AN FT,
OBSERVER AND NEW SCIENTIST 'BOOK TO LOOK OUT' FOR IN 2024 An urgent and
insightful investigation into the collapse in youth mental health, from the
influential social psychologist and international bestselling author Jonathan
Haidt has spent his career speaking wisdom and truth in some of the most the
most difficult spaces - communities polarized by politics and religion,
campuses battling culture wars, and now the perfect storm contributing to a
public health emergency for teenagers today. In The Anxious Generation, Haidt
argues that for the cohort that hit puberty around 2009, their sense of self
developed as the threads of three dramatic technological and social changes
emerged: smartphones and life with the constant companionship of a screen, front-facing
cameras and apps that thrive on selfie-culture, and social networks that reduce
engagement and affirmation to likes and hearts alone. This book shows how the
ground for the current crisis in teen mental health was seeded by a
decades-long shift from play-based childhoods to ones defined by
over-supervision, structure, and fear: how adults began to overprotect children
in the real world while unwittingly offering scant protection in the brutal
online world. Haidt delves into the latest psychological and biological
research to show the four fundamental ways in which a phone-based childhood
disrupts development - sleep deprivation, social deprivation, cognitive
fragmentation, and addiction - while offering concrete and scientifically based
advice to parents, schools, universities, governments, and to teens themselves.
Drawing on ancient wisdom and cutting-edge research, this eye-opening book is a
life-raft and a powerful call-to-arms.
