The Anxious Generation
The Transformation From Play To Phone
The shift from the physical world to the digital realm has been disastrous, particularly for girls, as Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times points out. This transformation isn't just happening in the U.S. but across the English-speaking world, as noted by The Wall Street Journal.
After a decade of stability or improvement in adolescent mental health, the early 2010s saw a sharp decline. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide skyrocketed—more than doubling in many cases. What caused this dramatic change?
In his book 'The Anxious Generation’ , Jonathan Haidt delves into this crisis, offering a clear-eyed analysis of the teen mental health epidemic that has affected multiple countries simultaneously. He explores the critical role childhood play has in healthy development, highlighting how the "play-based childhood" that once flourished began to decline in the 1980s, before being completely replaced by the "phone-based childhood" starting in the 2010s.
Haidt identifies over a dozen ways this "great rewiring" has damaged children’s social and neurological growth. These include sleep deprivation, fragmented attention, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and the rise of perfectionism. He explains why girls are particularly vulnerable to the harms of social media, while boys are withdrawing from the physical world into the virtual one, with devastating effects on their mental health, relationships, and society at large.