From New York Times bestselling co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse in youth mental health--and a scientifically proven path to health and strength There is no bigger public health story now than the collapse in youth mental health. The numbers are terrifying and dominate our headlines. Haidt has spent his career speaking wisdom and truth into the most difficult landscapes--communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the perfect storm contributing to a public health emergency for Gen Z. For the cohort that hit puberty around 2009, their sense of self developed as the threads of three dramatic technological and social changes unspooled: smartphones and life with the constant companionship of a screen, front-facing cameras and the bevy of apps that thrived on selfie-culture, and social networks that reduced engagement and affirmation to likes and hearts alone. But phones aren't the only villain here; the ground for this crisis was seeded by a decades long shift from play-based childhoods to ones defined by over-supervision, structure, and fear. Haidt documents the four fundamental harms of the phone-based childhood: sleep deprivation, social deprivation, cognitive fragmentation, and addiction. He then shows the unique harms affecting boys, and the unique harms affecting girls. In the last section of The Anxious Generation, he offers concrete and scientifically based advice with separate chapters addressed to parents, schools, universities, governments, and to teens themselves. He draws on ancient wisdom and modern psychology to help everyone understand what healthy development would look like in the digital age.