The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing and Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024)
The Anxious Generation explores the impact of modern technology and societal changes on the mental health of young people in the US and internationally. The central thesis of the book is that the convergence of smartphones and overprotective parenting has fundamentally “rewired” childhood in a manner that fuels a dramatic increase in adolescent mental illness. Haidt argues these are the main forces driving this “great rewiring” since approximately 2010.
The impact of the use of smartphones, with unsupervised parental oversight of a child’s social media and digital immersion (e.g., access to age-inappropriate YouTube videos, pornographic websites, interactions with adult strangers posing as children, etc.) at one end of the continuum of parental care and, at the other end of the continuum, “safetyism” (i.e., parental overprotection), which restricts real-world free play, age appropriate independence and freedoms restrict the development of resilience. Paradoxically, these two forces working in opposition, extreme smartphone and social media freedoms combined with real world parental overprotection, have weakened developmental foundations, leaving children more anxious, fragile, and vulnerable to depression.
In a 2024 pre-release description of his forthcoming The Anxious Generation, Haidt describes how the book’s origin:
“In the summer of 2022, I was working on a book project — Life After Babel: Adapting to a world we can no longer share — about how smartphones and social media rewired many societies in the 2010s, creating conditions that amplify the long-known weaknesses of democracy. The first chapter was about the impact of social media on kids, who were the “canaries in the coal mine,” revealing early signs that something was going wrong. When adolescents’ social lives moved onto smartphones and social media platforms, anxiety and depression surged among them. The rest of the book was going to focus on what social media had done to liberal democracies…. I quickly realized that the rapid decline of adolescent mental health could not be explained in one chapter—it needed a book of its own. So, The Anxious Generation is Volume 1, in a sense, of the larger Babel project. The book will be published March 26, 2024”
The key Adolescent Mental Illness Evidence Haidt Presents in The Anxious Generation
From 2010 to 2015, there was a sharp rise in mental health problems experienced by adolescents: a spike in major depression and anxiety disorders, especially among girls. Survey data on Hospital admissions for adolescent self-harm and suicide attempts substantiate this increase in mental health problems. Haidt further shows how “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and was almost extinguished by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. Haidt shows that an increasing decline in unsupervised outdoor free play had led to fewer and fewer opportunities for age appropriate risk-taking, conflict resolution, and autonomy which coincided with the rise in digital immersion (hours spent on continuous smartphone scrolling, fragmented attention, emotional dysregulation, and real-world social deprivation.
Haidt presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, techno-addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. The evidence he presents for this period helps to explain why social media immersion damages girls more than boys. The data indicates that online adolescent girls were becoming more vulnerable to social comparison, cyberbullying, and relational aggression. Boys, on the other hand were withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world and were more affected by the number of hours spent in online gaming, pornography, and increased withdrawal from opportunities for real-world socialization and experiences. For boys and girls, the “rewiring,” in the USA and internationally, was having disastrous consequences not only for children and adolescents but for their families, and their societies. The amount of time spent online was disrupting historically more normal developmental opportunities and experiences.
Haidt’s framing of the problem of cultural “re-wiring” included four foundational harms:
- Real-world social deprivation – diminishing face-to-face real-world interactions, less belonging, and a weakening of empathy (e.g., aggressive online “trolling” and bullying of strangers).
- Sleep deprivation – (constant connectivity was disrupting circadian rhythms)
- Attention fragmentation – (endless scrolling and notifications eroding focus and time spent in learning complex material).
- Addiction & emotional dysregulation – (dopamine-driven design of apps fosters hyper-compulsive use of smartphone and social media).
Haidt also described the role of “safetyism” parenting that continued subsequent to the introduction of the smartphone. This led to a strange paradox: offline parental “overprotection” (i,e, fear of danger in the outside world resulting in limitations on children’s independence, free play, and exploration) while simultaneously fostering “under protection” of children/adolescents online. Children were left exposed to unregulated digital environments with minimal safeguards. This combination created a paradoxical childhood, too little freedom in the real world and too much exposure in the virtual. “Safetyism” and smartphone/social media usage made children far too vulnerable, unable to learn how to successfully negotiate the complexities of the real world.
With respect to the broader cultural implications of Haidt ‘s findings, children were not experiencing the developmental benefits of free play and growing up without what he referred to as the “apprenticeship of risk”, which helps to build strong coping skills. He also noted that children were losing the ability to develop a sense of meaning and a loss of spiritual grounding, creating a decline in overall existential well-being from digital saturation. These factors made Gen Z the first generation raised primarily in a phone- and social media-based childhood and showed signs of unprecedented levels of fragility. This this echoed his findings described in the Coddling of the American Mind: increased fragility, fear of conflict, difficulty tolerating discomfort or ambiguity, and overreliance on adult intervention and institutional protections.
Haidt’s proposed solutions to this new “cultural rewiring” calls for individual families to take charge of the smartphone/social media usage allowed their children through limiting and monitoring, delay in providing smartphones and access to social media until mid-adolescence, encouraging more unsupervised outdoor activity and reasoned age-appropriate independence despite media-fueled safety concerns. He also calls for societal structural reforms by strengthening institutions (schools, laws, and communities) which must set boundaries on tech use by children and adolescence before age sixteen.
Haidt’s central warning: We are raising children in a social and technological environment for which evolution has not prepared them – overprotected in the physical world, unprotected in the digital. The result is an epidemic of anxiety, depression, and fragility.
At the outset of this post, I pointed to a conceptual connection between The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation. They are not just separate books, but are two components of a developing argument about how cultural changes since 2010 have created unprecedented level of anxiety, fragility, and depression among America’s young. Together they can be seen as two stages of Haidt’s psycho-cultural diagnosis. Stage One is The Coddling of the American Mind (2018) which identifies the fragility of young adults on college and university campuses. Stage Two is represented by The Anxious Generation (2024) which traces the developmental and technological roots that produced the fragility described in Stage One. In Stage Two, Haidt shows that the roots of college age fragility are due to the “Great Rewiring” of childhood that began around 2010 when two great forces collided, restricted independence offline, and unprotected exposure online. This “rewiring” disrupted historically important developmental foundations (e.g., free play, autonomy, resilience, and embodied socialization) which became manifest in a surge in adolescent anxiety, depression, and self-harm, especially within Gen Z. The epidemic of mental illness was not just a campus phenomenon but a developmental crisis that had begun even before middle school.
In both books, The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxiety Generation, Haidt argues that overprotective parenting, media-fueled safety fears, and the rise of screen-based entertainment have replaced free play with constant adult supervision and digital immersion. This shift deprives children of the very experiences that help them develop emotional strength and social competence leading to increased fragility and fear of conflict, the ability to tolerate discomfort or ambiguity and overreliance on adult intervention and institutional protection. Together, The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation two books form a causal narrative that suggests that overprotected childhood + digital immersion → anxious and depressed adolescents → fragile adulthood.
Haidt’s concept of Free Play, central to both The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation refers to unstructured, unsupervised, child-led play (kids decide what to do, how to do it, and with whom, typically outdoors, where children make up their own games, negotiate rules, resolve conflicts, and take manageable risks without adult intervention. Such play is both social and physical (often involves running, climbing, roughhousing, or imaginative group play) and risk-tolerant (includes minor physical and social risks that help children learn boundaries and resilience). Haidt draws on developmental psychology and evolutionary biology to argue that free play is essential for healthy brain development, especially in mammals. He sees its decline starting in the 1980s and accelerating in the 1990s as a major contributor to rising anxiety, depression, and fragility among Gen Zer’s.
The benefits of free play according to Haidt include the development of a variety of important psycho-emotional strengths:
Resilience: Children learn to cope with setbacks, fear, and conflict through direct experience.
Social Skills: Negotiating rules, resolving disputes, and cooperating with peers builds empathy and communication.
Risk Assessment: children learn to judge danger and make decisions, fostering independence and confidence.
Creativity & Problem-Solving: Imaginative play encourages flexible thinking and innovation.
Mental Health: Free play acts as a buffer against anxiety and depression by promoting autonomy and mastery.
With respect to the existential-analytic lens through which I experience the world, The Coddling of the American Mind represents a failure of authenticity in adulthood (students unable to confront anxiety, conflict, and ambiguity). The Anxious Generation resonates with existential themes (e.g., inauthentic development, failure to develop resilience, fear of uncertainty, acceptance of risk and limitation as existential realities, the failure to experience the benefits of genuine embodied social connectedness and denial of the dangers of non-embodied existence through the adoption of inauthentic online avatars and personas. One might say that The Anxious Generation argues that there has been a failure of initiation into authentic existence (children deprived of risk, play, and embodied being-in-the-world). From an existential perspective, Haidt’s books provides a psycho-cultural diagnosis of how technological mediation and parental overcontrol have disrupted the conditions for becoming a resilient, meaning-seeking adult in a complex world.