The Anxious Generation is Jonathan Haidt's follow up work to his well-known 2018 work "The Coddling of the American Mind” in which Haidt and co-author Greg Lukianoff looked at the increasing fragility of young people in the US.
In this work Haidt presents the evidence for what he calls a "great rewiring" of the minds of young people across the English speaking world in particular, and the Western world in general since the 2010s.
Using a lot of statistical data he shows how all the indices of mental health among young people has declined rapidly since the 2010s - when the smart phone became a standard possession for young people: young people are far more prone to anxiety, self-harm, and even suicide He shows how girls have suffered worse due to their particular vulnerability to social media, but that boys' lives too have altered for the worse due to the heavy usage of, and even addiction to, online video games and pornography.
Parents have unwittingly exposed their children to all kinds of bad actors online, not least the very social media providers who have unscrupulously exploited the vulnerabilities of the minds of young boys and girls. Feeding into these trends is the fact that since the 1980s parents (in the English speaking world at least) began bringing up their children with excessive risk aversion, thereby impeding the normal development of children through mildly risky play and other forms of exploration.
Haidt recommends two steps need to be taken urgently by parents to reverse the terrible effects on youngsters of coddling in real-life and naivety regarding the online world: protect children less in the real world, and more in the online world. In the last part of the book he makes many practical policies schools and parents could adopt to help the young. This book is essential reading for educators and parents alike.