The Anxious Generation

by Author Jonathan Haidt

  • Publisher Penguin Press
  • Year published 2024
  • ISBN: ISBN 978-0593655047
  • Number of pages 395 pages
  • WorldCat

Book cover of 'The Anxious Generation' by Jonathan Haidt, featuring a child holding a smartphone in front of their face, surrounded by yellow and blue balloons. The title highlights the book as a #1 New York Times Bestseller and a Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of 2024.
About the Book
Book description

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

 Jonathan Haidt head shot
About the Author
Author description

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. 

Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and of the New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff). He has given four TED talks. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. 

Photo credit: Jayne Riew

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last updated: 09/02/25 10:42