The Anxious Generation

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

by

Hardcover, 400 pages

English language

Published March 26, 2024 by Penguin Press.

ISBN:
978-0-593-65503-0
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OCLC Number:
1381441447
Goodreads:
171681821

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(3 reviews)

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 …

2 editions

reviewed The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

The Anxious Generation

Haidt argues the introduction of smart phones around 2012, with the resulting constant access to social media, has caused the decline in teen girls' mental health around the world, along with the loss of freedom as parents became more worried about "stranger danger". Research seems pretty robust to me, even though it cannot prove causation. I'm old so I grew up without mobile phones or internet, riding my bike around the suburbs. Even if the thesis of the book is wrong, I think a free range, smart-phone free childhood is not going to kill anyone, so why not try it? The only problem is that if your kid is the only one who doesn't have a smart phone or social media, they'll feel left out. So it's good to try and get your kids' friends' parents to ban the smart phones too. As regards letting kids roam the neighbourhood, I …

reviewed The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

Some decent points, overall an overhyped book

No rating

I read this because I am an educator and because I have a toddler that will be growing up in a world that favors screen time above all else. Some things are definitely worth considering (like allowing kids to have more unstructured time and responsibilities) but there’s almost no call to reform social media. There’s an explanation about why they are addicting and a push to get kids on it later, even some suggestions for legislation but almost nothing about protecting consumer privacy and the algorithms that highlight information about eating disorders to young users. Social media needs to be regulated. Otherwise banning screens at school will do little when kids are awake at 2am still scrolling. The book also suggests that the increase in people that are transgender is the latest “internet fad” which was an unnecessary paragraph in my opinion.

reviewed The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

Review of 'The Anxious Generation' on 'Goodreads'

If you combine this book with Pete Etchells' Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time, you'll probably find a good balance of information on this subject. There are other books on this subject which will likely highlight other angles, I just haven't read them yet. ;)

Jonathan clearly understands the situation we are in, but appears to have very black and white thinking on this subject, which is an honestly natural and completely human reaction to watching two generations of kids seriously damaged by smartphones, in real time.

We can absolutely pull Gen Alpha back from the brink, but Gen Z will be the most scarred by indiscriminate access to social media via smartphones.

There are a couple of areas I didn't agree with at all, but I will keep those to myself as I think they are important as discussion points, but not to the extent implied.

I didn't …

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