Words&Dirt

Summary:

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is a masterful and urgently important work of nonfiction. It tells the story of how, starting in the early 2010s, the “phone-based childhood” began to radically transform the lives of young people around the world. Haidt calls this “The Great Rewiring of Childhood”––an event which he identifies as the primary cause of the recent global surge of mental health problems in children and adolescents. Another key factor is the simultaneous decline of the “play-based childhood,” which began in the 1990s and picked up steam over several decades. Haidt demonstrates how these two trends have harmed young people and their families, leading to social deprivation, sleep disruption, attention fragmentation, addiction, and spiritual degradation. The book also explains why social media is particularly damaging for girls and why gaming and pornography are more challenging for boys. In the final chapters, Haidt lays out a series of practical recommendations for collective action, including efficacious government policies, platform design updates, school reforms, and advice for individual parents.

Key Concepts and Notes:

• I want to be upfront about the fact that I’m a fairly committed Jonathan Haidt fanboy, so I’m probably not the best source for a skeptical take on his work. Two of Haidt’s previous books––The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind––have had massive impacts on my ethical and intellectual development going back to the early 2010s. Time will tell, but I suspect that The Anxious Generation will be similarly influential when it comes to my take on modern technology, especially regarding when and how we should grant minors access to smartphones and social media. 
  
• I also want to highlight Haidt’s four “foundational reforms” here toward the top of the review, both because they are the book’s most important takeaways and because I personally endorse all of them. I believe that Haidt provides more than sufficient evidence to justify enacting all of these reforms as quickly as possible on the largest possible scale(s).

1. No smartphones before high school
2. No social media until age 16
3. Phone-free schools
4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence

• The Anxious Generation‘s central claim is as follows: “These two trends––overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world––are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation” (8-9).
• The Great Rewiring of Childhood, which took place between 2010 and 2015, was a period in which many already-existing trends began to accelerate, and some new ones also emerged. These include but are not limited to: increases in youth levels of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide; increases in youth screen time, especially on social media and gaming apps; decreases in in-person engagements with friends and family; decreases in young people engaging in “adult activities” such as drinking alcohol, getting a driver’s license, and having sex; higher levels of sleep deprivation/disruption; and increases in self-reported feelings of loneliness and kids feeling “useless.”
• Haidt also revisits the concepts of “safetyism” and “antifragility” that were central to The Coddling of the American Mind, demonstrating the drastic downsides of limiting kids’ access to real-world unsupervised play. It is indisputable that children and young adults need age-appropriate opportunities to take risks, make mistakes, and solve problems without adult intervention in order for healthy psychosocial development to take its natural course. Haidt makes a passionate and heartwarming case that adults should rediscover the joys of trusting young people to explore and grow on their own.
• Haidt presents a large amount of data and statistics to support his argument for the Great Rewiring. Some are correlational data and other data are pulled from designed experiments that he uses to justify causal claims about the negative impacts of smartphone technology. Haidt is bold in his assertion of an undeniable causal relationship between smartphone/social media use and negative mental health outcomes, but also admits that he is probably wrong about some things due to this field of research being relatively new. He created a website to complement the book where readers and researchers can dive more deeply into the data and where corrections can be posted as we learn more. The book is also very well-written, offers excellent bullet point summaries at the end of each chapter, and contains extensive notes, references, and an index.
• Haidt’s chapter on school reforms is an absolute masterpiece; as someone with some teaching experience myself and who also spends a lot of time socializing with educators in my community, I can say with confidence that fully banning smartphone use during school hours––not just during class time––would be the single most impactful reform we can and should be implementing in schools around the world.
• While most of the perspectives and arguments in this book were relatively familiar to me, there were at least a couple points that felt novel. The first was Haidt’s discussion of how male and female adolescents differ in the degrees to which they seek “agency and communion”––needs for independence/individuation as well as belonging/connectedness. Boys and girls both desire agency and communion, but girls tend to favor communion and boys lean more into agency. This helps explain why social media is more harmful to girls than to boys, because it preys on their desire to fit in and be accepted by others. It also explains why boys are more vulnerable to gaming and pornography, since those activities often simulate a sense of personal achievement and empowerment. As always with data on sex differences, these are differences in populations and do not dictate the tendencies/preferences of individuals.
• The other aspect of the book that surprised me was Haidt’s discussion of “spiritual elevation and degradation” in chapter eight. Haidt highlights how modern technology consistently pulls us away from the sources of deep flourishing that have been known to humankind since ancient times. I personally think that certain technology-assisted experiences can be incredibly elevating from a spiritual standpoint, but I also take Haidt’s point that doomscrolling definitely isn’t one of them.
• I tried pretty hard to find something major to criticize about this book, but I wasn’t able to locate anything that felt worth complaining about. Others on the web will do a better job than I can of poking holes and suggesting areas where further inquiry is needed. For my part, I’m appreciating Haidt’s contribution and feeling grateful to be alive in a time when we have people like him trying to understand and help solve society’s most pressing problems.

Favorite Quotes:

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternate universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and––as I will show––unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness––perpetually––to managing what became their online brand. This was now necessary to gain acceptance from peers, which is the oxygen of adolescence, and to avoid online shaming, which is the nightmare of adolescence. Gen Z teens got sucked into spending many hours of each day scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances, and distant influencers. They watched increasing quantities of user-generated videos and streamed entertainment, offered to them by autoplay and algorithms that were designed to keep them online as long as possible. They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviors that are essential for successful human development.

The members of Gen Z are, therefore, the test subjects for a radical new way of growing up, far from the real world interactions of small communities in which humans evolved. Call it the Great Rewiring of Childhood. It’s as if they became the first generation to grow up on Mars. (6-7)

As the transition from play-based to phone-based childhood proceeded, many children and adolescents were perfectly happy to stay indoors and play online, but in the process they lost exposure to the kinds of challenging and physical and social experiences that all young mammals need to develop basic competencies, overcome innate childhood fears, and prepare to rely less on their parents. Virtual interactions with peers do not fully compensate for these experiential losses. Moreover, those whose playtime and social lives moved online found themselves increasingly wandering through adult spaces, consuming adult content, and interacting with adults in ways that are often harmful to minors. So even while parents worked to eliminate risk and freedom in the real world, they generally, and often unknowingly, granted full independence in the virtual world, in part because most found it difficult to understand what was going on there, let alone know what to restrict or how to restrict it.

My central claim in this book is that these two trends––overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world––are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation. (8-9)

No other theory has been able to explain why rates of anxiety and depression surged among adolescents in so many countries at the same time and in the same way. Other factors, of course, contribute to poor mental health, but the unprecedented rise between 2010 and 2015 cannot be explained by the global financial crisis, nor by any set of events that happened in the United States or in any other particular country. (45)

Everything about raising children is messy, hard to control, and harder to predict. Children raised in loving homes that support autonomy, play, and growth may still develop anxiety disorders; children raised in overprotective homes usually turn out fine. There is no one right way to be a parent; there is no blueprint for building a perfect child. Yet it is helpful to bear in mind some general features of human childhood: Kids are antifragile and therefore they benefit from risky play, along with a secure base, which helps to shift them over toward discover mode. A play-based childhood is more likely to do that than a phone-based childhood. (93)

Smartphones and other digital devices bring so many interesting experiences to children and adolescents that they cause a serious problem: They reduce interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience. Smartphones are like the cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in other birds’ nests. The cuckoo egg hatches before the others, and the cuckoo hatchling promptly pushes the other eggs out of the nest in order to commandeer all of the food brought by the unsuspecting mother. Similarly, when a smartphone, tablet, or video game console lands in a child’s life, it will push out most other activities, at least partially. The child will spend many hours each day sitting enthralled and motionless (except for one finger) while ignoring everything beyond the screen. (Of course, the same might be true of the parents as well, as the family sits “alone together.”)

Are screen-based experiences less valuable than real-life flesh-and-blood experiences? When we are talking about children whose brains evolved to expect certain kinds of experiences at certain ages, yes. A resounding yes. Communicating by text supplemented by emojis is not going to develop the parts of the brain that are “expecting” to get tuned up during conversations supplemented by facial expressions, changing vocal tones, direct eye contact, and body language. We can’t expect children and adolescents to develop adult-level real-world social skills when their social interactions are largely happening in the virtual world. Synchronous video conversations are closer to real-life interactions but still lack the embodied experience.

If we want children to have a healthy pathway through puberty, we must first take them off experience blockers so that they can accumulate the wide range of experiences they need, including the real-world stressors their antifragile minds require to wire up properly. Then we should give children a clear pathway to adulthood with challenges, milestones, and a growing set of freedoms and responsibilities along the way. (99)

Adults are doing a variety of things to Gen Z, often with good intentions, that prevent adolescents from experiencing a widely shared and socially validated progression from childhood dependency to adult independence. We interfered with their growth in the 1980s and 1990s when we blocked them from risky play and ramped up adult supervision and monitoring. We gave them unfettered access to the internet instead, removing all age thresholds that used to mark the path to adulthood. A few years later, we gave their younger siblings smartphones in middle school. Once we had a new generation hooked on smartphones (and other screens) before the start of puberty, there was little space left in the stream of information entering their eyes and ears for guidance from mentors in their real-world communities during puberty. There was just an infinite river of digital experience, customized for each child to maximize clicks and ad revenue, to be consumed alone in his or her room. It all got worse during the COVID pandemic years of “social distancing” and online everything. (105-6)

This is the great irony of social media: the more you immerse yourself in it, the more lonely and depressed you become. This is true both at the individual level and at the collective level. When teens as a whole cut back on hanging out and doing things together in the real world, their culture changed. Their communion needs were left unsatisfied––even for those few teens who were not on social media.

After considering the four reasons that girls are particularly vulnerable, we can see why social media is a trap that ensnares more girls than boys. The lure is the promise of connecting with friends––enticing for girls who have strong needs for communion––but the reality is that girls are plunged into a strange new world in which our ancient evolved programming for real-world communities misfires continuously. Girls in virtual networks are subjected to hundreds of times more social comparison than girls had experienced for all of human evolution. They are exposed to more cruelty and bullying because social media platforms incentivize and facilitate relational aggression. Their openness and willingness to share emotions with other girls exposes them to depression and other disorders. The twisted incentive structures of social media reward the most extreme presentations of symptoms. And finally, the progress that many societies have made to reduce sexual violence and harassment in the real world is being counteracted by the facilitation of harassment and exploitation by companies that put profits above the privacy and safety of their users. (170)

Boys have increasingly disconnected from the real world and invested their time and talents in the virtual world instead. Some boys will find career success there, because their mastery of that world can lead to lucrative jobs in the tech industry or as influencers. But for many, though it can be an escape from an increasingly inhospitable world, growing up in the virtual world makes them less likely to develop into men with the social skills and competencies to achieve success in the real world. (176)

From a spiritual perspective, social media is a disease of the mind. Spiritual practices and virtues, such as forgiveness, grace, and love, are a cure. (211)

I want to acknowledge how hard it is to be a parent these days, or a teacher, school administrator, coach, or anyone else who works with children and adolescents. It’s even harder to be an adolescent. We’re all trying to do our best while struggling with incomplete knowledge about a rapidly changing technological world that is fragmenting our attention and changing our relationships. It’s hard for us to understand what is happening, or know what to do about it. But we must do something. We must try new policies and measure the outcomes. (226)

A school that is phone-free and play-full is investing in prevention. It is reducing overprotection in the real world, which helps kids to cultivate antifragility. At the same time, it is loosening the grip of the virtual world, thereby fostering better learning and relationships in the real world. A school that does neither is likely to struggle with high levels of student anxiety, and will need to spend large amounts of money to treat students’ growing distress. (253-4)

When we give trust to kids, they soar. Trusting our kids to start venturing out into the world may be the most transformative thing adults can do. But it is difficult for most parents to do this on their own. If your daughter goes to the park and there are no other kids there, she’ll come right home. If your son is the only 8-year-old anyone in your town ever sees walking without a chaperone, someone might call the police.

Re-normalizing childhood independence requires collective action, and collective action is most easily facilitated by local schools. When an entire class, school, or school district encourages parents to loosen the reins, the culture in that town or county shifts. Parents don’t feel guilty or weird about letting go. Hey, it’s homework, and all the other parents are doing it too. Pretty soon, you’ve got kids trick-or-treating on their own again, and going to the store, and getting themselves to school.

Our kids can do so much more than we let them. Our culture of fear has kept this truth from us. They are like racehorses stuck in the stable. It’s time to let them out. (256)

The Great Rewiring of Childhood, from play-based to phone-based, has been a catastrophic failure. It’s time to end the experiment. Let’s bring our children home. (293)

Rating: 10/10