THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of 2024 • A New
York Times and Washington Post Notable Book • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024 • A
TIME 100 Must-Read Book of 2024 • Named a Best Book of 2024 by the Economist the New York Post
and Town & Country • The Goodreads Choice Award Nonfiction Book of the Year • Finalist for the
PEN Literary Awards A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into
the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones social media and big tech—and a
plan for a healthier freer childhood. “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.” —Shannon Carlin TIME 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 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.
