Do you know that feeling when someone comes along and says exactly what you have been saying but puts it into a book that becomes a best-seller?
That’s how I felt reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. He unpacks how smartphones and social media have changed childhood and why our kids are so damn anxious all the time. But he doesn’t let parents off the hook; he says our helicopter parenting and being totally over-protective in real life – yet leaving kids basically defenseless online is a big contributor to this epidemic of mental health and suicide that we are seeing with young people.
A Free-Range Childhood
Growing up, we had so much more freedom than kids do nowadays. On the weekends or holidays, we’d say goodbye to our parents and head off into nature with our friends, coming back exhausted and dirty. Whether out fishing or riding our bikes, we were experiencing the world on our own terms.
In the book, Haidt says kids need a childhood packed with play exploration and risk-taking to develop properly. This is no longer happening because of smartphones and paranoid parenting.
Compare and Despair
Haidt breaks down four core harms that are messing with kids’ mental health in a big way. Because they have fewer face-to-face social interactions, they’re missing out on key social skills, and the endless cycle of comparison and despair on social media feeds their insecurity. This need to put their “perfectly cool” existence forward online is just a world of filters and frames and has little to do with real lives.
He says that cyberbullying is another major issue that teens and young adults have to deal with, so much so that it’s become “normalized” as a way of interacting. None of this surprised me; I’ve written about it quite a bit in my LinkedIn posts, but what did interest me was how Haidt writes that their inability to unplug and switch off social media is disrupting their sleep. When you are young and growing (at any age), sleep is so important for development and one’s general ability to cope with what life throws at you.
Finding the Way
But Haidt doesn’t just rant about the issues. He also maps out constructive solutions such as phone-free schools, no social media before age 16, smartphones before high school, and much more unsupervised play. By limiting technology and allowing kids to interact and create meaningful social interactions, they’ll find their way much easier than trying to navigate the digital world.
As Haidt says on the Prof G Show with Scott Galloway, titled “The Kids Are Not Alright,”: “The Internet has made almost everything that kids need to do super-easy to do, low cost, low embarrassment and in the process you don’t have to exert much effort, you don’t learn any skills, you don’t develop any abilities that transfer outside of that closed digital world.”
Not All Or Nothing, but Somewhere in between
While I don’t necessarily agree with everything Haidt says, I think we need to be careful about saying our kids are anxious only because of social media and helicopter parenting—they have inherited a crazy world that is really hard to navigate, even as adults.
I like that he also suggests spiritual practices, such as gratitude and mindfulness, that families can adopt to improve their mental well-being.
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness is a book I’ll go back to repeatedly. There are real nuggets of truth on his pages. It’s also up to us adults to find ways to help the younger generation find their way.
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