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    The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
    The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
    The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

    Written by Jonathan Haidt

    Narrated by Jonathan Haidt and Sean Pratt

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

    “Erudite, engaging, combative, crusading.” —New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

    “Words that chill the parental heart… thanks to Mr. Haidt, we can glimpse the true horror of what happened not only in the U.S. but also elsewhere in the English-speaking world… lucid, memorable… galvanizing.” —Wall Street Journal

    “[An] important new book... The shift in kids’ energy and attention from the physical world to the virtual one, Haidt shows, has been catastrophic, especially for girls.” —Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times

    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 hit many countries at the same time. He then 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 important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then 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 difficult 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Audio
    Release dateMar 26, 2024
    ISBN9780593829097

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    Reviews for The Anxious Generation

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    • 3/5
      This book presents as an important topic to me. I am a Zillennial and distinctly remember the smartphone revolution as a key event throughout high school. By the time I graduated, everyone had one. I do think there is an issue with attention being driven away as app design takes advantage of human psychology. Technology advanced rapidly before we could regulate it. The author has some sweeping reforms suggested but I'm not sure how easy those are to implement. I do know that I have benefited from less screen time (this is coming from a software developer). There is something meditative about it. I hope we improve things in the future.
    • 4/5
      I'm looking at my own media use as a result of reading this book.
    • 5/5
      I strongly recommend this book to anyone and everyone who is raising children.
      Screen-based childhoods do a disservice to everyone in a society.
      Jonathan Haidt has solutions to the epidemic of mental illness running rampant in childhood since the advent of smartphones.
      The book is organized very well and the author includes a list of extensive references and lists links to onliine resources and further information.