The key ideas

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

Jonathan Haidt, 2024

Why did teenagers in several countries at once become more anxious and less happy in the early 2010s? Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt links it to the five years in which childhood moved from the playground into the smartphone. He shows how adults stopped letting children out on the street and, at the same time, let them loose online with no protection at all. And he offers four simple norms that families and schools can adopt right now.

Who it is for

For parents who don't know at what age to give their child a smartphone. For teachers. And for everyone who grew up with a phone in hand and wants to understand what it did to their generation.

Today we overprotect children and teens in the real world and underprotect them in the virtual world.

A ten-year-old is invited to Mars

The book opens with a thought experiment. A visionary billionaire invites your ten-year-old daughter to the first human settlement on Mars. She is thrilled: all her friends have already signed up. They are taking children because children adapt to weak gravity more easily than adults. You ask what radiation and low gravity will do to a growing body, and when the children will come home. There are no answers. No sane parent would agree to this.

Then the author says: we have already sent our children to Mars. Gen Z is the first generation in history to have gone through puberty with a portal in their pocket. That portal leads away from the people nearby and into another world: thrilling, addictive, unstable and not built for children at all. Nobody checked beforehand what it would do to them.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University. In 2024 he published a book about why teenagers became so much more anxious, so suddenly, in the early 2010s. His central idea fits in one sentence: in the real world adults protect children too much, and in the virtual world they barely protect them at all. The two mistakes work together.

Ahead lies the path the author takes. What happened in those five years. Why children need risky play. Which four harms a phone-based childhood brings. Why girls and boys suffer in different ways. And what families can do right now, without waiting for new laws.

Five years in which childhood moved into the phone

In 2010 most American teenagers had a simple flip phone. They used it to call their parents and send short texts. Almost nobody had unlimited mobile data, and Instagram had only just appeared. Even the front-facing camera only came to the iPhone that summer, with the iPhone 4.

By 2015 the picture had changed. Most teens had a smartphone with a camera pointing at their face, fast internet and accounts on several social networks. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, and Instagram's audience grew fast. The author gives this stretch of time a name: the Great Rewiring of Childhood. Never before had the everyday life of teenagers changed so quickly.

Now comes the book's main move. Haidt and his colleagues gathered the charts of teen mental health, and many of them turn sharply upward around 2012. Anxiety, depression and self-harm all rise. According to the author, a similar bend shows up not only in the United States but in Britain, Canada and a number of other wealthy countries.

Haidt admits that timing alone is not yet proof. But it is what raised the question the whole book sets out to answer: what happened to children in those five years, and why did it hit so hard?

Read in Livria

About the author

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist, a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, and the author of The Righteous Mind. He is one of the founders of Let Grow, an organization that helps give children back their independence.

All books by this author: Jonathan Haidt

Terms from the book

  • Dopamine
  • Perfectionism
  • Skenazy
  • Let Grow
  • Nature
  • Collective effervescence
  • Taleb
  • Gen Z: People born from roughly the mid-1990s on. According to Haidt, the first generation to go through puberty with a smartphone in their pocket.
  • Great Rewiring: Haidt's name for the shift of childhood from play to the phone, which happened mostly between 2010 and 2015.
  • front-facing camera: The camera on the front of a phone, which makes it easy to film yourself. The iPhone first got one with the iPhone 4 in 2010.
  • Instagram: A social network for photos and videos, launched in 2010. Facebook bought it in 2012.
  • antifragile: Describes systems that grow stronger from small shocks and stresses instead of breaking. A concept from Taleb that Haidt applies to children.
  • discover mode: Haidt's name for the state in which a person is open to new things and looks for opportunities. A simplification by the author, not a diagnosis.
  • defend mode: Haidt's name for the state in which a person scans for threats and protects themselves. In the author's view, an anxious teenager lives in it almost all the time.
  • overprotection: Excessive care in which adults don't let a child take risks, make decisions and make mistakes on their own.
  • COPPA: A 1998 American law that protects children's privacy online. It bans collecting data from children under 13 without their parents' consent.
  • Markey: Ed Markey, an American politician, first a congressman and later a senator, and the author of COPPA.
  • social deprivation: A lack of face-to-face contact with people. For Haidt, it is the first of the four foundational harms of a phone-based childhood.
  • TikTok: A social network of short videos picked for you by an algorithm.
  • relational aggression: Aggression through relationships: shutting someone out of the group, spreading a rumor, turning others against a person.
  • NEET: Short for Not in Education, Employment or Training: young people who are not studying, not working and not in vocational training.
  • Durkheim: Émile Durkheim (1858 to 1917), a French sociologist and one of the founders of sociology. He studied religion and shared rituals.
  • collective action problem: A situation in which doing the right thing doesn't pay for anyone on their own, even though it would pay for everyone together.
  • Odgers: Candice Odgers, an American psychologist who studies teenagers and digital technology, and one of the book's most prominent critics.

All terms

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