The Anxious Generation

Meeting Dates: February 10, 24; March 10, 24; April 7, 2025

Meeting Times & Place: 4:00–5:00 p.m. at CHS Library

THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A Washington Post Notable Book • A New York Times Notable Book

A must-read for parents: This book examines the impact smartphones, social media, and other forms of technology are having on the mental health of our youth and offers solutions for how we can help.

If you are interested in joining us to discuss this book and the impact social media is having on our youth, please email Brenda Southworth at brenda.southworth@ccsd.us or inform your child’s teacher so that he or she can message me. The books will be provided for free, but I need a headcount as soon as possible to order them. Thank you.

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that emerged in many countries simultaneously. He investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most importantly, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us and proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most challenging landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.

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