The Anxious Generation

Summary

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, PhD (2024) argues that the adolescent mental-health crisis of the 2010s and 2020s is largely driven by two concurrent shifts: a great rewiring of childhood around smartphones and social media, and a parallel under-supply of unsupervised play and real-world risk-taking in adolescence. Haidt walks through the experimental and longitudinal evidence on social media and adolescent mental health, contrasts the experience of girls and boys, and proposes a four-norm intervention agenda (no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and far more independence and free play in the real world). The framing is applied and policy-oriented, not clinical-protocol.

About

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor at NYU Stern, author of The Righteous Mind and (with Greg Lukianoff) The Coddling of the American Mind. The Anxious Generation (2024) is his most recent book, focused on the mental-health effects of phone-based childhood and on a public-health-style intervention agenda.

Why I recommend it

Haidt's case for treating phone-based childhood as a population-level mental-health issue — not a parenting-style debate — is the framing I use when patients and families ask about screen time, social media, and adolescent anxiety. The book is useful for any clinician or parent who wants the underlying argument and a structured intervention frame.