I agree with most of what is said about too much tech being detrimental (but not all, esp the parts regarding gender identity, religion etc).

Although I do not believe that tech is to blame for anxiety increases alone. I believe at least part of that is genetic disposition, there is a nature component, not just nurture. (Also diet, environment and all social relationships play a part too)

The main issue I face as a parent who restricts tech usage is that because 98% of my children’s peers do NOT have those restrictions, my child feels disconnected from her peers and a social pariah which is also detrimental to her mental health not to mention the damage that is caused to my relationship with her over policing her tech time - it’s a double edged sword. I’m trying to protect her mental health and development but I’m also causing her distress and fracturing our bond because all the other parents give free rein to their kids so i become the mean mum... So what is the solution if the majority of parents don’t restrict their children’s usage and them being online 24/7 is the norm for their entire cohort?

Another thing I disagree with in regard to the book is the push to let kids be free range and without supervision out in the world. The world isn’t like it was back in the pre-gen Z day. 12 year old kids today are not like 12 year old kids then. Unsupervised 12 years old are more likely to engage in vaping, drugs and sex (is tech to blame partly for this, probably) so leaving them unchaperoned amongst peers is not ideal. I’m more for adult supervised play dates and sleepovers - kids can still have privacy in areas of the house to play and bond and would also be less likely to partake in dangerous activities while in the house.
But also, as a parent, I feel it’s my duty to get my child to the age of 18 alive and relatively unharmed therefore the cost to benefit ratio of my 9year old wandering alone or with friends wherever they wish is not worth it to me. Kids can run free in the park with a parent physically at that park, having help within reach is not as big aa hindrance to them developing resilience etc as the author makes it out to be.

It helps me to know my decision to restrict my kids access to tech/social media is supported by studies , but it still makes me feel like crap when my kids become ostracised by their peers because they are not in the loop and I just look like some Luddite overprotective parent. Unless all parents band together to set hard limits for kids under 16 for tech, there’s no real completely beneficial solution. There’s a price to pay either way.

“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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

The actual recommendations seem sound and backed up with data but the framing seems simplistic. The author doesn't seem to recognize any possibilities for what kids could be doing with unstructured free time besides "addictive social media use" or "physical free play with other kids." Having witnessed some major brawls between several dozen unaccompanied adolescents that required calling the police, I suspect a lot of them could use unstructured, non-social media time on their own that has nothing to do with jockeying for social position in person or online. Read a book, sketch something, bake cookies, write a song, work on your cosplay for the anime convention, take a quiet walk, etc., and develop a sense of self in order to give less of a damn about what other people think of you. There are passing mentions of a boy cooking a four course meal in a chapter on developing independent skills, and of going for a walk without one's phone to capture a sense of awe in a section on spirituality, religious or otherwise, but on the whole the thesis seems to completely neglect the possibility that solitary, screen-free recreation, or at least recreation that uses screens more in the way that we did before the modern era of social media like writing your novel on a computer, is a choice some kids would make. The author references an increase in happiness among adolescents in the Millennial generation, which he acknowledges was starting to come online but not in the hyper-connected, smartphone, emphasis on likes and shares era of social media into which Gen Z entered. Speaking as one of those Millennials: we did not live in each other's back pockets on phones, but we didn't live in each other's back pockets metaphorically in the sense of being glued to each other in person, either. We saw each other in school, we got together some days outside of school, and some days even if we had nothing else going on instead of hanging out with our friends we stayed home and wrote fan fiction and then set the perfect AIM away message when we were AFK, and the data that we were happier was right there. Haidt sometimes specifically emphasizes that limiting access to social media doesn't mean limiting access to the whole internet, but there doesn't seem to be any room for the rest of the internet in his idea of adolescence, either. In the actual chapter about video games he says that video games actually proved not to be harmful for most gamers, but were for some, but in the rest of the book he talks about the dangers of video games without mentioning the relatively low threat as he does in that chapter. He makes a brief reference to the possible benefits of online community for people "with autism" in his words and then ignores autistic people for the rest of the book. He makes a couple of passing references to avoiding "triggering" (quotation marks in the text) students but never discusses what this looks like, or makes mention of the fact that people with PTSD may need trigger warnings in order to avoid situations that will induce flashbacks. In short, I would love to see these strong points and proposals put forward in a book written with more nuance and a wider consideration of the human experience.