How the Great Rewiring Fuels an Epidemic of Mental Illness in Youth by Jonathan Haidt

How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. In his groundbreaking book “The Anxious Generation,” renowned social psychologist Jonathan Haidt fearlessly delves into the alarming rise of mental health issues among today’s youth. With meticulous research and profound insights, Haidt uncovers the detrimental effects of the “Great Rewiring” – a phenomenon that has radically transformed the landscape of childhood in recent decades. Prepare to be enlightened and challenged as you embark on a journey to understand the roots of this mental health crisis.

Discover the eye-opening truths and gain critical insights that every parent, educator, and concerned citizen must know. Keep reading to arm yourself with the knowledge needed to navigate this new reality and support the well-being of the next generation.

Genres

Psychology, Parenting, Education, Society, Culture, Sociology, Mental Health, Child Development, Social Science, Self-Help, Family

In “The Anxious Generation,” Haidt argues that the dramatic increase in mental health issues among young people is largely due to significant changes in parenting styles, educational practices, and societal norms over the past few decades – a phenomenon he calls the “Great Rewiring.”

He identifies key factors such as overprotective parenting, the decline of free play, the rise of social media, and a culture of safetyism as contributing to this crisis. Haidt presents compelling evidence and real-life examples to illustrate how these changes have left young people ill-equipped to handle adversity, cope with stress, and develop resilience. He also explores the broader societal implications of this trend and offers practical strategies for parents, educators, and policymakers to address the crisis.

Review

“The Anxious Generation” is a thought-provoking and timely book that sheds light on a critical issue facing today’s youth. Haidt’s extensive research and insightful analysis provide a comprehensive understanding of the complex factors driving the mental health crisis.

His writing style is engaging and accessible, making complex concepts easy to grasp for a wide audience. The book’s strength lies in its ability to connect the dots between various societal trends and their impact on young people’s well-being.

Haidt’s arguments are well-supported by data and real-world examples, adding credibility to his claims. While some readers may find certain points controversial or overreaching, the book serves as an important catalyst for essential conversations about the future of our youth. “The Anxious Generation” is a must-read for anyone concerned about the well-being of the next generation and seeking guidance on how to navigate this challenging landscape.

Introduction: An eye-opening account of the impacts of smartphone use in childhood

The Anxious Generation (2024) argues that the decline of play in childhood and the rise of smartphone usage among adolescents are the twin sources of increased mental distress in Generation Z. Grounded in psychological and biological research, this eye-opening text explores how the profound shift from play-based to phone-based childhoods has disrupted adolescent development – and offers practical advice to address this crisis.

As the first generation to grow up in the era of ubiquitous digital connectivity, Gen Z has faced a surge in mental health challenges that demand our urgent attention.

This Blink dives into the impact that smartphones and social media have had on the well-being of today’s youth. By understanding the four key ways in which these technologies have eroded the traditional foundations of a healthy childhood – through social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction – you’ll gain insights into addressing this mental health crisis.

Importantly, this Blink also provides actionable steps that you, as a parent, caregiver, or concerned citizen, can take to mitigate these harms and foster environments that nurture the essential elements of child development. Whether you’re raising a family or are simply worried about the future of our young people, get ready to equip yourself with the knowledge to support the next generation.

Smartphones are behind a worrying rise in childhood and adolescent mental health issues

In the early 2000s, the mental health landscape among preteens and adolescents appeared relatively stable, with no clear indications of an impending crisis. But the next decade brought about a dramatic shift: mental health issues among Generation Z children and teenagers began to surge at an alarming rate.

To put this phenomenon into perspective, consider the findings of a US National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The data reveals a staggering 145 percent increase in reported cases of depressive episodes among girls since 2012. For boys, the rise is even more pronounced, with a 161 percent increase in reported cases of depressive episodes over the same period. The impact extends beyond self-reported symptoms, with college students receiving a 134 percent increase in anxiety, a 106 percent increase in depression, a 72 percent increase in ADHD, and a 57 percent increase in bipolar disorder diagnoses since 2012. This surge in mental health challenges is, with the exception of some young millennials, largely confined to the Gen Z demographic.

The statistics only begin to scratch the surface. Among girls, there has been a 188 percent increase in emergency room visits for self-harm since 2010, and a 167 percent rise in suicide rates. For boys, the numbers are also alarming, with a 48 percent increase in self-harm-related ER visits and a 91 percent surge in suicide rates.

What accounts for this dramatic shift in the mental health landscape of Gen Z? The answer may lie, in part, with the widespread adoption of smartphones and the corresponding changes in the social fabric of adolescence. Smartphones, first introduced in 2007 and widely adopted by the 2010s, have profoundly influenced the way young people interact, communicate, and engage with the world around them.

Studies have shown that tweens and teens who accessed the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s were, on average, slightly happier during their adolescence than their Gen X predecessors. However, this trend reversed dramatically with the widespread adoption of smartphones, which enabled adolescents to be connected and online constantly, wherever they were. By 2016, 79 percent of teens owned a smartphone, as did 28 percent of children aged 8 to 12. Alarmingly, a 2022 Pew report indicates that 46 percent of teens describe themselves as being online “almost constantly.”

This shift in the social landscape of childhood and adolescence, often referred to as the “Great Rewiring of Childhood,” has had a significant impact on the mental health of Gen Z. As their social lives have increasingly moved online through the constant access to social media, video gaming, and other internet activities, the first generation of teens in the United States to go through adolescence with this level of connectivity has become more anxious, depressed, and suicidal than any generation recorded before them. This troubling trend is not limited to the US; studies across Canada, the UK, and the Nordic states have reported similar findings, suggesting that this is a global phenomenon.

While other factors, such as anxiety surrounding global issues like climate change, may also contribute to the mental health outcomes of Gen Z, the ubiquity of smartphone usage and the corresponding changes in social dynamics appear to be the primary drivers behind this tidal wave of mental illness. As we grapple with the implications of this crisis, it’s clear that a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between technology, social interaction, and adolescent development is needed to develop effective strategies for supporting the mental health of our youth.

Play-based childhoods, not phone-based childhoods, promote healthy development

Why has the introduction of the smartphone been so detrimental to children’s and adolescents’ mental health? The answer may lie not just in what the smartphone gives them access to – social media, photo filters, addictive games, and more – but in what time spent on a smartphone takes away from them. Specifically, the introduction of the smartphone has eroded the traditional play-based childhood, with far-reaching consequences for the mental well-being of Generation Z.

Humans have a longer childhood than any other mammal, and there’s a good reason for this. The slower pace of human development allows the brain to undergo a critical process of synaptic pruning, where the connections that are used frequently are strengthened while those that are used rarely fade away. This process of pattern and habit formation is evolutionarily designed to occur through three key areas: free play, attunement, and social learning. Smartphones have enticed children into a virtual world, where it’s challenging to fully explore these three critical functionalities.

Through unstructured, undirected play, children learn to cooperate with each other, assess risks, form friendships, and exercise their imagination. A phone-based childhood, in contrast, is necessarily structured – the content and interactions have been designed by teams of experts. This structured virtual environment can’t offer the same developmental opportunities as the physical world of free play.

Attunement, or the art of connecting with others, is another crucial aspect of child development. From a young age, children learn to read emotional cues, take turns, and build social bonds through synchronous interactions with their caregivers and peers. These interactions are vital for developing emotional self-regulation and social skills. By 2014, a third of preteen girls reported spending roughly 20 hours a week on social media, potentially losing valuable opportunities for attunement.

Social learning, the process by which children emulate effective behaviors and social strategies from role models, is also impacted by the rise of smartphones and social media. While social media doesn’t take away children’s and teens’ opportunities for social learning, it turbocharges them. Children can now identify behaviors to emulate through metric systems, such as the number of likes and engagement on posts. But the role models they choose to emulate may display behaviors or embody values that are inappropriate, or that set impossible standards for children to live up to rather than organically identifying good role models in their communities.

In recent decades, parents have focused on protecting children from perceived physical risks such as cars or sex offenders. But what about protecting them from smartphones and social media?

Setting up guardrails for children in the physical world can be counterproductive, leading to a decrease in resilience, independence, and unsupervised play time. Risky play is necessary for children to learn problem-solving and build confidence and self-efficacy. Dealing with boredom and frustration regularly is also key for becoming an emotionally healthy adult. In light of this, placing a child in a bubble of satisfaction and safety isn’t good for their development. At the same time, we’ve failed to adequately protect children from the risks posed by the constant access to social media, photo filters, and addictive games.

The introduction of the smartphone has fundamentally altered the nature of childhood, depriving children of the critical experiences of free play, attunement, and organic social learning. And this shift has had negative consequences for the mental health of Generation Z, as evidenced by the alarming surge in reported cases of depression, anxiety, and self-harm.

Addressing this crisis requires a deeper understanding of the connection between technology, social dynamics, and child development – which is what we’ll look at next.

From sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, smartphone use dangerously impacts children’s health

There’s no doubt that the rapid shift from flip phones to smartphones at the end of the 2000s and the start of the 2010s has dramatically transformed the nature of childhood. In this section, we’ll outline the four major ways in which smartphones have adversely impacted the mental well-being of young people.

First up? Social deprivation. As we know, in-person, play-based social interactions are fundamental to a child’s healthy social development. But from 2009 onward, the time children spend interacting with friends face-to-face has dropped markedly. Even when children and teens do spend time together, they increasingly do so with their phones in hand, diminishing the quality of their interactions. This trend extends to family life as well, as parents too have become distracted by their smartphones. In a study of children aged 6–12, 62 percent reported that their parents were “distracted” when they tried to talk with them, with the primary reason being smartphone use.

The second adverse effect of smartphones is sleep deprivation. Biological rhythms shift during adolescence; for generations, parents have struggled to wake their teen or preteen in time for school. Smartphones have exacerbated this issue, as late-night phone use is known to be disruptive to sleep. A review of 36 studies concludes that there’s a clear correlational relationship between smartphone use and sleep deprivation among adolescents. This sleep deprivation is associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety, aggression, and impeded impulse control.

Third, there’s attention fragmentation. The average teen receives eleven notifications per waking hour on their smartphone, with heavy users potentially experiencing one notification per minute of every waking hour. Smartphones and social media are designed to pull the user’s attention away from whatever they are doing, providing a constant stream of notifications and the accompanying dopamine hits. This fragmentation of attention can compromise an individual’s ability to focus deeply on a task or engage in slower, more reflective modes of thinking. Even the mere presence of a phone in the room has been shown to impede a teen’s ability to focus on a task! This continual access to smartphones during a crucial period of brain development can mean that some users’ capacity for focus and attention never fully matures, as evidenced by the upward trend in ADHD diagnoses. Not surprisingly, studies show that individuals with ADHD often spend above-average amounts of time online and on their smartphones.

Finally, let’s discuss addiction. Smartphones and the apps that live on them are deliberately designed to be habit-forming and addictive. Preteens and teens, with their more plastic brains, are particularly vulnerable to developing these addictions. Smartphones and social media employ advanced behavioral techniques to create compulsive habits in users – the activation of external triggers, like notifications, is paired with the promise of variable rewards, such as likes or comments. This variability actually makes the experience more addictive, as users find themselves unable to resist the urge to seek out these rewards, even in the absence of the initial trigger. The dopamine rush that users experience when indulging their addiction is countered by the symptoms of withdrawal, including dysphoria, irritability, insomnia, and anxiety, that occur when the addiction can’t be satisfied.

Taken together, these four core harms inflicted by smartphones – social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction – have set the stage for the surge in mental disorders we’re seeing among children and adolescents.

The negative impacts of smartphones and social media can be curbed

Many adults who care for children and teens in some capacity are already well aware of the deleterious impact that smartphone use is having on this group’s mental and social well-being. The question then becomes, What can be done to address this pressing issue and support the healthy development of young people in the digital age?

To achieve a lasting, positive transformation, structural changes need to occur at the societal level. In the United States, governments have taken a paradoxical approach to protecting children – zealously enforcing vague “child neglect” laws to overprotect them in the physical world while underprotecting them in the virtual realm. Governments should take proactive steps to address this imbalance, such as passing laws that compel online companies, including social media and gaming platforms, to treat underage users with an extra duty of care. The age of “internet adulthood” should be raised to 16, recognizing the unique vulnerabilities of adolescents. At the same time, governments should institute more opportunities for free play and recess in the school system, and narrow neglect laws so parents can legally allow their children to engage in unsupervised play.

Tech companies, which have demonstrated remarkable ingenuity in creating habit-forming products, should now turn that same level of innovation toward ensuring the safety and well-being of children online. This could involve developing better age verification methods and far stricter options for parental control over digital content and device usage.

While structural change is necessary, it may be slow in coming. In the meantime, there are steps that parents and caregivers can take to protect children and promote healthy development.

Essentially, children of all ages need less, and better, experience with screens – and more, and better, experience in the real world. So from the ages of zero to five, parents can limit screen time and maximize opportunities for free, unstructured play. While parent-child play is a wonderful connecting experience and provides educational development, children also need to engage in play with other children, ideally of a wide range of ages, to develop essential social and problem-solving skills.

As children enter elementary school, parents can encourage independence, such as walking to school or the local shops on their own. After-school time should be left mostly free for unstructured play, with limited structured activities. Families in the area can collaborate to create safe spaces for children to engage in free play while adhering to strict limits on screen time – for instance, no more than two hours per day – and utilizing rigorous parental controls and content filters on all devices in the home.

For preteens and teens, the focus should be on developing competence and self-efficacy through mastering modes of transportation, such as cycling or public transit; taking on more responsibilities at home, like cooking meals; and engaging with the real world through part-time jobs, camping trips with friends, and other independent experiences. Around the age of 16, parents can consider transitioning their child to a smartphone and active social media accounts – but they should maintain family rules about screen use and monitor for signs of addiction and mental or emotional distress.

At a minimum, the independence and competence that children are encouraged to develop in the real world should match – if not surpass – the autonomy they’re given in the virtual world. By striking this balance, parents and caregivers can mitigate the harmful impacts of excessive smartphone use and help their kids become healthier, happier individuals.

Conclusion

The widespread adoption of smartphones has been the primary driver behind the dramatic surge in mental health challenges facing Gen Z. This is due to the ways in which smartphones have eroded the traditional play-based childhood and deprived young people of the essential experiences that foster healthy development. By limiting screen time, maximizing opportunities for unstructured play, and encouraging independence in the real world, parents and caregivers can help nurture the healthy development of young people in the digital age.

About the author

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He’s the author of several influential books exploring the moral foundations of political and social divides, including The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind.