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

Human childhood evolved in savannas and forests, alongside streams and lakes. When you put children into natural settings, they instinctively explore and spontaneously invent games.

A 2014 survey of children ages 6–12, conducted by Highlights magazine, found that 62% of children reported that their parents were “often distracted” when the child tried to talk with them.[23] When they were asked the reasons why their parents were distracted, cell phones were the top response.

Humans have few true “critical periods” with hard time limits, but we do seem to have several “sensitive periods,” which are defined as periods in which it is very easy to learn something or acquire a skill, and outside of which it is more difficult.[31] Language learning is the clearest case. Children can learn multiple languages easily, but this

Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conformity engines ever invented. They can shape an adolescent’s mental models of acceptable behavior in a matter of hours, whereas parents can struggle unsuccessfully for years to get their children to sit up straight or stop whining.

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

some studies have failed to find evidence of harm. One well-known study reported that the association of digital media use with harmful psychological outcomes was so close to zero that it was roughly the same size as the association of “eating potatoes” with such harms.[5] But when Jean Twenge and I reanalyzed the same data sets and zoomed in on th

The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.

A play-based childhood is one in which kids spend the majority of their free time playing with friends in the real world as I defined it in the introduction: embodied, synchronous, one-to-one or one-to-several, and in groups or communities where there is some cost to join or leave so people invest in relationships.

Naomi Torres-Mackie, the head of research at the Mental Health Coalition, encapsulated the trend this way: “All of a sudden, all of my adolescent patients think that they have [DID]. . . . And they don’t.”