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The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Audiobook10 hours

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

Written by Jonathan Haidt

Narrated by Jonathan Haidt and Sean Pratt

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of 2024 • A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024 • A TIME 100 Must-Read Book of 2024 • Named a Best Book of 2024 by the Economist, the New York Post, and Town & Country • The Goodreads Choice Award Nonfiction Book of the Year

A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

“With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world . . . While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids.” —Shannon Carlin, TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2024


After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherPenguin Audio
Release dateMar 26, 2024
ISBN9780593829097

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Reviews for The Anxious Generation

Rating: 4.181102582677164 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5

    Feb 21, 2025

    There is no audiobook. This is just a 3 min sample and then says I finished
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5

    Nov 13, 2024

    This book presents as an important topic to me. I am a Zillennial and distinctly remember the smartphone revolution as a key event throughout high school. By the time I graduated, everyone had one. I do think there is an issue with attention being driven away as app design takes advantage of human psychology. Technology advanced rapidly before we could regulate it. The author has some sweeping reforms suggested but I'm not sure how easy those are to implement. I do know that I have benefited from less screen time (this is coming from a software developer). There is something meditative about it. I hope we improve things in the future.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5

    Aug 31, 2024

    I strongly recommend this book to anyone and everyone who is raising children.
    Screen-based childhoods do a disservice to everyone in a society.
    Jonathan Haidt has solutions to the epidemic of mental illness running rampant in childhood since the advent of smartphones.
    The book is organized very well and the author includes a list of extensive references and lists links to onliine resources and further information.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5

    Dec 8, 2024

    “The Anxious Generation” is an impressively well-organized book that makes it relatively easy and enjoyable for readers to wrap their heads around some complex problems.

    The author, a professor at New York University, argues that the seismic shift from a “play-based” to a “phone-based” childhood has increased anxiety and depression among adolescents. He spends a great deal of time citing research that suggests the digital age has “rewired” our brains. While Haidt focuses on the impact this rewiring has had on children, his book should prod people of all ages to reassess their smartphone and social media rituals. I know too many adults (including a friend who will turn 40 this month) whose digital habits undoubtedly cause some level of anxiety, stress and depression.

    Haidt’s book is also a condemnation of some social media platforms that have embraced tactics to make their platforms as addictive to children as slot machines are to many adults. He reviews actions some platforms have taken in the name of protecting minors from what he describes as the digital “Wild West,” but he argues the steps have been largely ineffective. As a college-level professor who has taught media literacy for decades, I was already familiar with most of the material the author included on this timely concern.

    True, some readers may brand Haidt’s proposed solutions to what he calls a mental health “epidemic” as simplistic. His four key suggestions to parents involve providing kids with more unsupervised play and independence, banning smartphones before high school, banning social media until age 16 and creating more phone-free schools.
    “The Anxious Generation” offers an enlightening look at an incredibly timely issue.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5

    Jul 28, 2024

    I'm looking at my own media use as a result of reading this book.