Name: The Anxious Generation
ISBN: 9780593655030

The Anxious Generation

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why? In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (pronounced "height") lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “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. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies. Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free.

What Hacker News says

slavoingilizovAug 2026

Thank you for writing this! I've been thinking about this a lot after becoming a dad (3yo + a 2nd baby in about one week or so).

Ambition may or may not be the right word to use, as others have commented. One thing I have reflected on is not if I should be making a compromise with one or the other, but why in our modern society the easiest path is to only pick one. The more I read about how to bring up healthy strong children, the more I think we've just gone backwards as a species.

There is a lot of research about the bad effects of screens and constant dopamine on long-term mental health and resilience (read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Heidt). In reality, until just maybe 50 years ago, it was socially accepted for parents to be raising children with a support network around them. That had both good and bad sides - fewer rights for moms/women, dads less involved in parenting. But instead of fixing that, we threw out the whole idea that you need a village to support you as a parent and replaced it with career maxxing as the only prominent virtue to speak about.

I have believed in individual freedom and liberalism forever, but these days I think there is such a thing as too much individualism and we've taken that to an extreme. This makes it really hard to want or be able to raise children, and our society's long-term health suffers as a result, despite all of our scientific progress. Individual parents shouldn't be forced to have the internal debate that the author is having and pick between them - we should fix our social systems and institutions to not need that choice. But that's an even harder problem.

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test1984Jun 2026

The Anxious Generation is a recent book that extensively explains the damage caused by social media before age 16. The arguments in the book would support such a ban if it manages to get the majority of kids off social media, but it has to be a critical mass and not easily evadable

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test1984Jun 2026

I recommend reading Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation.

What you describe was probably true, but it's not anymore. You have algos intentionally targeting formative brains, rewiring them and (at the risk of sounding hyperbolic), destroying children and teens.

This has resulted in a measurable spike in depression and self-harm globally.

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throwfaraway4Mar 2026

As is social media in general. I highly recommend reading the Anxious Generation

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creaturemachineFeb 2026

I suggest you read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. As much as it is damaging to adults, it's much more so to children in early development all the way through puberty.

https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/

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ludstonJan 2026

> What is it about this 16 y/o cutoff that seems to be the focus everywhere? Why not 18?

Some studies have found that puberty is the peak problematic age for people to be on social media and 16 is the rough point by which mostly this is finished. There is a book, "The Anxious Generation" that covers this pretty well.

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