The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

both sexes suffer from both, and both sexes have been experiencing more internalizing disorders and fewer externalizing disorders since the early 2010s.[7]

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.[6]

but somehow the world has reconfigured itself so that any parent who resists is condemning their children to social isolation.

Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children’s entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (roughly age 14). No social media before 16. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a

When I talk about the “real world,” I am referring to relationships and social interactions characterized by four features that have been typical for millions of years: They are embodied, meaning that we use our bodies to communicate, we are conscious of the bodies of others, and we respond to the bodies of others both consciously and unconsciously

Children: 0 through 12. Adolescents: 10 through 20. Teens: 13 through 19. Minors: Everyone who is under 18. I’ll also use the word “kids” sometimes, because it sounds less formal and technical than “minors.”

Recess in America—and children’s unstructured time outside school—has been shrinking ever since the publication of a landmark 1983 report titled A Nation at Risk. The report warned that American kids were falling behind those of other nations in test scores and academic proficiency.[21] It recommended increasing rigor by spending more time on acade

Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell ch