Jonathan Haidt

How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

The Anxious Generation

Bastien Vaucher

Those smartphones gave parents a new superpower that they did not have in the era of flip phones: the ability to track their children's movements at every moment.

Lenore pointed out to me that this could be part of the reason for increased anxiety and decreased confidence. Parents began to surveil their children everywhere, such as when they're on their way to school, or when they're hanging out with their friends after school. If anything looked unusual, the parent could call or text right away, or could grill the child about her activities when she returned home. Whether we think of the phone as "the world's longest umbilical cord" or as an "invisible fence," childhood autonomy plummeted when kids started carrying them. Even if a parent rarely looks at the tracker, and even if a kid never summons Mom to come get him because his bike chain broke, the fact that this is always possible makes it more difficult for children and adolescents to feel that they are on their own, trusted and competent. And it makes it more difficult for parents to let go.

Encourage activities that stretch them beyond their comfort zone. Yours too! Risking a serious injury for no good reason is dumb. But some risk is part of any hero's journey, and there's plenty of risk in not taking the journey too.

Find ways for them to nurture and lead. Any job that requires guiding or caring for younger children is ideal, such as a babysitter, camp counselor, or assistant coach. Even as they need mentors themselves, they can serve as a mentor to younger kids. Helping younger kids seems to turn on an empathy switch and a leadership gene. Lenore saw this happen the first time her younger son went on a Boy Scout overnight camping trip, at the age of 11. He was beyond excited. He was also beyond unprepared: He forgot his sleeping bag.

Oh, did he cry when he realized that; he thought he'd be sent home.

Then an older Scout—a high school student-said, "Don't worry! I always bring an extra sleeping bag for just this kind of situation!" Lenore's son was grateful, and so was she when she heard the story.

Lenore was even more grateful years later when she learned that in fact the older Scout had not brought an extra sleeping bag. He slept on the cold, hard ground. That's how you become a leader.

A phone "ban" limited to class time is nearly useless. This is wh schools should go phone-free for the entirety of the school day.

Nonetheless, religious injunctions to be slower to judge and quicker to forgive are good for maintaining relationships and improving mental health. Social media trains people to do the opposite: Judge quickly and publicly, lest ye be judged for not judging whoever it is that we are all condemning today. Don't forgive, or your team will attack you as a traitor.

From a spiritual perspective, social media is a disease of the mind

Though researchers have not found evidence that prayer works to change outcomes in the world, such as curing a child of cancer, DeSteno found that there is abundant evidence that keeping up certain spiritual practices improves well-being. The mechanism often involves reducing self-focus and selfishness, which prepares a person to merge with or be open to something beyond the self. When communities engage in these practices together, and especially when they move together in synchrony, they increase cohesion and trust, which means that they also reduce anomie and loneliness.

When we gave children and adolescents smartphones in the early 2010s, we gave companies the ability to apply variable-ratio reinforcement schedules all day long, training them like rats during their most sensitive years of brain rewiring. Those companies developed addictive apps that sculpted some very deep pathways in our children's brains.

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.

Prestige-based social media platforms have hacked one of the most important learning mechanisms for adolescents, diverting their time, at-tention, and copying behavior away from a variety of role models with whom they could develop a mentoring relationship that would help them succeed in their real-world communities. Instead, beginning in the early 2010s, millions of Gen Z girls collectively aimed their most powerful learning systems at a small number of young women whose main excellence seems to be amassing followers to influence. At the same time, many Gen Z boys aimed their social learning systems at popular male influencers who offered them visions of masculinity that were also quite extreme and potentially inapplicable to their daily lives.

In a real-life social setting, it takes a while-often weeks—to get a good sense for what the most common behaviors are, because you need to observe multiple groups in multiple settings. But on a social media platform, a child can scroll through a thousand data points in one hour (at three seconds per post), each one accompanied by numerical evidence (likes) and comments that show whether the post was a success or a failure.

Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conformity engines ever invented. They can shape an adolescent's mental models of acceptable behavior in a matter of hours, whereas parents can struggle unsuccessfully for years to get their children to sit up straight or stop whining. Parents don't get to use the power of conformity bias, so they are often no match for the socializing power of social media.

When people are raised in a community that they cannot easily escape, they do what our ancestors have done for millions of years: They learn how to manage relationships, and how to manage themselves and their emotions in order to keep those precious relationships going. There are certainly many online communities that have found ways to create strong interpersonal commitments and a feeling of belonging, but in general, when children are raised in multiple mutating networks where they don't need to use their real names and they can quit with the click of a button, they are less likely to learn such skills.

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. Children need a great deal of free play to thrive. It's an imperative that's evident across all mammal species. The small-scale challenges and setbacks that happen during play are like an inoculation that prepares children to face much larger challenges later. But for a variety of historical and sociological reasons, free play began to decline in the 1980s, and the decline accelerated in the 1990s.

This has a lot of food for thought and has made me consider my own phone use, even though I felt that it had a bit of a moral panic tone at times, and is using a fair amount of correlation and anecdata. Nevertheless, it makes a compelling argument for the negative effects of phone use on children and young people, and a case for greater freedom and more free play for children.

Laura Dobie

Very important book for parents. Vital info about raising kids in a digital age . 

Steven Harrison

Diamond Jim

I started off listening to this as an audiobook but found I wasn’t able digest the information properly having to pause and go check out all the charts/graphs so I waited until I could get my hands on a hard copy to finish it out. 10/10 do not recommend listening to this one.

I’m not really sure how to give this book a solid review as I’m still processing everything I just read but I will say that even if you don’t agree with everything he’s come to conclude through his research you could probably walk away having gained some perspective. Helicopter parenting out of fear hit home for me and I do believe that there is a strong correlation to sleep deprivation, anxiety and depression with those who have unlimited screen time. It is scary to feel like even when you try and monitor or limit your children’s screen time that they can find ways around it. Because I came from a generation that evolved with technology it sort of sets up an entirely different parenting plan. Something that no one has had to navigate until now and we’re all still learning. So take from it what you will and just keep doing your best.

Christa Bell

I started off listening to this as an audiobook but found I wasn’t able digest the information properly having to pause and go check out all the charts/graphs so I waited until I could get my hands on a hard copy to finish it out. 10/10 do not recommend listening to this one.

I’m not really sure how to give this book a solid review as I’m still processing everything I just read but I will say that even if you don’t agree with everything he’s come to conclude through his research you could probably walk away having gained some perspective. Helicopter parenting out of fear hit home for me and I do believe that there is a strong correlation to sleep deprivation, anxiety and depression with those who have unlimited screen time. It is scary to feel like even when you try and monitor or limit your children’s screen time that they can find ways around it. Because I came from a generation that evolved with technology it sort of sets up an entirely different parenting plan. Something that no one has had to navigate until now and we’re all still learning. So take from it what you will and just keep doing your best.

The Anxious Generation How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

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