The Anxious Generation

The Anxious Generation
“My central claim in this book is that these two trends – overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world – are the reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.” -Jonathan Haidt
 
Every generation struggles to understand every generation that comes after them. However, if you feel that the generation born after 1995 is a special case, you’re not alone. Known collectively as Gen Z, people born after 1995 have had a unique experience of the world in one central area: smart phones. In his book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt examines the effects that smartphones have had on Gen Z and what can be done to stem the tide of those effects that are less than desirable.

To show just how radically smartphones changed our world, Haidt proposes the following thought experiment: Imagine that you wake up from a deep sleep that you fell into the day before the iPhone was released. When you wake up ten years later, “Nearly all [people] are clutching a small glass and metal rectangle, and anytime they stop moving, they assume a hunched position and stare at it.” Strange isn’t it? Yet this is precisely what has happened to people all around us. In fact, it’s happened to us. But most importantly, it’s happened to our children and grandchildren who came of age at precisely the time smartphones gained ubiquity.

Haidt describes the problematic interaction of children and smartphones this way. “All young mammals have the same job: wire up your brain by playing vigorously and often.” Children need to play. They need to play hard. And they need to play a lot. Yet smartphones distract and prevent children from engaging in precisely the kind of play they need. “We might refer to smartphones and tablets in the hands of children as experience blockers.” Haidt further notes: “Surveys show that unstructured time with friends plummeted in the exact years that adolescents moved from basic phones to smartphones – the early 2010’s.”

The less children play, the less they learn how the real world works and how they can best navigate it and the more anxious they become. If you have a Gen Z child or grandchild, or if you’re raising children or grandchildren now, I can’t recommend this book enough.

Your Pastor and Friend,
John Knox Foster