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

One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can’t focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can’t pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely—in their neighborhoods and at school—because

Soberingly, despite all our advances in technology and material resources, we are not much more advanced in the art of delivering emotionally healthy childhoods than generations before us. The number of breakdowns, inauthentic lives and broken souls shows no marked signs of decline. We are failing to offer one another tolerable childhoods not becau

including Free to Learn. Gray’s research points to the decline of play in our younger people, how over the past sixty years we’re playing less and spending more and more time in “training” — in highly structured environments of expectations and control. As we’ve gotten more and more serious about getting into good schools and getting good jobs and