Changes in our children’s lives do not come with a full-blast announcement. The seeds of a mental health crisis in the young can be traced to the early 2010s: the emergence of the virtual world on phones in the hands of children.

According to Jonathan Haidt, an internationally praised social psychologist, the result has substituted play for “a great rewiring,” with alarming consequences.

He writes:

The result was a new “phone-based childhood,” which altered the developmental pathways of children and adolescents, bringing them minimal benefits while reducing the time spent on beneficial real-world activities such as sleeping, playing with friends, talking with adults, reading books, focusing on one task at a time, or even just daydreaming.

He elaborates on this in his just-issued book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

Haidt calls special attention to social media’s particular harm to girls. More generally, mental illness has risen dramatically among adolescents. Depression, social withdrawal, anxiety, suicide, and self-harm are among the consequences.

To the good, Haidt is at the forefront of working to remedy many of the unfortunate results he describes. He proposes solutions to reduce the damage and improve our children’s chances of flourishing.

On The Anxious Generation website, Haidt provides extensive information about his findings and the steps to take going forward. Unlike too many volumes that are better at telling you what’s wrong than what to do, this one includes suggestions for collective action, parents and educators, and what government and tech companies can do.

Links to organizations already pursuing reduced phone dependency and more free play are listed.

I hope you will take the opportunity to learn more. This is a mission for parents, grandparents, teachers, and those who wonder how to free children to be the children and future adults we all hope for.

Pass it on.