Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, has a new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. In it, he writes: “We’ve overprotected our children in the real world, and we’ve underprotected them online.”
Last year, the state Office of Mental Health published the findings of a “listening tour” it conducted focused on the mental health of young people.
“Many young people, particularly in but not limited to rural areas, noted that there are few safe spaces to establish communities,” it reported. “Young people frequently suggested more clubs and community spaces or the establishment of youth-friendly gyms and other ‘third spaces’ (i.e., neither school nor home) where young people can gather.”
In Beacon, the city released a study in March 2023, the Community Facility and Program Report, that recommended open space and recreation initiatives, especially “the redevelopment of a city-owned building to accommodate an expanded/enhanced community center.”
Neither the New York or Beacon recommendations have been acted on.
Haidt contends that the replacement of an earlier low-tech childhood centered on group play and outdoor exploration with a high-tech, screens-centered, social media and video-game childhood is driving our children crazy. He sees smartphone use as a cause, not a correlation.
Surveys by the American College Health Association since 2010 have found more than 100 percent increases in anxiety and depression among college students. Clearly, something is going on. Things were going sideways long before the pandemic. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health does not show such dramatic anxiety spikes for Boomers (born 1946-1964) or Gen X (1965-1976) as for Millennials (1977-1995) and Gen Z (1996-2015).
Haidt argues that the “great rewiring” is a convergence of “safetyism” culture, or the hampering of childhood development by overprotective caregivers, and the reliance on smartphones.
In a nutshell, Haidt maintains that we’ve channeled young people away from activities that are considered unsafe, such as climbing trees or roughhousing with friends, or because they involve leaving the house and wandering around in the woods, back alleys and unsupervised areas.
“Mammals need to play to wire up their brains,” he writes. “First comes sensory systems, and then walking, and then talking.” Social systems become active through “synchronous facial interaction. You make faces at each other; you laugh. So synchrony and embodiment are part of the scaffolding by which a child engages with the social and physical world, and the brain grows in response.”
He believes that the rise of the internet has blocked that.
There was safetyism before smartphones, but the tipping point seems to be their combination about 10 years ago. “Once you take these weaker children who’ve been play-deprived and draw them into the virtual world — that’s when mental health collapses,” he writes. “It was not a gradual thing from the ’80s on. It was a very sudden thing around 2012 or 2013.”
Haidt acknowledges that parents who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, when there was much more crime, may be more cautious. But those risks plummeted in the 1990s, he writes. “We have continued our overreaction to the crime levels of those bad old days, so we don’t let the kids go out to play.” As a Boomer, he grew up with “a free-range life.… Ultimately, we survived, accumulating scars, stitches and a deeper understanding of how far we could go, and go on our own.”
He sees children’s withdrawal from active play outside their bedrooms, the disconnect from the challenges and rewards of discovery in the woods and playgrounds reflected in an unusual statistic: the drop in the number of visits to the emergency room by boys and teens, which is lower today than the admittance rate for girls 15 years ago.
