Jonathan Haidt wrote “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” as an alarm bell for parents. Between the pages, he offers both analysis of the problems facing Gen Z and solutions. This overview summarizes many of the issues address by Haidt.
Overview
The mental health of Gen Z is in terrible shape – They experience more anxiety, depression, self-harm, attention deficit, and suicide than any prior generation. Part of this is because social media targets kids and teens. Case in point: 40% of 13-year old’s are on Instagram.
Teens, he explains, are the most vulnerable to social media addiction and problems because the portion of their brains charged with self-control, delayed gratification, and resisting temptation is not yet developed. As most people are now aware, the human brain is not fully developed until the early 20s. Haidt writes,
“As they begin puberty, they are often socially insecure, easily swayed by peer pressure, and easily lured by an activity that seems to offer social validation. We don’t let preteens buy tobacco or alcohol, or enter casinos. The costs of using social medial, in particular, are high for adolescents, compared with adults, while the benefits are minimal.”
He continues:
“Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and – as I will show – unsuitable for children and adolescents.”
The author calls this transformation “The Great Rewiring.”
It’s not just the technology, Haidt contends, there has also been a shift in parenting that has allowed kids to go from “play-based” childhood” to a “phone-based childhood” and this is based on a desire to over protect, control, helicopter parent. Kids are no longer able to free play and learn to interact with each other and the world without a parent hovering.
“My central claim in this book is that these two trends – overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world – are major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.”
Solutions – The Big Four
Haidt prefers four big ideas to help solve the problem. Later in the books, he offers additional suggestions.
- No smartphones before high school.
- No social media before 16.
- Phone-free schools.
- Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.
Mental Health and the rise of Online Screentime
Smartphones, social media, and video games have fundamentally shifted the parent-child dynamic. Every teen parent knows their teens are piling up hours online, while missing important parts of life and development. Moreover, there is a constant fight over screentime in most homes between parents and their children. But this familiar reframe is the best-case scenario for parents. More families, unfortunately, are facing much more severe issues. Anxiety, depression, ADHD, self-harm, and suicide all seem to have spiked beginning around 2010, and not just in the United States, but globally.
“Between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities. This Great Rewiring of Childhood, I argue, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s.”
“The Decline of Play-Based Childhood”
In the meat of the book, Haidt smashes readers with hard truths – these things are true and we all know it. They are hard because each and every one of us has betrayed truth, reality, natures, and even God.
- Kids need more free play to learn how to interact with each other and the world.
- There has been a decline in teens interacting physically with one another outside of school.
- Face to face interaction is an essential part of begin human and learning socialization.
- “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 exposer to setbacks, failures, shocks, and stumbles in order to develop strength and self-reliance. Over protection interferes with this development and renders young people more likely to be fragile and fearful as adults.”
- He continues, “Children are most likely to thrive when they have a play-based childhood int her real world. They are less likely to thrive when fearful parenting and a phone-based childhood deprive them of opportunities for growth.”
- Saftyism is the worship of safety. Parents have become too focused on safety, and in doing so, left young people with unhealthy fears and phobias, as well as ill equipped to protect themselves.
- The ladder from childhood to adulthood has collapsed, which has left many without the skills, experience, and knowledge to function as adults. Haidt argues, “Western societies have eliminated many rites of passage, and the digital world that opened up in the 1990s eventually buried most milestones and obscured the path to adulthood.
The Great Rewiring
The move from flip phones to smartphones damaged young people in four ways: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. This technological shift to smartphones negatively “affects the development of multiple social, emotional, and conative abilities. More specifically, these key points are essential for understanding the damage caused by a “phone-based” childhood:
- The average teen spends 7 hours (of leisure time) on their phones each day.
- Outside of school time with friends dropped from roughly 2 hours per day to 1 hour per day.
- Sleep deprivation caused by smartphones is causing a host of problems including poor heath and lower grades, anxiety and depression, and even causing more accidents.
- Development of executive function is harmed by attention fragmentation. Most adolescents receive hundreds of notifications per day, which means they rarely have uninterrupted concentration on a task.
- “The developers of the most successful social media apps used advanced behaviorist techniques to hook children into becoming heavy users of their products.” Teens are constantly exposed to dopamine hits, which produce pleasure, but these hits don’t produce satisfaction so it leaves people wanting more.
- “Social media harms girls more than boys. Correlational studies show that heavy users of social media have higher rates of depression and other disorders than light users or nonusers. The correlation is larger and clearer for girls: Heavy users re three times as likely to be depressed as nonusers.”
- Experimental studies how that social media use is a cause, not just correlated, of anxiety and depression. When people are assigned to reduce or eliminate social media for three weeks or more, their mental health usually improves.”
- Girls and boys both want agency and communion. Girls typically want greater communion with others, which is why they higher users of social media.
- Boys and men are able to approach and stalk girls and women on social media. Often this entails pressuring girls to share nude pictures.
- The success of men and boys has been in decline because of smartphones and social media. Boys are less physical, engage in fewer risk, some experience a “failure to launch,” and thinking patterns have shifted from typical male thinking by externalizing thoughts to traits associated with girls like internalizing.
- “one way smartphones have affected boys’ lives is by providing unlimited, free, hardcore pornography accessible anytime, anywhere. Porn is an example of how tech companies have made it easy for boys to satisfy powerful evolved desires without having to develop any skills that would help them make the transition to adulthood.”
- Gaming for boys has caused a decline in mental and physical health, and created family strife.
- For boys in girls, there has been a tremendous decline in much needed socialization. “The Great Rewiring of Childhood pulled young people out of real-world communities, including their own families, and created a new kind of childhood lived in multiple rapidly shifting networks. One inevitable result was anomie, or normlessness, because stable and binding moralities cannot form when everything is in flux.” This leads to despair, suicide, and meaningless.
- “The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.” A phone-based life replaces God with trivial and degrading content.
Solutions
Haidt begins with four solutions:
- No smartphones before high school.
- No social media before 16.
- Phone-free schools.
- Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.
Beyond these, he makes the case that local, state, and federal governments can take action. In addition to the big four, here are some of his suggestions:
- Assert a Duty of Care, making regulations different for children and adults.
- Raise the age of internet adult to 16 years old.
- Increase play time at school.
- Facilitate age verification.
- Schools can take many actions besides kicking out phones and allowing more play time. They can encourage real-world experience, allow more interaction between students, provide more hands-on learning, and give more vocational training opportunities.
- Parents can get out of the way and let kids play, learn, and interact on their own. Stop helicoptering over them. Let them forget homework, fight with other kids, and invent games in the yard.
- Parents can also delay when children receive smartphones until high school or beyond, and limit overall screen time for younger kids. Most importantly, lead by example by putting your phone away.
There is a way back to a more normal way of life, not just for Gen Z, but for all of us. Parents can stand together to against smartphones and all the other devices attacking our kids. Parents must also learn to let kids be kids again. In sum, let’s smash the phones and kick the kids out into the yard.
If you enjoy this review, you might like our review of Abigail Shrier’s book, “Bad Therapy” which you can watch on our YouTube channel. You can also follow along on Instagram for more parenting books and ideas.
If you want to purchase the book, buy it here!
