The anxious generation: Massive rewiring of childhood leads to epidemic of mental illness Jonathan Haidt Allen Lane (2024)
After reading this, I have two things to say: Anxious GenerationFirst, this book will sell a lot because Jonathan Haidt tells a scary story about child development that many parents have been led to believe. Second, the book repeats the claim that digital technology is rewiring children's brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness, which is scientifically unsupported. Worse, the bold suggestion that social media is to blame could distract us from effectively addressing the real causes of the current mental health crisis among young people.
Haidt claims that a massive restructuring of children's brains has occurred “by engineering a flood of addictive content into our eyes and ears,” and that “by eliminating physical play and face-to-face interaction, these companies have reshaped childhood and human development on an almost unimaginable scale.”Such serious claims require serious evidence.
Collection: Promoting youth mental health
Haidt presents graphs throughout the book that show the simultaneous increase in digital technology use and adolescent mental health problems. On the first day of my graduate statistics class, I draw a parallel line on the board connecting two different phenomena and ask my students what they think is happening. Within a few minutes, students usually begin to tell detailed stories about how the two phenomena are related, even explaining how one may cause the other. The graphs presented throughout the book will help teach students the basics of causal inference and how to avoid making up stories by looking only at trend lines.
Hundreds of researchers, including me, have explored the larger effects that Haidt suggests. Our efforts have found no associations, small, or mixed associations. Most of the data are correlational. If an association is found over time, it would not suggest that social media use predicts or causes depression, but rather that young people who already have mental health problems use such platforms more frequently or in different ways than their healthy peers.1.
These are not just our data or my opinions: several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message.2–5The analysis, conducted across 72 countries, found no consistent or measurable association between happiness and the global presence of social media.6Moreover, results from the Adolescent Cognitive Development study, the largest longitudinal study of adolescent brain development in the United States, found no evidence of dramatic changes associated with digital technology use.7Haidt, the social psychologist at New York University, is a skilled storyteller, but his story is currently in the process of being vetted.
Of course, our current understanding is incomplete, and more research is always needed. As a psychologist who has spent the past 20 years studying child and adolescent mental health, tracking their well-being and use of digital technology, I understand the frustration this generation feels and their desire for easy answers. As a parent of adolescents, I want to identify simple causes for the sadness and pain this generation is reporting.
Complex issues
Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. The onset and progression of mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression are caused by a complex combination of genetic and environmental factors. In the United States, suicide rates among people of most ages have been steadily increasing for the past 20 years. Researchers point to access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship, and social isolation as major causes.8.
Social media's impact on teen mental health: The missing link
The current generation of young people grew up in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008. Haidt suggests that the resulting poverty is not a factor, as unemployment rates have fallen. However, analysis of the differential impact of the economic shock shows that families in the bottom 20% of the income distribution continue to be hurt.9Nearly one in six children in the United States live below the poverty line and are growing up amid an opioid crisis, school shootings, and growing fears of racism, sexism, and violence.
The good news is that more young people than ever before are open about their symptoms and mental health concerns. The bad news is that there are insufficient services to meet their needs. In the United States, on average, there is one school psychologist for every 1,119 students.10.
Haidt's work on emotions, culture, and morality has been influential. To be fair, Haidt admits that he is not an expert in clinical psychology, child development, or media studies. In his previous books, he used the analogy of an elephant and its rider to argue that our instinctive reactions (the elephant) can drag our rational minds (the rider) around. Subsequent research has shown how easy it is to find evidence that supports our initial instinctive reactions to a problem. A lesson from Haidt's own work is that we should be careful to question the assumptions we take to be true. Once upon a time, everyone “knew” the world was flat. Testing previous assumptions against data can prevent us from becoming the rider dragged around by the elephant if our assumptions are proven wrong.
A generation in danger
Two things can be independently true about social media. First, there is no evidence that use of these platforms rewires children's brains or causes epidemics of mental illness. Second, these platforms are in need of significant reform, given the amount of time young people spend on them. Many of the solutions Haidt suggests to parents, adolescents, educators, and big tech companies are reasonable, such as tightening content moderation policies and requiring companies to consider the age of their users when designing their platforms and algorithms. Other solutions, such as age-based restrictions or bans on mobile devices, are likely to be ineffective in practice or, worse, may backfire, given what we know about adolescent behavior.
The third truth is that our generation is in crisis and desperately in need of the best that science and evidence-based solutions can offer. Unfortunately, our time is wasted telling stories that are not supported by research and that do little to support young people who need and deserve more help.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.