The Anxious Generation
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
By: Jonathan Haidt
[On my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2024]
“The Great Rewiring devastated the social lives of Gen Z by connecting them to everyone in the world and disconnecting them from the people around them.”
“It is very difficult to construct a meaningful life on one’s own, drifting through multiple disembodied networks.”
It was really interesting to read this book right after Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy book. They have slightly different premises.
Jonathan Haidt’s thesis is that parents have become too protective in the real world with not enough adventure and unsupervised play and not protective enough in the virtual world of social media, porn, and video games; the result being an increase in anxiety and mental illness in our children.
Shrier sees the increase in reported mental illness and recognizes the dangers of phone-based childhoods, but she speculates that perhaps, like transgenderism (in her book Irreversible Damage), it is now a trend to claim to have anxiety and mental health problems. Are we searching for trauma and mental problems where there is only normal anxiety and social discomfort? Do our children actually have mental health issues to the extent the reporting indicates?
I wouldn’t say these two books are in cahoots or diametrically opposed. But both shed new light on the similar concern: mental health problems in our children. I believe both to be valuable reads, but do caution readers to use their own wisdom and common sense in processing what they read.
[I will also add that if my review is preaching to the choir for you, it’s possible that you may not want to spend the time reading the entire book unless you like to know all the data. It does get a little long and slightly repetitive where I can see where people who already know the harms of social media and phone usage and have actively created boundaries with their children/teens around it may not find the book as useful. If that’s you, you may be more interested in just following his online resources where he plans to continue to update with new data/survey/findings- I’ll link at the end of the review.]
I really loved Jonathan Haidt’s coauthored (Greg Lukianoff) book The Coddling of the American Mind. Definitely read that one if you haven’t yet.
I don’t think I loved The Anxious Generation as much as that one. I don’t know if it was because Lukianoff’s lawyer-side tempered Haidt’s psychological-side to balance the interpretation and explanataion of data or what, but this book felt a little too steeped in evolutionary descriptions of why we are where we are and why we need or want different things.
I’m not all about that and I’ll explain more later in my review.
Nonetheless, Haidt’s presentation of the data is compelling and it’s truly hard to argue that a cell-phone based childhood rather than a play-based childhood doesn’t have negative effects on our kids.
Another book that I would highly recommend is Tony Reinke’s 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You. Reinke is fascinated by technology and writes to answer: “What is the best use of my smartphone in the flourishing of my life?”
Haidt organizes this book in four parts. He covers mental health trends since 2010, the nature of childhood and how we messed it up, a closer look at a phone-based childhood (including the differences between girls and boys), and wraps up with how to reverse the damage.
There is a lot of data and graphs in this book and I can’t cover it all in this review but I will just mention some things that stuck out to me.
“Impending threats to a nation or generation (as opposed to an individual) do not historically cause rates of mental illness to rise… People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.”
I think this is a really important piece of information for a lot of reasons. We are meant to live in community. Face-to-face community. Social media connects us in some ways, but especially for adolescents who are still learning how to engage with others, community via social media will not teach them much of anything that translates to real life. The evidence just confirms what we already know Scripture teaches, though Haidt would prefer to list millions of years of evolution to explain it: it is not good for man to be alone; we are to carry one another’s burdens; be in fellowship with one another; we are all members of one body—the body of Christ—unified and working together; Hebrews 3:12-13.
In this article about the dangers of isolation, Segal says, “The more isolated we become, the more we cut ourselves off from the fountains of His grace, mercy, and guidance.” We miss out on “the foundation of a full and happy life.”
If we allow our kids (or ourselves) to isolate into a virtual world, the sacrifices to our mental, emotional, and spiritual health are much too many.
I also think it’s worth noting that those who decide not to have children because they don’t want to ‘bring them into a world like this’ are missing all the important parts of life. People have been having kids for generations during all kinds of turmoil, but just bringing kids into this world is not going to damage them. You’re giving them life and they will thrive in a community. You’re actually depriving yourself of the joys of children and a love you never thought possible. And to one of Haidt’s later points, you’re depriving yourself of a ‘wind’ that will strengthen and grow you as a person.
He talks a lot about play-based childhood. This is what he means by that:
“A play-based childhood is one in which kids spend the majority of their free time playing with friends in the real world as I defined it in the introduction: embodied, synchronous, one-to-one or one-to-several, and in groups or communities where there is some cost to join or leave so people invest in relationships.”
He fleshes each of those points out in the book, but I like how he points out that there is value to relationships and groups that come with a cost to join or leave. It does create an investment and a long-term mindset that the virtual world takes away. That’s why it’s so easy to dehumanize people online. When we’re not embodied or likely to see them again, we don’t see them as people. Real life relationships require nurturing because they are (hopefully) ongoing.
“Even for kids who never post anything, spending time on social media sites can still be harmful because of the chronic social comparison, the unachievable beauty standards, and the enormous amount of time taken away from everything else in life.”
“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…”
How do kids learn? They mimic. He explains two forms of bias that signals what to copy: conformist (what is most common) and prestige (what is most accomplished/prestigious). The thing is, though, is that just because something is common or an influencer has a big following doesn’t mean that those things are good and should be followed. But if that’s what kids see in hours of scrolling, they can’t help but mimic it or be influenced by it.
They find ‘role models’ whose only credentials are that a million people happened to follow them. Some of these ‘role models’ are part of how the transgender craze took over teenage girls as Shrier describes in her book Irreversible Damage. That’s just one facet of influence, but you can be sure there are hundreds of others!
“On social media, the way to gain followers and likes is to be more extreme, so those who present with more extreme symptoms are likely to rise fastest, making them the models that everyone else locks onto for social learning… people get trained by their audiences to become more extreme versions of whatever it is the audience wants to see.”
I am an adult who knows all this information and yet I can tell when I spend too much time on certain platforms or websites I start to feel worse about myself even though I understand what’s happening in my brain. How much more susceptible are our kids?
I thought his illustration of growing trees in a biosphere was really compelling. The trees that scientists were trying to grow in these biospheres were collapsing under their own weight. Why? Because there was no wind in the biosphere. As the tree grows and the wind pushes against them their roots know to grow deeper to hold it up. When the wind variable was eliminated, the roots weren’t strong enough to hold up the weight of the full grown tree.
It’s the same way with our kids. If we protect them from all of life’s challenges, they don’t have opportunities to grow their ‘roots’ deeper so they can withstand greater challenges in their future. We want resilient kids. That means allowing them to experience discomfort and unfairness and pain.
Actually he uses the term ‘antifragile’ kids rather than resilient. Plastic cups don’t get better by constantly being knocked over, they just don’t get worse. It’s more like an immune system that gets stronger after being exposed to germs and fighting them off.
He quotes from the Stoics: “happiness comes from learning to deprive external events of the power to trigger negative emotions in you.”
We’re being overprotective if we don’t allow our kids to grow strong roots: “They may be blocking the development of competence, self-control, frustration tolerance, and emotional self-management.”
“the political divisiveness in the country can largely be attributed to social media and indoctrinating ourselves in a vacuum with the same rhetoric. I can usually tell the people who have thought through political issues for themselves from a variety of sources and those that only reiterate the commentary they say on their social media feeds”
This is perhaps less applicable to youths than adults, but the principle stands. The algorithms online are ridiculous and I would love if there could be legislation to prevent them from using them the way they do. I remember when my news feed used to be actual news from my actual friends. Now all I see are stupid ads that the platform thinks I’m interested in just because I stopped scrolling for two seconds to help my child and now they think I love hats made from cat fur.
It’s the same with political views. They have ADMITTED that they just show you more of what you like. The only thing missing from the vacuum is the actual cleaning up of dirt. I’ve experienced the same thing in real world discussions. A lot of people just repeat the slogans and the headlines; they haven’t actually thought for themselves.
Social media connects us to millions but it also divides us in big ways.
“Girls and boys are not identical psychologically. There are a number of reasons why girls’ core developmental needs are more easily exploited and subverted by social media than is the case for boys (whose needs are more easily exploited by video game companies.)”
For some reason we’re still having to explain to people that boys and girls are biologically different. Here’s yet another way. These chapters were really interesting to read.
For girls he talks about their visual social comparison and perfectionism, their aggression in relationships, how they share emotions and disorders, and are more susceptible to harassment.
For boys it’s less clear evidence-wise, but they point out the way girls are surpassing boys in school and how the workplace is more geared toward women now that physical labor jobs are decreasing.
I found this quote particularly enlightening considering the push towards female empowerment and society’s way of pushing down men in order to elevate women.
”A world of floundering men is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women.”
Another good book for boys specifically that I would recommend is The War Against Boys which affirms a lot of Haidt’s findings about why they aren’t succeeding as much in school.
I will also say here that social media sites like Instagram are targeting males with porn. My husband ended up just deleting Instagram after creating a profile for his trickshot videos. He showed me the ‘browse’ tab of his app and it’s all pornographic when he never searched, clicked, or engaged with anything of the story. But the app knows he’s a male. This kind of thing is an abuse and should be illegal. How hard it must be to resist these things when they’re constantly being paraded in our boys’ faces!
Which leads me to one of my biggest beefs with this book (other than his far from compelling evolutionary explanations): Haidt’s view of porn.
“I’m not saying that all pornography is harmful; I’m saying that immersing boys in an infinite playlist of hardcore porn video during the sensitive period in which the sexual centers of their brains are being rewired is maybe not so good for their sexual and romantic development, or for their future partners.”
I read this and thought- Wow! Could we take a softer stance on porn?! It’s not ALL harmful just MAYBE, CERTAIN types of porn at CERTAIN times of life MIGHT not be so good.
Sorry Haidt, I know you’re an intelligent human being, but I can’t think of a single positive thing that porn does for any person, ever. The industry itself is corrupt and is the catalyst for human trafficking all over the world. The number of relationships and marriages that porn ruins is staggering.
He says “10% of adolescent boys said they found pornography addicting” I don’t know if he believed this stat, but it’s clear that boys are not answering that question honestly. Was the other part of this that 80% found pornography VERY addicting?
Until we take a firmer stance on pornography there will be no positive progress. It’s just something that consumes you. Period. You can’t just dip your toes in the water. It pulls you in and it drowns you.
I would recommend reading this very short but very good book called The Porn Problem if you are believing the lie that porn is okay.
“I should point out that I am an atheist, but I find that I sometimes need words and concepts from religion to understand the experience of life as a human being.”
I thought it was very interesting that Haidt also admits that he believes everyone has a God-sized hole in their life. I am glad that Haidt appears to have some Christian friends in his life because honestly it felt like his constant reference to evolution was him trying to convince himself as much as the reader.
The principles Haidt explains in this book I thought, Oh that makes sense because God is this way or he created us this way, etc. And then Haidt would say something along the lines of ‘millions of years of evolution made our brains grow bigger so we could do such and such’ or ‘groups decided to be the most cohesive by creating religion’ etc. It feels like it takes a lot more faith to believe something as absurd and unproven as evolution when I see evidence of God every day. The Bible is the closest thing to explain what I see in the world today just like Haidt said— to understand the experience of life as a human being. God’s Word helps us understand our world better than anything else that has ever attempted to.
If you haven’t read it for yourself, I would encourage you to engage with the Bible and let it speak for itself. I think you’ll find a lot more truth and hope there than Haidt’s evolutionary theories.
And finally, Haidt devotes a few chapters explaining how governments, tech companies, schools, and parents can take action steps moving forward.
It’s possible that his suggested action steps may not make sense for everyone, but I appreciate that he took the time to set up a game plan. A lot of times books like this are just authors dropping knowledge and blasting walls and then peacing out- ‘So good luck with that!’
And that’s not helpful. We don’t always know what to do with the information. Haidt summarizes his points into four steps:
No smartphones before high school
No social media before 16
Phone-free schools
Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence
My kids’ school recently took a survey of parents and students regarding their cell phone policy and are looking at how to change it. I’d like schools to curb the use and presence of phones more.
My kids are young so a lot can change by the time they’re teenagers, but at this point I think I’m on board with No. 1 & 2. We already do quite a bit of the fourth one. They get limited TV time and they get some independence and a lot of play with other kids from a variety of ages.
I also liked his list of ages and things kids can do to gain more responsibility and independence— lots of good options in that list that I will try to implement.
It will be interesting to see how things go the more and more we learn the effects of our ever-changing technology.
Haidt reminds us that the tech world of today is far different from what it was 20-25 years ago. Social media is different than the internet and smart phones are different than desk top computers. We have to be committed to understanding what we are exposing our kids to and be willing to make different choices for them and for their future.
Recommendation
There are a few books I’ve linked throughout my review that I may recommend more than this one, especially if you feel like you will already agree with most of what Haidt talks about in The Anxious Generation.
If you haven’t really given any of this much thought and you’re here because you feel like there’s something off with your children and their phone/social media usage, then I would definitely read the book because I think it will give you a lot to think about.
When I read his book The Coddling of the American Mind I was recommending it left and right. I think I feel a little more hesitant to recommend this one in the same way. I think it’s important but the execution of the book wasn’t my favorite, especially as a Christ follower. Although, I’ll reiterate that aside from his stance on evolution and porn, I didn’t really disagree with much of what he said.
If you’re not sure you want to tackle the whole book, I think it would still be beneficial to just pick a chapter or few that look most interesting to you. At the end of each chapter Haidt has an ‘In Sum’ section that covers in short all of what was discussed for that chapter. You may find it easier to just read those to help you determine which parts you want to read more in-depth.
If you want to continue to follow along as Haidt continues to present new findings or graphs, check out these resources he provides in his book:
www.anxiousgeneration.com/supplement
You can order a copy of this book using my affiliate link below.
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