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

Awe can be triggered in many ways, but the beauty of nature is among the most reliable and accessible methods. After hearing Dacher in a podcast conversation[31] describe the “awe walks” he took while grieving his brother’s death from cancer, I decided to add a session on awe and beauty to the undergraduate Flourishing class that I teach at New Yor

a recent British study found direct evidence that puberty is indeed a sensitive period for harm from social media. A team led by the psychologist Amy Orben analyzed two large British data sets and found that the negative correlation between social media use and satisfaction with life was larger for those in the 10–15 age group than for those in the

Its report also recommends giving recess before lunch, rather than the common practice of combining lunch and recess as a single short period in which students wolf down their food in order to maximize their few precious minutes of free play.

Free play is as essential for developing social skills, like conflict resolution, as it is for developing physical skills.

Children learn through play to connect, synchronize, and take turns. They enjoy attunement and need enormous quantities of it. Attunement and synchrony bond pairs, groups, and whole communities. Social media, in contrast, is mostly asynchronous and performative.

the average number of notifications on young people’s phones from the top social and communication apps amounts to 192 alerts per day, according to one study.[42] The average teen, who now gets only seven hours of sleep per night, therefore gets about 11 notifications per waking hour, or one every five minutes. And that’s just for the apps that are

2020 Pew survey found that 68% of parents said that they sometimes or often feel distracted by their phones when they are spending time with their children.

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.

First, there is simple emotional contagion, as described by Fowler and Christakis. People pick up emotions from others, and emotional contagion is especially strong among girls. Second, there is “prestige bias,” which is the social learning rule I described in chapter 2: Don’t just copy anyone; first find out who the most prestigious people are, th

Once a few students get smartphones and social media accounts, the other students put pressure on their parents, putting them into a trap as well. It’s painful for parents to hear their children say, “Everyone else has a smartphone. If you don’t get me one, I’ll be excluded from everything.” (Of course, “everyone” may just mean “some other kids.”)