Table of Contents

The Book in Three Sentences

In this summary of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt investigates the collapse of youth mental health and provides a roadmap for a healthier childhood. In the 2010s, the mental health of adolescents plunged due to the use of smartphones. The author suggests four rules to revert the situation and return to a more natural childhood.

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The Anxious Generation Summary

If your child were sent to Mars on a mission, you’d have to worry about numerous threats, including radiation and gravity. Most parents wouldn’t let their children go on such a dangerous endeavor yet we allow technology companies to endanger them all the same. Technology makes our lives easier, but we’ve allowed our children to use phones and tablets without considering the potential side effects those devices cause. Addictive content has replaced physical play and socialization. It’s rewiring childhood and we’re not even aware of it. An example is social media which adds value to adults’ lives but can ruin kids’ lives. The author argues that we should let children grow up on Earth before we send them to Mars.

This book focuses on Gen Z (everyone born after 1995) or as Haidt calls them, the anxious generation. Since then, technology improved significantly. High-speed broadband, the iPhone, social media, and the “like” button are some inventions that changed the world. To succeed socially, members of the anxious generation had to dedicate time to creating and managing their online brands. Therefore, they spent less time playing or socializing with friends and family. The author refers to these technologies as the Great Rewiring of Childhood. This is the first generation that grew up on Mars.

Apart from new technologies emerging, adults started overprotecting their children as well. This loss of autonomy in the real world had serious consequences because children need free play to thrive. Play-based childhood was replaced by phone-based childhood, and the consequences are terrible.

The author points out four reforms that provide the foundation for a healthy childhood in the digital age:

No smartphones before age 14
No social media before age 16
Phone-free schools
More unsupervised play and childhood independence

Part I: A Tidal Wave

Chapter 1: The Surge of Suffering

Most parents worry about their kids overusing technology. The idea is that a childhood revolving around technology is unnatural. Parents feel trapped and powerless, but taking technology away from kids is not socially acceptable. In the 2010s, mental illness cases went up considerably. Children and teenagers were experiencing anxiety and depression regardless of their race or social class. Although anxiety serves a biological purpose, experiencing too much of it turns it into a disorder. Teenagers are particularly concerned with “social death” because humans have evolved to form strong social ties to survive. In extreme cases, anxiety and depression lead to suicidal thoughts because death means the end of suffering.

There’s a direct connection between the adoption of smartphones and an increase in mental health issues. Along with smartphones came a deluge of social media apps that let you compare yourself to others. On top of that, filters and editing software created unrealistic expectations about what you should look like. Soon, people had access to millions of hours of video content they could consume whenever they went. From 2010 to 2015 everything changed.

Part 2: The Backstory – The Decline of the Play-Based Childhood

Chapter 2: What Children Need to Do in Childhood

Evolutionarily speaking, human childhood takes a long time because children need that time to learn. As children learn new skills and pursue new experiences, their brains make new connections and lose old ones. Evolution lengthened childhood to make learning easy but also gave us three motivations: free play, attunement, and social learning.

First, the author turns his attention to free play. Kids need to play because it enables them to be socially, cognitively, and emotionally healthy. Playing teaches kids the skills they need to turn into successful adults. The most beneficial kind of play is physical, outdoors, and with other children of different ages. The possibility of physical harm teaches them not to get hurt, so a degree of physical risk is also important. The activity loses all of its benefits as soon as adults get involved. When an adult isn’t involved, the benefits are immense. Children learn to care for themselves and others, handle their emotions, read others’ emotions, take turns, solve conflicts, and follow rules. Modern technology deprives children of all of that.

Attunement refers to children’s need to connect. Children need to connect with other children because when they do, they synchronize their movements and emotions. Having simple interactions with others helps children develop essential social skills. Face-to-face rituals that require physical interactions are a strong part of human interaction. Using technology is the complete opposite of this. It’s often asynchronous, joyless, a mindless habit, and the connections you create as part of it are shallow.

Finally, Haidt turns his attention to social learning. Human evolution rewards those who learn the most which is why children copy others. To do this, humans use two strategies: conformist bias and prestige bias. Conformity is valuable because it’s a safe strategy, especially for newcomers. This means that if most children have social media accounts, yours will want one too. The problem with social media is that it overwhelms you with data points, like posts, likes, and comments. The author describes social media platforms as “the most efficient conformity engines ever invented”.

The other strategy is prestige bias. Unlike other animals, humans have an alternative to violence and we call that quality prestige. Prestige bias describes our propensity to value excellence in important domains. Social networks exploit this feature of human psychology and it has disastrous effects on young people. Kids now want to be famous which often translates into having millions of followers on social media.

Humans have sensitive periods. These are moments where it’s easy to acquire new skills. Once that period is gone, you can still learn the thing in question but it’s significantly more difficult. Introducing children to smartphones when they’re 11 or younger changes everything, including their identity, emotions, and relationships.

Chapter 3: Discover Mode and the Need for Risky Play

Over the last couple of years, the Western world has made two decisions related to raising children: the real world is so dangerous that children shouldn’t go outside without adult supervision and we’ve allowed children to explore the virtual world however they pleased. A healthy human childhood is one with autonomy and unsupervised play or, as the author puts it when children operate in “discover mode”.

Our ancestors relied on two systems. The behavioral activation system (or BAS) triggered when you encountered new opportunities, such as a cherry tree. This flooded you with positive emotions. The author calls this discover mode. The behavioral inhibition system (or BIS) triggered when you encountered threats, such as a leopard. When this happened, fear was so intense that any other emotion was suppressed. The author calls this defend mode.

Depending on the environment where you live, you have a default mode. If you never encountered threats, your default setting is discover mode. If you are always alert and suffer from chronic anxiety, your default mode is defend mode. Humans in discover mode are happy, sociable, and eager to explore their surroundings. Humans in defend more are defensive and anxious.

To thrive, young people need to be in discover mode because it lets them learn and grow. In fact, stress is necessary in childhood because this is how you get to antifragility. Children are antifragile which means they need to experience stress and difficulties to become strong adults. The opposite of this is raising kids in a “bubble of satisfaction” where there’s no frustration, consequences, or negative emotions. Overprotecting children turns them into adolescents stuck in defend mode. When children expose themselves to scary experiences, they learn how to cope with them until they overcome their fears. By doing so, they learn to judge risk, take action appropriately, and learn their physical limits.

When given the opportunity, children will seek out at least five risks: heights, high speed, dangerous tools, dangerous elements, rough-and-tumble play, and disappearing. Although video games display characters engaging in such activities, they offer none of those risks. A phone-based childhood doesn’t help children develop antifragility. There’s no physical benefit, mistakes bring heavy costs, and the online world can lead the child to social inadequacy.

The end of play-based childhood started in the 1980s when society agreed that everything and everyone was a threat to children. At the time, cable TV was popularized, so parents were terrified that something bad would happen to their kids. Unsupervised children became rarer. We now live in a culture of “safetyism” where safety is the ultimate value and as such, we don’t allow anything that compromises it.

As the attachment system describes, children (and mammals in general) need adults to act as a “secure base”. Children explore the world, but when something bad happens, they return to the secure base for protection. Nevertheless, children can’t live “on base” permanently because they need to prepare themselves for the real world. Eventually, they’ll reach the point where they can face problems by themselves. Emotionally helpful adults have spent most of their lives in the growth zone.

Chapter 4: Puberty and the Blocked – Transition to Adulthood

The activities teenagers do lead to structural changes in their brains. During adolescence, the brain is vulnerable to stressors, for example. This can lead to a variety of mental disorders, such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse. Safetysim prevents children from experiencing the challenges they need and so do smartphones. There’s an optimal degree of stress children should experience. This is acute stress that comes quickly but doesn’t last long, such as being excluded from a game at the playground. Chronic stress, on the other hand, lasts a long time or never goes away completely.

There are different rites of passage when a child hits puberty. During the separation phase, adolescents are removed from their parents and leave their childhood habits behind. Then, there’s the transition phase which involves a series of challenges. Finally, there’s the reincorporation phase where the adolescent is welcomed as a new member of the community. As important as they are, we’re abandoning rites of passage which means teenagers don’t have role models, challenges, or public recognition. When left to their own devices, teenagers will create their rituals, but their rites can be cruel and dangerous.

Rituals can be as simple as watching PG-13 movies, learning to drive a car, or buying alcohol and they are important. Nevertheless, young people have replaced real activities with online ones. On the internet, your age isn’t important, so you can do and learn whatever you want, but as everyone knows, the online world can’t replace first-hand experience. Our job as parents is to make our children feel like they’re climbing a ladder as they grow up, so we should tie responsibilities and freedoms to their birthdays. Examples include having an allowance, performing chores around the house, playing with other kids without supervision, or running errands.

Part 3: The Great Rewiring – The Rise of the Phone-Based Childhood

Chapter 5: The Four Foundational Harms: Social Deprivation, Sleep Deprivation, Attention Fragmentation, and Addiction

The first iPhone wasn’t designed to monopolize people’s attention. Everything changed when Apple released the App Store. Soon, developers competed to see who could hold people’s attention the longest. Children and adolescents were the most vulnerable groups. Unlike televisions, phones could fit in your pocket and you could take them wherever you went. Additionally, the companies behind the apps and games embraced business models that benefitted from people seeing ads. One type of app was more problematic than all the others: social media.

Social media has four main characteristics: user profiles, user-generated content, networking, and interactivity. Examples of social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitch. Messaging apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger don’t belong to the same category. Social media makes content viral using innovations such as the “Like” or “Retweet” buttons. On top of that, they use an algorithm to curate content that hooks users. Over the years, developers have refined their platforms to keep users’ attention as long as possible.

For everything a smartphone offers, it also takes time and attention away from you. The opportunity costs associated with phone usage are too big to ignore. The author mentions four harms related to using phones.

Social Deprivation: to develop socially, children need to play with each other. Phones negatively impact the quality and intimacy of interactions.
Sleep Deprivation: sleep is essential for performing well in school and life. Sleep deprivation prevents teens from concentrating, and remembering things. Without enough sleep, their reaction times, decision-making, and motor skills suffer. Nevertheless, the consequences of sleep deprivation don’t stop there. Sleep deprivation also leads to irritability, anxiety, worse relationships, weight gain, and other health-related problems. The main reason why teens don’t get enough sleep is because of social media.
Attention Fragmentation: a constant stream of notifications interrupts students’ lives. On average, most teens receive around 200 notifications per day. These interruptions make it almost impossible for teenagers to focus on a single activity for too long. Children are particularly sensitive to sensorial stimuli.
Addiction: when an action leads to a good outcome, our brain releases dopamine. This feels so good, that we want to repeat that action endlessly. Social media or gaming addiction isn’t the same as being addicted to drugs, but you feel a compulsion to do something and this is so strong that you feel powerless to stop. Most people aren’t addicted to Instagram or Fortnite, but they’re being manipulated nonetheless. Apps follow the model detailed in the book Hooked. Users receive a notification (trigger), they open an app (action), they get something out of it (reward) and the user feels compelled to put themselves into the app (investment). The problem with this is that when you spend too much getting dopamine hits, the brain adapts and everything pales in comparison.

Chapter 6: Why Social Media Harms Girls More Than Boys

Social media makes girls more vulnerable to depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicidal thoughts. Girls spend more time on social media than boys. While boys watch YouTube videos or play multiplayer games, girls use Instagram and Snapchat and those platforms are the worst for mental health.

There are four main reasons why social media makes girls vulnerable:

Girls are affected by visual social comparison and perfectionism: We’re wired to pursue prestige and when it drops, anxiety motivates us to change our behavior to improve it again. When girls constantly compete against other girls on platforms where the only thing that matters is how they look, they develop a mindset of perfectionism.
Girls’ aggression is more relational: boys are taught to be aggressive from a young age. Historically, this was a way to determine their social status. Girls, on the other hand, hurt each other emotionally rather than physically. This is why cyberbullying among girls increased over the past years.
Girls more easily share emotions and disorders: the people around us affect our moods. Emotions are contagious, even if the people involved use social media. Girls started sharing everything about them online, even their depression, and this has influenced other girls to feel the same.
Girls are more subject to predation and harassment: there are parts of the online world where men prey upon girls.

Chapter 7: What Is Happening to Boys?

A lot of boys fall into “digital pits”. This usually means playing games and watching porn. As a result, they often sacrifice a lot (such as socialization, sleep, grades, and dating) to do those things as long as possible. Unlike girls, boys have been disengaged from the real world earlier and the root cause isn’t a single technology.

In a way, boys were pushed away from the real world and pulled into the virtual world. As a result, boys are disconnected from the real world because they’ve invested so much in the virtual world. The more these young men isolate themselves, the more anxious they feel and the harder it is for them to navigate the real world. The price to pay to live in a world without risk is a high one. A safer world sounds good in theory, but this is ruining the mental health of a lot of boys. Withdrawing from the physical world is unhealthy because it prevents you from learning to manage risk.

When the internet was popularized, teenage boys used it to satisfy their needs in the form of pornography and video games. Porn made it easy for boys to satisfy their sexual satisfaction without having to confront the uncertainty of the dating scene. By consuming pornography, they’re less likely to pursue sex, love, intimacy, and marriage. Video games are more complicated. Some benefits of playing games include increased cognition, improved memory, decreased depression, and better cooperation. The problem with video games is when boys play too much. Doing so often means less sleep, exercise, or socializing.

Chapter 8: Spiritual Elevation and Degradation

A phone-based life leads to spiritual degradation in all members of society. Many cultures wrote about the actions that brought people closer to God. The author refers to that idea as divinity. This isn’t purely religious. Some things are considered pure or sacred and they lead to a moral elevation. Using phones all the time doesn’t bring you upward but downward because it blocks six spiritual practices. Having spiritual practices improves people’s overall well-being.

Shared Sacredness: humans work on two levels. In the realm of the profane, we pursue personal interests. In the realm of the sacred, we pursue collective interests. Being part of a community makes you happier and leads to lower suicide rates. To share collective experiences, you need times, places, and objects. The online world offers none of these things because everything is available all the time.
Embodiment: rituals require some level of physicality. Different movements have different meanings. Moving synchronously with other community members creates a sense of similarity and trust. Also, rituals involve sharing a special meal which strengthens bonds and reduces the possibility of conflict.
Stillness, silence, and focus: spiritual practices encourage stillness. Some spiritual practices require people to separate themselves from noise. Practicing silence has various mental benefits, such as reduced depression and anxiety. You can get those benefits by meditating ten minutes a day.
Transcending the self: some spiritual experiences lead to moments of awe, spiritual elevation, or moral beauty. Self-transcendence happens when you lose the self. As the self dissolves, we feel part of a community. In social media, you’re the center of everything you see which trains you to be materialistic, judgemental, and boastful.
Be slower to anger, quick to forgive: it’s human nature to judge others, but we must judge using the same standards we use to judge ourselves. Social media is about the opposite. Judging quickly and without having contempt regarding what happened. Developing the capacity to forgive is important and this is something most religions encourage.
Find awe in nature: the vastness and beauty of nature make us look small in comparison and this idea has always had an important role in human spirituality. Experiencing this beauty and awe makes the past and future dissolve and roots you in the present moment.

Everyone needs meaning, connection, and spiritual elevation and we try to fill that void with a phone-based life. Unfortunately, the trivial and degrading content we find there is inadequate, so we must pursue better-quality content.

Part 4: Collective Action for Healthier Childhood

Chapter 9: Preparing for Collective Action

Most people think it’s too late to delay the age at which children get their first smartphone and social media accounts, but it isn’t. Collective action problems (some people call them social dilemmas) are traps where everyone does what they think is beneficial to themselves, but end up ruining something for everyone unless they act now. Most children want social media accounts to fit in with their peers. As parents, we reluctantly agree because we don’t want our children to be excluded. To escape this trap, we need four types of collective response:

Voluntary coordination: parents get together to make a decision.
Social norms and moralization: communities see the decisions of individuals in moral terms and judge them. We shouldn’t judge the parents of 9-year-olds who walk around by themselves, for instance.
Technological solutions: examples include lockable pouches, easy age verification methods, or better basic phones.
Laws and rules: governments should make rules around social media. Schools should have strict policies around using phones in class.

Chapter 10: What Governments and Tech Companies Can Do Now

Social media companies do whatever they can to hold people’s attention as long as possible, even if that means harming their users. In the attention economy, users are the product. The problem is that companies don’t prohibit users under 13 from using their platforms. Video games that follow the free-to-play business model include similar traps to social media, such as “loot boxes”, a random collection of items. Through such practices, these companies want to addict their users so that they keep coming back.

There are four ways in which governments and tech companies could solve these problems:

Assert a duty of care: this involves creating a code so that companies have a moral and legal responsibility when it comes to minors.
Raise the age of internet adulthood to 16: 13 is the default age of internet adulthood, but the author thinks it should be increased to 16.
Facilitate age verification: social media platforms should require people to verify their age before letting them create an account.
Encourage phone-free schools: schools, from elementary to high school, should go phone-free because phones negatively impact children’s mental health, as well as academic performance.

Additionally, governments should encourage more real-world experience by doing the following:

Stop punishing parents for giving children real-world freedom: children should be allowed to play outside without their parent’s supervision
Encourage more play in schools: when you deprive children of play, they learn less.
Design and zone public space with children in mind: design more places where children can play and get there easily.
More vocational education, apprenticeships, and youth development programs: the educational system should offer courses in areas like shops, auto-mechanics, agriculture, or business.

Chapter 11: What Schools Can Do Now

To deal with the anxiety of this generation, we should do two things: phone-free schools and free play. Smartphones damage learning as well as social relationships. According to the author, phones are the problem, not the internet. Kids and teachers should still be allowed to use the internet for academic purposes. Free play, on the other hand, means opportunities where children play with little adult supervision and no rules. They could have a longer recess to do physical activities they come up with themselves. Should a conflict appear, they should also solve it themselves without adult supervision.

Chapter 12: What Parents Can Do Now

As families changed, so did the parents’ mindset. In the 1979s, parents started relying on experts to figure out the best ways to raise their children. They wanted precision and control in a job that was chaotic and unpredictable by nature. Instead of taking what developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik refers to as the carpenter approach, we should be more like a gardener. This means parents should protect and nurture their kids so that they can flourish. This demands time and effort, but it doesn’t have to be perfect to work. Don’t let the internet and social media “take over the garden”, as the author puts it.

For parents of children ages 0 to 5: give them time, let them play with other kids, and let them interact in the real world. Also, limit the use of screens.
For parents of children ages 6-13: give them more experience in the real world. They should run errands, have sleepovers, walk to school in small groups, and go camping. Also, establish clear boundaries around screens.
For parents of teens (ages 13-18): they should develop even more experience in the real world. They should use different transportation modes, and learn to drive. They should also assist as much as possible at home, cooking, cleaning, and running errands. Finding a part-time job is a great idea and so are high school exchange programs. Longer adventures involving nature are scary but incredibly fulfilling. Restrictions around screens should be loosened.

Conclusion: Bring Childhood Back to Earth

To bring about the reforms the author suggested earlier in the book, Haidt (suggests” the following: speak up and link up. When people speak up about a situation, it’s more likely that someone else could take action., When digital technology popularized and invaded our homes, everyone knew that something was happening, but nobody did anything. Speak to others about your suspicions: friends, neighbors, coworkers, and so on.

By linking up, the author refers to connecting with other parents who share similar values to you. You can delay the phone-based childhood together or encourage your children to play more and be more independent. Teachers should talk to other teachers. The policy around phones should be reconsidered. Our children’s lives shouldn’t be an experiment. We tried sending them to Mars even though humanity evolved on Earth. It’s time to bring them back to Earth.

Book Summary: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt