Summary
Chapter 1—The Surge of Suffering
Haidt observes the way that family life in the digital age has become dominated by disagreements about technology. Parents struggle with feeling trapped and powerless. On the one hand, they don't want their children to miss out on important embodied life experiences. But on the other hand, parents don't want to condemn their children to social isolation by prohibiting all devices, social media, video games, etc. Childhood depression has increased by about 150% for girls and boys since 2010. Among college students, anxiety has increased 134% since 2010. Anxiety is a negative and excessive anticipation of future threat, which can be physical or social in nature. Haidt discusses how both anxiety and depression perpetuate vicious cycles in which the symptoms and impacts worsen the condition.
Coinciding with these rising trends in adolescent anxiety, depression, and hospitalization was an increase in social media and smartphone use. Smartphones allowed teens to be online all the time, even outside the home. This marked the end of play-based childhoods. The invention of front-facing cameras on phones and the social media platform Instagram intensified teens' natural instinct for social comparison. These trends in adolescent mental health are seen not just in the United States but in Canada, the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. Data is far less abundant in non-Western nations.
Analysis
To convey the harmful impacts of digital technology on the lives of children and families, Haidt incorporates both researched trends and individual anecdotes. Including the stories of struggling families humanizes the argument and grounds research findings in a real-world context. Haidt also acknowledges the fact that disorders like anxiety and depression are caused by a combination of genes, thought patterns, and social and environmental conditions. For this reason, it is not realistic to expect a "bootstraps mentality" when it comes to dealing with anxiety and depression.
When crafting an argument, addressing opposing viewpoints is a hallmark of robust discourse. Haidt does so by sharing the pushback he received in claiming that adolescent mental health was worsening. After Haidt and his collaborator (the lawyer, author, and activist Greg Lukianoff) published The Coddling of the American Mind, a psychiatrist named Richard A. Friedman responded with doubt in a New York Times article titled "The Big Myth About Teenage Anxiety." Haidt agrees that examining several indicators of rising mental illness strengthens the analysis. For that reason, he looked at the numbers of adolescents hospitalized for emergency psychiatric care or nonsuicidal self-injury. The data shows that "the rate of self-harm for these young adolescent girls nearly tripled from 2010 to 2020," confirming a widespread pattern in the lives of adolescents (Chapter 1).
Haidt addresses another counterargument later in Chapter 1. Some people cite national and global affairs such as the 9/11 attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the global financial crisis as some of the primary factors fueling adolescent mental health problems. Other major reasons include climate change, school shootings, political polarization, inequality, and student loan debt. However, as Haidt points out, the timing of some of these factors should have meant that the millennial generation—not Gen Z—would have been the most heavily affected. According to Haidt, the emergence of smartphones and continuous access to social media, online video games, and internet-based activities best explains the surge in adolescent mental illness beginning in the early 2010s.
Haidt has been criticized for not having enough substantial evidence to back up his assertion that unregulated exposure to digital environments has led to a “great rewiring of childhood." According to his critics, Haidt commits the basic error of mistaking correlation with causation. A psychology professor named Candice Odgers reviewed The Anxious Generation in Nature, arguing that various analyses have found "no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally." In addition, a 2024 article titled "Mechanisms linking social media use to adolescent mental health vulnerability" published in Nature Reviews Psychology states that "the scientific results have been mixed and inconclusive" in terms of whether social media use has caused the decline in adolescent mental health (Orben et al.). However, these authors also call for further research "that could lead to concrete interventions to improve adolescent mental health." What Haidt and his critics have in common is a commitment to understanding what is fueling the current adolescent mental health crisis and addressing its root causes.
One way that Haidt distills his analysis to make it more accessible is by providing a bullet point summary at the end of the chapter. In this way, he leverages the brain's preference for structure and organization. Cognitive load refers to the mental effort and resources required by the working memory in order to process information and complete a task. Reducing the reader's cognitive load enhances comprehension, retention, and recall. However, critics have also written that Haidt oversimplifies the issue of adolescent mental health. While it is important to present an argument geared toward a general readership in a coherent way, it is also essential to address nuance.
