Giving a child unfettered access to social media is like sending them to Mars unaccompanied, social psychologist (and one of this year’s TIME100 Health honorees) Jonathan Haidt argues in the opening pages of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. After reading his best-selling book, which looks at how the advent of smartphones and social media in the mid-2000s led to the current epidemic of teenage mental illness, it’s hard to argue with his analogy. Haidt tracks what he calls “the Great Rewiring of Childhood” from the 1980s, when parents became more protective and children started spending less time socializing outside, to now, where much of childhood is “phone based” and in turn has become more isolating during the most vulnerable development stages. With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world, especially adolescent girls, who have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm compared to their male peers. While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids from tech dependency, The Anxious Generation makes a dire warning.
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