A Closer Look at “The Anxious Generation,” by Jonathan Haidt

Susanne Leslie: Hello and welcome to this mini webinar based on Dr. Jonathan Haidt’s book called The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. We will briefly talk about cell phone use and cell phone use in the classroom, social media, and the decline of the play based childhood.

I am Susanne Leslie and I work at Teaching Channel. I’m a professional learning. What that means is I create content like I’m doing here with this mini webinar and I write courses, blogs, and anything else they ask me to do. I just wrote a course called Educator Bandwidth that’s been very popular, all about like self care and trying to find time to fit everything in.

But really my focus is in early childhood education, educator wellness. and mental health. So here’s an illustration of the cover of the book by Dr. Height. This book caught my eye. I listened to I can’t remember now. It was like a presentation about the book. I think it was on NPR or something.

And it just piqued my interest just based on some of the mental health work that I’ve been doing at Teaching Channel and some of the reading I’ve been doing. So I wanted to learn more about it. Decided to buy the book and read it and then decided to share what I learned with others. So who is Jonathan Haidt?

He has written many books but this most recent book is a bestseller because everybody is looking for answers about with the increase in anxiety and the hyper on the book is that it provides a correlation between anxiety and the invention and access to smartphones and social media. Also Dr.

Hite pinpoints the loss of a play based childhood is another reason for the increase in anxiety and increase in suicide and self harm in our students and in our children. He is the Thomas Cooley Professor for Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, where he researches and studies moral and political psychology.

He earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and he taught at the University of Virginia for 16 years. He calls himself and is he’s a social psychologist. He uses data to study the connection between the rise in mental illness across the world. So he’s, he doesn’t, his focus isn’t solely on the United States.

He looks at the data from all the different countries. So that will come up soon. I’ll show you that. And he blames it on the increase in anxiety in our children. He calls it, it’s the result of the demise of free play, along with the introduction of smart phones and social media. The book itself is divided into four parts.

The tidal wave, the decline of play based childhood, the rise of phone based childhood, and collective actions for a better childhood. So one of the best things about his book is that he provides actions we can take. Yay! It’s important for us to talk to each other and to do what we can, obviously, to help our students and kids with their mental health.

When talking to teachers, smartphones have become a big challenge and issue in schools. So part one is the tidal wave. He provides basic statistics on mental health of young people, as you’ll see in the next three slides. So this first slide, Lonely at School, illustrates what’s happening in English speaking countries, Latin America, Europe, and East Asia.

This slide is from the New York Times. It is from 2000 to 2018. That data he includes that and many others in his book. And then this slide shows the entertainment screen use among tweens. So tweens are eight to 12 year olds, and then teens, 13 to 18 year olds. It’s from the article called Media Use by Tweens and Teens.

It’s from Common Sense Media. You can see that on the. Slide there. If you’re not familiar with common sense media, it’s a great resource for everybody, but specifically for teachers. and for parents if you’re looking for information. But you can see it’s increasing and that’s really comes as no surprise and that this this data only goes up to 2021.

So imagine it’s grown even higher now since it’s 2024. And then lastly, this graph shows the percentage increase in anxiety in the United States. This is ages 18 to 25 in the top there, but you can see that is the line that has grown most drastically, while the others aren’t growing quite as quite as dramatically, I guess.

Just simply because I would postulate just because of age and then again, this only goes from 2008 to 2020. So again, I would imagine that the line is even sharper since, since four years ago. Part two of his book, he talks about the decline of the play based childhood. And what he says is depriving children of play and role models.

Damaging attachment systems and erasing any clear path from childhood to adulthood is dangerous. One story that I read, not in his book, but in, I do a lot of actually do a lot of play research because it’s one of the early childhood outcomes and something that I’m very interested in and I read, I think it was Dr.

Peter Gray shared a story about a child Who said he didn’t like to go outside because there were no outlets outside. So he couldn’t plug in his screens and that made me so sad. I think it makes me sad because I am kind of an outdoorsy person. I grew up in the Minneapolis park system and my mom worked for the Minneapolis park board, so I grew up as a lifeguard.

I was a big bike rider. And spent a lot of time outdoors and that has been proven spending time in nature and outdoors has been proven to decrease anxiety. So that’s something else to keep in mind as you’re reading his book. And then in part three, he talked about, conversely, the rise of the phone based childhood.

Hite shares the harm that results from the new phone based childhood with a chapter about how phone based childhoods are particularly harmful to girls, and a chapter on how it uniquely harms boys, and another chapter called spiritual degradation that he says is resulting from our new phone based lives.

So I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I guess the best way to describe what he is saying is that we are losing some of our, what they call I think the communication research is called like the grease and the glue that connects us. For example, let’s say you go to the gym and you’re waiting for your class to start and it used to be that people would chat and visit.

I guess they still do, but many now are on their phones right up until the class starts. So there’s no none of that kind of camaraderie or community isn’t quite as prevalent as it once was. He also talks about the case for phone free schools, and that’s part of the research that he does when talking about the rise of the phone based childhood is how can we consider teaching in school without having students relying or using their cell phones.

I know that’s become a thing here in Minnesota where I’m, where I live. Some of the schools. Here have created a rule where they have to actually lock the phones up so they’re not being used during the day. Now, I’ve heard positive things and negative things. One of the positive things I’ve heard is students are really having a better time at school.

They’re happier. They’re connecting with their peers. They’re learning. They’re better able to focus. But Dr. Haidt makes a good case for phone free based schools. He says, since 2012, the smartphone has dramatically emerged in prevalence, creating conditions for students to be permanently distracted and congenitally distractible.

One way he put it was, he said forever elsewhere. We’re sitting with a group of people, and then we’re all looking at our phones, so instead of being present where we are with that group, we are forever elsewhere. I thought that was an interesting way to put it. to put it. But he does say the most common measures taken to restrict phones in school are inadequate.

School leaders should consider locked pouches or phone lockers. We’re kind of like, what do they say when you’re Building the plane while you’re flying it. That’s kind of what we’re doing, right? We’re figuring this out as we go. So we really, you know, I’m thankful for Dr. Heitz research and getting the conversation started.

Also this article from the national education association, cell phone bands and schools are back. How far will they go? I have this linked on the, in the show notes. If you’d like to dig a little deeper and see what the NEA says about it. And. If you want to hear Dr. Height talking about it, he is in this Pod Save America podcast.

Again, it is linked on the, in the show notes, but it’s actually Dr. Height speaking about the effects of social media and children. Conversely, there are also naysayers. Who are pushing back after peer reviewing his book and I’m going to talk about two of them right now. First of all, Dr.

Peter Gray, he became known because of his TED talk where he, it’s called Let’s see, it’s called I have it linked there, but it’s also linked again in the show notes, The Decline of Play. So he, many years ago did a TED Talk and people loved it because he was talking about the play based childhood, how important it is, how it’s not, you know, His line is, it’s not frivolous.

Play is not frivolous. It is how we learn, it is how we grow, it’s how our bodies develop from the inside out. So without having that play based learning we can’t move on to, reading, writing, and arithmetic until our bodies are developed in a way that allows us to to concentrate and focus and so on.

So I highly recommend that you learn a little bit more about Dr. Peter Gray’s research. It will give you another piece of the puzzle. Dr. Gray and Dr. Haidt did discuss this book together. And that is why I’m talking about some of the pushback. So here’s his quote, it is not at all surprising to me that the book has been praised to the skies by people who do not do research in the field and strongly criticized by people who do.

Candace Odgers, professor of social science and information. Informatics at UC Irvine, who many would agree is the leading U. S. researcher on the relation of social media to teen mental health, began her review of John’s book in the journal Nature with the following words. She says two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation.

First, the book is going to sell a lot of copies because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Secondly, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our child, our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.

Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental health crisis in young people. So There’s some good, that’s some good food for thought. It’s important whenever we are reading books, of course, as to look at all the different aspects of reading.

the different research. My point is that there are people who read his book and don’t necessarily agree with him. So just to be fair, I wanted to include that in this presentation. So here’s Dr. Candace Odgers, the researcher, that Peter Gray is talking about. So she’s the Director of Research and Faculty at the School of Ecology at California Irvine.

So what can we do? I think this is the best part about the book. So he lays out his hypothesis that this is this rise in anxiety is the result of smartphones. Giving kids the internet in their pocket at a young age social media, what it does in particular to girls with this, these ideas of beauty and what we have to look like and using filters and so on and so forth.

And again, as mentioned, what it does to boys as well. So he does cover all of those things. And again, he does provide data and research. But he also provides the collective actions that we can take for better childhood. And here’s what he says. He says more playtime with other kids and students, real life activities, Give him a flip phone first, a smartphone later, social media later.

So he says that if parents are concerned about being able to communicate or reach their child at school or wherever, that you can give them a flip phone and you can, so they don’t, what he’s saying is don’t give him the internet. He talks a bit about how you know, Back in the day, we were concerned about our children and, bad things happening to them at the park or whatever.

But now when we give them the internet in their pocket, the bad things are in their phones, right? They’re on the internet. And we have to, he suggests that we should keep the internet away from them until they’re old enough to understand, what is good, what is bad and make those decisions.

And he makes a good, he makes a good point. And I, what I like about the book is that he gives us something we can do. And one of the big things is that we talk to each other. We talk to each other. Teachers. We talked to other parents. We talked to our community members. We talked to families and friends about, what are you doing?

What are your rules? How are you managing this? Because it is it’s a lot. It’s a lot to manage. And then lastly, just wanted to let you know that here are the presentation links. You can click on those in the show notes, and then there are the resources. So thank you so much for listening. I hope this is a good starting off point for you to learn about Dr.

Haidt and the work and the research that he’s done. If you don’t want to read the book, there are a lot of clips out there where he talks about his research and what he does. What he considers to be happening. And if you get a chance to read the book it’s a good read. So thank you. Bye bye.