Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been explaining the human condition to us better than anyone else. He first did it with his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, which explored why people were so passionately divided over politics and religion, and argued that people are fundamentally religiously inclined creatures. Then, he did it again with The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, which laid out why kids today—especially on college campuses—have become so intolerant of opinions that conflict with their own.
Now, he’s done it once more with his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. This time, Haidt explains what so many parents have been confused by for the last decade: Why are kids today more anxious than ever, more depressed than ever, more risk-averse than ever, lonelier than ever, and less social than ever?
It’s pretty simple, Haidt argues: We changed childhood.
The mass migration of childhood, Haidt says, from the real world to the virtual world has completely changed what it means to be a kid. By replacing free and independent play and quality time with friends with the isolation of screens and phones, we instigated what he calls the “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” What resulted, he argues, is a childhood that is “more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.”
Today, Haidt explains how this massive change happened, its detrimental effects on kids, and what actions we can take—both in our own lives and legislatively—in order to reverse course and free the anxious generation.
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I teach middle school, and I have been preaching about the evils of smartphones in the hands of children for years. But Jonathan Haidt has added so much to the conversation. Sadly, he has shown, quite clearly, that by the time these 11-year olds arrive in my classroom, the damage has already been done. This newest generation cannot focus on a teacher's words for even 30 seconds. They have no curiosity about anything. They have been fed an algorithmically selected diet for two or three years before they arrive in school, and resent that the teacher expects them to focus on anything else. We need for pediatricians to warn parents against even minimal use of digital devices by preschoolers and we need to get them to play with other children, in person, rather than online. The development of our children's brains is being thwarted by these electronic babysitters.
In New Zealand, our new government (elected October 2023) just implemented a total ban on phones in school for all students of all schools across the country in February. (Start of our school year) There's been a small amount of pushback but largely this is welcomed by all and as a primary school (that's what we call elementary school) teacher I've already noticed better focus in class from students.