A Review of Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation
A Review of Jonathan Haidt's Anxious Generation
by Eli Denison
Remember when Facebook became free to use without a college email address? I do. It was well after my formative years as an adolescent, but it was still incredibly transformational, and it’s eye-opening to see how rapidly the technology has changed. It was 2007 when I first opened my Facebook account. It was a great way to stay connected to my friends and family who lived miles away and update them on my adventures after high school.
In 2009, the “Like” button came on the scene. By this time I was in Bible school and had begun traveling and doing missionary work overseas. After each trip, I would compile my pictures and videos into an album and post it hoping that all my friends and family would “like” my pictures, but I doubt if I ever topped 100 “likes”. I’d see other people’s pictures or albums getting five times as many “likes” which made me question what I was doing wrong. So I dabbled in photo editing to make sunsets more brilliant or to bring mountains into sharper relief. I curated my albums to make sure that I was only sharing pictures of epic or exotic shots thinking that if my pictures were better or my life looked cooler, I might get more “likes”. I never did. And that depressed me.
By 2011, I was 26 and I spent way too much time chasing likes and scrolling through the newsfeed trying to figure out the secret, tying my emotional wellbeing to my social status on Facebook. By 2014, I was a fully-fledged, married adult and in the span of seven short years, Facebook had dominated my spare time. When I finally realized that most of my free time was spent on Facebook despite my other responsibilities and had to make a conscious choice to cut back and find joy in the embodied relationships I had around me. As hard as it was to come to those realizations and make different choices in my early twenties, I can’t imagine how difficult it would be if I had experienced that as a teenager.
THE GREAT REWIRING
On June 17, 2024 the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy released an opinion essay in the New York Times calling for a warning label on social media. In it, he cited growing evidence and research that links mental health issues like anxiety and depression to overuse and overconsumption of social media content in adolescents. This is largely due to the proliferation of social media sites and apps that have taken over since Facebook’s inception and the engineering that has gone into making them profitable. His essay is just the latest in a series of essays and books that are sounding the alarm regarding social media use, technology, and our children. One of the most influential books to come out recently that I’ve been privileged to read is Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.
Haidt’s central claim in the book is that over the last forty years, children have become over-protected and over-scheduled in the real world which short circuits healthy social/emotional growth and grossly underprotected in the virtual world which opens up a whole different can of worms. He points out that the age of “internet adulthood”, thirteen years old, was adopted in 1998 when the internet was a very different place. He expounds on this over/under-protection idea by looking at how relationships and social interactions grew and were formed throughout most of history and compares that formation to how technology (including television, movies, and cell phones) has reshaped us and the world we live in today.
Haidt combines statistical research on adolescent behavior with the theory that childhood has been “rewired” over the last forty years from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood which is causing a rise in many of the mental health disorders that we see in teens today. This “Great Rewiring” as he terms it, has led to social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and in extreme cases, addiction. However, his observations are not all doom and gloom. He also offers resources and suggestions to parents, educators, and government officials on ways to reclaim childhood and interact with technology in a healthy way.
fOUR GUIDELINES
While it is no secret that the ubiquity of cell phones and the internet has impacted everyone, adults included, it has not impacted us all the same way. Haidt’s book outlines some of the different ways that technology and social media consumption has impacted young girls by drawing their social interactions into an unregulated online world where the quantity of social interactions trumps quality, which actually leads to poorer relationships overall and excessive social comparison. Boys, on the other hand, use social media less, but find themselves similarly isolated from face-to-face interactions with their peers by constant high speed access to videos, games, and pornography. The result for both genders, Haidt argues, is that many of our formative social interactions have been moved out of the real world and into the virtual world where those interactions are less regulated, more frequent, and less substantive.
Ultimately, Haidt advocates for four foundational reforms that parents and educators can put into place based on his research:
- No smartphones before high school, only basic phones that can call and receive text messages.
- No social media before age sixteen, so that their most vulnerable early years of puberty are behind them.
- Phone-free schools, so that students can focus well on their studies rather than being distracted by notifications or feeling a sense of missing out on something.
- More unsupervised play and childhood independence, so that kids learn how to manage risk and relationships while developing social skills like the ability to empathize and solve disagreements. This is also coupled with giving kids more responsibilities within the home.
Whether you agree or disagree with the claims that are put forth by Dr. Murthy and Jonathan Haidt, there is no denying that technology and instant gratification through internet access has radically changed both us and the world around us. Haidt’s book gives us a better understanding of the changes that have happened in our lifetimes and the ways that those changes are impacting our kids. This is the cultural water that our kids are growing up in and we have a responsibility to teach them to swim and navigate it well. This book is worth a read for parents who are trying to figure out how to parent in the digital age.
TAKING STOCK
Haidt doesn’t argue for a Luddite-esque shunning of technology. He argues instead for a thoughtful approach to raising kids and giving them the best chance to be kids so that they can grow and develop wisdom and strong embodied social relationships before they engage heavily with technology. He points out that this begins with parents taking stock of their own technological habits because children often pay more attention to what is being done rather than what is being said.
Maybe the best place for us to start would be to put down our phones and pick up Haidt’s book.
