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

As the MIT professor Sherry Turkle wrote in 2015 about life with smartphones, “We are forever elsewhere.”[33] This is a profound transformation of human consciousness and relationships, and it occurred, for American teens, between 2010 and 2015.

The clinical psychologist Lisa Damour says that regarding friendship for girls, “quality trumps quantity.” The happiest girls “aren’t the ones who have the most friendships but the ones who have strong, supportive friendships, even if that means having a single terrific friend.”[82] (She notes that this is true for boys as well.) Once girls flocked

on the emotion of awe in which we argued that awe is triggered by two simultaneous perceptions: first, that what you are looking at is vast in some way, and, second, that you can’t fit it into your existing mental structures.[30] That combination seems to trigger a feeling in people of being small in a profoundly pleasurable—although sometimes also

Natural sleep patterns shift during puberty.[26] Teens start to go to bed later, but because their weekday mornings are dictated by school start times, they can’t sleep later. Rather, most teens just get less sleep than their brains and bodies need.

A review of 36 correlational studies found significant associations between high social media use and poor sleep, and also between high social media use and poor mental health outcomes.

Self-transcendence is among the central features of spiritual experience, and it turns out that the loss of self has a neural signature. There is a set of linked structures in the brain that are more active whenever we are processing events from an egocentric point of view—thinking about what I want, what I need to do next, or what other people thi

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

“The cost of a thing is the amount of . . . life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

Moreover, those whose playtime and social lives moved online found themselves increasingly wandering through adult spaces, consuming adult content, and interacting with adults in ways that are often harmful to minors. So even while parents worked to eliminate risk and freedom in the real world, they generally, and often unknowingly, granted full in