7 lessons and 3 questions from "The Anxious Generation"
A review of Jonathan Haidt's new bestseller
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist. For almost a decade, he’s been trying to understand what’s happening with the wellbeing of the younger generation.
Haidt’s friend Greg Lukianoff noticed a drastic increase in depression, anxiety, and a need to be protected from ideas and people who made them feel unsafe on his college campus. He and Haidt began exploring the problem, publishing “The Coddling of the American Mind” in 2015.
Now, Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation compiles new research on adolescent mental health and technology usage to suggest that there has been a “great rewiring of childhood.”
This rewiring can be summarized with this phrase: “we’re under protecting children in the virtual world and overprotecting them in the real world.”
To begin this shift: Haidt proposes four foundational reforms that promote more real-world independence and less online independence:
No smartphones before high school
No social media before 16
Phone-free schools
Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence
I’ll share 7 lessons and 3 questions from my reading of the book, focusing on arguments and suggestions Haidt makes that feel especially important to me.
(I reference page numbers of the U.S. version of The Anxious Generation whenever I pull data, ideas, or anecdotes directly from the book).
Lesson #1: Smartphones pose a fundamentally different threat to children than former technological innovations.
Our World in Data shows that the smartphone was adopted faster than any other communication technology in history.
The reason they’re more dangerous is simple: smartphones allow you to access anything on the internet from anywhere. Now, kids and adolescents can be online all the time.
And a lot of them are.
And a lot of them are. Pew research found that in 2015, 1 in 4 teens said they were online “almost constantly.” That figure nearly doubled by 2022, rising to 46%.
Smartphones distract and distance adolescents, especially when they enable constant access to addictive content like social media, pornography, and video games.
Lesson #2: Kids thrive when they spend most of their time in “discover mode” as opposed to “defend mode,” but most born after 1995 are spending their lives in defend mode.
Our brain has two main systems to help us navigate a variety of environments. The behavioral activation system (discover mode) turns on when you detect opportunities, and the behavioral inhibition system (defend mode) turns on when you detect threats (pg 71-73).
Defend mode breeds anxiety, defensiveness, and a scarcity mindset, while discover mode breeds independent thinking, excitement for opportunities, and a “let me grow” mindset. Haidt cites the ~10% increase in anxiety and depression among college freshmen, which rose from 4% in 2012 to 13% in 2018, as a strong indicator that adolescents’ brains have been programmed to live in defend mode.
I recently stumbled upon my high school graduation speech (from 2019), and surprisingly, my 17 year-old self wrote a pretty astute assessment on the way phones and technology were affecting my graduating class. Here’s a short excerpt from my speech:
“The modern world in which we live is full of superficiality. Technology has enhanced our lives in many ways (let’s take this moment and thank Google, Wikipedia, and copy and paste--who are the real reason we are graduating at all). But is the web of digital connection sucking meaning from our lives? Have we forgotten how to embrace the feelings of the moment because we’re busy staring at a screen? Please do not let your fears, your frustrations, or your phones numb this beautiful experience we call life.”
I remember writing this and thinking, this is the message I want to share because most of my classmates just aren’t excited about their life.
The speech concluded with this statement: “To those who sit here, fear coursing through their veins, wondering what the future holds, I simply say this: embrace the unknown with excitement.”
Lesson #3: Technology harms us in 4 foundational ways: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.
These harms all emphasize the opportunity costs of a phone-based child, since many sources show that the average teen spends 6-8 hours a day on screen-based leisure activities.
Regarding social deprivation, Haidt cites the American Time Use Study to show that since 2012, the daily time 15-24 year-olds spend with friends has rapidly declined. In 2019 (before COVID-19), Gen Z spent an average of 45 minutes a day with friends, which is just ⅓ of the time they spent in 2012.
The book quotes a Canadian college student, who explains that “oftentimes I’ll arrive early to a lecture to find a room of 30+ students sitting together in complete silence, absorbed in their smartphones…leading to further isolation and a weakening of self identity and confidence, something I know because I’ve experienced it firsthand” (pg. 122).
Sleep deprivation seriously threatens teens’ mental and physical health. Not only do screens steal time that would otherwise be spent sleeping, but they also lead to “shorter sleep duration, longer sleep latency, and more mid-sleep awakenings” (pg. 124).
Perhaps the most obvious effect of social media and smartphones is their ability to fragment our attention. “When adolescents have continuous access to a smartphone at that developmentally sensitive age, it may interfere with their maturing ability to focus” (pg. 128).
Anna Lembke is a Stanford researcher and one of the leading experts on addiction (for a deep dive into her work, read Dopamine Nation). In the 2010s, she began to notice parity in the symptoms of teenagers with digital addictions and users of heroin and cocaine. She says that “the smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation” (pg. 135).
Lesson #4: Social media exploits teenage girls’ biggest weaknesses, who are typically more relational, emotional, and affected by visual comparison than boys.
The anecdotes in this chapter evoked many painful emotions as I reflected on my own experiences with social media and those of my friends. From visual comparison to passive aggressive bullying to sharing inappropriate pictures with older men, everything about how social media affects teenage girls makes me more passionate about helping them get off these platforms entirely.
I’ll share just one anecdote here, written by a 13-year-old girl on Reddit:
“i cant stop comparing myself. It came to a point where i wanna kill myself casue u dont want to look like this no matter what i try im still ugly/feel ugly. I constantly cry about this. Back when i was 10 i found a girl on tiktok and basically became obsessed with her. She was literally perfect and i remember being unimaginably envious of her. Throughout my pre-teen years, i became ‘obsessed’ with other pretty girls.”
Lesson #5: Boys experience harm from technology differently, and the negative effects for them mostly come through pornography and video games.
Haidt asserts that video games can be beneficial, but video game use is problematic or addicting for ~7% of teen boys. For all boys, the opportunity cost of excessive time spent on video games (less sleep and less real-world play) poses a serious threat to boys’ successful transition to adulthood.
Transferring risk-taking and unstructured play to virtual worlds with structured rules and risks that pose no real-world consequences leads boys to be at a greater risk of “failure to launch” than girls. Another element of the “failure to launch” problem stems from easy access to pornography via smartphones, enabling boys to satisfy sexual desires without taking risks to form real-life romantic relationships.
Lesson #6: Children and teens need to feel capable and needed to flourish as adults, and real-world independence at a young age enables this.
Developmental psychologist Allison Gopnik, in her book The Gardener and the Carpenter, explains that many parents today need to reframe their job as parents from one of a carpenter to one of a gardener.
“Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it’s to give them the toys…We can’t make children learn, but we can let them learn.”
A fear-based & formulaic parenting approach has resulted in many parents not giving their child large amounts of time for free play and independent discovery of the world around them. For older children, parents delay the responsibility of running errands, taking care of younger children, and traveling
Lesson #7: “The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.”
In the chapter on “Spiritual Elevation and Degradation,” Haidt offers six suggestions for adults, families, and children to restore a sense of spirituality in their lives:
Shared sacredness: Holidays and regular religious services provide rhythm and structure that the online world does not provide. Online, “there is no Sabbath and there are no holy days. Everything is profane.”
Embodiment: Powerful psychological effects come from moving together with a group. Physical embodiment can occur through sacred religious rituals, playing sports, listening to live music, and sharing meals.
Stillness, silence, and focus: If we want to be present with the people we love, we need to consistently practice stillness, silence, and focus. Ensure your schedule gives you regular opportunities to sit quietly, mediate, stare out a car window and think, or spend time in nature.
Transcending the self: When we have a spiritual experience or feel a strong sense of awe, we forget about ourselves and feel more a part of a family, a community, or an ecosystem. Phones rarely, if ever, enable us to have these transformative experiences.
My questions
Question #1: Do Haidt’s problem diagnoses and recommendations feel obvious yet idealistic to most people?
I’ve studied this topic for so long that it’s difficult for me to identify what will feel insightful to the average reader.
If Haidt’s intention is to make recommendations that feel obvious and achievable, he could’ve strengthened each recommendation by providing specific stories of schools implementing a no-phone policy, parents navigating the social media conversation with young teens, and people advocating for change with their local schools and governments (he did provide examples of how parents and communities have promoted more free play and independence, but I was left wanting the same tactical advice for the other three recommendations).
Question #2: How do parents’ personal technology habits affect a child’s relationship with smartphones, social media, video games, pornography, etc.?
I worry that Haidt under-emphasized something that I see as a key factor in a child’s development: if a parent uses some type of technology in an unhealthy way, their children and teens will likely mimic that habit.
Everyone who influences children, including parents, teachers, coaches, nannies, grandparents, teachers, etc., needs to exemplify the good technology habits they want the child to develop.
Question #3: What role does advertising on social media apps play in adolescent mental health and loneliness?
Targeted ads fund every social media platform. They thrive on a third-party pay business model, and this means that their key objective is to maximize the time each user spends on their platform.
This model encourages consumerism and materialism, both of which I observe to be increasing at dangerous levels among my peers. I want to see more conversations on how we can shift the business model incentives to be one that prioritizes users’ interests above advertisers’ interests.
(This concept is often referred to as limbic capitalism, and Haidt notes that he plans to explore this topic in his “After Babel” substack).
Conclusion
Overall, I really enjoyed this book and hope it reaches many parents, future parents, tech executives, and community leaders.
The Anxious Generation makes a powerful case for the need to change the way we approach childhood. It highlights the dangers of smartphones, social media, and technology, but more importantly, it helps us remember the beautiful real-life experiences that they’re forcing kids to forgo.
If you’ve read The Anxious Generation or another book on this topic, please share your perspective below!
If you’re interested in reading other books on this topic, explore our book list here.