Book Review – The Anxious Generation
Author: Jonathan Haidt
Publisher: Penguin Press
Year: 2024
Jonathan Haidt thinks smartphones broke kids. That’s the thesis. That’s the book. The rise of social media and smartphone ownership in the early 2010s correlates with a dramatic increase in anxiety, depression, and self-harm among young people, especially girls. He’s got charts. He’s got studies. He’s got proposed solutions.
And I’m. Conflicted.
Here’s what I think Haidt gets right. Something DID happen around 2012-2013. The mental health statistics are real. Kids are more anxious and depressed than they were a generation ago. The correlation with smartphone adoption is hard to dismiss entirely. And his descriptions of what social media does to developing brains — the constant comparison, the dopamine manipulation, the removal of real-world play — ring true.
His proposed solutions are mostly reasonable. No smartphones before high school. No social media before 16. More free play and independence for younger kids. Phone-free schools. None of this seems crazy. Some of it is already being implemented.
But. Here’s my problem.
Haidt writes like this is a solved question. Like the science is settled. And it isn’t. There are serious researchers who dispute the causal link between social media and teen mental health. Correlation isn’t causation and all that. The decline in teen mental health might be related to. I don’t know. The economy? Climate anxiety? Political polarization? COVID? All of the above? Maybe smartphones made it worse but aren’t the primary cause.
The book is also repetitive. He makes his core argument in the first hundred pages and then keeps making it for another three hundred. There’s a chapter structure but it feels padded. Like this could have been a very long article instead of a book.
And there’s something in Haidt’s tone that bothers me. A moralizing quality. A certainty that verges on smugness. He’s very sure he’s right and very frustrated that everyone else hasn’t caught up. That’s not an argument against his thesis but it made the reading experience less pleasant.
Do I think smartphones are good for kids? No. Probably not. I don’t have kids but if I did I’d probably limit their screen time. I think Haidt is pointing at something real even if his explanation is incomplete.
But I also think “technology ruined the children” is a story we tell ourselves every generation and it’s usually more complicated than that.
Read it if you’re a parent trying to navigate this stuff. Just don’t treat it as gospel.
My rating: ★★★☆☆