The Anxious Generation

I recently finished what I think will be one of the most talked about books of the decade. The book was written by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and is titled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. There's a thorough review of it by V. Susan Villani, a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist, in the Baltimore Sun.

Haidt's book is about how social media, the internet, and over-protectiveness of children are rewiring adolescent brains in ways that make it difficult for the young to function in the real world and which lead to serious dysfunctions.

Villani writes:

What have we done? First, we abandoned children to television, then to video games, and now to the internet and social media.

If anyone doubts the harm done to children by the internet and social media, then Jonathan Haidt’s must-read book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” will convince you otherwise.

Haidt presents powerful data about the emerging epidemic of anxiety and depression since 2010, when smartphones became easily available and soon were in the hands of most adults and many children. And while children were being over-protected in the real world by parents afraid to let them outdoors, they were under-protected in a virtual world, which was consuming them and rewiring their brains.

Haidt makes such a strong case for this that to deny his conclusions seems irrational.

The re-wiring process occurs in the adolescent brain through constant exposure to social media which employ algorithms intentionally designed to release dopamine and generate addiction.

Haidt also writes about the importance of play, which involves risk, fear, and excitement that are gradually mastered, producing the self-confidence and competence needed for the challenges of adulthood. Young adults who lack the skills acquired in play become more fearful, anxious, and withdrawn. Time spent on media displaces time that otherwise would have been spent interacting with other children and adults.

The constant use of smartphones during childhood harms them in at least four ways. It deprives them of sleep, face-to-face social interaction, the ability to concentrate (attention fragmentation), and it addicts them. Haidt is adamant that schools become phone-free to allow both education and social-emotional growth to take place. This would not require legislation and could be adopted as policy by every school district.

Haidt makes dozens of suggestions for helping both girls and boys to escape the avaricious manipulations of the people who design the smartphone and the apps that the phones can access, but the basic themes are these:

1. No smartphones before high school
2. No social media before age 16
3. Phone-free schools
4. Far more unsupervised play and independence for children

You'll have to read the book to understand his rationale for these measures, and every parent, teacher, school administrator, and pastor/priest/rabbi/imam in the Western world should consider it required reading this summer.