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

I grew up at a time when I was gone hours a day, and my parents didn’t have any way of finding me.  One summer before I had a driver’s license and a car, I rode literally hundreds of miles on my bicycle in the town of Bay City, Michigan.  It’s a time that Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness would like to bring back – at least some aspects.  Jonathan Haidt is a favorite author of mine, as I’ve read and reviewed The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind, and The Coddling of the American Mind.  The basic premise is that our online life – and particularly our constant social media use – has rewired our brains.  We’ve fundamentally become overprotective in the real world and under protective in the virtual world.

Free Play

I can remember times in my life of entertaining myself with a paper clip and a rubber band.  I can remember summers of relative boredom.  I can also remember times when we played games we made up and improvised.  This is the kind of play that is recommended by Haidt in this book and Stuart Brown in Play.  It’s an opportunity for kids to get bruises but not scars.  It’s a framework for experimentation where the stakes are not too high.  It’s a place where kids develop a sense of agency that they can do things.

The kind of freedom and play that I experienced has become rare.  We societally became scared.  We decided that the increased media coverage of crime in the 1990s meant the world was a scarier and more frightening place than ever before, and that this continued in an upward swing as time progressed.  As I mentioned in my review of Anthro-Vision, the statistics don’t bear out this conclusion.  The truth is that violent crime rose and peaked in about 1990 and then started to decline.  (See also The Tipping Point for a proposed reason.)

However, the statistics aren’t the stories in our head.  The rise of constant news from cable TV and then the internet has convinced us that crime is more prevalent than it really is.  Growing up in the 1980s, it wasn’t that bad things didn’t happen.  It was that we didn’t know about them.  While the media has been blamed for increasing violence, the truth is that it’s changed our perception of violence.  In Moral Disengagement, Albert Bandura takes aim at television, but the longer view doesn’t support his conclusions that television was making us more violent – particularly in light of the decrease in crime while television and violent game consumption increased.  The Blank Slate points this out effectively – but it hasn’t changed perceptions.

Community Parenting

One of the other challenges that Haidt points out is that we used to have community parenting – even in America.  Kids were expected to be corrected by other parents.  But, as he exposed in his prior book, The Coddling of the American Mind, that is no longer the case.  Parents have become the defenders of their children – well beyond what is healthy.  Robert Putnam in his book Our Kids (which follows his immensely popular Bowling Alone) explains how there is a good sort of protection and enablement of kids – but one that takes place inside of community.

Today, correcting a child who isn’t yours is just as likely to end up with an argument with the other parent as it is to engender a thank you.  We’ve lost something important in how we work together to ensure the next generation.  This is a central point to Robert Putnam’s latest work, The Upswing.

Community Boundaries

Perhaps part of the challenge is that the world we live in today is different.  Before we had the internet or even interstates to take us to other geographies quickly, there was a certain difficulty picking up and leaving a community to find another.  The result is that you had to learn how to repair relational rifts.  If you’re a farmer with thousands of acres who doesn’t get along with your neighbor, it’s not easy to pick up and move.  Nor is it easy for the barber to find a new set of friends when he gets into a disagreement with the butcher.  The nature of community living make the barriers to entry and exit high enough to force important learning.  Robert Putnam would say that it forced us to build social capital – the kind of capital we can call on in times of need.  (See Bowling Alone.)

The need for appropriately rigid boundaries is not unique to societal concerns.  Richard Hackman in Collaborative Intelligence explains both the benefits and weaknesses.  Too rigid, and you can’t accept new people – too lax, and the team never is able to work together.  Charles Vogl in The Art of Community explains how boundaries provide shape to a community and separate it from others.

Our car culture and then virtual worlds have all but destroyed the barriers to exiting a community.  In their wake, we’re left less able to stay in relationships when we disagree.  (See also Alone Together.)

Always Broken

Every generation // Blames the one before // And all of their frustrations // Come beating down your door. – “The Living Years,” Mike + The Mechanics

We believe that we’re uniquely positioned at a time of crisis in our world.  But so did our parents.  So did their parents.  Every generation has some concerns about the fate of the world, all the way back to Socrates and his concern that writing and books would ruin us.  Some of this concern is just the sheer impact of change and the awareness that things will not continue to be the same forever.  Some of it is that this prevents our ability to predict, which makes us uncomfortable.  (See Mindreading.)

So, while Haidt is concerned, he recognizes that every generation is concerned.

Decoupling Excellence and Prestige

An odd thing happened.  Throughout history, prestige was tightly coupled to excellence.  The work of Anders Ericsson in Peak explains what it takes to become the best at something.  Throughout history, that was what was required to earn prestige.  However, the rise of mass media decoupled excellence and expertise from prestige.  Now, one could become an “expert” by simply asserting statements as fact (with no supporting data).  If you could manipulate media (whether television or social media), you could gain prestige from followers who don’t know that you don’t really know anything.

Instead of people getting advice from real experts without much notoriety, there’s a trend towards listening to those people who have the most followers.  The problem with this is that their number of followers is based on them saying what the followers want to hear – not the truth.  We see this all the time in the ways that our children and their spouses take in news and make decisions.  Instead of experts, they turn to TikTok and trust what a stranger says.

Feelings of Fear (and Not Safety)

John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth discovered that the way someone was attached to their parents changed the way that they would explore the world.  (See Attached and Attachment Theory in Practice.)  The sense of safety that children drew from knowing that there was someone who was looking out for them made it safe enough to explore the world.  The problem may be that we’ve created a world that we’ve convinced others isn’t safe.  It’s filled with murderers and rapists.  There are people who are going to mug you and steal all your money.  So, we retreated into the perceived safety of the virtual world.

The virtual world removed barriers.  It made it easier to connect with people all over the world – including the bad people who want only to take advantage of us.  Nigerian princes who desperately wanted to share their fortune with us keep dying.  All we have to do is share some banking details so that they can wire us the money.  Our kids are being extorted for sexually explicit images.

However, somehow the belief remains that our physical world is unsafe but the virtual world isn’t.  It’s a reversal of the truth that is difficult to wrap one’s mind around.

Harms

Haidt proposes that there are four key harms that are being inflicted on youth today:

1. Social Deprivation – we connect less even as we are more technologically connected (See also Alone Together.)
2. Sleep Deprivation – We are a society that is chronically getting insufficient sleep.
3. Attention Fragmentation – We’re constantly interrupted and unable to focus. (See also The Organized Mind.)
4. Addiction – We’ve become addicted to substances and social media. (See also The Globalization of Addiction.)

Users and Customers

Very few fields call their customers “users.”  Computers is the one place where the people who actually use the computers to do work are called users instead of customers.  Customers are those who pay for services.  An odd thing happened with the rise of social media.  The people who use social media aren’t the customers.  The truth is that social media companies don’t directly benefit from the number of users and the attention they pay to the platform.  What they benefit from is the advertisers who pay to get in front of those users.

As a result, social media companies don’t treat us like valued customers – because we aren’t.  We are simply users.  We’re users that aren’t important and can be replaced.

Parenting by the Numbers

All of us want to raise our children to be healthy, productive members of society.  However, that’s not as easy as it seems, as Judith Harris Rich points out in No Two Alike and The Nurture Assumption.  In our desire for certainty, we are constantly scanning the horizon for a class to be taken, a workshop to attend, or a book that has all the answers.  We fail to realize that there’s no silver bullet answer to raising children to not become The Anxious Generation.