As a parent of two members of Generation Z, I think I’m among the lucky ones. My sons were still in elementary school in 2012, the year of Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, the introduction of the “like” button, and the front-facing camera on the iPhone. Before they spent even one hour scrolling, the critical pubescent pruning and myelination of their neurons were almost complete.
In 2019, my oldest son started high school without a smartphone, and I wrote about our family’s experience. Unlike parents just a few years ahead of me, I had a chance to notice something strange going on before my boys were old enough to make cogent arguments for having their own phones. The dystopian signs were everywhere. Children stumbling down my street toward the bus stop with their head down, ears plugged with tiny pods, eyes transfixed by handheld screens. Teens sitting around tables in restaurants ignoring each other in favor of their individual flashing distractions. “We are forever elsewhere,” wrote the MIT professor Sherry Turkle in 2015, describing our lives with smartphones.
It’s bad enough for adults, but for many children it’s catastrophic. In his new book, The Anxious Generation, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out with detailed research, common sense, and a nod toward the sublime how giving kids constant, unfettered access to the internet has rewired their brains, thus causing an epidemic of mental illness—documented by the surgeon general and the American Academy of Pediatrics, among others—in the generation born between 1997 and 2012—Generation Z.
Most parents Haidt talks with don’t necessarily have a child with a diagnosis. “Instead, there is an underlying worry that something unnatural is going on,” Haidt writes. Even those with no obvious signs of emotional or mental stress are being imprinted by social media as they go through the sensitive “wet cement” period of puberty, a time when whatever they’re exposed to “will cause lasting structural changes in the brain.” This way of growing up, unprecedented in human history, is not just bad for children but possibly also changes who they are. As Haidt writes, “It’s as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s, in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.”
Haidt uses the results of the U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which asks questions about feeling “sad, empty, or depressed” and loss of interest in activities that were previously enjoyed. Answering yes to more than five of the survey’s nine questions indicates the likelihood of having suffered a “major depressive episode” during the past year. In 2012, the number of 12-to-17-year-olds across all races and social classes who had suffered such an episode increased 150 percent—two and half times more than just two years before. By 2020, according to data collected before and after pandemic shutdowns, “one out of every four American teen girls had experienced a major depressive episode in the previous year.”
Anxiety and depression are, of course, part of the human experience for many people of all ages and have many causes, from genetics to childhood trauma. This book focuses on why, despite no warning during prior years, rates of mental illness among adolescents suddenly have surged across all races and economic backgrounds worldwide at this particular moment. Haidt’s answer is that between 2010 and 2015, basic cell phones were replaced by smartphones in most pockets, purses, and backpacks, creating what he calls the “great rewiring of childhood,” as the first generation of humans in history went through puberty with constant access to the internet and social media. For evidence of this collective move away from the real world and into the virtual one, he points to a slow decrease in daily face-to-face time with friends beginning in the late 1990s that quickly accelerated in the 2010s.
Even kids with no obvious signs of emotional or mental stress are being imprinted by social media as they go through the sensitive “wet cement” period of puberty, a time when whatever they’re exposed to will cause lasting structural changes in the brain.
Again, even those with no diagnosis, and no clear signs of distress, are affected by this new way of growing up. Haidt describes human childhood as “an apprenticeship for learning the skills needed for success in one’s culture,” and humans take longer than other animals to get this done. Children require years of eye contact, face-to-face conversation, and exposure to body language and facial expressions to learn how to function as adult members of the community. “Social media platforms … hijack social learning and drown out the culture of one’s family and local community,” Haidt writes. This is how Gen Z has gone through adolescence.
That this generation also happens to be more anxious, depressed, and suicidal than Millennials born just a few years earlier points to a causal relationship between social media and mental illness. To prove this, Haidt and his colleagues performed dozens of randomized controlled trials where the depressive symptoms of a group of students who continued to use social media were compared to those of a group that had taken a break. Results showed reduced depression in those who abstained from social media for three weeks.
Haidt boils the impact of the “great rewiring” down to four foundational harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. The story of how he arrived at his conclusion—of what happened to Gen Z—has two plotlines. The first is a cultural shift away from free play due to “safetyism.” The second is the rise and ubiquity of technology.
Safetyism is “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.” This theory was first introduced in “The Coddling of the American Mind,” a 2015 article in The Atlantic that Haidt coauthored with the First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff. That piece, later expanded into a New York Times best-selling book of the same name, explored the culture of fear and anxiety that both authors had noticed on college campuses—fear of speaking up, fear of exposure to ideas different from one’s own. Their explanation of this new fearful atmosphere was that “many parents, K–12 teachers, professors, and university administrators have been unknowingly teaching a generation of students to engage in the mental habits commonly seen in people who suffer from anxiety and depression.” Unlike the students a few years ahead, who arrived on campus in “discover mode,” looking for opportunities to grow, Gen Z arrived in “defend mode”—scanning for threats.
The authors’ suggestion that calling out microaggressions, for example, is less a pursuit toward equality and social justice and more of an emotional response to a perceived threat was met with criticism by some who suggested that the authors were condescending to student activists. “Enjoying the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination, [Haidt and Lukianoff] … insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads,” Moira Weigel wrote in The Guardian in 2018.
But in the context of Haidt’s new book, safetyism is about more than the social justice movement on college campuses. It’s about kids’ perceptions of themselves as fragile as the natural result of growing up under the watchful eyes of well-meaning but overprotective parents. In The Coddling of the American Mind, the authors look back to a watershed moment in 1981, when six-year-old Adam Walsh was kidnapped while shopping with his mother and later murdered. Adam’s tragic and widely publicized story raised a national panic about “stranger danger,” and led Adam’s father to lobby for the creation of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Suddenly, the children of Generation X, once free to roam their neighborhoods and play outside until dark, were herded inside and nestled away from the dangers of the outside world, a change that was especially hard on boys.
Fast-forward 30 years to those children’s children, and overprotection has become the norm—not only at home but also at school and in society at large. Kids of the middle and affluent classes attend chaperoned playdates and supervised sports practices and music lessons. Children from all socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to walk to neighborhood parks unsupervised lest an overzealous citizen report an unattended child to authorities. And even when kids manage to get to a park, the playground equipment has likely been designed to prevent injury rather than to challenge growing muscles and imaginations. In short, play has become more supervised and less risky, and thus not geared toward wiring the human mind in the way it was designed to evolve and grow.
Herein lies the irony at the core of the current epidemic of childhood mental illness. It’s all about trying to keep kids safe and protected. But humans are by nature “antifragile,” a term coined in Nassim Taleb’s 2012 book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Haidt writes, “The ultimate antifragile system is the immune system which requires early exposure to dirt, parasites, and bacteria in order to set itself up in childhood.” Free play and its accompanying confrontations, disappointments, and even injuries can vaccinate against anxiety and depression. Safetyism is dangerous to mental health because it’s an “experience blocker.”
And so is the smartphone.
If safetyism is the topsoil of the mental health crisis, then the smartphone and its accompanying social media are the seeds, sunshine, and water. Haidt points out that for millions of years, human interactions have had four characteristics. The first is that “we are physical, embodied creatures who evolved to use our hands, facial expressions, and head movements as communication channels.” Second, our communication is synchronous, meaning that it is “timed to respond in real time to the similar movements of our partners.” We are also designed to carry on one interaction at a time, and to exist in communities that have “a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen.”
However, for the past few decades, humans have experimented with communication in the virtual world, which is disembodied, asynchronous, one-to-many, and with a low bar for entry and exit that creates, as one college student wrote to Haidt, “relationships that are often disposable.” We’ve done this in the name of being better connected, but that connection is a mirage, and teenage girls have suffered the most. It’s possible that they are more affected simply because they use social media more, but there are plenty of additional reasons for their increased vulnerability. Haidt finds that girls are motivated by “communion” and connection, but their virtual social lives are making them lonely and depressed. Girls are also more likely than boys to compare themselves to others and place a higher emotional premium on the outcome of that comparison. Gen Z girls, Haidt writes, “are subjected to hundreds of times more social comparison than girls [have] experienced for nearly all of human evolution.”
And then there’s the addiction, which also affects boys and girls differently. Boys tend to be addicted to pornography and video games; girls are often addicted to crafting ever-more-perfect versions of themselves for the ever-present camera. And too many teens are addicted to the devices themselves, spending an average of six to eight hours a day engaged with a screen. This is time not spent playing sports, reading books, or spending time with their peers in person.
“God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” said the first president of Facebook, Sean Parker, in a 2017 interview about the company’s intentional efforts to hook users. Thanks to the whistleblower Frances Haugen and “The Facebook Files,” a set of internal documents that she leaked to The Wall Street Journal,we all know that Facebook knew plenty. Take, for example, one slide, included in a presentation to employees, showing an MRI image of a human brain with the caption,
The teenage brain is usually about 80% mature. The remaining 20% rests in the frontal cortex … At this time teens are highly dependent on their temporal lobe where emotions, memory and learning, and the reward system reign supreme.
Haidt writes that acceptance by one’s peers is the “oxygen of adolescence.” Tech companies have exploited and capitalized on this vulnerability in an experiment that has used as its subjects the kids of Gen Z and their parents. Thus far, we’ve all done our best to navigate this new world with no maps and no role models.
Thankfully, Haidt’s book provides both. He says we’ve sent our children to Mars but insists we can bring them home if we all work together. It sounds cliché and also chafes at my own individualistic tendencies—whose business is it if I want to give my own child a smartphone for his 11th birthday? Smartphone use is sort of like cigarette smoke in that it affects even the people who aren’t participating. Think of the sixth-grade girl who shows up at school not knowing the steps to the latest TikTok dance, or goes outside after school to play but her neighbors are inside on their phones. Haidt applauds the efforts of volunteer groups such as Wait Until 8th, where parents of elementary school students sign pledges not to give their children phones until the eighth grade—although he says even that age is too young. It’s better to wait until high school for both the smartphone and social media.
Parents can’t and shouldn’t be expected to solve this problem alone. Haidt calls on tech companies to raise the age of internet adulthood to 16 and to employ age verification systems. He points to the U.K.’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AACD), versions of which have been passed by several U.S. states. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) currently making its way through Congress includes many standards of the AACD, and Haidt supports this kind of legislation at the federal level. He also urges government to encourage phone-free schools, which means phones must be left at home or turned in to school officials during the school day all the way through high school.
Haidt uses Mountain Middle School in Durango, Colorado, as an example of a phone-free school where the ban was “transformative.” Academic performance improved—but perhaps more importantly, kids talked with each other more in the hallways between classes.
In compiling the research for his book, Haidt writes, he realized that he was seeing the “radical transformation of childhood into something inhuman.” But he is hopeful, as am I, that we can bring childhood back to the real world and make it human again. We can teach our children to stand barefoot in the dirt and look up toward the sky.
