Author: Jonathan Haidt
In his new book, “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt argues that today’s children and young adults are not being protected enough.
“The Anxious Generation” is a penetrating and alarming accounting of how adults began to overprotect children in the real world while giving essentially no protection in the brutal online world.
Haidt documents the four fundamental harms of phone-based sleep deprivation, social deprivation, cognitive fragmentation, and addiction.
He then shows the unique harms affecting boys and the unique harms affecting girls.
In the last section of “The Anxious Generation,” he offers concrete and scientifically based advice with separate chapters addressed to parents, schools, universities, governments, and teens themselves.
He draws on ancient wisdom and modern psychology to help everyone understand what healthy development would look like in the digital age.
“I’ve been struggling to figure out,” Haidt writes, “what is happening to us? How is technology changing us?”
His answer: “The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.”
