Weekend Book Review: The Anxious Generation

I just finished Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation,” and I need to be honest with you – this book left me sitting in uncomfortable silence for a good twenty minutes after I closed it.

As someone who raised kids and watched this transition unfold, reading this felt like watching a slow-motion car crash I’d been warning about for years. Haidt argues that the combination of smartphone-based childhoods and overprotective parenting has rewired an entire generation, leading to unprecedented rates of anxiety and depression, especially among girls.

What Hit Home:

The chapter on “the great rewiring” genuinely made me put the book down. I watched my own kids – and then their younger cousins – grow up increasingly glued to screens. I remember when a 16-year-old getting their first smartphone seemed like a rite of passage; now I see 8-year-olds with devices more powerful than the computers I used to work on. The statistics on teen mental health post-2010 aren’t just numbers – they’re kids I know, friends’ siblings, young people in my community.

Haidt’s comparison between “phone-based childhood” and “play-based childhood” hit hard because I *lived* the play-based childhood – unsupervised adventures, neighborhood kickball games, actual boredom that forced us to be creative. I tried to give my kids some of that freedom, but I watched it slip away year by year as the world decided it was too “dangerous” to let children just… be children.

Where I Struggled:

Sometimes Haidt’s tone veers into “back in my day” territory. Not everything was better before smartphones, and the book occasionally glosses over the real benefits of digital connection for marginalized kids who found their people online.

I also wished he’d spent more time acknowledging that correlation isn’t always causation. Yes, smartphones and social media exploded around 2010. So did economic anxiety, school shootings becoming regular news, and climate doom scrolling. It’s messier than just “phones bad.”

The Uncomfortable Truth:

This book made me look at my own phone usage with fresh horror. I’m *supposed* to be the generation that knows better, yet here I am, compulsively checking notifications, feeling that phantom buzz, scrolling when I’m bored for 0.3 seconds.

If Haidt’s thesis is even half-right, we’re running a massive uncontrolled experiment on young brains, and the early results are… not great. The question isn’t whether he’s 100% correct about every detail – it’s whether we’re brave enough to admit something has gone deeply wrong.

Should You Read It?

Yes, especially if you’re a parent, educator, or just someone who’s wondered why everyone seems so much more anxious than they used to be. It’s not a comfortable read. It’ll make you want to throw your phone in a lake (I’m writing this review on my laptop specifically because of that urge).

Fair warning: you’ll finish this book and immediately want to have difficult conversations about screen time, social media, and what we’ve lost in the name of “safety” and “connection.”

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

A necessary, frustrating, occasionally preachy, ultimately important book that we needed five years ago.

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