Book Review: The Anxious Generation

A friend recommended The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. It is quite popular, at #17 on Amazon charts. If only this important book had come out when I was still stumbling through new parenting territory with my sons. "Hindsight is 20/20," as they say. If only we knew then, what we know now. In ignorance, we launched into a technological world with ramifications we couldn't possibly foresee. This is a sobering look at why our young people are riddled with anxiety. Some of the author's recommendations are, indeed, being fleshed out in our society. Schools are trying to become phone-free zones. Sadly, the changes will not come swiftly enough and my own children are saddled with my unintentional mistakes.

Jonathan Haidt intended to write a book on how social media disrupts society. After finishing the first chapter, he realized the thrust of the book needed to focus on how childhood has been disrupted by a phone-based existence. While I don't agree with this author's atheistic worldview, his arguments ring true. It is horrifying. Toward the end of the book, he writes a paragraph that helped me understand why we failed to see the dangers. He writes:

"The diffusion of digital technology into children's lives has been like smoke pouring into our homes. We all see that something strange is happening, but we don't understand it. We fear that the smoke is having bad effects on our children, but when we look around, nobody is doing much about it."

This is true. I looked to those around me when I considered what to allow or disallow in my home. I gave in to the pressure of, "Every other kid has a phone, Mom." If I had it to do over, with the wisdom from this book, I would have emphasized real-world experiences and relationships, limited freedom on their phones, and talked them through the new conundrums they faced with technology.

I loved the summaries at the end of each chapter. They made it easier to digest and retain the mass of information gleaned in these pages. The key problem for children born after 1995 (as all my sons were) is that they were overprotected in the real world and underprotected in the virtual world. Haidt identifies four harms of phone-based childhood: sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.

I recently saw news of new "tin-can" phones that parents are giving their children. Other parents are giving their kids landlines. These phones are stripped of the dangerous social media exposure and instant information overload. Our children need physical play and social interaction to learn how to navigate relationships. The digital world has altered all of our relationships. Thus, the takeaway from this book extends beyond how the phone influenced the maturation of our children. It highlights how different our world is today from that in which we were raised. After reading this book, I'm not only regretting my past parenting mistakes, but I'm also wanting to join Carlos Whittaker and unplug more for myself. It is a difficult balance. Writers are encouraged to be available and involved online. Yet, there is a cost. Do I really want to pay that cost any more? This whole subject will fill my thoughts for many days to come.