The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
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I’m a Jonathan Haidt stan and I tend to name-drop him as if we go way back because he was my Intro to Psychology professor at UVA. At the time, he was known for The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and it always stuck with me that, while he assigned his own book for homework (flex), he gave it to us for free. My poor ass was thankful.
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness is a pretty intuitive premise. We all know we’re on our phones too much and can imagine that it’s probably screwing up kids. Haidt has the data to show that this is the case, especially pubescents and particularly girls. As someone who just had a baby girl, I decided to read this now to stress myself out about how to raise her in the digital age.
Haidt argues that children are ‘anti-fragile’-- they need to experience some adversity at pivotal life stages to build a strong psychological immune system. Again, this makes intuitive sense to me. I can see the temptation to be a helicopter parent, but the decline of a ‘play-based childhood’ filled with a certain degree of free-spiritedness has coincided with an uptick in a ‘phone-based childhood’ filled with unhealthy comparison and isolationism. The two trends go against how we’ve evolved as a species, so kids are left with a funky, rewired social and neurological development, contributing to anxiety, depression, wonky attention spans, etc.
His book not only spells out the problem, but also gives concrete solutions. He helped found the Let Grow program, which gives kids the tools to be more independent and parents the tools to be more chill about it. He also has clear-cut suggestions for interventions at multiple levels– the federal government, schools, and tech companies, to name a few. I appreciate that the book gives ideas for a way forward rather than just complaining about the way things are. That being said, it got very repetitive. It was kind of ~this could have been an email~ vibes, with the same message reiterated over and over. I definitely glazed over at times.
As a whole, I’m glad that I read this. I agree with its message about mindfulness, and I don’t think that our plight is a lost cause. The Anxious Generation is useful in that it condenses several resources all in one place, in a well-organized way, and forces you to grapple with the issue over multiple days as you read compelling science that backs up the inkling that you already had that too much phone stuff is bad. It also encouraged me to think about less obvious negative effects of the digital avalanche on teens, like the fact that phone use disrupts sleep at a time when sleep is of the utmost importance for development. There were also interesting studies about how just the mere presence of a phone (even face down on the table in front of you) impacts our ability to think. We’re making ourselves a bunch of dumb dumbs!
He also talks about how a phone-based lifestyle is leading to something more nebulous: spiritual degradation. Teens report feeling empty and deprived as a result of their phone use, and while they openly recognize that it’s hurting them, they don’t have the tools to resist the pressures because their frontal lobes are not 100.
So, the message of the book is very important, the data behind it is useful in terms of having a conversation about it, and the solutions he provides are a worthwhile starting point. But was it a titillating read? Nah. I think he could have chopped 100 pages and gotten his message across– although what does that say about my attention span (yikes). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness receives 3 out of 5 flames. Read the Sparknotes, don’t be such a helicopter parent, be on your phone less yourself, and be intentional and strategic about how and when to allow your kid access to smartphones.
