Book Review: The Anxious Generation

In The Anxious Generation, Mr Haidt produces his best work yet, having already contributed to a series squarely aimed at everything wrong with our modern, technologically enabled society. Mr Haidt has already written The Coddling of the American Mind. It may be credited with reigniting the debate on freedom of speech in campuses and American society as a whole. Mr Haidt attacks the pervasive philosophy of “safetyism”, which he defines as an irrational need to safeguard, protect and shelter children at all costs. While well-meaning, the good intentions often translate into stunted emotional and mental development for children.

The central thesis of the book is hard to disagree with. One, humans have evolved through the millennia on the basis of a long period of socio-cultural adjustment. It takes nearly 20 years for the human brain to fully develop into a functional one, plus or minus a couple of years. And the process of child rearing - or “parenting” in modern speak - is accompanied by signposts marking the emotional and physical maturity of children. From sacred birth rituals to secular licenses, these events are steps towards adulthood, and with that, responsibility. Two, the onset of mobile phones and social media have hijacked this process of maturation. In what Mr Haidt terms as the Great Rewiring of the Child’s Brain, he argues that governments, parents, and schools have largely ceded the ground to profit-oriented tech companies bent on maximizing profits by exploiting the vulnerabilities of a child’s undeveloped mind. Third, the radical safetyist culture has rendered the physical, three-dimensional world largely out-of-reach to children. Mr Haidt cites disturbing examples the public reporting unsupervised children as criminally liable cases of parental “neglect”. The passing of numerous child protection laws in several states severely constrained and continues to constrain parents to allow children to roam.

In so doing, society has become overprotective in the physical world and underprotective in the virtual world. This imbalance, which began to show in charts all across the developed Anglosphere (which tech companies first penetrated), has resulted in an alarming increase in anxiety, depression, and maladaptive psychological disorders. Mr Haidt convincingly and scientifically argues that since 2008, accounting for other third-factor confounders, these disorders are caused rather than merely correlate to the prevalence, distribution, and growth of social media, video games, online networks, and smartphone penetration. The COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in massive populations isolated for long periods of time, exacerbated and empowered the dangerous psychological mechanisms. The result we see today - Gen Z children in the workplace with rising levels of anxiety and depression - are the delayed effects of this trend.

The book is alarming and critical, but most importantly, educational. Parents, teachers, and education officials are facing a pandemic that they have little to no experience dealing with. For diseases, at least, one has the work of microbiologists dating all the way to the 19th century. Psychology is by comparison a relatively new field, and its insights into this emerging trend are also quite fresh. No doubt, the debate will continue to draw more research, criticism, and changes in policy. But Mr Haidt’s contribution to this side of the argument is momentous. He has, for one, managed to turn the tide against the multi-billion dollar businesses that run the attention economy.