The Anxious Generation

In his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024), social psychologist John Haidt tells the story of what happened to the generation born after 1995, popularly known as Gen Z. Between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities. Gen Z, the first generation who went through puberty with smartphones in their hands, became more anxious, depressed, self-harming, and suicidal. The tidal wave of anxiety, depression and self-harm hit girls harder than boys, and it hit preteen girls hardest of all. The mental health crisis also hit boys. Their rates of depression and anxiety have also increased a lot, although usually not by as much as for girls. Suicide rates in the United States began rising around 2008 for adolescent boys and girls; they rose much higher in the 2010s. The increase in suffering was not limited to the United States. The same pattern is seen at roughly the same time among teens in the U.K., Canada, and other major Anglosphere countries, and the five Nordic nations. Feelings of alienation in school rose after 2012 across the Western world. Data is less abundant in non-Western nations, and the patterns are less clear.

Haidt refers to this phenomenon as “the Great Rewiring of Childhood.” However, the Great Rewiring is not just about changes in the technologies that shape children’s days and minds. There’s a second plotline here: the well-intentioned and disastrous shift toward overprotecting children and restricting their autonomy in the real world. As a result of these two trends, we have seen a shift from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood.” Haidt’s central claim in the book is that “these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.

Kids must have a great deal of free play to develop and they benefit from risky physical play, which has anti-phobic effects. Free play is essential for developing social and physical skills. However, 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. 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.

The background to this transition is the rise of safetyism, the worship of safety above all else. In the 1980’s and especially the 1990s, parents in Anglo countries became more fearful for many reasons, including changes in the media ecosystem and new cycle. The rise of safetyism has made it harder for children to learn to care for themselves and to deal with risk, conflict, and frustration. 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.

Early puberty is a period of rapid brain rewiring, second only to the first few years of life. This process of rewiring is guided by the adolescent’s experiences. Safetyism is an experience blocker. According to Haidt, “When we make children’s safety a quasi-sacred value and don’t allow them to take any risks, we block them from overcoming anxiety, learning to manage risk, and learning to be self-governing, all of which are essential for becoming healthy and competent adults.” Smartphones are a second kind of experience blocker. Once they enter a child’s life, they push out or reduce all other forms of non-phone-based experience.

Reversing the Great Rewiring of Childhood and the detrimental effects on the mental health of children and adolescents will require collective action on the part of parents, schools, tech and social media companies, and government, but Haidt suggests that parents can begin by giving their children more and better experiences in the real world and less and better experiences on screen. He makes a series of recommendations for parents of young children (ages 0 to 5), parents of children ages 6-13 (elementary and middle school), and parents of teens ages 13-18 (high school). I will summarize these recommendations in a future article. For now, I just want to mention a few. Haidt recommends delaying giving children smartphones until age 13 (high school) and the opening of social media accounts until 16. He also suggests focusing more on maximizing in-person activity and sleep than on total screen hours, providing clear structure to the day and week, watching out for signs of addiction or problematic use, and talking with preteens about the risks and listening to their thoughts.