The Anxious Generation

The Anxious Generation: The Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Social psychologist and book author Jonathan Haidt examines the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries simultaneously. Deep dive into the nature of childhood, and why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Examine how “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and then eliminated by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s--when the mental health of adolescents plunged. Explore mechanisms by which the “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. These “collective action problems” trap us, but there are four simple rules that set restore a more humane childhood. Get the evidence-based data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and the public health emergency faced by Gen Z.