The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
“For Haidt, and for many other parents, we must return childhood to our children.”
What’s bothering Gen Z? In the United States and other western nations, despite overall health and prosperity, the generation born after 1995 has taken a seemingly inexplicable, sustained dive into frightening rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide, while older generations appeared untouched. The reasons, argues social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as are close as the child-rearing practices in our homes and the phones in our hands.
The decline in a play-based childhood and the rise of an ever-increasing focus on “safety,” which began in the late 1980s, together with the early 2010s rise of social media and smart phones that gave immediate access to social media, video games, online (and hardcore) pornography, and other internet sites designed to “engage” (or rather, addict) their users meant that “Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable and . . . unsuitable for children and adolescents.”
For girls, this meant a social life that moved onto social media, where endless comparisons and perfectionist standards, along with online bullying, the sharing of emotional concerns that turned normal development into disorders, and increased exposure to sexual predation and harassment fostered anxiety, depression, and physical harm.
Boys, however, “burrowed deeper into the virtual world . . . particularly immersive online multi-player video games, YouTube, Reddit, and hardcore pornography—all of which became available anytime, anywhere, for free . . .” becoming progressively disengaged from the real world that was once their space for learning and play.
This “Great Rewiring of Childhood,” as Haidt calls it, occurs during sensitive periods of brain development, meaning potential life-long harms in the cognitive and social skills required for adulthood. Central to this are the “foundational harms” of social deprivation (“The Great Rewiring devastated the social lives of Gen Z by connecting them to everyone in the world and disconnecting them from the people around them.”); sleep deprivation (which facilitates depression, anxiety, and behavioral issues, while harming the concentration needed for learning and socialization); attention fragmentation (“Every hyperlink is an off-ramp, calling us to abandon the choice we made moments earlier.”); and internet and social media addiction.
None of this is a coincidence or an unintended consequence of modern technology. Haidt draws on Meta whistleblower Frances Haugen and others to show that Microsoft, Google, Apple, and of course Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms) understand quite well how human beings develop neurologically and how they learn, and they apply well-established behavioral techniques to create apps, platforms, games, and other internet-based activities that create and maintain user addictions in children and adults.
While Haidt’s focus is harms to children and teens, adults struggling with social media and smart phone “engagement” will learn about variable ratio reinforcement schedules and other well-established behavioral techniques that keep us emotionally manipulated, our attention hijacked by the small screen in our hands.
Haidt’s strength is his empirically based specificity. He breaks down by age, biological sex, nationality, and other demographic indicators the (overall harmful) impact of social media and smart phone technology on preteens, teens, young adults, and older adults. Haidt’s data is largely correlational, but whether he’s looking at rises in youth suicide, self-mutilation, hospitalizations, or self-reports of anxiety, depression, and other inward-focused distresses, the years 2010–2015 show a sudden, staggering rise in mental illness. For Haidt, these years mark the Great Rewiring, when the lives of children and teens moved out of the real world and increasingly onto social media and other internet-based activities.
Haidt isn’t presenting interesting psychological and sociological research for the informal education of the lay public. The Anxious Generation is the scholarly foundation for what Haidt hopes will be large-scale changes in K–12 education and childrearing, specifically phone-free schools, keeping smartphones and social media away from children younger than age 16 (Haidt details feasible changes in age-verification that won’t harm online privacy), and age-appropriate childhood independence, especially unsupervised, free play that can return children to a real-world focused, socially-oriented, and risky adventure that builds the problem-solving and social skills needed to become resilient, confident, and courageous adults.
The Anxious Generation is exhaustive in its research presentation, and Haidt preempts all (or most) rebuttals. Haidt may not be completely right, but that may not matter.
His data expresses what parents, their children, and childless adults are increasing reporting from shattered attention, to loneliness, to social media addiction. His many solutions, such as digital Sabbaths (no technology for at least one day a week) to letting children walk to school on their own, are sensible and without self-righteousness. Haidt details what he and his wife did well in raising children in a digital world and what they regret, and describes his fatherly fears, ones he learns to modulate, as he sees his son and daughter walk with greater independence into the world beyond their family.
Moving from the academic to the activist, The Anxious Generation includes organizations, Substack newsletters (especially Haidt’s own After Babel) and other resources so that parents and those of Gen Z can turn their concerns into effective social change.
It’s not just that we can change how technology companies operate or how we use the internet at our fingertips. For Haidt, and for many other parents, we must return childhood to our children.