One doesn’t go to meetings of the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District’s Board of Education in search of book recommendations. At nearly every recent meeting of that body, however, members have espoused their interest in a certain text, hosted a book club discussion of that text and even directly cited it as a driver in their recent work to create a new cellphone policy barring the use of any and all “personal devices” from district schools.
“The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” is a roughly 400-page book by psychologist and New York City college professor Jonathan Haidt. In it, Haidt argues that a “Great Rewiring” of childhood away from play to a new culture dominated by phones and social media is causing a decline in mental health, specifically in Generation Z.
At several meetings, school board member Jason Tauriainen has led calls to other members and attendees to read the book. At the board’s formal book discussion during a Nov. 5 work session, he said that the evidence in the book led him directly to his support of a full ban of cellphones in district schools.
Other board members and even the KPBSD Superintendent have similarly lauded “Anxious Generation” as capturing their imagination and illustrating their fears about the impacts of cellphones on local youth.
Virginia Morgan has been a rare voice on the school board not heaping praise on “Anxious Generation.” She said that the book made “some overly broad conclusions with conflicting data.”
“The issue is more complicated,” she said.
Board President Zen Kelly said, after that book discussion, that he supports a full ban of cellphones in schools, from kindergarten through the 12th grade, from the starting bell to the ending bell, through passing periods and lunch time. That’s the policy that soon will be considered by the school board and it matches exactly the recommendations of Haidt in “Anxious Generation.”
Because the book seems to be playing an oversized role in driving local policy, because I’m profoundly interested in the effects of social media and modern technology and culture on mental health and because I’m a member of Gen Z who’s both struggled with mental health and spent a whole lot of time in virtual spaces, I decided to pick up a copy.
What I found was a surface level exploration of the use of cellphones and their impacts in the years since they exploded onto the scene in the early to middle 2010s — when I was attending Kenai Central High School with an iPhone 4 in my pocket.
Haidt describes the book as being about a grand desire to “reclaim human life for human beings in all generations,” with a central thesis that children and adolescents experience “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world” that directly leads to increased rates of anxiety, depression and suicide.
At length, Haidt ascribes the challenges facing contemporary children almost entirely to phones. He writes that children are being lost to social media platforms that cause them measurable harm and virtual spaces — like video games — that fail to emulate important, unstructured play on playgrounds.
Toward the end of the book, Haidt writes that he hadn’t intended to write it. The project began, he says, in an effort to explore how social media is changing democracy. But then he stumbled onto the question of adolescent mental health — “so much bigger than I thought.”
The central piece of evidence cited by Haidt repeatedly in “Anxious Generation” is that marked increases of rates of anxiety and depression were noted — in a few metrics but mostly as self-reported by college students — starting in 2010 and increasing more rapidly after 2015. That’s only a few years after the iPhone was introduced, when cellphones suddenly became much more advanced and when everyone had a connection to social networks and thousands of other people in their pockets — not to mention cameras.
Haidt doesn’t ever consider as an explanation for rises in anxiety and depression an increased awareness of both issues or a reduction in some of the stigma around those conversations. The Affordable Care Act, enacted in 2010, also greatly increased access to mental health care in this time period.
He says that issues like climate change and school shootings can’t possibly be drivers of declines in mental health because big issues should actually make people “energized” to band together and seek solutions.
I was energized to do something about climate change when I was a kid, excited to bring in my dad’s discarded copies of the Clarion to the Kenai Middle School recycling bin so I could do my part to save the world. I feel a lot less hopeful now as the conversation has only grown more urgent and less productive in my lifetime.
Information from the United Nations say that emissions are “at a record high, with no signs of slowing down,” that cities are at risk of sea level rise, food and water security are threatened, and climate disasters are growing more frequent. A Reuters report from this week says that climate change is happening “faster than expected” and may have already surpassed the “critical point” of 1.5 degrees Celsius that portends “irreversible and extreme climate change.”
Haidt acknowledges in “Anxious Generation” that a recent study of climate activists found they had markedly worse mental health than others.
Similar is the conversation around gun violence in schools and against young people. The number of instances of reported gunfire on school grounds, during school hours, annually has also climbed from 9 in 2008, 2009 and 2010 to 16 in 2014, 30 in 2018 and 46 in 2022, per data compiled by The Washington Post. That doesn’t include the number of valid threats that have triggered lockdowns or been stopped short of tragedy.
I wasn’t energized when I spent time hiding in a Kenai Central High School classroom my senior year, or when a local law enforcement officer gathered my class in the KCHS Little Theater and told us we should actually try to neutralize a potential threat rather than hiding away — that we could probably survive a bullet.
These issues aren’t new and the efforts of decades to effect change on both of these issues have remained fruitless.
Haidt says that part of the issue might be people using social media to express their feelings about “a collapsing world.” I’d think it’s worth exploring why so many feel that their world is collapsing. There’s lots of reasons I don’t think the outlook for the future is bright, and kids with cellphones don’t top my list.
That’s not to say I think Haidt is wrong in all his arguments. I’ve always been a defender of virtual spaces as a place of value and a place where people — especially those of a variety of marginalized communities — can find belonging. I found interesting Haidt’s claim that these digital spaces can’t compare to real belonging in physical communities because a lack of barriers to entry and departure necessarily mean less investment in them. A conflict on the playground where children will have to remain in proximity isn’t like one in a video game lobby or on social media where a user can simply log off.
But there, too, is another underbaked element of “Anxious Generation.” He says one of the biggest indicators of a problem is that adolescents report a stark decline in the time they spend physically with their friends. Today, where are the teens supposed to go? We’ve seen a decline in youth-friendly spaces on the Kenai Peninsula and elsewhere. When I was a young kid, we had a bowling alley in Kenai and a roller rink in Soldotna — both long gone.
By the time I was in high school, my friends and I almost exclusively met at the movie theater — where the barrier to entry was uniquely lowered because I got free tickets as an employee — or walked laps around Walmart. I venture we met physically more than most of my peers — and I don’t often see groups of youngsters together around town.
All of Haidt’s musings take entirely for granted his own idea that cellphones are only bad for kids. He ignores real and genuine connection that is possible and is happening with phones and in virtual spaces — which is true even if and as they are doing harm. There are kids here on the Kenai Peninsula who are finding a place to belong with these contemporary mediums — just like I did when I was in their shoes.
Haidt rails against a cultural shift away from affording freedom to children, calling for parents to let their kids walk to school or complete errands on their own, without reckoning meaningfully with the way larger systems have failed to accommodate and create space for them.
In “Anxious Generation,” Haidt seems at every turn to walk right up to bigger issues like the collapse of public spaces and civic life; wholly unregulated tech companies that are well aware of the harms they’re doing to kids in their pursuit of profit; or the loss of freedom in the lives of our youngsters, but he never manages to look beyond the cellphones and social media platforms he explicitly set out to tackle. There are big problems here worthy of more nuanced and considered attention.
I suspect that Haidt’s book has resonated with many because a lot of his conclusions make a certain amount of sense — it’s perhaps obvious that the uncontrolled spread and development of social media and cellphones have had negative impacts on our youth. It’s also true that Haidt wholly refuses to consider any benefits that may have come at the same time, seems mired in a moral panic about teen cellphone use, and relies on data that’s shaky at best.
The school board may be justified in its efforts to curtail cellphone use in schools, certainly the word from teachers at local meetings is that they’re plainly disruptive to local classrooms and learning. At the same time, pretending like cellphones don’t exist from 7:45 a.m. to 2:15 p.m. every day isn’t going to save childhood.
Social media platforms can be mediums for bullying and harm, or they can be spaces for something resembling genuine connection for those most needing of it. Video games can be twisted engines of capitalism driving kids to the next dopamine hit, or they can be an engaging and exciting interactive art form at the cutting edge of contemporary storytelling — they can even just a place for kids to hang out. Cellphones can be the cause of the “Great Rewiring” that’s causing irreparable harm to our kids, or the issue might be more complicated.
“The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” was published by Penguin Press in 2024. The copy read for this review was purchased at River City Books.
Reach reporter Jake Dye at jacob.dye@peninsulaclarion.com.
Off the Shelf is a bimonthly literature column written by the staff of the Peninsula Clarion and Homer News.
