The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood I Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt

During puberty, neurons in the child’s brain are pruned and surrounded by more insulation (myelination). Changes in experiences can have large and lasting effects. Sustained stressors can lead to mental disorders. Nutrition, sleep, and exercise are also important. For parents, the first few years of puberty deserve special attention.
Children need real-world experiences and challenges are necessary. A little stress is essential. A lot is detrimental. Safty-ism blocks real-world experiences as do smartphones. Texts lack facial expressions, changes in tone of voice, eye contact, and body language. Historically, cultures had rites of passage that turned children into adults. As life has moved online, age has mattered less. As soon as children can use a web browser, they have unlimited access to everything on the web where there are no movie ratings. Porn sites can show anal sex prior to a kid’s first kiss. Jonathan offers his own suggestions for rites of passage that parents can control.

Social Deprivation: The advent of a phone-based childhood increased total screen time by two to three hours a day. Some say they are online most of the time. Children need face-to-face, synchronous, embodied, physical play, ideally outdoors with occasional risk-taking. Phones decrease your ability to pay full attention to others. Parent phone use also degrades social growth.
Sleep Deprivation: Phone use, especially late at night, disrupts sleeps that kids need. Learning and grades suffer as do reaction times, decision making, and motor skills. They are more anxious and irritable. Relationships suffer.
Attention fragmentation: Every hyperlink is an off ramp to attention. Schools that allow phones make matters worse. The mere presence of one’s smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. It may also exacerbate existing ADHD symptoms. A phone-based childhood is likely to interfere with executive function.
Addiction: It starts with an action (tigger) like a social media notification. This provides a variable reward, which may or may not be a pleasurable event. This causes the person to look for the next trigger. Starting with the 2010s, doctors now treat teens as it they have digital addictions. While there may be some benefits resulting from smartphone use, Jonathan believes that there isn’t much and the literature supports this view.

Research is clear that heavy users of social media are much more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. Since girls are more interested in communication, they are much more likely to suffer. Students talk to each other less. While kids may have many more friends, the friendships have lower quality. Lower quality relationships cause more cyberbullying. Cyberbullies can follow you anywhere.
Visual apps like Instagram and TikTok almost force comparisons of appearance. Social standing and beauty are often tied together. Images focus heavily on the body and lifestyle. Negative emotions are contagious. Depression spreads easily with girls as boys don’t share feelings as much. Real diseases like Tourette’s syndrome, personality disorder, and gender dysphoria can be picked up via social media. Gender dysphoria was much more common in boys but now it’s more common in girls as friends copy each other with this disease and it’s showing up in social clusters.
Girls are also more subject to predation and harassment. Many automatically follow someone who follows them not knowing that it may be a male with bad intentions. They post pictures in bras and bathing suits, which attracts predators. They also get coerced into posting nude pictures.

Although there may be some benefits from playing video games, they seem to cause more harm than good, especially for heavy users. Potential benefits for moderate users include increased cognitive and intellectual functioning, improved working memory, response inhibition, and school competence. Users can also learn collaboration skills. When you combine video game use with increased supervision and lack of free play, boys lose out on taking the minor play-based risks that help them develop. Changes in the job market have also been a problem for males as fewer jobs require their brute strength. Girls now earn about 60% of Batchelor degrees as their communication skills are better suited to schooling. Boys get lower grades, are more likely to have ADHD and more likely to be expelled or suspended, especially those from lower income families.
The friendships boys do make playing online games are of lower quality than real-world friendships. 27% of boys in their late 20s live with their parents. Boys who watch a lot of pornography don’t develop the skills needed to form real relationships. Porn may not be good for sexual development and can reduce interest in potential life partners. Porn and video game use also have all the symptoms of addiction.

Although Jonathan is an atheist, he warns that social media can disrupt and degrade the benefits of communal action associated with the world’s religions. We can also miss out on a lot of the awe available in nature and the made-made world around us if our heads are stuck in a phone. Many religions warn against judging, but many aspects of social media make it easy to judge others rather than forgive.
A phone-based life may make you less virtuous. It may interfere with time together, which can make one less happy and more lonely. Social media can flood our consciousness with alerts and triviality, fill the ears with sounds, fragment attention, and scatter consciousness. The real world is more awe inspiring than anything you will see on a screen.