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• The Anxious Generation (41)

The Anxious Generation

Jonathan Haidt

Introduction: Growing Up on Mars

A fourth trend began just a few years later, and it hit girls much harder than boys: the increased prevalence of posting images of oneself, after smartphones added front-facing cameras (2010) and Facebook acquired Instagram (2012), boosting its popularity. This greatly expanded the number of adolescents posting carefully curated photos and videos of their lives for their peers and strangers, not just to see, but to judge. 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 alternative 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.

Nonetheless, there are four reforms that are so important, and in which I have such a high degree of confidence, that I’m going to call them foundational. They would provide a foundation for healthier childhood in the digital age. They are: No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children’s entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (roughly age 14). No social media before 16. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers. Phone-free schools. In all schools from elementary through high school, students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked pouches during the school day. That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

Chapter 1: The Surge of Suffering

Between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities. This Great Rewiring of Childhood, I argue, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent

first generation of Americans who went through puberty with smartphones (and the entire internet) in their hands became more anxious, depressed, self-harming, and suicidal. We now call that generation Gen Z, in contrast to the millennial generation, which had largely finished puberty when the Great Rewiring began in 2010.

The tidal wave of anxiety, depression, and self-harm hit girls harder than boys, and it hit preteen girls hardest of all.

same pattern is seen at roughly the same time among teens in the U.K., Canada, and other major Anglosphere countries, and also in the five Nordic nations.

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.

Chapter 2: What Children Need to Do in Childhood

After the Great Rewiring, however, it became common for adolescents to spend most of their waking hours interacting with a smartphone, consuming content from strangers as well as friends, playing mobile games, watching videos, and posting on social media. By 2015, adolescents had a lot less time and motivation to get together in person.[1]

Human childhood is very different from that of any other animal. Children’s brains grow to 90% of full size by age 5, but then take a long time to configure themselves. This slow-growth childhood is an adaptation for cultural learning. Childhood is an apprenticeship for learning the skills needed for success in one’s culture.

Free play is as essential for developing social skills, like conflict resolution, as it is for developing physical skills. But play-based childhoods were replaced by phone-based childhoods as children and adolescents moved their social lives and free time onto internet-connected devices.

Children learn through play to connect, synchronize, and take turns. They enjoy attunement and need enormous quantities of it. Attunement and synchrony bond pairs, groups, and whole communities. Social media, in contrast, is mostly asynchronous and performative. It inhibits attunement and leaves heavy users starving for social connection.

Children are born with two innate learning programs that help them to acquire their local culture. Conformist bias motivates them to copy whatever seems to be most common. Prestige bias motivates them to copy whoever seems to be the most accomplished and prestigious. Social media platforms, which are engineered for engagement, hijack social learning and drown out the culture of one’s family and local community while locking children’s eyes onto influencers of questionable value.

Social learning occurs throughout childhood, but there may be a sensitive period for cultural learning that spans roughly ages 9 to 15. Lessons learned and identities formed in these years are likely to imprint, or stick, more than at other ages. These are the crucial sensitive years of puberty. Unfortunately, they are also the years in which most adolescents in developed countries get their own phones and move their social lives online.

Chapter 3: Discover Mode and the Need for Risky Play

In fact, the best parenting book[13] that my wife and I read when our children were toddlers urged us to look for opportunities to frustrate our children every day by laying out and enforcing the contingencies of life: If you want to watch Teletubbies, you must first put away your toys. If you persist in doing that, you’ll get a time-out. Yes, your sister got something you didn’t, and that happens sometimes.

excursions that are so helpful for developing their antifragile nature, don’t get to spend as much time in the growth zone. They may therefore spend more of their lives in defend mode, remaining more dependent on a parent’s physical presence, which reinforces parental overprotection in a vicious cycle.

All children are by nature antifragile. Just as the immune system must be exposed to germs, and trees must be exposed to wind, children require exposure to setbacks, failures, shocks, and stumbles in order to develop strength and self-reliance. Overprotection interferes with this development and renders young people more likely to be fragile and fearful as adults.

Kids must have a great deal of free play to develop, and they benefit from risky physical play, which has anti-phobic effects. Kids seek out the level of risk and thrill that they are ready for, in order to master their fears and develop competencies. Risk-taking online may not have comparable anti-phobic effects.

Children are most likely to thrive when they have a play-based childhood in the real world. They are less likely to thrive when fearful parenting and a phone-based childhood deprive them of opportunities for growth.

Chapter 4: Puberty and the Blocked Transition to Adulthood

Early puberty is a period of rapid brain rewiring, second only to the first few years of life. Neural pruning and myelination are occurring at a very rapid rate, guided by the adolescent’s experiences. We should be concerned about those experiences and not let strangers and algorithms choose them.

Safetyism is an experience blocker. When we make children’s safety a quasi-sacred value and don’t allow them

to take any risks, we block them from overcoming anxiety, learning to manage risk, and learning to be self-governing, all of which are essential for becoming healthy and competent adults.

Smartphones are a second kind of experience blocker. Once they enter a child’s life, they push out or reduce all other forms of non-phone-based experience, which is the kind that their experience-expectant brains most need.

Once children began spending much or most of their time online, the inputs to their developing brains became undifferentiated torrents of stimuli with no age grading or age restrictions.

Chapter 5: The Four Foundational Harms: Social Deprivation, Sleep Deprivation, Attention Fragmentation, and Addiction

The sheer amount of time that adolescents spend with their phones is staggering, even compared with the high levels of screen time they had before the invention of the iPhone. Studies of time use routinely find that the average teen reports spending more than seven hours a day on screen-based leisure activities (not including school and homework).

The opportunity cost of a phone-based childhood refers to everything that children do less of once they get unlimited round-the-clock access to the internet.

The first foundational harm is social deprivation. When American adolescents moved onto smartphones, time with friends in face-to-face settings plummeted immediately, from 122 minutes per day in 2012 down to 67 minutes per day in 2019.

The second fundamental harm is sleep deprivation. As soon as adolescents moved from basic phones to smartphones, their sleep declined in both quantity and quality, around the developed world. Longitudinal studies show that smartphone use came first and was followed by sleep deprivation.

Sleep deprivation is extremely well studied, and its effects are far reaching. They include depression, anxiety, irritability, cognitive deficits, poor learning, lower grades, more accidents, and more deaths from accidents.

The third fundamental harm is attention fragmentation. Attention is the ability to stay on one mental road while many off-ramps beckon. Staying on a road, staying on a task, is a feature of maturity and a sign of good executive function. But smartphones are kryptonite for attention. Many adolescents get hundreds of notifications per day, meaning that they rarely have five or 10 minutes to think without an interruption.

The fourth fundamental harm is addiction. The behaviorists discovered that learning, for animals, is “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain.” The developers of the most successful social media apps used advanced behaviorist techniques to “hook” children into becoming heavy users of their products.

Dopamine release is pleasurable, but it does not trigger a feeling of satisfaction. Rather, it makes you want more of whatever you did to trigger the release.

When we put these four foundational harms together, they explain why mental health got so much worse so suddenly as soon as childhood became phone-based.

Chapter 6: Why Social Media Harms Girls More Than Boys

Social media harms girls more than boys. Correlational studies show that heavy users of social media have higher rates of depression and other disorders than light users or nonusers. The correlation is larger and clearer for girls: Heavy users are three times as likely to be depressed as nonusers.

Experimental studies show that social media use is a cause, not just a correlate, of anxiety and depression.

Girls use social media a lot more than boys, and they prefer visually oriented platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, which are worse for social comparison than primarily text-based platforms such as Reddit.

Two major categories of motivations are agency (the desire to stand out and have an effect on the world) and communion (the desire to connect and develop a sense of belonging). Boys and girls both want each of these, but there is a gender difference that emerges early in children’s play: Boys choose more agency activities; girls choose more communion activities. Social media appeals to the desire for communion, but it often ends up frustrating it.

There are at least four reasons why social media harms girls more than boys. The first is that girls are more sensitive to visual comparisons, especially when other people praise or criticize one’s face and body. Visually oriented social media platforms that focus on images of oneself are ideally suited to pushing down a girl’s “sociometer” (the internal gauge of where one stands in relation to others). Girls are also more likely to develop “socially prescribed perfectionism,” in which a person tries to live up to impossibly high standards held by others or by society.

The second reason is that girls’ aggression is often expressed in attempts to harm the relationships and reputations of other girls, whereas boys’ aggression is more likely to be expressed in physical ways. Social media has offered girls endless ways to damage other girls’ relationships and reputations.

The third reason is that girls and women more readily share emotions. When everything moved online and girls became hyperconnected, girls with anxiety or depression might have influenced many other girls to develop anxiety and depression. Girls are also more vulnerable to “sociogenic” illnesses, which means illnesses caused by social influence rather than from a biological cause.

The fourth reason is that the internet has made it easier for men to approach and stalk girls and women and to behave badly toward them while avoiding accountability. When preteen girls open social media accounts, they are often followed and contacted by older men, and they are pressured by boys in their school to share nude photographs of themselves.

Social media is a trap that ensnares more girls than boys. It lures people in with the promise of connection and communion, but then it multiplies the number of relationships while reducing their quality, therefore making it harder to spend time with a few close friends in real life. This may be why loneliness spiked so sharply among girls in the early 2010s, while for boys the rise was more gradual.