Book Review: The Anxious Generation

‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt explores the rise of anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges among young people in the era of smartphones and social media. Drawing on psychology, sociology, and neuroscience, Haidt argues that a “phone-based childhood” has fundamentally changed how children grow, play, and connect. The book offers both a diagnosis of the problem and a call to restore balance by reintroducing more independence, play, and real-world interaction into kids’ lives.

Although I was fairly sceptical of Facebook right from its inception, I did join-up for a while in the 2010’s. It had its merits; I was able to connect to some long-lost relatives. But I soon realised that the stream of shallow posts from people I barely cared to know did not bring happiness. Nor did the increasing number of ill-informed posts about matters of politics and community safety. Eventually, I shut my account and never looked back. But that was a long time ago. Since then, Facebook has been joined by other social media platforms such as Instagram, SnapChat and TikTok which compete for users attention with streams of low-quality content about all manner of nefarious subjects.

For grown-ups like me (a “Millennial“), these platforms can be troubling enough, but what of children? Coupled with the ubiquitous availability of high-speed internet and smart devices, social media has come to dominate many peoples lives. All around me, I witness what could only be described as “phone addiction”; people who are simply unable to ignore their phone for more than a minute or two. These people are almost always distracted, and for good reason: their phones and the social media platforms that run on them are designed to interrupt and “engage” them as much as possible. I have had to sit through endless “social” gatherings with friends and family whilst they sit there playing with their phones instead of being sociable. I know some people who literally cannot find anything else to do in their spare time than play with their phone.

When prominent cartoonist Michael Leunig published his famous “Mummy was Busy” cartoon in the Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers, there was outrage from some quarters. In the cartoon, Leunig depicted a mother walking with a pram whilst watching her phone. When her baby inadvertently fell out, she didn’t even notice and the baby wished that they were “loved like a phone”. Like all good cartoonists, Michael Leunig was holding up a mirror to Australian society, but Australian society did not like what it saw. Instead of recognising that, perhaps, there was a broad problem with phone addiction, people worked themselves up into a lather of indignation at a slight that had been delivered to “hard-working mothers” across the nation. A critique of phone culture turned into a sexist attack on women, or so they’d have you believe. Leunig’s point had been entirely missed.

We can see the effects that phone addiction is having on adults, so what then of children?

For our youngest citizens, the damage is even more acute because their brains are developing. In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt provides ample evidence that the parental reliance on mobile devices and (for older children) social media as an amusement tool for children is having a detrimental impact on their development. Haidt cites credible, peer-reviewed data that demonstrates that rates of depression and anxiety in young people skyrocketed from the time that smartphones were released. His argument, which is made compellingly, is that whilst social media pre-dated the smartphone, it was the smartphone that made access ubiquitous. Prior to that, one had to sit at a computer or a laptop to gain access, because ‘dumb phones’ were simply unable to access such content and internet speeds were too slow to support it. That previous mode of access, which would often be in a public space, precluded the possibility of addiction or negative mental health effects for the vast majority of minors.

For me, The Anxious Generation articulates what had seemed innately logical for some time; that the prevalence of smartphones and social media was unhealthy for people, especially children. But until I read this book, I had no basis for articulating such views other than a “hunch”. Haidt provides the argument and the data to back it up.

What was most surprising to discover is how girls and boys are affected differently by social media. For girls, it is the body-shaming and bulling that comes with image-based platforms that cause the most harm. For boys, it’s pornography and gaming. Both are as bad as each other, but work in different ways. Haidt refers to this process as “the great rewiring” (a much-laboured phrase in the book) to describe how the reduction of play-based childhoods, and their replacement with ‘screen time’ have caused the brains of children to develop differently. These trends, when combined with “over-parenting” have led to a generation of young adults that are unable to easily cope with uncertainty and change, and who in increasing numbers are afflicted with anxiety and/or depression. Many are socially isolated.

Haidt made a most interesting argument when he spoke about the role of “helicopter parents” and the general rise of over-protective parenting since the 1990’s. He noted the irony that as the physical world has become safer (crime in most Western nations is much reduced to what it used to be in the 1950’s and 1960’s, including Australia), parents have become ever more protective of their children in it. For example, in generations past where many children may have walked alone to the local school once they attained a certain age, now parents will drive them “to be safe”. The rise in parental fear of ‘predators’ has caused this change in behaviour in adults, which has reduced the ability of children to learn from each other in an informal context, to play and to socialise. Yet, these same parents will happily permit their children to wander unfettered in the online world, where the likelihood of being bullied or actually interacting with a ‘predator’ is far more likely. Haidt argues for a reduction in real-world supervision for many children (depending on age) with a corresponding increase in supervision in the online world.

The Australian Government’s new Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, better known colloquially as the Under-16 Social Media Ban, could not have come at a better time, in my view. Although the tech companies have fiercely resisted it, Australia has taken a world-leading role in attempting to address the harms caused by social media. Other countries, as well as the European Union, are looking at the Australian experience closely.

Where the book falls down is in the last couple of chapters, where Haidt wanders into giving more general lifestyle advice. Whilst well-intentioned, it seemed to me to have overextended the brief. Nevertheless, The Anxious Generation makes a worthwhile and informed contribution to the debate about social media regulation, as well as the broader social issues that contribute to the sharp decline in the mental health of young people (in particular). It refutes many of the spurious arguments put forward by social media companies (and their supporters) with convincing arguments and evidence.

I found this to be a most engaging and thoughtful book that left me with a far better understanding of how young people are affected by social media.

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