The Anxious Generation

The Anxious Generation shows how smartphones, social media, and helicopter parenting have led to a decline in young people’s mental health and offers actionable solutions to help both our kids and ourselves become mature, emotionally stable adults.

Let’s say your child signed up to be one of the first humans to live on Mars. As you learn about the space company, you realize they only want test subjects and don’t care about safety at all. Would you let them take your child? Of course not!

Since 2010, tech companies have basically done the same, Haidt suggests: exploiting our kids’ attention and mental health for profit. “Childhood is an apprenticeship for learning the skills needed for success in one’s culture,” he writes. Millions of children are now hampered in learning those skills — because they live in their phones instead of reality.

Our connections in the real world share 4 distinct properties:

They rely on body language. They happen in sync with others. Communication happens in sequence and with a few individuals max. They happen in communities with high barriers to entry.

None of this is true about our online activities. That’s why they are often detrimental to human flourishing. Therefore, Haidt sees a phone-based childhood leading to 4 “foundational harms:”

Social deprivation. Since 2012, the time adolescents spend with friends in face-to-face settings has dropped 50% — and the pandemic only made it worse. Sleep deprivation. A lack of sleep leads to “depression, anxiety, irritability, cognitive deficits, poor learning, and lower grades” — and long-term studies have proven smartphones are making us sleep worse. Attention fragmentation. Since our phones are constantly interrupting us, our ability to focus is severely impaired. Addiction. Many kids are using their phones like dopamine slot machines, always in search of the next hit — and big tech has designed their apps to encourage this behavior.

How can we address these harms and create healthier, more grounded lives? Haidt has some ideas for that too.

In the book’s 2nd half, Haidt discusses what governments, schools, and parents can do to provide healthy childhoods. He calls out 4 “foundational reforms” to combat the 4 foundational harms: No smartphones before high school. We should give our kids basic, text-and-call only phones until they are 14 years old. No social media before 16. When preteens are subjected to endless algorithmically chosen content and comparisons with influencers, it can damage their self-worth permanently. Phone-free schools. More than just disallowing phones during class, schools should force kids to lock them away altogether. “That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers,” Haidt writes. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. Let your kids…