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Review of The Anxious Generation: How The Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt. Penguin Press.
Reports of depression, anxiety, and self-harm among pre-teens and teenagers in the United States surged in the 2010s. Concerns about mental health, which continue to grow, have coincided with the rapid spread of smartphones, which reached a majority of homes by 2012 or 2013.
In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt—a Professor of Ethical Leadership in New York University's School of Business; the author of The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind; and co-author, with Greg Lukianoff, of The Coddling of the American Mind—provides an informative and compelling synthesis of a view that has recently been gaining support: Over-protection of children in the real world and under-protection in the virtual world “are the major reasons” why Gen Z has become “the anxious generation.”
On average, Haidt reveals, teens spend more than seven hours a day on screen-based activities, excluding school and homework assignments, numbers that vary by social class and race. As a consequence, face-to-face time with friends has dropped from 122 minutes to 67 minutes per day. Tethered to their smartphones, generating an endless stream of interruptions, adolescents are also sleep deprived, have cognitive and attention deficits, and get lower grades. In one experiment, students did best when they left their phones in another room and worst when they were close at hand.
Claims that social media help individuals connect with friends, Haidt asserts, should be qualified by reports of loneliness and isolation, perhaps because the connection is not “as good as what it replaced.”
With their likes, shares, retweets, comments, influencers, and other validation feedback loops, Haidt writes, social media platforms “are the most efficient conformity engine ever invented,” decoupling excellence and prestige and defining “what is desirable.”
Girls spend more time on and suffer more harm from social media platforms than boys, Haidt reports. Adolescent girls often tie their self-image to beauty and sex appeal and are subjected online to assessments of their bodies. More invested in the quality of their relationships than boys, girls are more susceptible to gossip, harassment, bullying, and predation. Those who make substantial use of the virtual world are three times more likely to be depressed than non-users. For 13-year-olds—the current, but unenforced, minimum age for opening an account on a social media platform—puberty is already challenging, and for them, pervasive and public aggression can be especially damaging.
Haidt acknowledges that the data is less clear that social media is a cause of anxiety and depression for boys. That said, once boys get smartphones, their average mental-health declines and their rates of addiction to pornography and video games increase—as does the number of young adults who qualify as “NEETs" (not in education, employment or training).
The rewiring of childhood, Haidt emphasizes, came on the heels of fundamental changes in norms of “responsible” parenting. Haidt endorses the view that children are resilient. From an early age, they should learn through tasks assigned by parents and through rough-and-tumble outdoor play to “handle, process, and get past frustrations, minor accidents, teasing, exclusions, perceived injustices, and normal conflicts.” By contrast, overprotected children are likely to be trapped in anxious, phobic, and defensive patterns of thought and behavior.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, amid real and fabricated news stories about strangers abusing children, however, “fearful parenting” began to take hold and physical and emotional “safety” became non-negotiable demands. By 2000, unsupervised children were disappearing from public places. In a survey conducted in 2015, a substantial percentage of parents concluded that kids should be at least 12 before being allowed to stay alone in their own home for an hour, and 14 before they should be permitted to go by themselves to a public park.
Haidt concludes with a series of sensible but not always surprising proposals designed to “bring childhood back to earth.” He recommends that parents limit screen time to 2 hours a day for children ages 6-12 and use content filters for all devices in the house. The age of internet adulthood, Haidt maintains, should be raised from 13 to 16 and social media platforms should be compelled to verify age without compromising anonymity by assigning the task to another company, using biometrics, or making it possible for parents to mark phones belonging to a minor. Haidt wants schools to forbid cell-phone use during class time, as many already do, but also to require that the devices be stored in a backpack or locker throughout the school day. When a middle school in Colorado implemented such a policy, Haidt reports, academic performance improved dramatically.
Haidt supports laws that prohibit prosecuting parents for giving their children reasonable, age-appropriate independence. He urges schools to schedule longer recesses with little intervention and no-phone-play club zones, with near complete autonomy for students (except for rules against intentionally harming anyone or leaving the premises without telling the person in charge). The American Academy of Pediatrics, Haidt points out, has found that minimizing or eliminating recess is detrimental to academic achievement as well as physical health and social development. And, of course, Haidt wants children to spend more time appreciating nature, playing with friends, riding and falling off their bikes, and doing age-appropriate chores—because pre-teens and teens “thrive when they are rooted in real-world communities, not in disembodied virtual networks.”
Glenn C. Altschuler is The Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
