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.