Book Review: The Anxious Generation

Is today’s generation of children and young teenagers more anxious than previous generations? Is mental illness more common than it used to be in adolescents, or is it only that it is more acceptable to talk about it than it used to be? Are smartphones part of the problem? I have been part of discussions about questions such as these several times in recent years, usually with other teachers. So, when I heard of Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, I was eager to read it and to consider his perspective on this topic.

The subtitle lays out the basic premise of the book: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Haidt uses numerous statistics and graphs to show that rates of anxiety and depression among adolescents spiked in the early 2010s, at the very same time that the use of smartphones became common. His theory is that the switch from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood is the main culprit.

It is ironic that while parents stopped letting children play around the neighborhood without adult supervision because of the fear of what random strangers would do, they allowed their children access to the internet where random strangers could steal their minds and hearts. Haidt says, “My central claim in this book is that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.”

Previous generations were exposed to screens and the internet, but only with the arrival of the smartphone were screens suddenly in children’s pockets and accessible almost anywhere. Haidt outlines four foundational harms of the “great rewiring”: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. He shows that while the internet offers a pretense of connection and socializing, its prevalence has made people (adolescents in particular) feel lonelier and has deprived them of real-world connections. The comparisons and perfectionism of social media have been especially harmful to girls, while boys have been more likely to fall prey to pornography and addictive gaming.

The final part of the book is a call to collective action. To undo the harm caused by the Great Rewiring, Haidt says communities must work together. Parents, schools, tech companies, and governments need to do their part to build better policies that will give children a better childhood—a childhood with more freedom in the real world and less freedom in the virtual world.

I find it intriguing that although Haidt proclaims himself an atheist, he reaches many conclusions that align with Christian values. He even quotes Scripture as “ancient wisdom literature.” One of his key emphases is our human need for embodied activities that bind us together. He reminds us, “Humans are embodied; a phone-based life is not. Screens lead us to forget that our physical bodies matter.” I believe that this points directly to the image of God in people and to the incredible beauty of the incarnation.

Along with this, Haidt mentions the power of synchronous activities that groups of people do together, such as playing sports or singing in a choir. Human beings are wired to do things like this that connect us to each other, and the internet can never entirely replicate this important form of connection.

Reading a book like The Anxious Generation makes me grateful for the cautious approach that our Anabaptist churches have taken with technology. Most of our young people have not been affected by smartphones and the internet in the extreme ways that the book describes. Yet this book also reminds us of our need to be vigilant. 

Recently a friend of mine from church was lamenting how difficult it has been to stick to the decision of not letting her daughter have a phone until she is sixteen, because “everyone else has one.” I said, “It’s like parents have to get together and make this pact that they will not allow their children to have smartphones until a certain age.” I thought of this conversation when I read Haidt’s “call to collective action.” It is hard for one family to make decisions about technology on their own. No one wants to be the “mean” parent who makes their children feel left out of what everyone else is doing. Churches, parents, and schools must work together.

The Anxious Generation speaks primarily of the harm that smartphones have done to children and adolescents, but I think we adults also need constant reminders to evaluate how smartphones are rewiring our lives. If we expect our children to learn how to use technology in healthy ways, we need to model it for them. If we want our children to enjoy active, embodied, connecting activities, we need to do those things with them. Together we can find ways to use technology wisely and to keep from being entangled by its harms.