Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development. It is in 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 t

What emerged on campus as emotional safety, in contrast, was a much broader concept that came to mean this: I should not have to experience negative emotions because of what someone else said or did. I have a right not to be “triggered.”

Life on the platforms forces young people to become their own brand managers, always thinking ahead about the social consequences of each photo, video, comment, and emoji they choose. Each action is not necessarily done “for its own sake.” Rather, every public action is, to some degree, strategic.

DISCOVER MODE VERSUS DEFEND MODE

Google’s Ngram viewer

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.

When people are raised in a community that they cannot easily escape, they do what our ancestors have done for millions of years: They learn how to manage relationships, and how to manage themselves and their emotions in order to keep those precious relationships going.

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.

Imagine that you fell into a deep sleep on June 28, 2007—the day before the iPhone was released. Like Rip Van Winkle, the protagonist in an 1819 story by Washington Irving, you wake up 10 years later and look around. The physical world looks largely the same to you, but people are behaving strangely. Nearly all of them are clutching a small glass a