"The Anxious Generation" by Jonathan Haidt. A Review

 

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

Jonathan Haidt

Penguin Press

ISBN: 9780593655030; March 2024; $30

 

There is this creeping feeling that things are amiss, which keeps snagging our perceptions and catching on our minds. Some people shift the blame to this or that political party to explain the trouble or fault the stupidity and lameness of “those younger folk”. Most of the time much of the blame and assertions are prejudicial anecdotes with very little research or factual analysis. That’s where Jonathan Haidt comes in. Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is also the author of several valuable works and papers, such as “The Righteous Mind” and “The Coddling of the American Mind” and other compositions. In March of 2024 he published “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness”. This 400-page hardback, along with the supporting website at anxiousgeneration.com, give thoughtful, concerned readers a ton of factual research and analysis that diagnose what’s ailing us, but it also maps out practical ways “to reclaim human life for human beings in all generations” (17).

 

Haidt carefully walks readers through numerous studies to show that there has been a multi-decade trend in American society (and the West) that has rewritten childhood, and the consequences are showing up with alarming frequency among those in the teens and twenty. He calls this trend the “Great Rewiring.” As he notes, the “most intense period of this rewiring was 2010 to 2015, although the story I will tell begins with the rise of fearful and overprotective parenting in the 1980s and continues through the COVID pandemic to the present day” (4). In a nutshell, the author shows how two trends have brought our teens and twenties to be an anxious generation: (1) overprotective parenting that removed kids from play-based childhood and brought them into (2) phone-based childhood. This is a childhood shaped early by easy, unprotected access to social media and the internet. “My central claim in this book is that these two trends – overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world – are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation” (9). That is the book in summary, and every chapter makes his case over and over again.

 

In regard to overprotective parenting in the real world I can personally testify. The social pressure to protect our kids pushed us to restrain their independence as the grew up, because we were told repeatedly that there were sexual predators under every bush and around every corner.  And then the increasing expectation was that no sensible parent would leave their eight-year-old child alone or allow their eleven-year-old to walk to the local grocery store, and more. “We shouldn’t blame parents for “helicoptering.” We should blame – and change – a culture that tells parents that they must helicopter.” This created, and still creates, an environment where “independence milestones” disappear “under a mountain of media-fueled fear” (254).

 

Then, concerning the underprotective parenting in the virtual world, Haidt states that when “we gave our children and adolescents smartphones in the early 2010s, we gave companies the ability to apply variable-ratio reinforcement schedules all day long, training them like rats during their most sensitive years of brain rewiring. Those companies developed addictive apps that sculpted some very deep pathways in our children’s brains” (136). The majority of the book’s chapters work through this underprotection in the virtual world, and how it is fomenting emotional and mental troubles for our young adults, as well as many older adults.

 

But the author is not like so many other writers and thinkers who only tell us what’s wrong. He weaves into his volume remedial aspects, and then takes four concluding chapters to speak to parents, teachers and administrators, governments, and tech companies. Not only are his suggestions helpful and practical, but they also seem to me to be common sense. As a Christian minister, his points and suggested solutions have stirred me think about how our congregation can be part of the cure for girls and boys, younger men and women.

 

For example, Haidt – who is not a Christian – recommends families and communities take a “digital Sabbath” (204). Similarly, he applauds the value of communal rituals, social practices where people move together and “enter the realm of the sacred together, at the same time.” And that as this happens then as communities “engage in these practices together, and especially when they move together in synchrony, they increase cohesion and trust, which means they also reduce anomie and loneliness” (202-203). There is so much more, but one of the crucial ideas is to recognize, for us and our teens and twenties, that often social media platforms do not foster forgiveness, patience, slowness to anger, readiness to forgive. Instead, “Social media trains people to do the opposite: Judge quickly and publicly, lest ye be judged for not judging whoever it is we are all condemning today. Don’t forgive, or your team will attack you as a traitor” (211).

 

“The Anxious Generation” is a must-read for parents, grandparents, educators, clergy, church elders, government officials, and whoever really cares about what is going on, and how to help bring healthiness into our world. I wholeheartedly recommend this volume!