Reading Between the Lines

‘The Anxious Generation’ explores the effects of growing up entirely in the Digital Age

by Jessica Martell

In “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt explains the impact smartphones and their addictive content have on young people and offers hope through next steps to address the problem. Image credit: Amazon.com

Most books I read add some dimension to the way I see the world, but every so often I encounter a book that really changes me, changes not just the way I see the world, but changes the way I exist in it.

For me it started in high school with Mitch Albom’s “Tuesdays with Morrie.” As a young adult launching in the post-9/11 and great recession era, it was “The Survivors Club” by Ben Sherwood. In 2024, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” topped The Wall Street Journal’s list of best books of the year, and it has been added to the list of books that changed my life because of its stark reminder to put down the phone.

In “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt explains the impact smartphones and their addictive content have on our young people. While the author includes substantial data and research to support his claims, it is presented in a very clear and easy-to-understand way. Readers will, no doubt, recognize many of the phenomena Haidt explains—safety-first playgrounds, trigger warnings, and groups of people staring at their phones while together in public.

The book has four parts, each of which has up to four chapters. In Part 1, Haidt establishes that there is a “surge of suffering,” and he provides a multitude of research. For example, he cites results from a U. S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health that shows rates of young adult members of Gen Z who reported “high levels of anxiety” increased 139% between 2010 and 2020. Importantly, anxiety rates reported prior to 2010 had been relatively stable, and the sharp increase began around 2012, well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Haidt makes a compelling link between smartphone usage and the mental health decline by showing the pattern worldwide. In this way, he dispels the suggestion that domestic issues related to gun violence or the economy might be the cause of the surging rates of anxiety and depression in the United States.

Haidt follows these findings with a bold statement:

“… two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.”

Part 2 of the book, “The Backstory: The Decline of the Play-Based Childhood” is a fascinating exploration of what children need during childhood for healthy development into capable adults. It also includes a reflection on the way society has drifted away, albeit often with the best intentions, from meeting those needs.

In Part 3, the tone gets a bit darker as Haidt describes “The Great Rewiring: The Rise of The Phone-Based Childhood.” In this section, Haidt explains “The Four Foundational Harms: Social Deprivation, Sleep Deprivation, Attention Fragmentation and Addiction.” One of the most haunting passages from this section involves the economic principle of opportunity cost, which Haidt defines as “the loss of other potential gains when one alternative is chosen.” According to Haidt, opportunity cost takes a major hit when considering the six to eight hours per day that teens spend on all screen-based leisure activities. The reader can’t help but mourn the lost time, missed opportunities and wasted potential sacrificed to the screens.

“The Anxious Generation” reads like a nonfiction horror story, a dystopian tragedy that might have been described by Ray Bradbury or George Orwell 70-plus years ago, both fascinating and terrifying in equal measure.

However, Haidt offers hope in Part 4 by concluding the book with thorough, specific, reasonable next steps government, tech companies, schools and parents can take to address the problems we can no longer ignore. This book will be an interesting read for smartphone users as it helps readers understand the technology in their pockets and their relationships to that technology. Beyond smartphone users, this book is a must-read for anyone involved with young people–from parents to policy-makers.

Jessica Martell spent 17 years as a high school English teacher before accepting her current position as an educational consultant. She and her husband live in Munith with their cat, Scootie.