is to move to a deserted island. She attended summer camp for six weeks each summer where no phones were permitted--no electronics at all. Whenever we picked her up from camp she was her normal self. But as soon as she started using her phone again it was back to the same agitation and glumness. Last year I took her phone away for two months and gave her a flip phone and she returned to her normal self. When I hear such stories about boys, they usually involve video games (and sometimes pornography) rather than social media, particularly when a boy makes the transition from being a casual gamer to a heavy gamer. I met a carpenter who told me about his 14 year-old son, James, who has mild autism. James had been making good progress in school before COVID arrived, and also in the martial art of judo. But once schools were shut down, when James was eleven, his parents bought him a PlayStation, because they had to find something for him to do at home. At first it improved James's life--he really enjoyed the games and social connections. But as he started playing Fortnite for lengthening periods of time, his behavior began to change. "That's when all the depression, anger, and laziness came out. That's when he started snapping at us," the father told me. To address James's sudden change in behavior, he and his wife took all of his electronics away. When they did this, James showed withdrawal symptoms, including irritability and aggressiveness, and he refused to come out of his room. Although the intensity of his symptoms lessened after a few days, his parents still felt trapped: "We tried to limit his use, but he doesn't have any friends, other than those he communicates with online, so how much can we cut him off?" No matter the pattern or severity of their story, what is common among parents is the feeling that they are trapped and powerless. Most parents don't want their children to have a phone-based childhood, but somehow the world has reconfigured itself so that any parent who resists is condemning their children to social isolation. In the rest of this chapter, I'm going to show you evidence that something big is happening, something changed in the lives of young people in the early 2010s that made their mental health plunge. But before we immerse ourselves in the data, I wanted to share with you the voices of parents who feel that their children were in some sense swept away, and who are now struggling to get them back. Excerpted from The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Introduction: Growing Up on Mars | 1 |
Part 1 A Tidal Wave | |
1 The Surge of Suffering | 21 |
Part 2 The Backstory: The Decline of the Play-Based Childhood | |
2 What Children Need to Do in Childhood | 49 |
3 Discover Mode and the Need For Risky Play | 67 |
4 Puberty and the Blocked Transition to Adulthood | 95 |
Part 3 The Great Rewiring: The Rise of the Phone-Based Childhood | |
5 The Four Foundational Harms: Social Deprivation, Sleep Deprivation, Attention Fragmentation, and Addiction | 113 |
6 Why Social Media Harms Girls More Than Boys | 143 |
7 What Is Happening to Boys? | 173 |
8 Spiritual Elevation and Degradation | 199 |
Part 4 Collective Action for Healthier Childhood | |
9 Preparing for Collective Action | 221 |
10 What Governments and Tech Companies Can Do Now | 227 |
11 What Schools Can Do Now | 247 |
12 What Parents Can Do Now | 267 |
Conclusion: Bring Childhood Back to Earth | 289 |
Acknowledgments | 297 |
Notes | 301 |
References | 339 |
Index | 369 |