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

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.”

In fact, posting and commenting on social media sites is the opposite of Gray’s definition. 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 publ

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] So what was the opportunity cost to children and adolescents when they started spending six, or eight, or perhaps even 16 hours each day interacti

Martin Luther King Jr. used the power of forgiveness, as developed in the Judeo-Christian tradition, to inspire those in the civil rights movement to act in elevated ways that would win hearts and minds: We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good

Even if the content on these sites could somehow be filtered effectively to remove obviously harmful material, the addictive design of these platforms reduces the time available for face-to-face play in the real world. The reduction is so severe that we might refer to smartphones and tablets in the hands of children as experience blockers.

state of energized communion “collective effervescence.”

Girls in virtual networks are subjected to hundreds of times more social comparison than girls had experienced for all of human evolution. They are exposed to more cruelty and bullying because social media platforms incentivize and facilitate relational aggression. Their openness and willingness to share emotions with other girls exposes them to de

Kids are antifragile and therefore they benefit from risky play, along with a secure base, which helps to shift them over toward discover mode. A play-based childhood is more likely to do that than a phone-based childhood.

For those in the peak years of puberty, which comes a bit earlier for girls, the answer was yes. For girls, the worst years for using social media were 11 to 13; for boys, it was 14 to 15.[36] These results offer clear evidence that 13, which is the current (and unenforced) minimum age for opening an account on social media platforms, is too low.