The anxious generation How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness

Portable telephones were originally celebrated as a way to stay connected to friends and family. But in the early 2010s, with the onset of smartphones and their easy access to the internet, children's brains were being effectively rewired, shifting from "play-based" to "phone-based." Parents, who worked to keep their children safe from outdoor play and predators, now allowed their kids to stroll unfettered through the internet. Excessive phone use can lead to social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. For young women, Haidt writes, it can lead to depression; for young men, it can lead to existing in their own separate realities. The author admits to some benefits of online use for children, including lower rates of injury and alcohol use and a measure of intellectual stimulation, but the pluses are overshadowed by the loss of social interactions and life experiences. Academic Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind, 2018) backs up his claims with scientific studies and graphics, and presents plans to limit the effects of smartphones by large tech companies, schools, and parents. This is a practical look at a vital topic.

A pitched argument against the "firehose of addictive content" aimed at children via technology. Psychologist Haidt, author of The Righteous Mindand co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, turns to the disaffection of children rendered zombielike by their smartphones and social media. "The members of Gen Z are…the test subjects for a radical new way of growing up," he writes, their sensibilities formed by the instant gratifications and instant peer-pressure judgments delivered by online outlets. Before 2009, writes the author, social media use was largely harmless, mostly a means of keeping up with friends and family, without the toxicity inherent in being constantly subject to opinions given and received--a good way to get locked into "defend mode…on permanent alert for threats, rather than being hungry for new experiences." This corresponds to the shift, beginning in the 1980s, from what Haidt calls "play-based childhood" to "phone-based childhood," one effect of which is to remove children from the socialization they would otherwise have undergone simply by one-on-one play. It wasn't necessarily phones but overanxious parents who took down the sky-high monkey bars. However, coupled with the rapid rise of addictive technology, this drove children indoors and into anxieties and depressions of their own as their lives are "radically rewired." Haidt concludes by advocating a regime of free play and strictly monitored social media use, including not allowing children under high school age to have smartphones and forming parental associations that would essentially police for this kind of behavior. That program may seem draconian, especially to a 12- or 13-year-old, but Haidt argues persuasively that it's an essential defense against the assaults on mental health that social media inflict on unformed young minds. A strong case for tempering children's technological dependency in favor of fresh air and sunshine. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Part 1 A Tidal Wave Chapter 1 THE SURGE OF SUFFERING When I talk with parents of adolescents, the conversation often turns to smartphones, social media, and video games. The stories parents tell me tend to fall into a few common patterns. One is the "constant conflict" story: Parents try to lay down rules and enforce limits, but there are just so many devices, so many arguments about why a rule needs to be relaxed, and so many ways around the rules, that family life has come to be dominated by disagreements about technology. Maintaining family rituals and basic human connections can feel like resisting an ever-risingtide, one that engulfs parents as well as children. For most of the parents I talk to, their stories don't center on any diagnosed mental illness. Instead, there is an underlying worry that something unnatural is going on, and that their children are missing something--really, almost everything--as their online hours accumulate. But sometimes the stories parents tell me are darker. Parents feel that they have lost their child. A mother I spoke with in Boston told me about the efforts she and her husband had made to keep their fourteen-year-old daughter, Emily, away from Instagram. They could see the damaging effects it was having on her. To curb her access, they tried various programs to monitor and limit the apps on her phone. However, family life devolved into a constant struggle in which Emily eventually found ways around the restrictions. In one distressing episode, she got into her mother's phone, disabled the monitoring software, and threatened to kill herself if her parents reinstalled it. Her mother told me: It feels like the only way to remove social media and the smartphone from her life is to move to a deserted island. She attended summer camp for six weeks each summer where no phones were permitted--no electronics at all. Whenever we picked her up from camp she was her normal self. But as soon as she started using her phone again it was back to the same agitation and glumness. Last year I took her phone away for two months and gave her a flip phone and she returned to her normal self. When I hear such stories about boys, they usually involve video games (and sometimes pornography) rather than social media, particularly when a boy makes the transition from being a casual gamer to a heavy gamer. I met a carpenter who told me about his 14 year-old son, James, who has mild autism. James had been making good progress in school before COVID arrived, and also in the martial art of judo. But once schools were shut down, when James was eleven, his parents bought him a PlayStation, because they had to find something for him to do at home. At first it improved James's life--he really enjoyed the games and social connections. But as he started playing Fortnite for lengthening periods of time, his behavior began to change. "That's when all the depression, anger, and laziness came out. That's when he started snapping at us," the father told me. To address James's sudden change in behavior, he and his wife took all of his electronics away. When they did this, James showed withdrawal symptoms, including irritability and aggressiveness, and he refused to come out of his room. Although the intensity of his symptoms lessened after a few days, his parents still felt trapped: "We tried to limit his use, but he doesn't have any friends, other than those he communicates with online, so how much can we cut him off?" No matter the pattern or severity of their story, what is common among parents is the feeling that they are trapped and powerless. Most parents don't want their children to have a phone-based childhood, but somehow the world has reconfigured itself so that any parent who resists is condemning their children to social isolation. In the rest of this chapter, I'm going to show you evidence that something big is happening, something changed in the lives of young people in the early 2010s that made their mental health plunge. But before we immerse ourselves in the data, I wanted to share with you the voices of parents who feel that their children were in some sense swept away, and who are now struggling to get them back. Excerpted from The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.