The Anxious Generation

I’m reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How The Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The book is about the effects of the modern age of technology on the mental health of children and adolescents. After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on multiple measures.

Haidt argues that the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and that it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents several mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

As a psychologist who has practiced before, during, and after the period he discusses, I think what he proposes is more right than it is wrong based on what I have seen over the last twenty five plus years working with kids in crisis.

Haidt suggests four rules which he believes would make a dramatic impact on the mental health of our kids. These rules are as follows:

1. No smartphones before high school.
2. No social media before age 16.
3. No phones in schools.
4. More independence, free play and responsibility in the real world for our kids.

What do you think of Haidt’s four rules?