“The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” is the title of a new book written by Jonathan Haidt. The book was recently recommended to me by my daughter-in-law, Kristen. Haidt is an NYU professor, and his 300-page groundbreaking book sounds the alarm concerning the negative impact of social media on children. I found this YouTube video interview of Haidt, which will provide an executive summary of his book.

If you’re a parent or grandparent of pre-teens, I would highly recommend watching the YouTube video, and then you can decide if you want to read the book. I know of a wonderful mom and dad whose children are all in counseling with chronic issues that never made sense to me until I read this book.

Here are the sound bites that really hit me:

1. Haidt believes parents are overprotecting their pre-teens in real-world activities, and underprotecting them in virtual world (online) activities.
2. He makes a very compelling case that in 2010, pre-teens began to experience the Great Rewiring as a result of the easy accessibility of social media on their cell phones.
3. He uses the expressions “Play-Based Childhood” (which is what I had the privilege of experiencing growing up) and “Phone-Based Childhood.”
4. Prior to writing this book, Haidt was already warning parents that they were being overly protective of their children and it was negatively affecting their development. In this book, he provides some pretty clear evidence for his position, including the detrimental effects on the natural maturing of the brain.
5. He provides several charts showing the dramatic change in children’s:
   • Daily time with friends.
   • Sleep habits (50 percent of pre-teen girls get less than seven hours of sleep per night).
   • Rates of depression (currently at 30 percent for pre-teen girls) and anxiety.
   • Increased self-harm and suicide rates.
6. He summarizes his concerns in these four Harms:
• Social Deprivation: Children need a lot of time to play with each other, face to face, to foster social development skills.
• Sleep Deprivation: During puberty the brain is rewiring itself even faster than it did in the years before puberty, and sleep is essential.
• Attention Fragmentation: It’s hard for adults to stay committed to one mental road, but it’s far more difficult for an adolescent, who has an immature frontal cortex and therefore a limited ability to say “No.”
• Addiction: Our good friend dopamine is provided by online screen time and it’s very hard to resist. It’s a well-known fact that tech/social media executives shield their own children from social media because they’re aware of the dangers to children.
7. Haidt provides some shocking data about boys spending significant time in the virtual online world with video games and pornography.
8. He recommends parents provide children under age 16 with flip phones versus smartphones.
9. Haidt recommends four critical ways that tech companies and governments can improve the virtual world for adolescents:
   

   • Assert a Duty of Care (currently there’s nothing built into social media platforms to protect children.)
   • Raise the Age of Internet Adulthood to 16.
   • Place the Burden of Age Verification on the Tech Companies.
   • Encourage Phone-Free Schools.

There are antagonists who dispute Haidt’s position by saying there’s a correlation but not a causation related to pre-teens’ mental health and social media. However, the skeptical side of me would suggest that the tech/social media companies are probably financing biased research, and no one has suggested an alternative cause for the mental health epidemic.

Although Haidt provides significantly more ideas for parents and teachers, I’ll stop now and pray that if you have pre-teens, you’ll invest the time to at least watch the podcast. Then, if you want more details, read the book; it includes lots of independent data and research from the U.S. and other Western countries.