Sunday, December 28, 2025

Review: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hooter: Parenting hacks in a digital world

After a decade of steady teen mental health, everything cracked around 2012. Right when smartphones swallowed childhood whole.

Haidt nails it: overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world flipped kids from playground explorers to screen-scrolling loners. Girls got hit hardest by Instagram's comparison trap. Boys by endless porn and gaming isolation. Sleep shattered, attention fragmented, self-harm spiked. Not coincidence. Correlation this tight screams causation.

No fluff. Haidt hands parents a battle plan: smartphones after high school, social media at 16, phone-free schools, unleash the kids for real-world chaos. Collective action beats solo nagging. Rally the neighborhood before Big Tech rewires the next batch. I like how digital devices flagged as child devices by a hardware confiugration which then apps and websites verify against seems like a technologically simple way to start building such a protective yet free setup for children to learn and grow in.

Stats morph into system failure: teen depression doubled, suicides tripled post-2010. This isn't another hand-wringing screed. It's a blueprint to unbreak childhood before we lose another generation to likes and filters. Read. Act. Now.


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