Jonathan Haidt

Review: The Anxious Generation

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Cover image for "The Anxious Generation" by Jonathan Haidt.

The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt. Penguin Press (ISBN: 9780593655030), 2024.

Summary: Explores the connections between the decline in independent play in childhood, the advent of smartphones, and the sharp rise in anxiety and depression, among adolescents and young adults.

Everyone in higher education is talking about the mental health crisis, particularly the incidence of anxiety and depression among adolescents and young adults. Counseling centers on every campus are slammed with the demand. But why is this? Some trace it to COVID and the experience of isolation these youth went through. But in fact, COVID only accelerated a trend mental health professionals were seeing for the past decade.

Jonathan Haidt believes this may be traced to a shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood, a transition that coincides with the rise in incidence in anxiety and depression. He contends that children have been over-protected in the world of embodied, independent play and under-protected in the disembodied, virtual world that they are connected to by the devices in their pockets.

In the first part of the book, Haidt offers a number of of graphs, all showing sharp increases during the 2010’s in the incidence of various mental health issues. What is most striking is that this is true for all Western nations and not just the United States–it’s not just American cultural factors. It is striking that girls have been hit the hardest, but boys have also shown increases in all of these indicators.

Part Two explorers the decline of the play-based childhood going back to the 1990’s, reflecting parental fearfulness and overprotection. Free play, not controlled by adults, is crucial for the development of social skills and attunement to others. Children become more resilient and antifragile with play in which there is an element of risk and where parents don’t immediately swoop in and rescue (unless there are actual injuries requiring attention). This makes children more inclined to operate in “discover” rather than “defend” mode and for children learning to care for themselves and assess risks. We’ve also eliminated rites of passage that build a ladder from childhood through puberty to adulthood. Haidt offers guidelines for age appropriate steps, including when (not until high school) children have smartphones. The advent of smartphones accelerated this decline, replacing embodied play with the unprotected virtual world online.

In Part Three, Haidt outlines the harms phone-based childhoods cause. He notes four foundational harms to both boys and girls: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. He then discusses the harms to girls, which are greater, as well as the harms to boys, Haidt shows the experimental evidence for how social media harms girls: visual media results in invidious physical comparisons, promotes aggression against other girls, promotes sharing of emotions resulting in “sociogenic” illness, and exposes girls to male predators urging sexting and other dangerous activities. Boys engage differently, engaging more with online porn and multi-player online games. While there are some positive aspects of the latter, Haidt traces the “failure to launch,” including problems of forming healthy relationships with real-life partners. Finally, Haidt explores how phones pull us downward in the spiritual or “elevation” aspect of our life, and suggests six practices, secular spiritual disciples as it were, to recover what we’ve lost.

The last part of the book explores what government and industry, what schools, and what parents can do. He advocates for four foundational reforms:

  1. No smartphones before high school, giving children only basic flip phones before then (up to about age 14).
  2. No social media before age 16, including more stringent age verification standards on social media platforms.
  3. Phone-free schools, where phones, smartwatches, and other devices are stored in phone lockers, to free up students attention.
  4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.

Haidt draws on the work of Lenore Skenazy, who wrote Free Range Kids for his guidance to parents about unsupervised play and independence. He commends the work of Let Grow, an organization Skenazy has served as president. He notes how working with other parents and needing to be aware of state laws (and in some cases, working to change them), around child supervision is important. A child exercising responsible independence can look like a neglected child in some eyes. I would have liked to see Haidt address more the real-world dangers that did not exist or were very rare in our childhoods and how parents address these while not lapsing into over-protection, as well as addressing the particular risks girls and women face.

I know smartphones have rewired my brain and have snared me with their addictive power. I’ve had to make decisions regarding my own use of them. What Haidt proposes seems both scientifically demonstrable and just plain common sense. Talking with mental health professionals, it is just not feasible from workforce or insurance factors, to significantly expand their services. Haidt proposes that we tackle the problem at its roots in our shift from play-based to phone-based childhoods. This will take concerted action on the part of parents, schools, and governments acting together, but actually seem relatively low cost by comparison. It just takes shared recognition of the problem and concerted action (and maybe resistance to the social media lobby claiming the safety of its products). In the end, we will all be the better for it.

Review: The Coddling of the American Mind

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The Coddling of the American Mind

The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. New York: Penguin Press, 2018.

Summary: Discusses three bad ideas that result in a culture of “safetyism” in higher education, chronicles the consequences of these bad ideas, traces factors that led to the embrace of these ideas, and how we might choose a wiser way.

  1. The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
  2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
  3. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt contend that these three bad ideas constitute a well-intentioned but toxic basis for a campus culture of “safetyism.” They argue that these ideas contradict ancient wisdom, psychological research on well-being, and are harmful to the individuals and communities who embrace this mindset. Lukianoff, the president of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and Haidt, a social psychologist perhaps best known for his recent work, The Righteous Mind, began to notice, from 2013 on, an increasing trend of concern on university campuses about “triggering material,” efforts to disinvite, or obstruct controversial speakers by heckling or even violence, coupled with reports of increasing levels of anxiety and fears about safety.

There seemed to be an increasing perception by university administrators that students were “fragile” and needed protection and “safe spaces.” They noted the priority given to feelings, and that the response to anything that evokes negative emotions is not to consider how one ought think about the external cause, but to simply remove whatever offends or causes stress–be it course material or offensive speakers, or perceived “microaggressions.” (Although I wonder whether two white men can fully take on board what it is like to experience frequent microaggressions because of one’s race, ethnicity, gender, orientation, or disability.) They also noted the framing of the world in terms of a toxic form of identity politics, focused on common enemies rather than common humanity–us versus them, good versus evil.

After delineating the contours and problems with these “three great untruths,” the authors chronicle a number of incidents in the last five years that they believe result from these often well-intentioned but bad ideas. They chronicle violent outcomes to this thinking at Berkeley after Milo Yiannopoulos was invited to speak with no disciplinary action by the university, and at Middlebury College when controversial scholar Charles Murray attempted to speak and a hosting faculty member suffered a concussion and whiplash requiring six months of physical therapy, in attempts to disrupt the event. Perhaps not as well publicized were the “witch hunts,” often against liberal faculty like Erika Christakis at Yale, who objected to an administration’s paternalistic instructions about offensive Halloween costumes, suggesting that students might be mature enough to set their own norms. Students called her out as a racist, for creating an unsafe space, and sought her firing. She ultimately resigned. On many campuses, faculty feel they are walking on egg shells, often choosing to avoid anything controversial for fear that it may evoke complaints, or a witch hunt.

The authors identify six contributing factors to this culture of safetyism, devoting a chapter to each:

  • Rising political polarization, with campuses shifting leftward and increasingly distrusted by those on the right.
  • An increase in adolescent anxiety and depression beginning in 2011, significantly correlating to smartphone usage. This group began arriving on campus in 2013.
  • Paranoid parenting resulting in far less unsupervised play and greater fears of abduction (even though crime rates for this crime have dropped).
  • The decline of free play and the rise of emphasis on test preparation.
  • The growth of a bureaucracy of safetyism at universities, driven by federal mandates, risks of lawsuits, and a consumerist mentality, in which students are the consumers.
  • The quest for justice, evoked by events between 2012 and 2018 that sometimes focuses on “equal outcomes social justice” in which any demographic disparity is assumed to be the result of discrimination, and alternative explanations are themselves considered discriminatory.

The authors observe that many of these factors arise from good intentions taken to extremes and are careful to distinguish between legitimate forms of concern (like protecting physical safety) and more extreme forms of safetyism.

They conclude with three chapters on wising up, with applications to children, to universities, and to the wider society. They argue for preparing kids for the road rather than the road for the kids. They propose that our worst enemies cannot harm us as much as our emotional reasoning. And they encourage the recognition that “the line dividing good and evil goes through the heart of every human being,” and that we ought be watchful for any institution that promotes a common enemy rather than common humanity narrative. They commend the Chicago Statement (including a version of it in an appendix) that promotes free speech, academic freedom and free inquiry and sanctioning efforts to suppress speech.

The authors, particularly Greg Lukianoff, who benefited personally from this approach, advocate for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that improves mental health and coping skills through recognizing cognitive distortions and maladaptive behaviors, and challenging and changing these. Essentially, they would contend that their “three bad ideas” are both cognitive distortions and lead to maladaptive behaviors good neither for the person, nor the university, nor society. Hence, it should be understood that CBT is integral to their critique and recommendations.

Working in a collegiate setting, I’ve seen many of the conditions the authors describe. Most faculty I know readily resonate with the feeling that they walk on egg shells, even while being deeply committed to academic freedom and challenging students thinking. I’ve seen the growing sensitivity to microaggressions. I’ve witnessed the surprise when I’ve suggested that being offended is a choice–that no one can offend us unless we let them, and that there are other options. I have been concerned that universities often seem to be echo chambers for the progressive end of our political discourse, blind to the very practices they excoriate on the right.

Given the character of our wider society, it seems the last thing universities should be doing is engaging in the kinds of “coddling” Lukianoff and Haidt describe. If we are to have any hope, it will take resilient, anti-fragile people who will engage and keep engaging differing and even off-putting ideas. Most of all, in a climate of us versus them, we need people able to follow the Pauli Murray principle: “When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them.” Here’s to drawing larger circles!