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

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

We spend most of our lives as individuals pursuing our own interests. He called this the realm of the “profane,” which means the ordinary day-to-day world where we are very concerned about our own wealth, health, and reputation. But Durkheim showed that nearly all societies have created rituals and communal practices for pulling people “up,” tempor

social media has been especially damaging to girls, including chronic social comparison and relational aggression.

They all enter the realm of the sacred together, at the same time. When they return to the profane level, where they need to be most of the time to address the necessities of life, they have greater trust and affection for each other as a result of their time together in the sacred realm.

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

Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness—perpetually—to managing what became their online brand. This was now necessary to gain acceptance from peers, which is the oxygen of adolescence, and to avoid online shaming, which is the nightmare of adolescence. Gen Z teens got sucked into spending ma

five ways that awe improves well-being: Awe causes “shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning.”

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

the concept of safety had undergone such extensive concept creep among Gen Z and many of the educators and therapists around them that it had become a pervasive and unquestionable value. We used the term “safetyism” to refer to “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make tr