The Anxious Generation
Jonathan Haidt has spent his career speaking wisdom and truth in some of the most the most difficult spaces - communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the perfect storm contributing to a public health emergency for teenagers today. In The Anxious Generation, Haidt argues that for the cohort that hit puberty around 2009, their sense of self developed as the threads of three dramatic technological and social changes emerged: smartphones and life with the constant companionship of a screen, front-facing cameras and apps that thrive on selfie-culture, and social networks that reduce engagement and affirmation to likes and hearts alone. This book shows how the ground for the current crisis in teen mental health was seeded by a decades-long shift from play-based childhoods to ones defined by over-supervision, structure, and fear: how adults began to overprotect children in the real world while unwittingly offering scant protection in the brutal online world.
