Review: The Anxious Generation. How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt

Over the last decade, the mental health of young people has become a matter of increasing concern to politicians, commentators and others. In its manifesto for the 2024 general election, the Labour Party identified ‘poor mental health’ as a ‘barrier to learning’ and promised ‘access to specialist mental health professionals in every school’ (Our Plan to Change Britain: Labour Party Manifesto, 2024). The issue that the Labour government said it would seek to address in this way has also received detailed attention from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University. Haidt first examined this issue in an essay, ‘The coddling of the American mind’, that he and Greg Lukianoff published in The Atlantic magazine in 2015. Thereafter, they wrote on the same issue at book length (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting up a Generation for Failure, 2018). In each of these publications, they associated a decline in mental health among young people with the introduction of smartphones in the second half of the noughties.

Haidt has now returned to this issue in The Anxious Generation. He argues not merely for a correlation but, rather, for a causal connection between the use of smartphones by young people and increases among them in rates of depression, anxiety and self-harm. Haidt also presents his readers with a set of proposals as to how parents, schools and government can respond to these matters. These proposals, as we will see, serve ends that call to mind the liberalism of John Stuart Mill who, in his On Liberty (1859), urged us to think of individuals as ‘progressive’ beings.

In The Anxious Generation, Haidt traces a timeline at the end of which he finds a ‘sharp decline in the mental health’ of members of ‘Generation Z’ (who were born after 1995). The first point on this timeline is an alteration in parenting that began in the 1980s. According to Haidt, a movement away from a ‘play-based childhood’ occurred at this time. Consequently, children engaged less frequently in unsupervised interaction with their peers. As a result, ‘they lost exposure to the kinds of challenging physical and social experiences that all young mammals need to develop basic competences’. These ‘experiential losses’ prompt Haidt to describe parents as overprotective in ‘the real world’.

With this point in place, Haidt moves to the second point on his timeline. This is the introduction of the smartphone in 2007. This technology—which gave children ready access to the internet—encouraged a further change in parenting. It took the form of a ‘smartphone-based childhood’ (a mode of socialisation that no previous generation had experienced). This shift resulted in large numbers of young people spending much of their time in a virtual world where they were, according to Haidt, ‘underprotected’.

On Haidt's account, the combination of underprotection in the virtual world and overprotection in the real world has left many young people ill-equipped to meet the demands of life as an adult. He drives this point home when he turns to the third (and very specific) point on his timeline. He tells us that, in 2014, members of Generation Z arrived on university campuses in the USA and elsewhere and presented those who were to teach them with a ‘surge in suffering’. Mental illness afflicted them much more often than their immediate predecessors. Moreover, they made demands for security—protection from expression that they found disturbing and safe spaces—with much greater frequency than students who had been at university just a few years earlier.

While clinical conditions such as depression feature in Haidt's analysis, he identifies a smartphone-based childhood as the cause of a range of more particular harms—including social deprivation, sleep deprivation and attention fragmentation. Moreover, he argues that these conditions and harms explain why a significant number of the young people he describes engage with others in a ‘defensive’ mode. They seek to manage threats to their sense of security - such as emotional disturbance - in ways that will reduce exposure to risk.

Haidt contrasts such defensiveness with an ‘exploratory’ mode of engagement that was regularly present in university students and other young people until recent times. He argues that this mode of engagement is necessary if young people are to have any prospect of flourishing. This is because it equips them to negotiate a world in which risks are inescapable. Haidt adds that those who lack the ability to engage on an exploratory basis with the world around them may fail to ‘launch’ as adults. Here, he focuses attention on an issue that would have caught John Stuart Mill's eye.

If societies are to respond effectively to the harms and dangers on which The Anxious Generation focuses, coordinated responses are, according to Haidt, essential. Moreover, he proposes a range of responses to the state of affairs he describes. Parents should deny their children below the age of 14 ‘round-the-clock’ internet access by providing them not with smartphones, but with more basic alternatives. Schools should operate on a ‘phone-free’ basis. When Haidt turns to government, he argues that it should require internet service providers to adopt better age verification procedures and bear a duty of care attuned to the vulnerability of the young. He adds that, even if governments fail to work along these lines, his other proposals should have positive effects.

As well as making these proposals, Haidt identifies as relevant to his concerns the account of ‘antifragility’ offered by his colleague at New York University Nassim Nicholas Taleb. According to Taleb, humans exhibit antifragility when they encounter and overcome sources of difficulty, such as an academic discipline with which they are unfamiliar (N. N. Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, 2013). Taleb adds that, in the absence of such difficulty, the ability to make responses of the sort he describes may ‘atrophy’. Haidt builds on Taleb's account of antifragility by arguing that people in whom this property is strong are ‘experience-expectant’. By this he means that that they are ‘ready to go’—willing, for example, to engage with aspects of an academic discipline that may generate controversy and give rise to feelings of offence.

Through the use of terms like ‘antifragility’ and ‘experience expectancy’ Haidt draws our attention to what we might call a dispositional deficit. Dispositions find expression in tendencies or characteristic ways of behaving in those who possess them. While Haidt does not talk in terms of a disposition, he finds defensive tendencies in members of the generation on whom he focuses. If we share with John Stuart Mill the idea that humans are ‘progressive’ beings, who have it in their power to engage in ‘experiments of living’, defensiveness of the sort Haidt describes is a matter of obvious practical concern.

Haidt's use of terms like ‘experience-expectancy’ and ‘antifragility’ strongly suggests interest in a disposition to which he attaches value. Here we can see signs of a Millian agenda that he could usefully have brought into sharp focus. It is the same story when we turn to his proposals, like denial of access to smartphones and tighter regulation. The means by which he seeks to protect young people serve ends that would have made sense to Mill.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt. Allen Lane. 400 pp. £25.