The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence,

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In some corners of the Internet there’s a fascination with traditionalism, and criticism of the ways the openness and optionality of modernity have left people feeling lost. I’ve always felt like, look, I could never be a traditionalist, because I don’t want to give birth to five kids without anesthesia and spend half of my day cleaning up around t... See more

Jonathan Haidt is right when he talks about the sudden switch from play-based to phone-based childhoods and how it destroyed mental health—particularly for young girls. Our childhoods weren’t spent toying with risk and danger, teaching ourselves we could cope with it, learning that it’s baked into life. We had bans on play fighting. Health and safe... See more

We think social media has changed childhood and adolescence for the worse, so much so that it constitutes a “great rewiring of childhood.” Beginning in the 1990s, a childhood based heavily on outdoor play began to fade away and was replaced by a phone-based childhood in the early 2010s, when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones.

Can we

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