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

Recess in America—and children’s unstructured time outside school—has been shrinking ever since the publication of a landmark 1983 report titled A Nation at Risk. The report warned that American kids were falling behind those of other nations in test scores and academic proficiency.[21] It recommended increasing rigor by spending more time on acade

Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell ch

account is a major step in which adolescents

The pressure on schools to deliver rising scores increased again after the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind Act was passed, and more recently the Common Core State Standards.[22] (The pressure was so intense that some school districts met their targets by simply falsifying their students’ test scores.[23]

Alison Gopnik notes that the word “parenting” was essentially never used until the 1950s, and only became popular in the 1970s. For nearly all of human history, people grew up in environments where they observed many people caring for many children. There was plenty of local wisdom and no need for parenting experts.

Its report also recommends giving recess before lunch, rather than the common practice of combining lunch and recess as a single short period in which students wolf down their food in order to maximize their few precious minutes of free play.

Human childhood evolved in savannas and forests, alongside streams and lakes. When you put children into natural settings, they instinctively explore and spontaneously invent games.

thousands of accounts of awe experiences from people around the world and sorted them into the eight most common categories, which he calls the “eight wonders of life.” They are moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spiritual and religious awe, life and death, and epiphanies (moments in which a new and grand understa

Émile Durkheim showed that human beings move up and down between two levels: the profane and the sacred. The profane is our ordinary self-focused consciousness. The sacred is the realm of the collective. Groups of individuals become a cohesive community when they engage in rituals that move them in and out of the realm of the sacred together.