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The Anxious GenerationHow the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, a work of parenting and mental-health nonfiction, argues that the shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based one explains the surge in teen anxiety and depression, and backs it with enough data that even skeptics have to engage with it.
From the review
Haidt returns more than once to a single exhibit: a set of lines tracking teen depression, self-harm, and loneliness. They sit flat through the 2000s, then within a few years of 2012 they all bend sharply upward at once, across multiple countries, both sexes, and nearly every survey measure available. That synchronized turn drives the whole book. Haidt, a social psychologist, spends the opening chapters establishing how sharp and how widespread the shift really was. He spends the rest of the book building a case for why. Not video games. Not the 2008 recession. The point at which most teenagers got a smartphone and a social media feed in the same pocket. The middle chapters do the real work. Haidt groups the damage into what he calls four foundational harms: lost sleep, fractured attention, a feed built to be addictive, and a social life that moved indoors and onto a screen. He works through each one methodically, then adds social comparison and social contagion as amplifiers, especially for girls. The gender split gets careful treatment. Girls absorb more harm from the comparison and exclusion built into social apps. Boys retreat into gaming and pornography instead of the real world. Both trade away the unsupervised, occasionally risky play that used to make growing up work.
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