I recently read The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt (2024). Dr. Dennis Wissing, the Dean of our college at LSU Shreveport, “baited” us to read this book. I am thankful.
My top takeaways:
- Mental health and social acuity of children plummeted from 2010-2015, the window in which phone-based existence began to predominate.
- Haidt’s 4-fold proposal: 1) No smartphones before HS, 2) No social media before 16, 3) Phone-free schools, 4) Far more supervised play and childhood independence.
- Fear triggers full response; anxiety is triggered at “perceived” threat.
- Smartphones allow us, and our kids, to be “forever elsewhere.”
- Attunement develops in free play as result of “serve and return” interactions, which forge emotional maturity.
- Synchronous, F2F, physical interactions serve as basis for this healthy social development.
- Social media in a powerful purveyor of conformity attraction, serving as virtual peer pressure.
- Antifragile = things that need to get pummeled and knocked down in order to grow stronger.
- Safetyism = safety above all else.
- The human brain has two subsystems: Discover mode and Defend mode.
- Superbly effective experience blockers: Safetyism and smartphones.
- Four Harms of a phone-based childhood… Harm #1: Social Deprivation. Harm #2: Sleep Deprivation. Harm #3: Attention Fragmentation. Harm #4: Addiction.
- 4 reasons girls are particularly vulnerable: 1) Girls are more affected by visual social comparison and perfectionism. 2) Girls’ aggression is more relational. 3) Girls more easily share emotions and disorders. 4) Girls are more subject to predation and harassment.
- Loss of belonging to a loving and lasting community may be the highest price of social media addiction.
- “The Great Rewiring of Childhood pulled young people out of real-world communities, including their own families, and created a new kind of childhood lived in multiple rapidly shifting networks.” (p. 197)
- Our attention makes USthe product that platforms sell to their customers.
- We should consider the Gardener vs Carpenter analogical dichotomy of childrearing.
My favorite quotes:
“… overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.” (p. 9)
“I see few indications that a phone-based childhood develops antifragility.” (p. 81)
“We should be giving children more of the practice they need in the real world and delaying their entry into the online world, where the benefits are fewer and the guardrails nearly nonexistent.” (p. 82)
“The strongest and most satisfying communities come into being when something lifts people out of the lower level so that they have powerful collective experiences. They all enter the realm of the sacred together, at the same time.” (p. 203)
“We need to start prevention early, in elementary and middle schools, before our children start wilting.” (p. 263)
I’ve read JH before, and been impressed with his thinking each time. A worthy scholar and impactful researcher who seems genuinely interested in shaping better for futures for all of us, particularly our children.
*If you’d like to read more of nc’s blatherings, go to nc’s Recursive Learning.
