Distilled Knowledge

Source contribution

Haidt argues that childhood shifted from embodied, play-based development toward a phone-based environment during the same period that several adolescent mental-health indicators worsened. The book combines a developmental mechanism claim with a collective-action argument: families cannot solve platform and norm problems entirely alone.

• Free play and independent exploration train risk assessment, conflict resolution, agency, and social competence.
• Phone-centered life can displace sleep, face-to-face interaction, sustained attention, movement, and embodied experience.
• Social media mechanisms plausibly vary by sex, developmental stage, platform, use pattern, and prior vulnerability.
• Parents, schools, governments, and platforms face coordination problems; unilateral restriction can impose social costs on one child unless norms change together.

Routes into permanent notes

• Graduated Independence Builds Capability captures the developmental claim without treating every risk alike.
• Childhood argument map separates trend, mechanism, causal identification, and policy.
• Parenting holds the provisional personal synthesis.

Evidence boundary

The timing and mechanisms are important evidence, not proof of one sufficient cause. Mental-health measures, countries, cohorts, platforms, and outcomes differ; refresh the empirical debate before using claims publicly.

DESCRIPTION

THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of 2024 • A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book • One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2024 • A TIME 100 Must-Read Book of 2024 • Named a Best Book of 2024 by the Economist, the New York Post, and Town & Country • The Goodreads Choice Award Nonfiction Book of the Year • Finalist for the PEN Literary Awards A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood. “With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world … While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids.” —Shannon Carlin, TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 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. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood. Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.

The Anxious Generation_ How the Great Rewi - Jonathan Haidt.pdf (file not included in this release)

Critiques (debunked)

deep-research-report
The new CDC report shows Covid added little to mental health trends

Summary

Here’s a thorough summary of the main ideas and statistics in The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood by Jonathan Haidt:

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📘 Main Thesis

Haidt argues that the mental health crisis among young people, especially those born after 1995 (Gen Z), is primarily due to two major societal shifts:

1. Overprotection in the real world – children are overly supervised and sheltered.
2. Underprotection in the virtual world – children are left to navigate smartphones, social media, and the internet with little guidance or constraint.

These shifts culminated in what Haidt calls the “Great Rewiring” of childhood, dramatically altering brain development and cultural learning.

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📈 Key Statistics and Trends

🚨 Mental Health Crisis Timeline

• Surge began 2010–2015, aligned with widespread smartphone and social media adoption.
• Depression among U.S. teens rose by ~150% from 2010.
• Suicide rates for girls aged 10–14 rose 167% from 2010 to 2021.
• Average screen-based leisure time for teens rose to 7+ hours/day (not including schoolwork).

👧 Girls Were Hit Hardest

• Social media correlates strongly with depression and anxiety in girls.
• Girls use visually oriented platforms (Instagram, TikTok) more frequently.
• Heavy female users of social media are 3x more likely to be depressed than nonusers.

👦 Boys’ Experience

• Boys’ issues relate more to withdrawal: gaming, pornography, and failure to launch.
• Boys are more likely to disengage from school, work, and social life.
• ~7% of boys show signs of video game addiction, with mental and physical health decline.

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🔄 Developmental Impacts: The Four Foundational Harms

1. Social Deprivation – Time with friends dropped from 122 min/day (2012) to 67 min/day (2019).
2. Sleep Deprivation – Worsened in both quality and quantity due to night-time phone use.
3. Attention Fragmentation – Teens face hundreds of notifications/day, weakening focus and executive function.
4. Addiction – Apps and games exploit the brain’s dopamine system; usage mimics gambling addiction.

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🧠 Developmental Vulnerability

• Frontal cortex (self-control, decision-making) is not fully developed until mid-20s.
• Adolescents are biologically wired to seek validation, making them easy targets for digital addiction.
• Ages 9–15 are a “sensitive period” for cultural imprinting—making early smartphone/social media use especially harmful.

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🧒 What Children Need (and Aren’t Getting)

• Free Play: Unstructured, risky, unsupervised physical play builds emotional resilience and social skills.
• Attunement: Serve-and-return interactions foster empathy and connection—something digital media inhibits.
• Social Learning: Children rely on “conformist” and “prestige” biases to learn culture—but social media hijacks these instincts and channels them to influencers.

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📉 Why Smartphones Are “Experience Blockers”

• Safetyism in parenting limits real-world experiences.
• Smartphones displace important real-world inputs needed for brain development.
• Traditional rites of passage (which helped kids transition into adulthood) are now largely absent.

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🙏 Spiritual and Communal Costs

• Digital life inhibits:
  • Ritual participation
  • Stillness and self-transcendence
  • Real-world community
• Social media fosters judgment, performance, and anxiety, rather than collective identity and awe (e.g., nature, rituals, silence).

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🛠 Policy and Practical Solutions

Government Reforms

• Raise digital adulthood to age 16.
• Enforce age verification and data protections.
• Narrow definitions of child neglect to allow free-range parenting.

School Reforms

• Go phone-free all day.
• Add more recess and risky play (e.g. Let Grow Play Club).
• Include vocational training, especially for boys.

Parental Guidance

• Delay smartphones until high school.
• No social media before age 16.
• Increase unsupervised play, camping, part-time jobs, and community involvement.

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🌍 Global Trends

• The mental health crisis occurred simultaneously across Western countries (U.S., U.K., Canada, Nordic nations).
• Non-Western data is less clear but emerging patterns are similar.

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• hooked children during vulnerable developmental stages, while their brains were rapidly rewiring in response to incoming stimulation.
• Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), enacted in 1998.
  • Age 13 — consent to contract with company
• Social media companies behaving like tobacco, vaping, leaded gasoline companies
• While the reward-seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, the frontal cortex—essential for self-control, delay of gratification, and resistance to temptation—is not up to full capacity until the mid-20s, and preteens are at a particularly vulnerable point in development. As they begin puberty, they are often socially insecure, easily swayed by peer pressure, and easily lured by any activity that seems to offer social validation.
• Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness—perpetually—to managing what became their online brand.
• Decline in outdoor play and rise of computers
• My central claim in this book is that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.
• Reforms:
  1. No smartphones before high school
  2. No social media before 16
  3. Phone-free schools
  4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence
• People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.
• Those who are politically active nowadays usually have worse mental health.
• Free play:
  • need to play, and come out socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.
  • “play requires suppression of the drive to dominate and enables the formation of long-lasting cooperative bonds.”
  • Gray defines “free play” as “activity that is freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake, not consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.”
  • Physical play, outdoors and with other children of mixed ages, is the healthiest, most natural, most beneficial sort of play. Play with some degree of physical risk is essential because it teaches children how to look after themselves and each other.[9] Children can only learn how to not get hurt in situations where it is possible to get hurt, such as wrestling with a friend, having a pretend sword fight, or negotiating with another child to enjoy a seesaw when a failed negotiation can lead to pain in one’s posterior, as well as embarrassment. When parents, teachers, and coaches get involved, it becomes less free, less playful, and less beneficial. Adults usually can’t stop themselves from directing and protecting.
  • key feature of free play is that mistakes are generally not very costly.
  • unsupervised, child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair. Children are intrinsically motivated to acquire these skills because they want to be included in the playgroup and keep the fun going.
• Attunement
  • serve-and-return social dynamics
  • essential for social development
  • synchronous movement with others
• Thirteen-year-olds should not be scrolling through endless posts from influencers and other strangers when their brains are in such an open state, searching for exemplars to lock onto. They should be playing, synchronizing, and hanging out with their friends in person while leaving some room in the input streams to their eyes and ears for social learning from their parents, teachers, and other role models in their communities.

Collaborative Review Docs - The Anxious Generation

Summary by Chapters

• Chapter 1: The Surge of Suffering
  • Between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities. This Great Rewiring of Childhood, I argue, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s.
  • The first generation of Americans who went through puberty with smartphones (and the entire internet) in their hands became more anxious, depressed, self-harming, and suicidal. We now call that generation Gen Z, in contrast to the millennial generation, which had largely finished puberty when the Great Rewiring began in 2010.
  • The tidal wave of anxiety, depression, and self-harm hit girls harder than boys, and it hit preteen girls hardest of all.
  • The mental health crisis has also hit boys. Their rates of depression and anxiety have also increased a lot, although usually not by as much as for girls. Boys’ technology use and mental health difficulties are somewhat different from those of girls, as I’ll show in chapter 7.
  • Suicide rates in the United States began rising around 2008 for adolescent boys and girls; they rose much higher in the 2010s.
  • The increase in suffering was not limited to the United States. The same pattern is seen at roughly the same time among teens in the U.K., Canada, and other major Anglosphere countries, and also in the five Nordic nations. Feelings of alienation in school rose after 2012 across the Western world. Data is less abundant in non-Western nations, and the patterns there are less clear.[61]
  • No other theory has been able to explain why rates of anxiety and depression surged among adolescents in so many countries at the same time and in the same way. Other factors, of course, contribute to poor mental health, but the unprecedented rise between 2010 and 2015 cannot be explained by the global financial crisis, nor by any set of events that happened in the United States or in any other particular country.
• Chapter 2: What Children Need to do in Childhood
  • Human childhood is very different from that of any other animal. Children’s brains grow to 90% of full size by age 5, but then take a long time to configure themselves. This slow-growth childhood is an adaptation for cultural learning. Childhood is an apprenticeship for learning the skills needed for success in one’s culture.
  • Free play is as essential for developing social skills, like conflict resolution, as it is for developing physical skills. But play-based childhoods were replaced by phone-based childhoods as children and adolescents moved their social lives and free time onto internet-connected devices.
  • Children learn through play to connect, synchronize, and take turns. They enjoy attunement and need enormous quantities of it. Attunement and synchrony bond pairs, groups, and whole communities. Social media, in contrast, is mostly asynchronous and performative. It inhibits attunement and leaves heavy users starving for social connection.
  • Children are born with two innate learning programs that help them to acquire their local culture. Conformist bias motivates them to copy whatever seems to be most common. Prestige bias motivates them to copy whoever seems to be the most accomplished and prestigious. Social media platforms, which are engineered for engagement, hijack social learning and drown out the culture of one’s family and local community while locking children’s eyes onto influencers of questionable value.
  • Social learning occurs throughout childhood, but there may be a sensitive period for cultural learning that spans roughly ages 9 to 15. Lessons learned and identities formed in these years are likely to imprint, or stick, more than at other ages. These are the crucial sensitive years of puberty. Unfortunately, they are also the years in which most adolescents in developed countries get their own phones and move their social lives online.
• Chapter 3: Discover Mode and the Need for Risky Play
  In Sum ^20f6b6
  • The human brain contains two subsystems that put it into two common modes: discover mode (for approaching opportunities) and defend mode (for defending against threats). Young people born after 1995 are more likely to be stuck in defend mode, compared to those born earlier. They are on permanent alert for threats, rather than being hungry for new experiences. They are anxious.
  • All children are by nature antifragile. Just as the immune system must be exposed to germs, and trees must be exposed to wind, children require exposure to setbacks, failures, shocks, and stumbles in order to develop strength and self-reliance. Overprotection interferes with this development and renders young people more likely to be fragile and fearful as adults.
  • Kids must have a great deal of free play to develop, and they benefit from risky physical play, which has anti-phobic effects. Kids seek out the level of risk and thrill that they are ready for, in order to master their fears and develop competencies. Risk-taking online may not have comparable anti-phobic effects.
  • In the 1980s and especially the 1990s, parents in Anglo countries became more fearful for many reasons, including changes in the media ecosystem and news cycle. They lost trust in each other, they started spending far more time supervising their own children, and they did more parenting in defend mode, seeing risks and threats everywhere.
  • The worship of “safety” above all else is called safetyism. It is dangerous because it makes it harder for children to learn to care for themselves and to deal with risk, conflict, and frustration.
  • The attachment system evolved to help young mammals learn the skills they’ll need to reach adulthood while retreating to their “secure base” when they feel threatened. Fearful parenting keeps children on home base too much, preventing them from having the experiences they need to grow strong and to develop a secure attachment style.
  • Children are most likely to thrive when they have a play-based childhood in the real world. They are less likely to thrive when fearful parenting and a phone-based childhood deprive them of opportunities for growth.
• Chapter 4: Puberty and the Blocked Transition to Adulthood
  In Sum
  • Early puberty is a period of rapid brain rewiring, second only to the first few years of life. Neural pruning and myelination are occurring at a very rapid rate, guided by the adolescent’s experiences. We should be concerned about those experiences and not let strangers and algorithms choose them.
  • Safetyism is an experience blocker. When we make children’s safety a quasi-sacred value and don’t allow them to take any risks, we block them from overcoming anxiety, learning to manage risk, and learning to be self-governing, all of which are essential for becoming healthy and competent adults.
  • Smartphones are a second kind of experience blocker. Once they enter a child’s life, they push out or reduce all other forms of non-phone-based experience, which is the kind that their experience-expectant brains most need.
  • Rites of passage are the curated sets of experiences that human societies arrange to help adolescents make the transition to adulthood. Van Gennep noted that these rites usually have a separation phase, a transformation phase, and a reincorporation phase.
  • Western societies have eliminated many rites of passage, and the digital world that opened up in the 1990s eventually buried most milestones and obscured the path to adulthood. Once children began spending much or most of their time online, the inputs to their developing brains became undifferentiated torrents of stimuli with no age grading or age restrictions.
  • A society that is large, diverse, and secular (such as the United States or the U.K.) might still agree to a set of milestones that mark stepwise increases in freedoms and responsibilities.
• Chapter 5: The Four Foundational Harms: Social Deprivation, Sleep Deprivation, Attention Fragmentation, and Addiction
  In Sum In this chapter I described the four foundational harms of the phone-based childhood. These are profound changes to childhood caused by the rapid technological shift of the early 2010s. Each one is foundational because it affects the development of multiple social, emotional, and cognitive abilities.
  • The sheer amount of time that adolescents spend with their phones is staggering, even compared with the high levels of screen time they had before the invention of the iPhone. Studies of time use routinely find that the average teen reports spending more than seven hours a day on screen-based leisure activities (not including school and homework).
  • The opportunity cost of a phone-based childhood refers to everything that children do less of once they get unlimited round-the-clock access to the internet.
  • The first foundational harm is social deprivation. When American adolescents moved onto smartphones, time with friends in face-to-face settings plummeted immediately, from 122 minutes per day in 2012 down to 67 minutes per day in 2019. Time with friends dropped further because of COVID restrictions, but Gen Z was already socially distanced before COVID restrictions were put in place.
  • The second fundamental harm is sleep deprivation. As soon as adolescents moved from basic phones to smartphones, their sleep declined in both quantity and quality, around the developed world. Longitudinal studies show that smartphone use came first and was followed by sleep deprivation.
  • Sleep deprivation is extremely well studied, and its effects are far reaching. They include depression, anxiety, irritability, cognitive deficits, poor learning, lower grades, more accidents, and more deaths from accidents.
  • The third fundamental harm is attention fragmentation. Attention is the ability to stay on one mental road while many off-ramps beckon. Staying on a road, staying on a task, is a feature of maturity and a sign of good executive function. But smartphones are kryptonite for attention. Many adolescents get hundreds of notifications per day, meaning that they rarely have five or 10 minutes to think without an interruption.
  • There is evidence that the fragmentation of attention in early adolescence caused by problematic use of social media and video games may interfere with the development of executive function.
  • The fourth fundamental harm is addiction. The behaviorists discovered that learning, for animals, is “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain.” The developers of the most successful social media apps used advanced behaviorist techniques to “hook” children into becoming heavy users of their products.
  • Dopamine release is pleasurable, but it does not trigger a feeling of satisfaction. Rather, it makes you want more of whatever you did to trigger the release. The addiction researcher Anna Lembke says that the universal symptoms of withdrawal are “anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.” She and other researchers find that many adolescents have developed behavioral addictions that are very much like the way that people develop addictions to slot machine gambling, with profound consequences for their well-being, their social development, and their families.
  • When we put these four foundational harms together, they explain why mental health got so much worse so suddenly as soon as childhood became phone-based.
• Chapter 6: Why Social Media Harms Girls more than Boys
  In Sum
  • Social media harms girls more than boys. Correlational studies show that heavy users of social media have higher rates of depression and other disorders than light users or nonusers. The correlation is larger and clearer for girls: Heavy users are three times as likely to be depressed as nonusers.
  • Experimental studies show that social media use is a cause, not just a correlate, of anxiety and depression. When people are assigned to reduce or eliminate social media for three weeks or more, their mental health usually improves. Several “quasi-experiments” show that when Facebook came to campuses, or when high-speed internet came to regions and provinces, mental health declined, especially for girls and young women.
  • Girls use social media a lot more than boys, and they prefer visually oriented platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, which are worse for social comparison than primarily text-based platforms such as Reddit.
  • Two major categories of motivations are agency (the desire to stand out and have an effect on the world) and communion (the desire to connect and develop a sense of belonging). Boys and girls both want each of these, but there is a gender difference that emerges early in children’s play: Boys choose more agency activities; girls choose more communion activities. Social media appeals to the desire for communion, but it often ends up frustrating it.
  • There are at least four reasons why social media harms girls more than boys. The first is that girls are more sensitive to visual comparisons, especially when other people praise or criticize one’s face and body. Visually oriented social media platforms that focus on images of oneself are ideally suited to pushing down a girl’s “sociometer” (the internal gauge of where one stands in relation to others). Girls are also more likely to develop “socially prescribed perfectionism,” in which a person tries to live up to impossibly high standards held by others or by society.
  • The second reason is that girls’ aggression is often expressed in attempts to harm the relationships and reputations of other girls, whereas boys’ aggression is more likely to be expressed in physical ways. Social media has offered girls endless ways to damage other girls’ relationships and reputations.
  • The third reason is that girls and women more readily share emotions. When everything moved online and girls became hyperconnected, girls with anxiety or depression might have influenced many other girls to develop anxiety and depression. Girls are also more vulnerable to “sociogenic” illnesses, which means illnesses caused by social influence rather than from a biological cause.
  • The fourth reason is that the internet has made it easier for men to approach and stalk girls and women and to behave badly toward them while avoiding accountability. When preteen girls open social media accounts, they are often followed and contacted by older men, and they are pressured by boys in their school to share nude photographs of themselves. Social media is a trap that ensnares more girls than boys. It lures people in with the promise of connection and communion, but then it multiplies the number of relationships while reducing their quality, therefore making it harder to spend time with a few close friends in real life. This may be why loneliness spiked so sharply among girls in the early 2010s, while for boys the rise was more gradual.
    
• Chapter 7: What is happening to Boys?
  In Sum
  • Like girls, boys got more depressed and anxious in the early 2010s, in many countries. Unlike girls, boys experienced a slow decline since the 1970s in achievement and engagement in school, work, and family life. Boys and young men withdrew much of their time and effort from the physical world (which was increasingly opposed to unsupervised play, exploration, and risk-taking) and invested it in the rapidly expanding virtual world.
  • Boys are at greater risk than girls of “failure to launch.” They are more likely to become young adults who are “Not in Education, Employment, or Training.” Some Japanese men developed an extreme form of lifelong withdrawal to their bedrooms; they are called hikikomori.
  • In the early 2010s, American teen boys’ thinking patterns shifted from what they had traditionally been (higher rates of externalizing cognitions and behaviors than internalizing) to a pattern more commonly shown by girls (higher rates of internalizing). At the same time, boys also began to shun risk (more so than happened for girls).
  • As boys engaged in fewer risky activities outdoors or away from home, and began spending more time at home on screens, their mental health did not decline in the 1990s and 2000s. But something changed in the early 2010s, and their mental health then began to decline.
  • Once boys got smartphones, they—like girls—moved even more of their social lives online, and their mental health declined.
  • One way that smartphones—amplified by high-speed internet—have affected boys’ lives is by providing unlimited, free, hardcore pornography accessible anytime, anywhere. Porn is an example of how tech companies have made it easy for boys to satisfy powerful evolved desires without having to develop any skills that would help them make the transition to adulthood.
  • Video games offer boys and girls a number of benefits, but there are also harms, especially for the subset of boys (in the ballpark of 7%) who end up as problematic or addicted users. For them, video games do seem to cause declining mental and physical health, family strife, and difficulties in other areas of life.
  • As with social media for girls, spending hours “connecting” with others online produces an increase in the quantity of social interactions and a decrease in the quality of social relationships. Boys, like girls, became lonelier during the Great Rewiring. Some boys use video games to strengthen their real-world packs, but for many others, video games made it easier for them to retreat to their bedrooms rather than doing the hard work of maturing in the real world.
  • The Great Rewiring of Childhood pulled young people out of real-world communities, including their own families, and created a new kind of childhood lived in multiple rapidly shifting networks. One inevitable result was anomie, or normlessness, because stable and binding moralities cannot form when everything is in flux, including the members of the network.
  • As the sociologist Émile Durkheim showed, anomie breeds despair and suicide. This may be why boys and girls, who followed different paths through the Great Rewiring, ended up in the same place, with a sudden and rapid increase in the feeling that their lives were meaningless.
• Chapter 8: Spiritual Elevation and Degradation
  In Sum ^c84c0e
  • When people see morally beautiful actions, they feel as though they have been lifted up—elevated on a vertical dimension that can be labeled divinity. When people see morally repulsive actions, they feel as though they have been pulled downward, or degraded.
  • A phone-based life generally pulls people downward. It changes the way we think, feel, judge, and relate to others. It is incompatible with many of the behaviors that religious and spiritual communities practice, some of which have been shown to improve happiness, well-being, trust, and group cohesion, according to researchers such as David DeSteno. I described six such practices.
  • First, Émile Durkheim showed that human beings move up and down between two levels: the profane and the sacred. The profane is our ordinary self-focused consciousness. The sacred is the realm of the collective. Groups of individuals become a cohesive community when they engage in rituals that move them in and out of the realm of the sacred together. The virtual world, in contrast, gives no structure to time or space and is entirely profane. This is one reason why virtual communities are not usually as satisfying or meaning-giving as real-world communities.
  • Second, religious rituals always involve bodily movement with symbolic significance, often carried out synchronously with others. Eating together has a special power to bond people together. The virtual world is, by definition, disembodied, and most of its activities are conducted asynchronously.
  • Third, many religions and spiritual practices use stillness, silence, and meditation to calm the “jumping monkey” of ordinary consciousness and open the heart to others, God, or enlightenment. Meditation has been shown to promote well-being, even brief regular meditation in fully secular contexts. The phone-based life, in contrast, is a never-ending series of notifications, alerts, and distractions, fragmenting consciousness and training us to fill every moment of consciousness with something from our phones.
  • Fourth, a defining feature of spirituality is self-transcendence. There is a network of brain structures (the default mode network) that becomes less active during moments of self-transcendence, as if it were the neural basis of profane consciousness. Social media keeps the focus on the self, self-presentation, branding, and social standing. It is almost perfectly designed to prevent self-transcendence.
  • Fifth, most religions urge us to be less judgmental, but social media encourages us to offer evaluations of others at a rate never before possible in human history. Religions advise us to be slower to anger and quicker to forgive, but social media encourages the opposite.
  • Sixth, the grandeur of nature is among the most universal and easily accessible routes to experiencing awe, an emotion that is closely linked to spiritual practices and progress. A simple walk in a natural setting can cause self-transcendence, especially if one pays close attention and is not attending to a phone. Awe in nature may be especially valuable for Gen Z because it counteracts the anxiety and self-consciousness caused by a phone-based childhood.
  • There is a “God-shaped hole” in every human heart. Or, at least, many people feel a yearning for meaning, connection, and spiritual elevation. A phone-based life often fills that hole with trivial and degrading content. The ancients advised us to be more deliberate in choosing what we expose ourselves to.
• Chapter 10: What governments and tech companies can do now
  In Sum
  • Governments at all levels need to change policies that are harming adolescent mental health and support policies that would improve it. In the United States, governments at the state and local level are partly responsible for the overprotection of children in the real world (via vast overreach of vague neglect laws), and the federal government is partly responsible for the underprotection of children in the virtual world (by passing an ineffective law in 1998 and failing to update it as the dangers of life online became more apparent).
  • To correct underprotection online, national and federal governments should enact laws of the sort first passed in the U.K., which require companies to treat minors differently than adults, with an extra duty of care. National governments should also raise the age of internet adulthood to 16.
  • Tech companies can be a major part of the solution by developing better age verification features, and by adding features that allow parents to designate their children’s phones and computers as ones that should not be served by sites with minimum ages until they are old enough. Such a feature would help to dissolve multiple collective action problems for parents, kids, and platforms.
  • To correct overprotection in the real world, state and local governments should narrow neglect laws and give parents confidence that they can give their children some unsupervised time without risking arrest or state intervention in their family life.
  • State and local governments should also encourage more free play and recess in schools. They should consider the needs of children in zoning and permitting, and they should invest in more vocational education and other programs that have been shown to help adolescents, especially boys, make the transition to adulthood.
• Chapter 11: What Schools can do Now
  In Sum
  • U.S. middle and high schools have seen an increase in mental illness and psychological suffering among their students since the early 2010s. Many are implementing a variety of policies in response.
  • There is a Polynesian expression: “Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.” Sometimes what you are looking for is right there, underfoot, and it is better than anything you could find by looking farther away. I suggested two potential whales that schools can implement right away, with little or no additional money: going phone-free, and becoming more play-full.
  • Most schools say they ban phones, but that typically means only that students must not use their phones during class. This is an ineffective policy because it incentivizes students to hide their phone use during class and increase their phone use after class, which makes it harder for them to form friendships with the kids around them.
  • A better policy is to go phone-free for the entire school day. When students arrive, they should put their phones into a dedicated phone locker or into a lockable phone pouch.
  • The second whale is becoming a play-full school. The simple addition of a Let Grow Play Club—an afternoon option in K–8 schools of playing on the school playground, with no phones, plenty of loose parts, and minimal adult supervision—may teach social skills and reduce anxiety better than any educational program, because free play is nature’s way of accomplishing these goals.
  • Schools can become more play-full by improving recess in three ways: Give more of it, on better playgrounds (such as those incorporating loose parts and “junk,” and/or more natural elements), with fewer rules.
  • The Let Grow Project is another activity that seems to reduce anxiety. It is a homework assignment that asks children to “do something they have never done before, on their own,” after reaching agreement with their parents as to what that is. Doing projects increases children’s sense of competence while also increasing parents’ willingness to trust their children and grant them more autonomy.
  • When all the families in a neighborhood or town give their children more free play and independence, it solves the collective action problem: Parents are no longer afraid to give their children more unsupervised free play and independence, which children need to overcome normal childhood anxieties and develop into healthy young adults.
  • Schools can do more to reverse the growing disengagement of boys and their declining academic progress relative to girls. Offering more shop classes and more vocational and technical training and hiring more male teachers would each serve to re-engage boys. (As would offering better recess in the earlier years.)
  • An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If K–8 schools become phone-free and play-full, and if they add in the Let Grow Project, they will be applying many pounds of prevention, which will reduce the flow of depressed and anxious students entering high schools.
• Chapter 12: What Parents can do now
  In Sum
  • Being a parent is always a challenge, and it has become far more challenging in our era of rapid social and technological change. However, there is a lot that parents can do to become better “gardeners”—those who create a space in which their children can learn and grow—in contrast to “carpenters” who try to mold and shape their children directly.
  • If you do one thing to be a better gardener in the real world, it should be to give your children far more unsupervised free play, of the sort you probably enjoyed at that age. That means giving them a longer and better play-based childhood, with ever-growing independence and responsibility.
  • If you do one thing to be a better gardener in the virtual world, it should be to delay your children’s full entry into the phone-based childhood by delaying when you give them their first smartphone (or any “smart” device). Give only basic phones before the start of high school, and try to coordinate with other parents so that your children do not feel that they are the only ones without smartphones in middle school.
  • There are many other ways to increase your children’s engagement with the real world and embeddedness in communities, including sending them to a technology-free sleepaway camp, going camping, and helping them find additional settings in which they can hang out with other children who are not carrying smartphones.
  • As your children get older, increase their mobility and encourage them to find part-time jobs and ways to learn from other adults. Consider an exchange program, a summer wilderness program, and a gap year.
  • A free-range childhood is more likely to produce confident, competent young adults, with lower levels of anxiety, than is a childhood ruled by safetyism, fear, and constant adult supervision. The biggest obstacle is the parents’ own anxiety about letting a child out of sight, unchaperoned by an adult. This takes practice, but the ultimate pleasure of being able to trust your child outweighs the temporary anxieties of letting go.
  • Most authorities recommend little or no screen time in the first 18–24 months (other than video calls with family members) and limited screen time through the age of 5 or 6.
  • For children in elementary and middle school, use parental controls, provide clear limits, and designate some times and places as no-device zones. Look out for signs of problematic or addictive use.
  • Your actions as a parent can contribute to solving the collective action problem. If you delay giving your child a smartphone, it makes it easier for other parents to do so. If you give your child more independence, it makes it easier for other parents to do so too. If you do it together, with other families, it will make it easier still, and more fun.

Highlights

Introduction Growing Up on Mars (Page 1)

the companies had done little or no research on the mental health effects of their products on children and adolescents, and they shared no data with researchers studying the health effects. When faced with growing evidence that their products were harming young people, they mostly engaged in denial, obfuscation, and public relations campaigns.[ 3] Companies that strive to maximize “engagement” by using psychological tricks to keep young people clicking were the worst offenders. They hooked children during vulnerable developmental stages, while their brains were rapidly rewiring in response to incoming stimulation. This included social media companies, which inflicted their greatest damage on girls, and video game companies and pornography sites, which sank their hooks deepest into boys.[ 4] By designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale. The most intense period of this rewiring was 2010 to 2015, although the story I will tell begins with the rise of fearful and overprotective parenting in the 1980s and continues through the COVID pandemic to the present day. (Page 3)

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Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), enacted in 1998. (Page 4)

requires children under 13 to get parental consent before they can sign a contract with a company (Page 4)

wording of the law doesn’t require companies to verify ages; (Page 4)

A few of these companies are behaving like the tobacco and vaping industries, which designed their products to be highly addictive and then skirted laws limiting marketing to minors. We can also compare them to the oil companies that fought against the banning of leaded gasoline. In the mid-20th century, evidence began to mount that the hundreds of thousands of tons of lead put into the atmosphere each year, just by drivers in the United States, were interfering with the brain development of tens of millions of children, impairing their cognitive development and increasing rates of antisocial behavior. Even still, the oil companies continued to produce, market, and sell it.[ (Page 4)

While the reward-seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, the frontal cortex—essential for self-control, delay of gratification, and resistance to temptation—is not up to full capacity until the mid-20s, and preteens are at a particularly vulnerable point in development. As they begin puberty, they are often socially insecure, easily swayed by peer pressure, and easily lured by any activity that seems to offer social validation. (Page 5)

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The last of these was kicked off in 2009 by the arrival of the “like” and “retweet” (or “share”) buttons, which transformed the social dynamics of the online world. (Page 6)

fourth trend began just a few years later, and it hit girls much harder than boys: the increased prevalence of posting images of oneself, after smartphones added front-facing cameras (2010) and Facebook acquired Instagram (2012), boosting its popularity. (Page 6)

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, (Page 6)

Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness—perpetually—to managing what became their online brand. (Page 6)

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avoid online shaming, (Page 6)

They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviors that are essential for successful human development. (Page 6)

Children need a great deal of free play to thrive. (Page 7)

But for a variety of historical and sociological reasons, free play began to decline in the 1980s, and the decline accelerated in the 1990s. Adults in the United States, the U.K., and Canada increasingly began to assume that if they ever let a child walk outside unsupervised, the child would attract kidnappers and sex offenders. Unsupervised outdoor play declined at the same time that the personal computer became more common and more inviting as a place for spending free time.[*] (Page 7)

late 1980s as the beginning of the transition from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood,” a transition that was not complete until the mid-2010s, when most adolescents had their own smartphone. (Page 7)

My central claim in this book is that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation. (Page 9)

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Part 1 A Tidal Wave (Page 19)

Chapter 1 The Surge of Suffering (Page 21)

“constant conflict” story: Parents try to lay down rules and enforce limits, but there are just so many devices, so many arguments about why a rule needs to be relaxed, and so many ways around the rules, that family life has come to be dominated by disagreements about technology. Maintaining family rituals and basic human connections can feel like resisting an ever-rising tide, one that engulfs parents as well as children. (Page 21)

there is an underlying worry that something unnatural is going on, and that their children are missing something—really, almost everything—as their online hours accumulate. (Page 21)

The Wave Begins (Page 23)

My focus is on why rates of mental illness went up in so many countries between 2010 and 2015 for Gen Z (and some late millennials) while older generations were much less affected. Why was there a synchronized international increase in rates of adolescent anxiety and depression? (Page 23)

Major Depression Among Teens (Page 24)

However, boys started at a lower level than girls, so in relative terms (the percent change since 2010, which I’ll always use as the baseline), the increases were similar for both sexes—roughly 150%. (Page 24)

depression became roughly two and a half times more prevalent. (Page 24)

The Nature of the Surge (Page 25)

The first clue is that the rise is concentrated in disorders related to anxiety and depression, which are classed together in the psychiatric category known as internalizing disorders. These are disorders in which a person feels strong distress and experiences the symptoms inwardly. The person with an internalizing disorder feels emotions such as anxiety, fear, sadness, and hopelessness. They ruminate. They often withdraw from social engagement. (Page 25)

Across ages, cultures, and countries, girls and women suffer higher rates of internalizing disorders, while boys and men suffer from higher rates of externalizing disorders.[ (Page 25)

Cognitively, it often becomes difficult to think clearly, pulling people into states of unproductive rumination and provoking cognitive distortions that are the focus of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), such as catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, and black-and-white thinking. For those with anxiety disorders, these distorted thinking patterns often elicit uncomfortable physical symptoms, which then induce feelings of fear and worry, which then trigger more anxious thinking, perpetuating a vicious cycle. (Page 28)

suicide rate for young adolescent girls began to rise in 2008, with a surge in 2012, after having bounced around within a limited range since the 1980s. From 2010 to 2021, the rate increased 167%. This too is a clue guiding us to ask: What changed for preteen and younger teen girls in the early 2010s? (Page 32)

Smartphones and the CREATION of Gen Z (Page 32)

According to a survey of U.S. parents conducted by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, by 2016, 79% of teens owned a smartphone, as did 28% of children between the ages of 8 and 12.[ 29] (Page 34)

A 2015 Common Sense report found that teens with a social media account reported spending about two hours a day on social media, and teens overall reported spending an average of nearly seven hours a day of leisure time (not counting school and homework) on screen media, which includes playing video games and watching videos on Netflix, YouTube, or pornography sites.[ (Page 34)

By 2012, many teen girls would have felt that “everyone” was getting a smartphone and an Instagram account, and everyone was comparing themselves with everyone else. (Page 35)

Aren’t They Right to Be Anxious and Depressed? (Page 36)

The 2021 book Generation Disaster offered exactly this argument for the mental health problems of Gen Z.[ 39] But while I agree that the 21st century is off to a bad start, the timing does not support the argument that Gen Z is anxious and depressed because of objective facts about rising national or global threats. (Page 36)

When countries are attacked, either by military force or by terrorism, citizens usually rally around the flag and each other. They are infused with a strong sense of purpose, suicide rates drop,[ 41] and researchers find that decades later, people who were teens during the start of the war show higher levels of trust and cooperation in lab experiments.[ 42] When young people rally together around a political cause, from opposing the Vietnam War in the 1960s through peak periods of earlier climate activism in the 1970s and 1990s, they become energized, not dispirited or depressed. Every generation grows up during a disaster or under the threat of an impending disaster, from the Great Depression and World War II through threats of nuclear annihilation, environmental degradation, overpopulation, and ruinous national debt. People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless. (Page 37)

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Among previous generations, researchers often found that those engaged in political activism were happier and more energized than average. “There is something about activism itself that is beneficial for well-being,” said Tim Kasser, coauthor of a 2009 study on college students, activism, and flourishing.[ 43] Yet more recent studies of young activists, including climate activists, find the opposite: Those who are politically active nowadays usually have worse mental health.[ 44] Threats and risks have always haunted the future, but the ways that young people are responding, with activism carried out mostly in the virtual world, seem to be affecting them very differently compared to previous generations, whose activism was carried out mostly in the real world. (Page 38)

Why do we usually see the biggest relative increases of anxiety and depression among preteen girls? (Page 38)

Why the spike in mental illness in the early 2010s, in so many countries? (Page 38)

All Over the Anglosphere (Page 39)

The Rest of the World (Page 42)

Across the Western world, it seems that as soon as teens began carrying smartphones to school and using social media regularly, including during breaks between classes, they found it harder to connect with their fellow students. They were “forever elsewhere.” (Page 43)

In Sum Between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities. This Great Rewiring of Childhood, I argue, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s. The first generation of Americans who went through puberty with smartphones (and the entire internet) in their hands became more anxious, depressed, self-harming, and suicidal. We now call that generation Gen Z, in contrast to the millennial generation, which had largely finished puberty when the Great Rewiring began in 2010. The tidal wave of anxiety, depression, and self-harm hit girls harder than boys, and it hit preteen girls hardest of all. The mental health crisis has also hit boys. Their rates of depression and anxiety have also increased a lot, although usually not by as much as for girls. Boys’ technology use and mental health difficulties are somewhat different from those of girls, as I’ll show in chapter 7. Suicide rates in the United States began rising around 2008 for adolescent boys and girls; they rose much higher in the 2010s. The increase in suffering was not limited to the United States. The same pattern is seen at roughly the same time among teens in the U.K., Canada, and other major Anglosphere countries, and also in the five Nordic nations. Feelings of alienation in school rose after 2012 across the Western world. Data is less abundant in non-Western nations, and the patterns there are less clear.[ 61] No other theory has been able to explain why rates of anxiety and depression surged among adolescents in so many countries at the same time and in the same way. Other factors, of course, contribute to poor mental health, but the unprecedented rise between 2010 and 2015 cannot be explained by the global financial crisis, nor by any set of events that happened in the United States or in any other particular country. (Page 44)

Part 2 The Backstory The Decline of THE Play-Based Childhood (Page 47)

Chapter 2 What Children Need to Do in Childhood (Page 49)

But human children wait. They grow rapidly for the first two years, slow down for the next seven to 10, and then undergo a rapid growth spurt during puberty before coming to a halt a few years later. (Page 50)

Our planet-changing trait was the ability to learn from each other and tap into the common pool of knowledge our ancestors and community had stored. Chimpanzees do very little of this.[ 4] Human childhood extended to give children time to learn. (Page 51)

But evolution didn’t just lengthen childhood to make learning possible. It also installed three strong motivations to do things that make learning easy and likely: motivations for free play, attunement, and social learning. In the days of play-based childhood, the norm was that when school let out, children were out playing with each other, unsupervised, in ways that let them satisfy these motives. But in the transition to phone-based childhood, the designers of smartphones, video game systems, social media, and other addictive technologies lured kids into the virtual world, where they no longer got the full benefit of acting on these three motivations. (Page 51)

Free Play (Page 51)

Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and come out socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.[ (Page 51)

Human toddlers clumsily run around and climb up, over, or into anything they can, until they become skilled at moving around a complex natural environment. With those basic skills mastered, they move on to more advanced multiplayer predator-prey games, such as tag, hide-and-seek, and sharks and minnows. As they get older still, verbal play—as in gossip, teasing, and joking around—gives them an advanced course in nuance, nonverbal cues, and instantaneous relationship repair when something they said fails to produce the desired response. Over time, they develop the social skills necessary for life in a democratic society, including self-governance, joint decision making, and accepting the outcome when you lose a contest. (Page 52)

Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist at Boston College and a leading play researcher, says that “play requires suppression of the drive to dominate and enables the formation of long-lasting cooperative bonds.”[ (Page 52)

Gray defines “free play” as “activity that is freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake, not consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.”[ (Page 52)

Physical play, outdoors and with other children of mixed ages, is the healthiest, most natural, most beneficial sort of play. Play with some degree of physical risk is essential because it teaches children how to look after themselves and each other.[ 9] Children can only learn how to not get hurt in situations where it is possible to get hurt, such as wrestling with a friend, having a pretend sword fight, or negotiating with another child to enjoy a seesaw when a failed negotiation can lead to pain in one’s posterior, as well as embarrassment. When parents, teachers, and coaches get involved, it becomes less free, less playful, and less beneficial. Adults usually can’t stop themselves from directing and protecting. (Page 52)

key feature of free play is that mistakes are generally not very costly. (Page 53)

adult-led lessons may provide useful information, but information doesn’t do much to shape a developing brain. Play does. This relates to a key CBT insight: Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development. (Page 53)

unsupervised, child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair. Children are intrinsically motivated to acquire these skills because they want to be included in the playgroup and keep the fun going. (Page 53)

It’s as if we gave our infants iPads loaded with movies about walking, but the movies were so engrossing that kids never put in the time or effort to practice walking. (Page 54)

Attunement (Page 55)

loop. Infants in the first weeks of life have enough muscular control to mimic a few facial expressions, and the many rounds of mutual gazing and face making are important means of fostering attachment between parents and children.[ 15] (Page 55)

When toddlers begin to speak, vast new possibilities for attunement open up. The social connections with parents and other caretakers grow deeper. Turn taking and good timing are essential social skills, and they begin to develop in these simple interactions: How long should I wait before I make the next funny face or give the next rhyme in the rhyming game we’re developing? Each partner learns to read the other’s facial expressions and emotions to get the timing right. Developmental psychologists refer to these sorts of interactions as serve-and-return, conveying the idea that social interactions are often like a game of tennis or ping-pong: You take turns, it’s fun, there’s unpredictability, and timing is essential. (Page 56)

Attunement practice is as essential for social development as movement and exercise are for physical development. (Page 56)

As children get older, they go beyond turn taking to find joy in perfect synchrony, doing the same thing at the same time as their partner. (Page 57)

Anthropologists have long noted that collective rituals are universally human. The European explorers of the 16th and 17th centuries found that on every continent, communities performed rituals in which everyone moved together to drumming, chanting, or beat-heavy music.[ 18] Such rituals were widely said to renew trust and mend frayed social relations. The great sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote about the “social electricity” generated by such rituals;[ 19] he thought rituals were essential for fostering a sense of communion and belonging. (Page 57)

Synchronous, face-to-face, physical interactions and rituals are a deep, ancient, and underappreciated part of human evolution. (Page 57)

major social media platforms draw children into endless hours of asynchronous interaction, which can become more like work than play. (Page 57)

By 2014, nearly a third of teen girls were spending over 20 hours a week on social media sites. (Page 58)

Such social labor creates shallow connections because it is asynchronous and public, unlike a face-to-face conversation, or a private phone call or video call. (Page 58)

Social Learning (Page 58)

You might think that choosing role models is simple: Children should just copy their parents, right? But that turns out to be a losing strategy. There is no reason for a child to assume that her own parents happen to be the most skilled adults in the community, so why not search more widely? Also, children need to learn how to be a successful older child in their particular community, so children are particularly attentive to such models. (Page 58)

conformist bias and prestige bias. (Page 59)

conformity attraction. (Page 59)

Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conformity engines ever invented. They can shape an adolescent’s mental models of acceptable behavior in a matter of hours, whereas parents can struggle unsuccessfully for years to get their children to sit up straight or stop whining. Parents don’t get to use the power of conformity bias, so they are often no match for the socializing power of social media.[ (Page 59)

Detect prestige and then copy the prestigious. (Page 60)

humans have an alternative ranking system based on prestige, which is willingly conferred by people to those they see as having achieved excellence in a valued domain of activity, such as hunting or storytelling back in ancient times. (Page 60)

People can perceive excellence for themselves, but it’s more efficient to rely on the judgments of others. (Page 60)

Sean Parker, one of the early leaders of Facebook, admitted in a 2017 interview that the goal of Facebook’s and Instagram’s founders was to create “a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”[ (Page 60)

Expectant Brains and Sensitive Periods (Page 61)

Ducks, geese, and many other water-or ground-dwelling birds have an evolved learning mechanism called imprinting that tells the babies which adult they must follow. They will follow whatever mother-sized object moves in their field of vision a set number of hours after hatching. (Page 62)

Humans have few true “critical periods” with hard time limits, but we do seem to have several “sensitive periods,” which are defined as periods in which it is very easy to learn something or acquire a skill, and outside of which it is more difficult.[ 31] Language learning is the clearest case. Children can learn multiple languages easily, but this ability drops off sharply during the first few years of puberty.[ 32] When a family moves to a new country, the kids who are 12 or younger will quickly become native speakers with no accent, while those who are 14 or older will probably be asked, for the rest of their lives, “Where are you from?” (Page 63)

sensitive period for cultural learning, (Page 63)

returned to Japan at 15 or later, they had a harder time readjusting, or coming to “feel Japanese.” Those who didn’t arrive in America until age 15 had no such problems, because they never came to feel American, and those who returned to Japan well before 14 were able to readjust, because they were still in their sensitive period and could relearn Japanese ways. (Page 63)

Minoura noted that “during the sensitive period, a cultural meaning system for interpersonal relationships appears to become a salient part of self-identity to which they are emotionally attached.”[ (Page 63)

This may explain why Gen Z’s mental health outcomes are so much worse than those of the millennials: Gen Z was the first generation to go through puberty and the sensitive period for cultural learning on smartphones. (Page 64)

puberty is indeed a sensitive period for harm from social media. (Page 64)

For girls, the worst years for using social media were 11 to 13; for boys, it was 14 to 15.[ (Page 64)

Thirteen-year-olds should not be scrolling through endless posts from influencers and other strangers when their brains are in such an open state, searching for exemplars to lock onto. They should be playing, synchronizing, and hanging out with their friends in person while leaving some room in the input streams to their eyes and ears for social learning from their parents, teachers, and other role models in their communities. (Page 64)

In Sum (Page 65)

Human childhood is very different from that of any other animal. Children’s brains grow to 90% of full size by age 5, but then take a long time to configure themselves. This slow-growth childhood is an adaptation for cultural learning. Childhood is an apprenticeship for learning the skills needed for success in one’s culture. Free play is as essential for developing social skills, like conflict resolution, as it is for developing physical skills. But play-based childhoods were replaced by phone-based childhoods as children and adolescents moved their social lives and free time onto internet-connected devices. Children learn through play to connect, synchronize, and take turns. They enjoy attunement and need enormous quantities of it. Attunement and synchrony bond pairs, groups, and whole communities. Social media, in contrast, is mostly asynchronous and performative. It inhibits attunement and leaves heavy users starving for social connection. Children are born with two innate learning programs that help them to acquire their local culture. Conformist bias motivates them to copy whatever seems to be most common. Prestige bias motivates them to copy whoever seems to be the most accomplished and prestigious. Social media platforms, which are engineered for engagement, hijack social learning and drown out the culture of one’s family and local community while locking children’s eyes onto influencers of questionable value. Social learning occurs throughout childhood, but there may be a sensitive period for cultural learning that spans roughly ages 9 to 15. Lessons learned and identities formed in these years are likely to imprint, or stick, more than at other ages. These are the crucial sensitive years of puberty. Unfortunately, they are also the years in which most adolescents in developed countries get their own phones and move their social lives online. (Page 65)

Chapter 3 Discover Mode and the Need for Risky Play (Page 67)

In recent decades, America and many other Western nations made two contradictory choices about children’s safety, and both were wrong. We decided that the real world was so full of dangers that children should not be allowed to explore it without adult supervision, even though the risks to children from crime, violence, drunk drivers, and most other sources have dropped steeply since the 1990s.[ 1] At the same time, it seemed like too much of a bother to design and require age-appropriate guardrails for kids online, so we left children free to wander through the Wild West of the virtual world, where threats to children abounded. (Page 67)

we are overprotecting our children in the real world while underprotecting them online. (Page 68)

Unsupervised outdoor play teaches children how to handle risks and challenges of many kinds. By building physical, psychological, and social competence, it gives kids confidence that they can face new situations, which is an inoculation against anxiety. (Page 68)

Discover Mode Versus Defend Mode (Page 69)

In humans (and other highly sociable mammals, such as dogs), the default setting is a major contributor to their individual personality. People (and dogs) who go through life in discover mode (except when directly threatened) are happier, more sociable, and more eager for new experiences. Conversely, people (and dogs) who are chronically in defend mode are more defensive and anxious, and they have only rare moments of perceived safety. (Page 70)

Kids Are Antifragile (Page 72)

This altered cell structure is called reaction wood, or sometimes stress wood. Trees that are exposed to strong winds early in life become trees that can withstand even stronger winds when full grown. Conversely, trees that are raised in a protected greenhouse sometimes fall over from their own weight before they reach maturity. (Page 72)

Stress wood is a perfect metaphor for children, who also need to experience frequent stressors in order to become strong adults. (Page 72)

Parents who try to raise their children in a bubble of perfect hygiene are harming their children by blocking the development of their antifragile immune systems. (Page 73)

the best parenting book[ 13] that my wife and I read when our children were toddlers urged us to look for opportunities to frustrate our children every day by laying out and enforcing the contingencies of life: If you want to watch Teletubbies, you must first put away your toys. If you persist in doing that, you’ll get a time-out. Yes, your sister got something you didn’t, and that happens sometimes. (Page 73)

Well-intentioned parents who try to raise their children in a bubble of satisfaction, protected from frustration, consequences, and negative emotions, may be harming their children. They may be blocking the development of competence, self-control, frustration tolerance, and emotional self-management. Several studies find that such “coddling” or “helicopter parenting” is correlated with later anxiety disorders, low self-efficacy (which is the inner confidence that one can do what is needed to reach one’s goals), and difficulty adjusting to college.[ (Page 74)

Antifragile Kids Need Risky Play to Stay in Discover Mode (Page 74)

Phobias are concentrated around a few animals and situations that kill almost nobody, (Page 74)

phobias in adults can rarely be traced to a bad experience in childhood.[ 16] In fact, kids who fall out of trees often turn into the adults who are least afraid of climbing trees. (Page 74)

Sandseter and Kennair analyzed the kinds of risks that children seek out when adults give them some freedom, and they found six: heights (such as climbing trees or playground structures), high speed (such as swinging, or going down fast slides), dangerous tools (such as hammers and drills), dangerous elements (such as experimenting with fire), rough-and-tumble play (such as wrestling), and disappearing (hiding, wandering away, potentially getting lost or separated). (Page 77)

Researchers who study children at play have concluded that the risk of minor injuries should be a feature, not a bug, in playground design. (Page 79)

Brussoni guided me to research showing that the risk of injury per hour of physical play is lower than the risk per hour of playing adult-guided sports, while conferring many more developmental benefits (because the children must make all choices, set and enforce rules, and resolve all disputes).[ (Page 80)

Our goal in designing the places children play, she says, should be to “keep them as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.”[ (Page 80)

I see few indications that a phone-based childhood develops antifragility. Human childhood evolved in the real world, and children’s minds are “expecting” the challenges of the real world, which is embodied, synchronous, and one-to-one or one-to-several, within communities that endure. (Page 81)

Mistakes can be met with intense criticism by multiple individuals with whom one has no underlying bond. Apologies are often mocked, and any signal of re-acceptance can be mixed or vague. Instead of gaining an experience of social mastery, a child is often left with a sense of social incompetence, loss of status, and anxiety about future social interactions. (Page 82)

The Beginning of the End of Play-Based Childhood (Page 82)

In the United States,[ 28] Canada,[ 29] and Britain,[ 30] children used to have a great deal of freedom to walk to school, roam around their neighborhoods, invent games, get into conflicts, and resolve those conflicts, beginning around first or second grade. But in the 1990s, parenting changed in all three countries. It became more intensive, protective, and fearful. (Page 83)

A separate study, looking at how children spend their time (as reported by parents), found that American children were also facing a time crunch that reduced their time for free play between 1981 and 1997.[ 32] Kids began spending more time in school and other structured (adult-supervised) activities and less time playing or watching TV. (The same thing happened in the U.K.[ 33]) What happened? Children were getting less time to play, but they suddenly got more time with their time-starved parents? (Page 83)

Fearful Parenting in the Anglosphere (Page 85)

Psychologists and sociologists have pointed to several reasons why parents began giving their children less autonomy in the 1980s and 1990s, including gradual changes to urban design as cities and towns became more car-centric and urbanized. A related factor is a declining sense of social cohesion throughout the late 20th century, which had many causes. When people no longer knew their neighbors, they no longer had “eyes on the street” from adults who could look out for kids.[ (Page 85)

Furedi says that there is one factor above all others that created the conditions for the 1990s turn to paranoid parenting: “the breakdown of adult solidarity.” As Furedi explains, Across cultures and throughout history, mothers and fathers have acted on the assumption that if their children got into trouble, other adults—often strangers—would help out. In many societies adults feel duty-bound to reprimand other people’s children who misbehave in public. (Page 86)

adults internalized the reciprocal message: Stay away from other people’s children. Don’t talk to them; don’t discipline them if they are misbehaving; don’t get involved. (Page 87)

But when adults step away and stop helping each other to raise children, parents find themselves on their own. Parenting becomes harder, more fear-ridden, and more time consuming, especially for women, (Page 87)

He noted that children in Europe, from Italy to Scandinavia, and in many other parts of the world, enjoyed far greater freedom to play and explore the outside world than did children in the U.K. and the United States. (Page 87)

Safetyism and Concept Creep (Page 88)

“concept creep,” (Page 88)

You can see concept creep in action by observing the expansion of terms like “addiction,” “trauma,” “abuse,” and “safety.” For most of the 20th century, the word “safety” referred almost exclusively to physical safety. It was only in the late 1980s that the term “emotional safety” began to show up at more than trace levels in Google’s Ngram viewer. From 1985 to 2010, at the start of the Great Rewiring, the term’s frequency rose rapidly and steadily, a 600% increase.[ (Page 88)

In The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg and I found that the concept of safety had undergone such extensive concept creep among Gen Z and many of the educators and therapists around them that it had become a pervasive and unquestionable value. We used the term “safetyism” to refer to “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. ‘Safety’ trumps everything else, no matter how unlikely or trivial the potential danger.”[ (Page 89)

Antifragility and the Attachment System (Page 91)

discover mode and defend mode as parts of a dynamic system for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat. That system is embedded in a larger dynamic system called the attachment system. (Page 91)

A securely attached child usually settles within a few seconds or minutes, shifts back to discover mode, and heads out for more learning. (Page 92)

In adolescence, young people begin seeking out romantic relationships. These new attachments will reuse the psychological architecture and “internal working models” that were developed while forming attachments to parents. Adolescents will reuse those models to attach to love interests and later, perhaps, a spouse. But children who are kept on home base, prevented from making those off-base excursions that are so helpful for developing their antifragile nature, don’t get to spend as much time in the growth zone. They may therefore spend more of their lives in defend mode, remaining more dependent on a parent’s physical presence, which reinforces parental overprotection in a vicious cycle. (Page 92)

In Sum The human brain contains two subsystems that put it into two common modes: discover mode (for approaching opportunities) and defend mode (for defending against threats). Young people born after 1995 are more likely to be stuck in defend mode, compared to those born earlier. They are on permanent alert for threats, rather than being hungry for new experiences. They are anxious. All children are by nature antifragile. Just as the immune system must be exposed to germs, and trees must be exposed to wind, children require exposure to setbacks, failures, shocks, and stumbles in order to develop strength and self-reliance. Overprotection interferes with this development and renders young people more likely to be fragile and fearful as adults. Kids must have a great deal of free play to develop, and they benefit from risky physical play, which has anti-phobic effects. Kids seek out the level of risk and thrill that they are ready for, in order to master their fears and develop competencies. Risk-taking online may not have comparable anti-phobic effects. In the 1980s and especially the 1990s, parents in Anglo countries became more fearful for many reasons, including changes in the media ecosystem and news cycle. They lost trust in each other, they started spending far more time supervising their own children, and they did more parenting in defend mode, seeing risks and threats everywhere. The worship of “safety” above all else is called safetyism. It is dangerous because it makes it harder for children to learn to care for themselves and to deal with risk, conflict, and frustration. The attachment system evolved to help young mammals learn the skills they’ll need to reach adulthood while retreating to their “secure base” when they feel threatened. Fearful parenting keeps children on home base too much, preventing them from having the experiences they need to grow strong and to develop a secure attachment style. Children are most likely to thrive when they have a play-based childhood in the real world. They are less likely to thrive when fearful parenting and a phone-based childhood deprive them of opportunities for growth. (Page 93)

Chapter 4 Puberty and the Blocked Transition to Adulthood (Page 95)

In Sum Early puberty is a period of rapid brain rewiring, second only to the first few years of life. Neural pruning and myelination are occurring at a very rapid rate, guided by the adolescent’s experiences. We should be concerned about those experiences and not let strangers and algorithms choose them. Safetyism is an experience blocker. When we make children’s safety a quasi-sacred value and don’t allow them to take any risks, we block them from overcoming anxiety, learning to manage risk, and learning to be self-governing, all of which are essential for becoming healthy and competent adults. Smartphones are a second kind of experience blocker. Once they enter a child’s life, they push out or reduce all other forms of non-phone-based experience, which is the kind that their experience-expectant brains most need. Rites of passage are the curated sets of experiences that human societies arrange to help adolescents make the transition to adulthood. Van Gennep noted that these rites usually have a separation phase, a transformation phase, and a reincorporation phase. Western societies have eliminated many rites of passage, and the digital world that opened up in the 1990s eventually buried most milestones and obscured the path to adulthood. Once children began spending much or most of their time online, the inputs to their developing brains became undifferentiated torrents of stimuli with no age grading or age restrictions. A society that is large, diverse, and secular (such as the United States or the U.K.) might still agree to a set of milestones that mark stepwise increases in freedoms and responsibilities. (Page 109)

Part 3 The Great Rewiring The Rise of THE Phone-Based Childhood (Page 111)

Chapter 5 The Four Foundational Harms: Social Deprivation, Sleep Deprivation, Attention Fragmentation, and Addiction (Page 113)

Thorndike described the cat’s learning like this: “The one impulse, out of many accidental ones, which leads to pleasure, becomes strengthened and stamped in.” He said that animal learning is “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness.”[ 1] Keep that phrase in mind whenever you see anyone (including yourself) making repetitive motions on a touch screen, as if in a trance: “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain.” (Page 114)

The Opportunity Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood (Page 118)

Long-running studies of American adolescents show that the average teen was watching a little less than three hours per day of television in the early 1990s.[ (Page 119)

Putting it all together, the Great Rewiring and the dawn of the phone-based childhood seem to have added two to three hours of additional screen-based activity, on average, to a child’s day, compared with life before the smartphone. (Page 119)

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”[ 16] (Page 120)

Harm #1: Social Deprivation (Page 120)

Children need a lot of time to play with each other, face to face, to foster social development.[ (Page 120)

members of Gen Z began socially distancing themselves as soon as they got their first smartphones. (Page 120)

Jean Twenge has shown, teens who spend more time using social media are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and other disorders, while teens who spend more time with groups of young people (such as playing team sports or participating in religious communities) have better mental health.[ 20] (Page 121)

When a conversation partner pulls out a phone,[ 21] or when a phone is merely visible[ 22] (not even your own phone), the quality and intimacy of a social interaction is reduced. As screen-based technologies move out of our pockets and onto our wrists, and into headsets and goggles, our ability to pay full attention to others is likely to deteriorate further. (Page 122)

A 2014 survey of children ages 6–12, conducted by Highlights magazine, found that 62% of children reported that their parents were “often distracted” when the child tried to talk with them.[ (Page 122)

A 2020 Pew survey found that 68% of parents said that they sometimes or often feel distracted by their phones when they are spending time with their children. Those numbers were higher for parents who were younger and who were college educated.[ (Page 122)

Harm #2: Sleep Deprivation (Page 123)

Rather, most teens just get less sleep than their brains and bodies need. This is a shame because sleep is vital for good performance in school and life, particularly during puberty, when the brain is rewiring itself even faster than it did in the years before puberty. Sleep-deprived teens cannot concentrate, focus, or remember as well as teens who get sufficient sleep.[ 27] Their learning and their grades suffer.[ 28] Their reaction times, decision making, and motor skills suffer, which elevates their risk of accidents.[ 29] They are more irritable and anxious throughout the day, so their relationships suffer. If sleep deprivation goes on long enough, other physiological systems become perturbed, leading to weight gain, immune suppression, and other health problems.[ 30] (Page 123)

Teens need more sleep than adults—at least nine hours a night for preteens and eight hours a night for teens.[ (Page 123)

review of 36 correlational studies found significant associations between high social media use and poor sleep, and also between high social media use and poor mental health outcomes.[ (Page 123)

A study by Jean Twenge and colleagues of a large U.K. data set found that “heavy use of screen media was associated with shorter sleep duration, longer sleep latency, and more mid-sleep awakenings.”[ 37] The sleep disturbances were greatest for those who were on social media or who were surfing the internet in bed.[ (Page 124)

when your sleep is truncated or disturbed, you’re more likely to become depressed and develop behavioral problems. The effects were larger for girls. (Page 125)

In short, children and adolescents need a lot of sleep to promote healthy brain development and good attention and mood the next day. (Page 125)

When screens are allowed in bedrooms, however, many children will use them late into the night—especially if they have a small screen that can be used under the blanket. The screen-related decline of sleep is likely a contributor to the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that swept across many countries in the early 2010s. (Page 125)

Harm #3: Attention Fragmentation (Page 125)

When you add it all up, the average number of notifications on young people’s phones from the top social and communication apps amounts to 192 alerts per day, according to one study.[ 42] The average teen, who now gets only seven hours of sleep per night, therefore gets about 11 notifications per waking hour, or one every five minutes. And that’s just for the apps that are about communication. When we add in the dozens of other apps for which they have not turned off push notifications, the number of interruptions grows far higher. (Page 126)

Attention is a choice we make to stay on one task, one line of thinking, one mental road, even as attractive off-ramps beckon. When we fail to make that choice and allow ourselves to be frequently sidetracked, we end up in “the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state” that James said is the opposite of attention. (Page 127)

“Sensitiveness to immediately exciting sensorial stimuli characterizes the attention of childhood and youth… . the child seem[ s] to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice.” Overcoming this tendency to flit around is “the first thing which the teacher must overcome.” This is why it is so important that schools go phone-free for the entire school day by using phone lockers or lockable pouches.[ 45] Capturing the child’s attention with “immediately exciting sensorial stimuli” is the goal of app designers, and they are very good at what they do. (Page 127)

phone-based childhood is likely to interfere with the development of executive function.[ 52] I cannot say that light use of these products is harmful to attention, but among heavy users we do consistently find worse outcomes in part because such users are often, to some degree, addicted. (Page 129)

Harm #4: Addiction (Page 129)

This is a key discovery of behaviorist psychology: It’s best not to reward a behavior every time the animal does what you want. If you reward an animal on a variable-ratio schedule (such as one time out of every 10 times, on average, but sometimes fewer, sometimes more), you create the strongest and most persistent behavior. (Page 131)

Lembke says that “the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.”[ 57] Dysphoria is the opposite of euphoria; it refers to a generalized feeling of discomfort or unease. This is basically what many teens say they feel—and what parents and clinicians observe—when kids who are heavy users of social media or video games are separated from their phones and game consoles involuntarily. Symptoms of sadness, anxiety, and irritability are listed as the signs of withdrawal for those diagnosed with internet gaming disorder.[ (Page 135)

When we gave children and adolescents smartphones in the early 2010s, we gave companies the ability to apply variable-ratio reinforcement schedules all day long, training them like rats during their most sensitive years of brain rewiring. Those companies developed addictive apps that sculpted some very deep pathways in our children’s brains.[ 61] (Page 136)

On the Benefits of Social Media for Adolescents (Page 136)

2023, the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory discussing the effects of social media use on youth mental health.[ 62] The advisory warned that social media poses “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” His 25-page report outlined the potential costs and benefits of social media use. (Page 136)

very little evidence showing benefits to adolescent mental health from long-term or heavy social media use.[ (Page 137)

During the COVID shutdowns I often heard people say, “Thank goodness for social media! How would young people have connected without it?” To which I respond: Yes, let’s imagine a world in which the only way that children and adolescents could connect was by telephone, text, Skype, Zoom, FaceTime, and email, or by going over to each other’s homes and talking or playing outside. And let’s imagine a world in which the only way they could find information was by using Google, Bing, Wikipedia, YouTube,[ 67] and the rest of the internet, including blogs, news sites, and the websites of the many nonprofit organizations devoted to their specific interests.[ (Page 138)

In Sum In this chapter I described the four foundational harms of the phone-based childhood. These are profound changes to childhood caused by the rapid technological shift of the early 2010s. Each one is foundational because it affects the development of multiple social, emotional, and cognitive abilities. The sheer amount of time that adolescents spend with their phones is staggering, even compared with the high levels of screen time they had before the invention of the iPhone. Studies of time use routinely find that the average teen reports spending more than seven hours a day on screen-based leisure activities (not including school and homework). The opportunity cost of a phone-based childhood refers to everything that children do less of once they get unlimited round-the-clock access to the internet. The first foundational harm is social deprivation. When American adolescents moved onto smartphones, time with friends in face-to-face settings plummeted immediately, from 122 minutes per day in 2012 down to 67 minutes per day in 2019. Time with friends dropped further because of COVID restrictions, but Gen Z was already socially distanced before COVID restrictions were put in place. The second fundamental harm is sleep deprivation. As soon as adolescents moved from basic phones to smartphones, their sleep declined in both quantity and quality, around the developed world. Longitudinal studies show that smartphone use came first and was followed by sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is extremely well studied, and its effects are far reaching. They include depression, anxiety, irritability, cognitive deficits, poor learning, lower grades, more accidents, and more deaths from accidents. The third fundamental harm is attention fragmentation. Attention is the ability to stay on one mental road while many off-ramps beckon. Staying on a road, staying on a task, is a feature of maturity and a sign of good executive function. But smartphones are kryptonite for attention. Many adolescents get hundreds of notifications per day, meaning that they rarely have five or 10 minutes to think without an interruption. There is evidence that the fragmentation of attention in early adolescence caused by problematic use of social media and video games may interfere with the development of executive function. The fourth fundamental harm is addiction. The behaviorists discovered that learning, for animals, is “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain.” The developers of the most successful social media apps used advanced behaviorist techniques to “hook” children into becoming heavy users of their products. Dopamine release is pleasurable, but it does not trigger a feeling of satisfaction. Rather, it makes you want more of whatever you did to trigger the release. The addiction researcher Anna Lembke says that the universal symptoms of withdrawal are “anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.” She and other researchers find that many adolescents have developed behavioral addictions that are very much like the way that people develop addictions to slot machine gambling, with profound consequences for their well-being, their social development, and their families. When we put these four foundational harms together, they explain why mental health got so much worse so suddenly as soon as childhood became phone-based. (Page 139)

Chapter 6 Why Social Media Harms Girls More Than Boys (Page 143)

For girls, there is a larger and more consistent relationship. The more time a girl spends on social media, the more likely she is to be depressed. Girls who say that they spend five or more hours each weekday on social media are three times as likely to be depressed as those who report no social media time. (Page 147)

Four Reasons Why Girls Are Particularly Vulnerable (Page 153)

Reason #1: Girls Are More Affected by Visual Social Comparison and Perfectionism (Page 153)

Reason #2: Girls’ Aggression Is More Relational (Page 158)

Researchers have found that when you look at “indirect aggression” (which includes damaging other people’s relationships or reputations), girls are higher than boys—but only in late childhood and adolescence.[ (Page 158)

Reason #3: Girls More Easily Share Emotions and Disorders (Page 160)

They found that happiness tends to occur in clusters. This was not just because happy people seek each other out. Rather, when one person became happier, it increased the odds that their existing friends would become happier too. (Page 160)

Happiness is contagious; it spreads through social networks. (Page 161)

Depression was significantly more contagious than happiness or good mental health. The second twist was that depression spread only from women. When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%. When a man became depressed, it had no measurable effect on his friends. (Page 161)

Given that depression and anxiety are more contagious than good mental health, and given that girls are more likely to talk about their feelings than boys, we might expect a sudden burst of depression and anxiety as soon as large numbers of girls joined Instagram and other “sharing” platforms, around 2012. (Page 161)

When adolescents moved onto image-based social media platforms, especially video-oriented platforms such as YouTube and later TikTok, they hooked themselves up in a way that facilitated the transmission of psychogenic illnesses. As soon as they did this, rates of anxiety and depression surged around the world, particularly among adolescent girls. (Page 162)

But on social media, the way to gain followers and likes is to be more extreme, so those who present with more extreme symptoms are likely to rise fastest, making them the models that everyone else locks onto for social learning. This process is sometimes known as audience capture—a process in which people get trained by their audiences to become more extreme versions of whatever it is the audience wants to see.[ (Page 163)

A group of German psychiatrists led by Kirsten Müller-Vahl[ 61] noted a sudden increase in young people showing up at clinics claiming to have Tourette’s syndrome— (Page 163)

Even though Tourette’s is mostly a male disease, once it became a popular disorder on social media, it spread faster among girls. (Page 164)

The recent growth in diagnoses of gender dysphoria may also be related in part to social media trends. Gender dysphoria refers to the psychological distress a person experiences when their gender identity doesn’t align with their biological sex. People with such mismatches have long existed in societies around the world. According to the most recent diagnostic manual of psychiatry,[ 68] estimates of the prevalence of gender dysphoria in American society used to indicate rates below one in a thousand, with rates for natal males (meaning those who were biological males at birth) being several times higher than for natal females. But those estimates were based on the numbers of people who sought gender reassignment surgery as adults, which was surely a vast underestimate of the underlying population. Within the past decade, the number of individuals who are being referred to clinics for gender dysphoria has been growing rapidly, especially among natal females in Gen Z.[ 69] In fact, among Gen Z teens, the sex ratio has reversed, with natal females now showing higher rates than natal males.[ (Page 165)

gender dysphoria now often appears in social clusters (such as a group of close friends),[ 71] the fact that parents and those who transition back to their natal sex identify social media as a major source of information and encouragement,[ 72] and the fact that gender dysphoria is now being diagnosed among many adolescents who showed no signs of it as children[ 73] all indicate that social influence and sociogenic transmission may be at work as well. (Page 165)

Reason #4: Girls Are More Subject to Predation and Harassment (Page 166)

In many regions of the virtual world, some men prey upon teen and preteen girls. Older men prey upon boys too, using online dating apps for gay and bisexual men to find them.[ 76] But brushes with sexual predators are a larger part of internet life for girls than they are for boys, requiring greater reliance on defend mode.[ (Page 166)

When girls’ nudes are sent around, it can be devastating and often begins a round of cyberbullying. (Page 167)

Quantity over Quality (Page 168)

The happiest girls “aren’t the ones who have the most friendships but the ones who have strong, supportive friendships, even if that means having a single terrific friend.”[ (Page 168)

Once girls flocked onto social media platforms and had fewer long talks with one or two special friends, they found themselves immersed in a vast sea of transient, unreliable, fair-weather “friends,” followers, and acquaintances. (Page 168)

This is the great irony of social media: the more you immerse yourself in it, the more lonely and depressed you become. This is true both at the individual level and at the collective level. (Page 170)

In Sum Social media harms girls more than boys. Correlational studies show that heavy users of social media have higher rates of depression and other disorders than light users or nonusers. The correlation is larger and clearer for girls: Heavy users are three times as likely to be depressed as nonusers. Experimental studies show that social media use is a cause, not just a correlate, of anxiety and depression. When people are assigned to reduce or eliminate social media for three weeks or more, their mental health usually improves. Several “quasi-experiments” show that when Facebook came to campuses, or when high-speed internet came to regions and provinces, mental health declined, especially for girls and young women. Girls use social media a lot more than boys, and they prefer visually oriented platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, which are worse for social comparison than primarily text-based platforms such as Reddit. Two major categories of motivations are agency (the desire to stand out and have an effect on the world) and communion (the desire to connect and develop a sense of belonging). Boys and girls both want each of these, but there is a gender difference that emerges early in children’s play: Boys choose more agency activities; girls choose more communion activities. Social media appeals to the desire for communion, but it often ends up frustrating it. There are at least four reasons why social media harms girls more than boys. The first is that girls are more sensitive to visual comparisons, especially when other people praise or criticize one’s face and body. Visually oriented social media platforms that focus on images of oneself are ideally suited to pushing down a girl’s “sociometer” (the internal gauge of where one stands in relation to others). Girls are also more likely to develop “socially prescribed perfectionism,” in which a person tries to live up to impossibly high standards held by others or by society. The second reason is that girls’ aggression is often expressed in attempts to harm the relationships and reputations of other girls, whereas boys’ aggression is more likely to be expressed in physical ways. Social media has offered girls endless ways to damage other girls’ relationships and reputations. The third reason is that girls and women more readily share emotions. When everything moved online and girls became hyperconnected, girls with anxiety or depression might have influenced many other girls to develop anxiety and depression. Girls are also more vulnerable to “sociogenic” illnesses, which means illnesses caused by social influence rather than from a biological cause. The fourth reason is that the internet has made it easier for men to approach and stalk girls and women and to behave badly toward them while avoiding accountability. When preteen girls open social media accounts, they are often followed and contacted by older men, and they are pressured by boys in their school to share nude photographs of themselves. Social media is a trap that ensnares more girls than boys. It lures people in with the promise of connection and communion, but then it multiplies the number of relationships while reducing their quality, therefore making it harder to spend time with a few close friends in real life. This may be why loneliness spiked so sharply among girls in the early 2010s, while for boys the rise was more gradual. (Page 170)

Chapter 7 What Is Happening to Boys? (Page 173)

That move followed the publication of his 2022 book, Of Boys and Men, which laid out the evidence of a long decline in men’s fortunes, achievements, and welfare in the United States since the 1970s. Part of the decline was caused by structural and economic changes that made physical strength less valuable. As America and other Western nations deindustrialized, factory work was sent to less developed nations or was done increasingly by robots. The service economy grew in its place, and women have several advantages over men, on average, in service jobs.[ (Page 177)

Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, explains this transformation well: “What the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills: You need intelligence, you need an ability to sit still and focus, to communicate openly to be able to listen to people and to operate in a workplace that is much more fluid than it used to be. Those are things that women do extremely well.”[ 7] She notes that by 2009, “for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who continue to occupy around half of the nation’s jobs.”[ (Page 177)

It’s not just college completion. Reeves shows that at every level of education, from kindergarten through PhD, girls are leaving boys in the dust. Boys get lower grades, they have higher rates of ADHD, they are more likely to be unable to read, and they are less likely to graduate from high school, in part because they are three times as likely as girls to be expelled or suspended along the way.[ 10] The gender disparities are often small at the upper end, among the wealthiest families, but they grow much larger as we move down the socioeconomic ladder. (Page 177)

Boys are also more vulnerable to becoming complete shut-ins, as has happened in Japan. (Page 179)

One of the most widely noted traits of Gen Z is that they are not doing as much of the bad stuff that teenagers used to do. They drink less alcohol, have fewer car accidents, and get fewer speeding tickets. They have far fewer physical fights or unplanned pregnancies.[ 24] These are, of course, wonderful trends—nobody wants more car accidents. But because the rate of change for so many risky behaviors has been so rapid, I also look at these trends with concern. What if these changes came about not because Gen Z is getting wiser, but because they are withdrawing from the physical world? What if they are engaging in less risk-taking overall—healthy as well as unhealthy—and therefore learning less about how to manage risks in the real world? (Page 181)

So let’s look at how those two phases might have affected boys in particular. How might safetyism in the 1980s and 1990s (along with males’ declining societal value) and the move onto online gaming followed by smartphones in the 2000s and early 2010s have worked together to push boys away from the real world, pull them into the virtual world, and fuel their mental health crisis? (Page 184)

The Virtual World Welcomes Boys (Page 184)

Perhaps as much as 40% of all internet traffic in the late 1990s was porn.[ (Page 187)

several studies indicate that after watching porn, heterosexual men find real women less attractive, including their own partners.[ 39] Compulsive pornography users, who are predominantly men, are more likely to avoid sexual interactions with a partner and tend to experience lower sexual satisfaction.[ 40] In a 2017 meta-analysis of over 50 studies collectively including more than 50,000 participants from 10 countries, pornography consumption was “associated with lower interpersonal satisfaction outcomes in cross-sectional surveys, longitudinal surveys, and experiments.” Importantly, the relationship was only significant among males.[ (Page 188)

In 1897, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim—perhaps the most profound thinker about the nature of society—wrote a book about the social causes of suicide. Drawing on data that was just becoming available as governments began to keep statistics, he noted that in Europe the general rule was that the more tightly people are bound into a community that has the moral authority to restrain their desires, the less likely they are to kill themselves. (Page 194)

In Sum Like girls, boys got more depressed and anxious in the early 2010s, in many countries. Unlike girls, boys experienced a slow decline since the 1970s in achievement and engagement in school, work, and family life. Boys and young men withdrew much of their time and effort from the physical world (which was increasingly opposed to unsupervised play, exploration, and risk-taking) and invested it in the rapidly expanding virtual world. Boys are at greater risk than girls of “failure to launch.” They are more likely to become young adults who are “Not in Education, Employment, or Training.” Some Japanese men developed an extreme form of lifelong withdrawal to their bedrooms; they are called hikikomori. In the early 2010s, American teen boys’ thinking patterns shifted from what they had traditionally been (higher rates of externalizing cognitions and behaviors than internalizing) to a pattern more commonly shown by girls (higher rates of internalizing). At the same time, boys also began to shun risk (more so than happened for girls). As boys engaged in fewer risky activities outdoors or away from home, and began spending more time at home on screens, their mental health did not decline in the 1990s and 2000s. But something changed in the early 2010s, and their mental health then began to decline. Once boys got smartphones, they—like girls—moved even more of their social lives online, and their mental health declined. One way that smartphones—amplified by high-speed internet—have affected boys’ lives is by providing unlimited, free, hardcore pornography accessible anytime, anywhere. Porn is an example of how tech companies have made it easy for boys to satisfy powerful evolved desires without having to develop any skills that would help them make the transition to adulthood. Video games offer boys and girls a number of benefits, but there are also harms, especially for the subset of boys (in the ballpark of 7%) who end up as problematic or addicted users. For them, video games do seem to cause declining mental and physical health, family strife, and difficulties in other areas of life. As with social media for girls, spending hours “connecting” with others online produces an increase in the quantity of social interactions and a decrease in the quality of social relationships. Boys, like girls, became lonelier during the Great Rewiring. Some boys use video games to strengthen their real-world packs, but for many others, video games made it easier for them to retreat to their bedrooms rather than doing the hard work of maturing in the real world. The Great Rewiring of Childhood pulled young people out of real-world communities, including their own families, and created a new kind of childhood lived in multiple rapidly shifting networks. One inevitable result was anomie, or normlessness, because stable and binding moralities cannot form when everything is in flux, including the members of the network. As the sociologist Émile Durkheim showed, anomie breeds despair and suicide. This may be why boys and girls, who followed different paths through the Great Rewiring, ended up in the same place, with a sudden and rapid increase in the feeling that their lives were meaningless. (Page 195)

Chapter 8 Spiritual Elevation and Degradation (Page 199)

In Sum When people see morally beautiful actions, they feel as though they have been lifted up—elevated on a vertical dimension that can be labeled divinity. When people see morally repulsive actions, they feel as though they have been pulled downward, or degraded. A phone-based life generally pulls people downward. It changes the way we think, feel, judge, and relate to others. It is incompatible with many of the behaviors that religious and spiritual communities practice, some of which have been shown to improve happiness, well-being, trust, and group cohesion, according to researchers such as David DeSteno. I described six such practices. First, Émile Durkheim showed that human beings move up and down between two levels: the profane and the sacred. The profane is our ordinary self-focused consciousness. The sacred is the realm of the collective. Groups of individuals become a cohesive community when they engage in rituals that move them in and out of the realm of the sacred together. The virtual world, in contrast, gives no structure to time or space and is entirely profane. This is one reason why virtual communities are not usually as satisfying or meaning-giving as real-world communities. Second, religious rituals always involve bodily movement with symbolic significance, often carried out synchronously with others. Eating together has a special power to bond people together. The virtual world is, by definition, disembodied, and most of its activities are conducted asynchronously. Third, many religions and spiritual practices use stillness, silence, and meditation to calm the “jumping monkey” of ordinary consciousness and open the heart to others, God, or enlightenment. Meditation has been shown to promote well-being, even brief regular meditation in fully secular contexts. The phone-based life, in contrast, is a never-ending series of notifications, alerts, and distractions, fragmenting consciousness and training us to fill every moment of consciousness with something from our phones. Fourth, a defining feature of spirituality is self-transcendence. There is a network of brain structures (the default mode network) that becomes less active during moments of self-transcendence, as if it were the neural basis of profane consciousness. Social media keeps the focus on the self, self-presentation, branding, and social standing. It is almost perfectly designed to prevent self-transcendence. Fifth, most religions urge us to be less judgmental, but social media encourages us to offer evaluations of others at a rate never before possible in human history. Religions advise us to be slower to anger and quicker to forgive, but social media encourages the opposite. Sixth, the grandeur of nature is among the most universal and easily accessible routes to experiencing awe, an emotion that is closely linked to spiritual practices and progress. A simple walk in a natural setting can cause self-transcendence, especially if one pays close attention and is not attending to a phone. Awe in nature may be especially valuable for Gen Z because it counteracts the anxiety and self-consciousness caused by a phone-based childhood. There is a “God-shaped hole” in every human heart. Or, at least, many people feel a yearning for meaning, connection, and spiritual elevation. A phone-based life often fills that hole with trivial and degrading content. The ancients advised us to be more deliberate in choosing what we expose ourselves to. (Page 216)

Part 4 Collective Action for Healthier Childhood (Page 219)

Chapter 9 Preparing for Collective Action (Page 221)

Chapter 10 What Governments and Tech Companies Can Do Now (Page 227)

What Governments and Tech Companies Can Do to End the Race to the Bottom of the Brainstem (Page 232)

Assert a Duty of Care (Page 232)

The code was revolutionary for asserting that companies have some moral and legal responsibility for how they treat minors. (Page 232)

Raise the Age of Internet Adulthood to 16 (Page 234)

In the negotiations over the bill, a compromise was reached that the age would be lowered to 13. That decision had nothing to do with adolescent brain development or maturity; it was just a political compromise. Nonetheless, 13 became the de facto age of “internet adulthood” for the United States, which effectively made it the age of internet adulthood for the world. Anyone who is 13, or at least says they are, can be treated as an adult for the purposes of data acquisition. As Senator Markey later said, “It was too young and I knew it was too young then. It was the best I could do.”[ 21] (Page 234)

Facilitate Age Verification (Page 236)

Encourage Phone-Free Schools (Page 239)

What Governments Can Do to Incentivize More (and Better) Real-World Experience (Page 240)

Stop Punishing Parents for Giving Children Real-World Freedom (Page 240)

Encourage More Play in Schools (Page 242)

Design and Zone Public Space with Children in Mind (Page 242)

More Vocational Education, Apprenticeships, and Youth Development Programs (Page 243)

In Sum Governments at all levels need to change policies that are harming adolescent mental health and support policies that would improve it. In the United States, governments at the state and local level are partly responsible for the overprotection of children in the real world (via vast overreach of vague neglect laws), and the federal government is partly responsible for the underprotection of children in the virtual world (by passing an ineffective law in 1998 and failing to update it as the dangers of life online became more apparent). To correct underprotection online, national and federal governments should enact laws of the sort first passed in the U.K., which require companies to treat minors differently than adults, with an extra duty of care. National governments should also raise the age of internet adulthood to 16. Tech companies can be a major part of the solution by developing better age verification features, and by adding features that allow parents to designate their children’s phones and computers as ones that should not be served by sites with minimum ages until they are old enough. Such a feature would help to dissolve multiple collective action problems for parents, kids, and platforms. To correct overprotection in the real world, state and local governments should narrow neglect laws and give parents confidence that they can give their children some unsupervised time without risking arrest or state intervention in their family life. State and local governments should also encourage more free play and recess in schools. They should consider the needs of children in zoning and permitting, and they should invest in more vocational education and other programs that have been shown to help adolescents, especially boys, make the transition to adulthood. (Page 244)

Chapter 11 What Schools Can Do Now (Page 247)

Voss implemented a cell phone ban. For the entire school day, phones had to stay in backpacks, not in pockets or hands. There were clear policies and real consequences if phones were found out of the backpack during school hours.[ 3] The effects were transformative. Students no longer sat silently next to each other, scrolling while waiting for homeroom or class to start. They talked to each other or the teacher. Voss says that when he walks into a school without a phone ban, “It’s kind of like the zombie apocalypse, and you have all these kids in the hallways not talking to each other. It’s just a very different vibe.” (Page 248)

A phone “ban” limited to class time is nearly useless. This is why schools should go phone-free for the entirety of the school day. (Page 249)

August 2023, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) issued a report that addressed the adverse effects that digital technologies, and phones in particular, are having on education around the world.[ 7] The report acknowledged benefits of the internet for online education and educating some hard-to-reach populations, but noted that there is surprisingly little evidence that digital technologies enhance learning in the typical classroom. (Page 249)

report also noted that mobile phone use was associated with reduced educational performance and increased classroom disruption.[ (Page 249)

In Sum U.S. middle and high schools have seen an increase in mental illness and psychological suffering among their students since the early 2010s. Many are implementing a variety of policies in response. There is a Polynesian expression: “Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.” Sometimes what you are looking for is right there, underfoot, and it is better than anything you could find by looking farther away. I suggested two potential whales that schools can implement right away, with little or no additional money: going phone-free, and becoming more play-full. Most schools say they ban phones, but that typically means only that students must not use their phones during class. This is an ineffective policy because it incentivizes students to hide their phone use during class and increase their phone use after class, which makes it harder for them to form friendships with the kids around them. A better policy is to go phone-free for the entire school day. When students arrive, they should put their phones into a dedicated phone locker or into a lockable phone pouch. The second whale is becoming a play-full school. The simple addition of a Let Grow Play Club—an afternoon option in K–8 schools of playing on the school playground, with no phones, plenty of loose parts, and minimal adult supervision—may teach social skills and reduce anxiety better than any educational program, because free play is nature’s way of accomplishing these goals. Schools can become more play-full by improving recess in three ways: Give more of it, on better playgrounds (such as those incorporating loose parts and “junk,” and/ or more natural elements), with fewer rules. The Let Grow Project is another activity that seems to reduce anxiety. It is a homework assignment that asks children to “do something they have never done before, on their own,” after reaching agreement with their parents as to what that is. Doing projects increases children’s sense of competence while also increasing parents’ willingness to trust their children and grant them more autonomy. When all the families in a neighborhood or town give their children more free play and independence, it solves the collective action problem: Parents are no longer afraid to give their children more unsupervised free play and independence, which children need to overcome normal childhood anxieties and develop into healthy young adults. Schools can do more to reverse the growing disengagement of boys and their declining academic progress relative to girls. Offering more shop classes and more vocational and technical training and hiring more male teachers would each serve to re-engage boys. (As would offering better recess in the earlier years.) An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If K–8 schools become phone-free and play-full, and if they add in the Let Grow Project, they will be applying many pounds of prevention, which will reduce the flow of depressed and anxious students entering high schools. (Page 264)

Chapter 12 What Parents Can Do Now (Page 267)

For Parents of Young Children (Ages 0 to 5) (Page 269)

More (and Better) Experience in the Real World (Page 269)

Less (and Better) Experience on Screens (Page 270)

Smartphones, tablets, computers, and televisions are not suitable for very young children. Compared with other objects and toys, these devices transmit intense and gripping sensory stimulation. At the same time, they encourage more passive behavior and information consumption, which can delay learning. This is why most authorities recommend against making screens a part of daily life in the first two years, and using them sparingly until the age of 6 or so.[ 5] The child’s brain is “expecting” to wire up in a three-dimensional, five-senses world of people and things. (Page 270)

Expert advice on screens is clear and somewhat consistent across the Western world.[ 7] A representative set of recommendations that seem reasonable to me comes from the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry:[ 8] Until 18 months of age, limit screen use to video chatting along with an adult (for example, with a parent who is out of town). Between 18 and 24 months, screen time should be limited to watching educational programming with a caregiver. For children 2–5, limit noneducational screen time to about one hour per weekday and 3 hours on the weekend days. For ages 6 and older, encourage healthy habits and limit activities that include screens. Turn off all screens during family meals and outings.[ 9] Learn about and use parental controls. Avoid using screens as pacifiers, babysitters, or to stop tantrums. Turn off screens and remove them from bedrooms 30–60 minutes before bedtime. (Page 270)

For Parents of Children Ages 6–13 (Elementary and Middle School) (Page 271)

More (and Better) Experience in the Real World (Page 271)

Practice letting your kids out of your sight without them having a way to reach you. (Page 272)

Encourage sleepovers, and don’t micromanage them, although if the friend brings a phone, hold on to it until the friend leaves, otherwise they’ll have a phone-based sleepover. (Page 272)

Encourage walking to school in a group. (Page 273)

After school is for free play. (Page 273)

Go camping. (Page 273)

Find a sleepaway camp with no devices and no safetyism. (Page 273)

Form child-friendly neighborhoods and playborhoods. (Page 274)

For 6-to-12-year-olds: As a general rule, no more than two hours per day is recommended for screen-based recreational activities. However, this depends on the content (social media, video games, chats, TV, and so forth), the context (time of day, multitasking, and so on), and the young person’s individual traits (age, physical and mental health, analytical skills, critical thinking, and so on). Parental supervision must therefore be based on these criteria. For younger children especially, the content should be educational, and the devices should be used in common areas, where adults can control the content, rather than in children’s bedrooms. (Page 277)

Learn how to use parental controls and content filters (Page 277)

Focus more on maximizing in-person activity and sleep than on total screen hours. (Page 278)

Provide clear structure to the day and the week. (Page 279)

Look for signs of addiction or problematic use. (Page 279)

Delay the opening of social media accounts until 16. (Page 280)

Talk with your preteen about the risks, and listen to their thoughts. (Page 280)

For Parents of Teens Ages 13–18 (High School) (Page 281)

More (and Better) Experience in the Real World (Page 281)

Increase their mobility. (Page 281)

Rely more on your teen at home. (Page 282)

Encourage your teen to find a part-time job. (Page 282)

Find ways for them to nurture and lead. (Page 282)

Consider a high school exchange program. (Page 283)

Bigger thrills in nature. (Page 283)

Take a gap year after high school. (Page 284)

Less (and Better) Experience on Screens (Page 285)

In Sum Being a parent is always a challenge, and it has become far more challenging in our era of rapid social and technological change. However, there is a lot that parents can do to become better “gardeners”—those who create a space in which their children can learn and grow—in contrast to “carpenters” who try to mold and shape their children directly. If you do one thing to be a better gardener in the real world, it should be to give your children far more unsupervised free play, of the sort you probably enjoyed at that age. That means giving them a longer and better play-based childhood, with ever-growing independence and responsibility. If you do one thing to be a better gardener in the virtual world, it should be to delay your children’s full entry into the phone-based childhood by delaying when you give them their first smartphone (or any “smart” device). Give only basic phones before the start of high school, and try to coordinate with other parents so that your children do not feel that they are the only ones without smartphones in middle school. There are many other ways to increase your children’s engagement with the real world and embeddedness in communities, including sending them to a technology-free sleepaway camp, going camping, and helping them find additional settings in which they can hang out with other children who are not carrying smartphones. As your children get older, increase their mobility and encourage them to find part-time jobs and ways to learn from other adults. Consider an exchange program, a summer wilderness program, and a gap year. A free-range childhood is more likely to produce confident, competent young adults, with lower levels of anxiety, than is a childhood ruled by safetyism, fear, and constant adult supervision. The biggest obstacle is the parents’ own anxiety about letting a child out of sight, unchaperoned by an adult. This takes practice, but the ultimate pleasure of being able to trust your child outweighs the temporary anxieties of letting go. Most authorities recommend little or no screen time in the first 18–24 months (other than video calls with family members) and limited screen time through the age of 5 or 6. For children in elementary and middle school, use parental controls, provide clear limits, and designate some times and places as no-device zones. Look out for signs of problematic or addictive use. Your actions as a parent can contribute to solving the collective action problem. If you delay giving your child a smartphone, it makes it easier for other parents to do so. If you give your child more independence, it makes it easier for other parents to do so too. If you do it together, with other families, it will make it easier still, and more fun. (Page 286)

Conclusion Bring Childhood Back to Earth (Page 289)

No smartphones before high school No social media before 16 Phone-free schools Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence (Page 290)

The most important lesson here is to speak up. If you think the phone-based childhood is bad for children and you want to see a return to play-based childhood, say so. Most people share your suspicion, but they are not sure what to do about it. Speak to your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, your social media followers, and your political representatives. (Page 292)