This is the last book I finished in 2025 and is perhaps the most important book I read all year. Since it was published in March of 2024, I have been hearing about it, positive and negative. I have read and heard from those who wholeheartedly agree with it and support its conclusions and remedies. I have also heard criticism that perhaps there are other causes of increased mental illness in the world’s children, that the research was cherry picked to reach the author’s chosen conclusions. Finally, in the last week of last year, I decided to read the book and decide for myself.
The author of this book was a co-writer on a previous book about youth, The Coddling of the American Mind. That book is a sort of prelude to this one. At least it highly influenced Haidt’s decision to write this one. In that previous book, he cites what he calls safetyism as an issue in raising and educating children. By this he means protecting children and young people from the problems of the world. Instead they need to learn to face them and deal with them at age-appropriate levels. In The Anxious Generation he lays out the case for why social media is rewiring the world’s children from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood and how that is creating our present day mental health crisis.
He starts by outlining the surge in mental health issues around the world and pinning down the timing of this uptick to 2010 to 2015. He then shows how mammals in general and humans specifically need to play as children in order to learn how to be healthy adults. When children play they face challenges and harms that they learn to deal with. If this is short circuited by trading playtime for phone time, these lessons are never learned. Much of this state is due to parents wanting to protect their children from the potential harms of the world. But doing so prevents them from entering discovery mode and seeking out the risky play that kids need to grow up healthy.
The core of the book is when the author outlines and details what he calls the four foundational harms of social media. These are:
- Social Deprivation
- Sleep Deprivation
- Attention Fragmentation
- Addiction
He then goes on to explore how and why social media is more harmful for girls than boys as well as how boys are also experiencing these foundational harms from a different direction (video games and pornography).
The final section on how to address these issue is welcome after all the bad news. After laying down a foundation for collective action, Haidt goes on to outline what government, schools, and parents can do to begin to remedy this dire situation.
What impressed me most about this book was the dedication to scholarship. Everything is based on study after study. He is maintaining a website that links to all the studies and shows the numbers used to come to the conclusions in the book. This includes examining possible other causes. But none fits the data as well as those outlined in this book. The author is also open to the idea that he could be wrong. He plans to update and correct anything in that vein on this online supplement at http://anxiousgeneration.com/supplement.
I found the evidence and conclusions of this book extremely persuasive. It matches my experience with my own children and those I see around me. I only wish that this level of information had been available when I was raising children.
My rating: 5/5
