Notes from ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt

The central claim of the book is that there are two trends – overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world – are the major reasons why childtren born after 1995 became the anxious generation.

Real world relationships and social interactions are characterised by four features that have been typical for millions of years:

1. They are embodied, meaning that we use our bodies to communicate, we are concious of the bodies of thers, and we respond to the bodies of others both consciously and unconsciously.
2. They are synchronous, which means they are happening at the same time, with subtle cues about timing and turn taking.
3. They involve primarilty one-to-one or one to several communication, with only one interaction happening at a given moment.
4. They take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen.

Virtual world relationships and interactions are characterised by four features that have been typical for a few decades:

1. They are disembodied, meaning that no body is needed, just language. Partners could be (and already are) artifical intelligences (AIs).
2. They are heavily asynchronous, happening via text-based posts and comments (A video call is diffeernt; it is synchronous).
3. They involve a substational number of one-to-many communications, broadcasting to a potenially vast audience. Multiple interactions can be happening in parallel.
4. they take place within communities that have a low bar for entry and exit, so people can block others or just quit when they are not pleased. Communities tend to be short-lived, and relationships are often disposable.

Haidt has come up with some four reforms that would provide a foundation for healthier childhood in the digital age:

1. No Smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children’s entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (no internet access) before ninth grade.
2. No social media before 16. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of of socail comparision and algorithmically chosen influencers.
3. Phone-free schools. In all schools from elementary through high school, sturdents should store their phones, smartwatches, and any ohter personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked puches during the school day. That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers.
4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety,and become self-governing young adults.

Surge of Suffering

• Between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved largely onto smartphones with continouse access to social mdia, only video games, and other internet-based actibvites. This great rewiring of childood is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s.
• The 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 who had largely finished puberty when the Great Rewiring began in 2010.
• The tidal wave of anxiety, depression, and self-harm it gilrs harder than boys, and it hit preteen girls hardest of all.
• The mental healthcrisis has also hit boys. Their rates of depression and anxiety have also increased a lot, although usually not by as much as for girls. Boys’ technology use and mental healht difficulites are somewhat different from those of girls.
• Sucide rates in the United States began rising around 2009 for adolescent boys and girls’ they rose much higher in the 2010s.
• The increase in suffering was not limited to teh United States. Teh same pattern is seen at roughtly the same time among teens in the UK, Canada, and other major Anglosphere countries, and also in the five Nordic nations. Feelings of alienation in school rose after 2012 across the Western world. Data is less abundant in non-Western nationls, and the patterns there are less clear.
• No other theory has been able to explain why rantes 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 unprescendeed rise between 2010 and 2015 cannot be explained by the global financial crisis, nore by any set of events that hapepend in the United States or in any other particular country.

What Children Need to Do in Childhood

• 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 adaption for cultural learning. Childhood is an apprenticeship for learning the skills needed for success in one’s culture.
• Free play is essential for developming social skills, like confict resoution, as it is for developing physical skills. But play-based childhoods were replaced by phone-based childhoods as chidren and adolscents moved their social lives and free tim onto internet connected devices.
• Children learn through play to connect, syncronise and take turns. They enjoy attunement and need enormouse quantities of it. Attunment and syncrony bond pairs, groups, and whole communiteis. Social media, in contrast, is mostly asynchronous and performative. It inhibits attunemnet and leaves heavly 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 seetms to be the most accomplished and prestigious. Social media platforms, which are engineered for enagement, hijack social learning and drown out the culture of one’s family and local community while locking children’s eyes onto influences of questionable value.

Puberty and the Blocked Transition

• Early puberty is a period of rapid brain rewiring, second only to the first few years of life. Neural pruning and myelination are occuring 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 from overcoming anxiety, learning to manage risk, and learning to be self-governming, all of which are essential from becoming healthy and competent adults.
• Smartphones are a second kind of expeirence blocker. Once tehy enter a child’s life, they push out or reduce all other forms of non-phone-based experience, which is the kind that their expeirence-expectant brains most need.
• Rites of passage are the curated sets of experiences that human societies arrange to help adolescents make the transiton to adulthood. Van Gennep notesd that these rites ususally have a seperation phase, a transformation phase, and a reincorporation phase.
• Western societies have elminated many rites of passage, and the digital world that opened up in the 1990s eventually buried most milestones and obscured the path to adulthood. 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.

The Four Foundational Harms

• The sheer amount of time that adolescents spend wiht their phoens is staggering, even compared 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 referes to everything that children do less of onece they get unlimted round-the-clock access to the internet.
• Teh first foundational harm is socila deprivation. When American adolsecnets moved onto smartphones, time with friends in face-to-face settings plummeted immediately, from 122 minutes per day in 2012 down to 67 mintutes per day in 2019. Time with friends dropped furtehr because of COVID restrictions, but Gen Z was already socially distanced before COVID restrictions were put in place.
• The second fundamental harm is sleep deprevation. 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 maturityand a sing of good executive function. But smartphones are kryptonite for atteniton. Many adolescents give hundreds of notifcations per day, menaing that htey realrey have five or 10 mintues to think without an interuption.
• There is evidence that the fragmentation of attention in early adolescence caused by problematic use of soicla media and vidoe games may interfere with the developments of executive function.
• The fourth fundamental harm is addiciton. The behaviourists discovered that learning, for animals, is the wearing smooth of a path in the brain. The developers of the most succesful social media apps used advanced behaviorist techniques to hool children into becoming heavy users of their products.
• When we put these four foundational harms together, they explain why mental health got so much wors so suddenly as soon as childhood became phone-based.

Why Social Media Harms Girls more than Boys?

• Social media harms girls more than boys. Correlation studies show that heavy users of soicla media have higher rates of depression and other disorders that light users or nonusers. The correlation is larger and clearer for girlds: Heavy users are three times as klikely to be depressed as nonusers.
• Experimental studies show that socila media use is a cause, not just a correlate , of anxiety and depression. When people are assigned to reduce or eliminate socila media for three weeks or more, tehir mental health usually improves. Several “quasi-expriments” show that when Facebook came to campuses, or when high -speed internet came to regions and provinces, mental health declined especially for young girls and worman.
• Two major catergories of motivations are agency (the desire to stanrd out and haf an efffect on teh world) and commnion ( the desire to connect and devleop a sense of belonign). 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 criticise one’s face and body. Visually oriented soical media platforms that focus on images of oneself are ideally suited to pushing down a girls “socialmeter”(teh internal gauge of where one stands in relation to tohers). Girls are also more likely to develop “socially prescirbed perfectionism”, in which a person tries to live up to impossibly high standards held by others or by society.
• The second reason that girls’ agression is often expressed in attempts to harm the relationships and reputations of others girls, whereas boys’ agression is more likley to be expressed in physical ways. Social media has offered girls endless ways to damage other girls’ relationships and reputations.
• The third reasons is that girls and women more readily share emotions. When everyhthign moved online and girls became hyperconnected, girls with anxiety or depression might have influenced many other girls to develop anxiety and dpression. Girls are also more vulnerable to ‘sociogenic’ illnesses, which means illnesses caused by social influence rather than from a biological case.
• The fourth reason is that the interent has made it easier for men to approach and stalk girls and woemn and to behave badly toward them while avoiding accountability. When preteen girls open soical media accounts they are often follwoed an contacted by older men, and they are pressured by boys in their school to share nude photographs of themselves.
• Soical media is a trap that ensnares more girls than boyhs., It lures people in with the promise of connection and communiion, but then it multiplies the number of relationships while reducing their quality, therefore making it harder to spend time wiht a few close friends in real life. This may be why lonliness spiked so sharply among girls in the early 2010s, while for boys the rise was more gradual.

What Is Happening to Boys?

• Like girls, boys got more depressed and anxious in the early 2010s, in many countries. Unlike girls, boys experienced a slow decline since the 1970s in achievement and engagement in school, work, and family life.
• Boys and young men withdrew much of their time and effort from the physical world (Which was increasingly opposed to unsupervised play, exploration, and risk taking) and invested it in the rapidly expanding virtual world.
• Boys are at greater risk than girls of “failure to launch”. They are more likely to become young adults who are “Not in education, Employment, or Training”. Some Japanese men developed an exterme form of lifelong withdrawal to their bedrooms; they are called hikikomori.
• In the early 2010s, American teen boys’ thinking patterns shifted from what they had traditionally been (higher rates of externalising cognitions and behaviours than internalising) to a pattern more commonly shown by girls (higher rates of internalising). At the same time, boys also began to shun risk (more so than happened for gilrs).
• As boys engaged in fewer risky activities outdoors or away from home, and began spending more time at home on screens, their mental health did not decline in the 1990s and 2000s. But something changed in the early 2010s , adn their mental health then began to decline.
• Once boys go stmartphoens, they -like gilrs – moved even more of their social lives online, and their mental health then began to decline.
• Once boys got smartphones, they-like girls-moved even more of their soical lives online, and their mental health declined.
• One way that smartphones-amplified by high-speed internet-have affected boys’ lives is by providing unlimited, free, hardcore pornography accessible anytime, anywhere. Porn is an example of how tech companies have made it easy for boys to satisfy powerful evolved desires without having to developin any skills that would help them make the transition to adulthood.
• Video games offer boys and girls a number of benffits, but there are also harms, especially for the subset of bosy (7%ish) who end up as problemative or addicted users. For them, video games do seem to cause declining mental and physical healht, family strife, and difficulties in other areas of life.
• As with social media for girls, spending hours “connecting” with others online produces an increas in the quality of social interactions and a decrease in the quality of socila relationship. Boys, like girls, became lonelier during hte Great Rewiring. Some boys use video games to strengthen their real-world packs, but for many others, video gams made it easier for them to retreat to their bedrooms rather than doing the hard work of matuering in the real world.
• The Great Rewiring of Childhood pulled young people out of real-world communiteis, including their own families, and created a new kind of childwhood lived in multiple rapidly shifting networkls. One inevitable result was anomie, or normlessness, because stable and binding moraliites cannot form when everything is in flux, inclding the members of the network.
• As the socilogist Emile Durkheim showed, anomie breeds dispair and sucide. This may be why boys and girls, who followed different paths through the Great Rewiring, ended up in the same place, wiwth a sugged and rapid increase in the feeling that their lives were meaningless.

What Governments and Tech Companies Can Do

• Governments at all levels need to change policies that are hamrming adolescent mental health and support policies that would improve it. In the United STates, govenments at teh start and local level are partly responsible for the overprotection of chidlren in the real world (via vast overreach of neglect lays), and the federal government is partly responsble for the underprotection of children in the virtual world (by passing an ineffective law in 1998 and failing to update it as the danges of life online becomes more apparent).
• To correct underprotection online, national and federal govements should enact laws of the sort first passed in the UK whihcf require companines to treat minors differently than adults, with an extra duty of care. National governmetns should raise the age of intenet adulthood to 16.
• Tech companies can be a major part of hte solution by developing better age verification features, and by adding features that allow parents to desgnate their children’s phones and computers as ones that should not be served by sites with minimum ages until they are old enough. Such a feature would help to dissolve multiple collective action problems for parents, kids, and platforms.
• To correct over protection in the real world, state and locla governmetn should narrow neglect laws and give prents confdience that they can give their children some unsupervised time wihtout risking arrest or state intervention in their family life.
• State and local governments should also encourage more free play and recess in schools. They shcould consdier the needs of children in zoning and permitting, adn they should invest in more vocational education.

What Schools Can Do Now

• US middle and high schools have seen an increase in mental illness and psychologicla suffering among their students since hte early 2010s. Many are implementing a variety of polices in response.
• There is a Polynesian expression: “Standing on a whale, fishing for minows”. Sometimes what youa re looking for is right there, under foot, and it is better than anything you could find by looking farther away. I suggested two potential whales that schools can implement right way, with little or no addiontal money: going phone-free,a nd becoming more play-full.
• Most schools say they ban phones, but that typically means only that studnets must not use thier phones during class. This is an effective policy because it incentivies studnets to hide their phone us eduring class and increase their phone use after class, which makes it harder for them to form friendships with the kids around them.
• A better policy is to go phone-free for the entire school day. When students arrive, they shoudl put their phones into a dedicated phone locker or into a locable phone pouch.
• The second whal is becoming a play-full school. The simple addiotn of a Let Grow Play Club-an afternoon option in K-9 schools of playing on the school playground, with no phones, plenty of loose parts, and minmal adult supervision -may teach social skills and reduce anxiety better than any educaitonal program, bercuase free play is nature’s way of accomplishing these goals.
• Schools can become more play-full by improving recess in three ways:L
  • Give more of it
  • On better playgrounds (such as those incorporating loose parts and junk)
  • Fewer rules
• Schools can do more to revers teh growing disengagement of bosy adn their declining academic progres relative to girls. Offering more shop classes and more vocational and technical trainign and hiring mor emale teachers would each serve to re-engage boys.
• An ounce of preventing is worth a pound of cure. If K-9 schools become phone free and play full, they wuill be applying many pounds of prevention, wich will reduce the flow of depressed an daxcious studnets entering high school.

What Parents Can Do Now

• Being a parent is always a challenge, and it has become far more challenging in our era of rapid social and technological change. However, there is a lot that parentsn can do to be come better “gardeners” thoes who create a space to which their children can learn and grow-in contrast to “carpenters” who try to mold and shape their hildren directly.
• If you do one thing to be a better gardener in the real world, it should be to give your chidlren far more unsupervised free palay, of the sort that you probably enjoeyd at that age. That means givng them a larger and btter play-based childhood, with ever-growing independence and responsiblity.
• If you do one thing to be a better gardener in the virtual world, it should be to delay your children’s full entry into the phone-based childhood by delaying when you give them their first smartphone. Give tonly basi phones before the start of high schoolk, and try to coordinate with other parents so your children do not feel they are the only ones wihtout smartphones in middle school.
• There are many other ways to increase your children’s engagement with the real world and embeddedness in communities, including sending them to a technology-free sleepaway camp, go camping, and helping them find addiotnal settings in which they can hang out wiht other children who are not carrying smartphones.
• As your children get older, increase their mobility and encourage th em to find part-time jobs and ways to learn from other adults. Consider an exchange program, a summer wilderness programme, and a gap year.
• A free-range chldhood is more likely to produce condirent, competent young adults, with lower levesl of anxiety, than is a chidlwhood ruled by safetyism, fea, and constant adult supervision. The biggest obstacle is the parents’ own anxiety about letting a child out of sight, unchaperoned by an adult. This takes practice, but the ultimate plreasure of beign able to trust your child outwights the temporary anxieties of letting go.