The Anxious Generation
How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
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The Anxious Generation
Narrated by:
Sean Pratt, Jonathan Haidt
Buy Now for €17.99
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Narrated by:
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Sean Pratt
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Jonathan Haidt
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By:
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Jonathan Haidt
Named one of the best books of the year by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Time, The Economist, New York Post, and Town & Country • One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of the Year • Named finalist for the PEN Literary Awards
“With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world . . . While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids.” —Time
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 (pronounced "height") 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.
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Amazing must read for everyone
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We’ve all heard, and we all know that phones and social media are no good for kids. But i doubt many of us understand the magnitude of the revolution we’ve unwittingly let happen on our watch. The choice of the March analogy by Haidt, from the first lines of the book, is as cruel as well thought.
Realising the grand-scale, real-life experiment we have let set up to the detriment of everyone and to the very fundations of what sapiens offsprings need to grow into functional adults is so revolting, revulsing that it makes me willing to start involving myself into some kind of collective action to start to fight back.
The book details plenty of ways in which i can start doing just that. All the more thankful.
Read it. Offer it. Use it.
There’s much at stake.
Major work, must read for every parent… and society member
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