The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt. A Review

I could see this coming at least 17 years ago…. Well, sort of. When Steve Jobs announced Apple’s bombshell product, the iPhone, in 2007, I knew this would change the way people lived their lives. What I did not know was just how detrimental smartphones would become for children’s mental health… and finally, just as of June, 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General has issued a warning about the indiscriminate use of social media among children and teens.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt

I have worked in the Information Technology industry for about 39 years, and the pace of technology change has been breathtaking. “Overwhelming” is another word to describe it. But the smartphone revolution has probably had the most profound impact of anything in our information age.

I must confess that I have been part of the problem. The Internet revolution has changed the way we as humans exchange information, and get things done. Expedia makes travel easier. I like my Amazon Prime. Who needs physical road maps when you have Google or Apple Maps on your phone?

But Internet technology has also transformed how we handle relationships, and this impacts our mental health. Though I had been building computer networks during my entire professional career, it took me a while to get my first smartphone, probably about twelve years ago. I was hesitant to get one since my trusty flip phone served me quite well.

A Confession to Make

However, my first experience with a smartphone got me sucked in. It was cool. Everything was at my fingertips.

I remember bringing that smartphone into a church worship service, looking up a song lyric as our church had run out of paper bulletins to hand out to people, so that they could follow along with the service. How convenient it was to have everything I needed in my hand on this backlit screen! I had that song lyric on my phone screen, while the choir was singing a rather somber melody while the lights dimmed within the sanctuary..

Nevertheless, I was absolutely clueless as to how distracting my shiny smartphone was to other worshippers. Finally, the lady next to me kindly asked me to turn off my phone as my screen was flashing in her eyes. To my embarrassment, I shut my phone down. But it did get me thinking. I was part of the smartphone misuse problem, and was not even fully aware of it, until someone pointed it out to me.

Over the years, I must admit that the “Like” button on so many social media apps produced some of my own anxiety. But I was an adult, so I pretty much knew how to handle it. Yet the story is quite different for children.

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, who had previously authored The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics, makes the case that our phone-based culture has been responsible, at least in large part, for the tremendous rise in teenage and preteen mental health issues.

Jonathan Haidt teaches at New York University, where his research is on morality. His earlier book, The Righteous Mind, was perhaps the most important book I read during the decade of the 2010s (Read my review on Veracity). Though a secular Jew who considers himself as an atheist, Haidt has a very generous appreciation towards the Christian faith, as you might discover below. This new book, The Anxious Generation, has plenty of research analysis like The Righteous Mind, but it is also a plea for a return to sanity in how we as a culture, Christians included, need to rethink our usage of the Internet.  In this new book, Haidt says: “Social media use does not just correlate with mental illness; it causes it.”

I think he is right.

How We Lost a Generation of Children to Social Media

What I could not figure out is that even twelve years ago friends in my church were buying these smartphone devices for their preteen and teenage children. Why were they being so willing to buy in so quickly into the smartphone craze? As a technology advocate who worked in the information technology industry, I should have spoken up more. But to my chagrin now, I kept far too quiet.

We as Christians talk about training up our children in the ways of the Lord, offering guard rails to children, incrementally exposing them to things they must deal with as an adult, and resisting peer pressure. For the most part, conservative Christians broadly speaking have done fairly well at that.

But when it came to technology, Christians, just like most other people, have taken nearly all of it in with very few guard rails. Now as these kids have become college students and even young adults, some of these kids and former-kids show signs of severe anxiety and depression which many of us never saw so much in previous generations.

Haidt likens this to a grand scientific experiment where a whole generation of parents sent their children off to live on Mars, despite the fact that Mars is a very dangerous place for even adults to be. Little did we all know that the use of smartphone technology itself, not simply visiting certain websites, would become a problem.

My liberal-mainline-Christian Episcopalian parents had enough concern to keep me away from adult bookstores when I was a kid. But even in the most conservative Christian households today, for the past decade, children have been given hand-held devices which enable unfettered access to adult-only explicitly sexual content that I never would have dreamed of having access to in the 1970s. Nevermind the exposure to worldviews that seek to undermine one’s Christian faith and witness. Even up through the 1980s, one would need to go visit your local library in order to fact-check a sermon. Now on a smartphone, you can fact-check a sermon in under 30 seconds. Furthermore, who knows if the “fact-checking” online via the Internet is going to be accurate?

The sad truth is that smartphones are difficult enough for adults to control. Use of them can be quite addictive, despite how useful they can be in making telephone calls, listening to audiobooks (something I do quite a lot), and in checking my email. What I try to resist as much as possible are social media apps. But it even becomes more difficult when employers essentially require you to be less than a step away from your cell phone.

So far, I have resisted the urge to sign up for Facebook, despite how useful Facebook Marketplace is for selling things online. I stay away completely from Tik Tok and Instagram. But the story is different for teens and preteens, and the scientific results that Haidt reports are startling. High-tech social media companies have exploited the psychology of adolescents, such that they get hooked on social media via their smartphones. The impact is worse for girls than boys, but girls and boys suffer from a highly sensitive “Defense Mode,” as Haidt calls it, in that smartphone usage, which can easily surpass the hourly usage of watching television that kids like me in the 1970s experienced, just has skyrocketed since the early 2010s.

As a result, kids are stressed out. Many find it difficult to have face-to-face conversations with physically present human beings. Depression and anxiety disorders have practically become the norm among many teenagers. Anxiety has become the worst, with a 134% percent increase of diagnosed anxiety disorders among college students since 2008. Then there are also increases in ADHD, bipolar, anorexia, substance abuse, and schizophrenia.

Boys Versus Girls

The differences in how social media impacts girls versus boys is disturbing. Girls suffer the most. Girls who become exposed to social media apps that are highly visual, like Instagram, end up comparing themselves with other girls in terms of physical beauty. Cyber-bullying is particularly bad for girls, as shaming girls on the basis of their looks is so easily done on social media. Young teenage girls who aspire to become “influencers” are particularly vulnerable to exploitation from adult men and even otherwise supposedly “reputable” corporations.

Boys on the other hand, while less impacted in general than girls, suffer from social media in other detrimental ways. Boys tend to delay launching into the adult world more than girls, and they tend to isolate themselves more. Boys are less likely to succeed academically when compared to girls. Such problems are exacerbated among boys who lack respected male role models in their life, whom they can emulate. Haidt does not report any such particular findings with respect to role models for young girls.

(Churches which seek to diminish the role of adult male leaders who interact with boys would do well to take note of this report of the scientific data. The bottom line: young boys need to see positive male role models in positions of leadership in order for them to succeed in making it successfully to adulthood).

Even in Christian households, with mature Christian parents, the plague of teenage anxiety has stunted growth and made it even more difficult to pass on the faith to that next generation. As a Christian, this has really puzzled me, as many Christian parents have been quite diligent with policing how their kids spend time with others, enforcing curfews, and the like. But when it comes to smartphone usage, setting enforceable limits has become a fantasy for many families.

It is important to say that it would be wrong to blame parents as wholly responsible. Christian leaders, social media companies, and a whole host of other players alongside parents have made it difficult to figure out how to navigate the smartphone revolution. Even when efforts to rein in smartphone usage are attempted by parents, they often do not work as well as hoped. The addictive power of social media among young people makes it difficult for parents to effectively limit use of such technology, once kids get their hands on smartphone devices at an early age. GenZ, young people who were born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, have had the greatest risk, and now even younger kids are vulnerable. Reliance on communications technology during the COVID epidemic just made matters worse. Haidt shares all of the relevant statistics to show just how severe the problem is.

And it is really bad.

Other Factors, Plus the Specific Features of Social Media Which Harm Children

In fairness, Haidt does not blame everything on smartphones. Overprotective parenting, otherwise known as “helicopter” parenting, has ironically played its own role. In Haidt’s argument, children need to be gradually exposed to challenging situations in order to gain better resilience. Parents who keep their kids indoors too much are taking away from their child’s ability to go into “Discover Mode,” where they can learn to adapt to new situations, where the risk for hurting themselves is still present, but that the risk factor is not extreme.

Kids need time to play, and interact with other kids on a physically present basis. Neighbors need to stop freaking out whenever they see a child out on their own without their parents present, fearing that some parent MUST be neglecting their child and exposing them to potentially dangerous, physically-present strangers. Kids need to be allowed to explore the outside world, at age appropriate times, without their parents hovering over them. Otherwise, kids will be all too glad to hide in their bedroom to binge out on Instagram videos, etc., hoping that their friends, and even perfect strangers online might click that “Like” button, and give them that dopamine rush, which serves as the hook for how social media companies can lure young people into their orbit.

As Haidt puts it, social media for young people before their brains have matured has devastating effects. Young people can have their brains rewired by their smartphones to be on a chronic “Defense Mode” almost all of the time. We all need to have a healthy “Defense Mode” in order to handle acute, short lived threats. But exposure virtually to the following combination characteristic of social media has a detrimental impact on mental health:

• Asynchronous as opposed to synchronous interactions with others
• Disembodied versus embodied interactions with others
• One-to-many interactions versus one-on-one interactions
• Joining communities with a low-bar to entry versus a high-bar to entry

All of these factors have coalesced together work to give young people an oversensitive, chronic “Defense Mode” that can cripple a young person’s ability to successfully navigate relationships in the real world. Frankly, it can probably also have a negative impact on adults, too!

What Can Be Done About the Anxiety Crisis Among Children and Teenagers

Haidt gives us all of the bad news, but he does offer some solutions for resolving this teenage anxiety crisis:

• No smartphone before high school (flip-phones are okay, with limited applications)
• No social media before the age of 16
• Phone-free schools.
• Allow for more unsupervised play and childhood independence

Some critics of Haidt’s proposals have complained that they are too draconian. But Haidt is not a Luddite. Instead, he favors rites of passage in terms of how kids get exposed to such technology, so that they can incrementally adjust to them at age appropriate times.

Even some of the founders of the Internet revolution, like Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs, were vigilant in limiting screen time for their kids. Gates did not allow his kids to get cell phones until they turned 14. Steve Jobs would not allow his kids at home to use iPhones or iPads until he died in 2012. The oldest teenager in that family at home was 17 at the time and the youngest was 14. Haidt’s proposals are anything but draconian.

The current age for Internet “adulthood” is 13 years old, younger than Haidt’s recommended age of 16, and that age limit is rarely, if ever, enforced by social media companies. Some balk at the idea of setting age limits for social media, citing the argument that some kids mature faster than others. But we do not that with setting age limits on obtaining a driver’s license, or obtaining alcohol.

Much of the challenges parents face in enforcing their rules for their own kids is because not every parent holds to the same rules. Being a part of a community with shared values makes it much easier to enforce restrictions on children. Family small groups, home schooling groups, and neighborhood associations can all help to keep peer pressure off of both children and parents to lower the age for initiation into the world of social media before young people are ready for it. So if the social group you and/or your kids belong to do not share the same values about limiting smartphone and social media usage, and they are not open to change, then perhaps it might be time to look for a different community which does share your values.  Or at the very least, look to be a part of a community with a critical mass of people who do share your values, such that neither you nor your children will feel socially ostracized for not “fitting in” to an unhealthy norm.

Christian parents in particular should seriously consider these solutions, if they are really serious about trying to pass their faith onto the next generation…. not just for simply mental health reasons. Interestingly, Jonathan Haidt is a secularized Jew, but he advocates for faith communities to offer substitutes for the lure of social media by offering better rites of passage for the journey from childhood to adulthood. Haidt dedicates an entire chapter on the important role that religious communities can play in pushing back against the damaging effects of social media among young people.

Local churches might consider implementing such rites of passage for their youth groups. What would it look like if parents in a Christian community were all committed to having 16th birthday parties where families could celebrate their kids getting their first social media accounts? Perhaps Christians can lead the way in setting good examples for how to raise resilient children, in a world where Christian values seem to be declining among the younger generations.

I am not sure if The Anxious Generation is the best book I have read this year, but it is undoubtedly the most IMPORTANT book I have read within the last two or three years. I listened to it as an audiobook on Audible and I highly recommend that you and everyone you know gets the book and reads it.

It is one thing when you hear a preacher decrying the corrosive impact of the world infecting the minds of children. One could easily dismiss such teaching as mere legalism. But when a secular Jewish intellectual who does not believe in God, like Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation, is telling us the same thing, we would do well to heed the message.

Russell Moore has an interview with Jonathan Haidt, sponsored by Christianity Today magazine. Some good news from the Russell Moore interview, based on research done by Haidt after the book was released, is that children in conservative Christian churches have done better during the last 15 or so years of the social media-induced mental health crisis than children from liberal Christian and secular environments. Below is another interview, focusing on the mental health issues from a more secular perspective.