Wick Welker's Reviews > The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

Children should not have smartphones and social media until they are 16.

As a parent of a young child, I read this book with interest and horror. This book is about the tragic great rewiring that was inflicted on Gen Z between 2010 and 2015 that completely upended them from a normal childhood and caused a generational mental health crisis. The author does a good job of explaining himself with good research and makes a compelling case against a phone-based childhood and praises the virtues of a play-based childhood. I think this book was very good and important but I didn’t agree with everything and think some of his reasoning is actually fallacious when it comes to “helicopter” parenting, which I’ll get into.

Depression, self harm and anxiety are undoubtedly higher in Gen Z and have a sharp rise in boys and girls in 2010 and thereafter. One could speculate that these children grew up after the 9/11 era and after the 2008 financial crisis but, as the author argues, every generation has socio-economic upheaval but doesn't typically result in dramatic drop in mental health. The most likely, and obvious, explanation is that their childhood became steeped in toxic self comparisons on social media (affecting girls more) and video game and pornography addiction (affecting boys more.) Social media is a strategic, asynchronous, disembodied interaction with the aims of fostering and protecting an individual's self brand. Social media platforms are the most efficient conformity machines ever invented where a user can literally gauge approval by numerical likes and views. This is really bad for everyone and basically inhumane to expose a child’s brain to this type of thinking. When a child starts doing this around the age of 10, they chase the dopamine hit of views and likes and sink the enormous opportunity of real-life social interactions and development that prepare them for adulthood. Social media doesn’t just correlate with poor mental health, it is causative. I think the author demonstrates this beyond doubt.

Children have “defend mode” and “discovery mode”, both useful but the former gets engaged more with a phone based childhood. Free and unsupervised play foster the discovery mode where children learn how to navigate not only the three dimensional space but relationships and their own feelings. A phone based childhood constantly puts a child in defend mode which spills over to real life and chronic anxiety. Social media inflicts sleep deprivation and social deprivation along with attention fragmentation and addiction. Again, these things are awful on an already socialized adult, imagine the cost on a child’s mind that has many years to go before adult brain development.

According to the author, there are real gender differences between boys and girls which are almost certainly sociogenic (culturally created) and these differences account for the disparate impact of a phone based childhood on boys and girls. Girls strive for communion and relationship building where boys strive for self autonomy and actualization. These culturally programmed desires I believe are functionally very real. Girl aggression is relational which explains why social media impacts them more than for boys. Take all the self comparison to airbrush models on magazine covers from the 70s and now put that on hyperdrive, socialize it over a screen, adding cyber bullying and dopamine addiction, and you will have a very sad, lonely and anxious girl. For boys, video games can fragment their socialization and silo it off into asynchronous relationships that then addict and hamper their growth. The easy access to pornography, while impacting both boys and girls, seems to hit boys harder who consume it at very early ages.

Here’s where I have a problem with this book: the author creates a false dilemma between a play-based childhood and phone-based childhood. These two things are not mutually exclusive and the author likes to partition them off like they are the only two options. As a parent who is very involved with my child’s life, I take umbrage with the term “helicopter parent” which the author uses. This well intentioned author asserts many times in this book that during the 1980s, parents become overprotective and stopped letting their kids have autonomy. My first response is what!?. This overt generalization is overtly speculative and laughably simplistic. In my opinion, having more parental presence, particularly when it comes to safety, is not hampering children’s socialization and growth. I’m not joking here: the author thinks kids should be able to play in junkyards and with fire, unsupervised. Without presenting much evidence, he talks about the statistic improbability of your child being really harmed or kidnapped. Okay, but what about the stakes? They are enormous. I think it's a parents responsibility to protect them from catastrophe, regardless of how unlikely because the stakes are absolutely enormous. The author creates a false dichotomy that you either must let your children roam the streets unsupervised or put a phone in front of their faces. Of course, this is not true. There is an entire spectrum of parenting, one which could involve letting children roam under freeway overpasses while also sticking a phone in front of their noses for 6 hours a day. I found his take on this bizarre and his assertions that parent’s are hampering their children’s development with over supervision mostly unsupported. “Helicopter parenting” has become a term used by parents who don’t actively engage with their children. Anyway, I digress.

The solutions the author offers are very good: no social media or smart phones before age 16 and phone free schools. He also laments the loss of spirituality and suggests we need to engage more in shared sacredness, self transcendence (the literal opposite of social media), be slow to anger and quick to forgive (never happens on social media) and to find awe in nature. Overall, I think this was a very good book that everyone should read.