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

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Summary

An eye-opening look at data that points to social media addictions and how it is negatively impacting mental health of everyone (especially kids). I think a lot of people intuitively know that many social media apps and phone culture are bad for them, but this book finally points to over a decade of research that backs up those ideas.

Notes and Quotes

Yet the companies had done little or no research on the mental health effects of their products on children and adolescents, and they shared no data with researchers studying the health effects. When faced with growing evidence that their products were harming young people, they mostly engaged in denial, obfuscation, and public relations campaigns.

In fact, 40% of American children under 13 have created Instagram accounts, yet there has been no update of federal laws since 1998. (The U.K., on the other hand, has taken some initial steps, as have a few U.S. states.)

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and—as I will show—unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness—perpetually—to managing what became their online brand. This was now necessary to gain acceptance from peers, which is the oxygen of adolescence, and to avoid online shaming, which is the nightmare of adolescence. Gen Z teens got sucked into spending many hours of each day scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances, and distant influencers. They watched increasing quantities of user-generated videos and streamed entertainment, offered to them by autoplay and algorithms that were designed to keep them online as long as possible. They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviors that are essential for successful human development.

So even while parents worked to eliminate risk and freedom in the real world, they generally, and often unknowingly, granted full independence in the virtual world, in part because most found it difficult to understand what was going on there, let alone know what to restrict or how to restrict it.

My central claim in this book is that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.

The key factor is the commitment required to make relationships work. When people are raised in a community that they cannot easily escape, they do what our ancestors have done for millions of years: They learn how to manage relationships, and how to manage themselves and their emotions in order to keep those precious relationships going.

In general, when children are raised in multiple mutating networks where they don't need to use their real names and they can quit with the click of a button, they are less likely to learn such skills.

This book has four parts. They explain the mental health trends among adolescents since 2010 (part 1); the nature of childhood and how we messed it up (part 2); the harms that result from the new phone-based childhood (part 3); and what we must do now to reverse the damage in our families, schools, and societies (part 4). Change is possible, if we can act together.

At the time, however, nearly all evidence was correlational: Soon after teens got iPhones, they started getting more depressed. The heaviest users were also the most depressed, while those who spent more time in face-to-face activities, such as on sports teams and in religious communities, were the healthiest. But given that correlation is not proof of causation, we cautioned parents not to take drastic action on the basis of existing research. Now, as I write in 2023, there's a lot more research—experimental as well as correlational—showing that social media harms adolescents, especially girls going through puberty.

As evidence mounts that phone-based childhood is making our children mentally unhealthy, socially isolated, and deeply unhappy, are we okay with that trade-off? Or will we eventually realize, as we did in the 20th century, that we sometimes need to protect children from harm even when it inconveniences adults?

I'll offer many ideas for reforms in part 4, all of which aim to reverse the two big mistakes we've made: overprotecting children in the real world (where they need to learn from vast amounts of direct experience) and underprotecting them online (where they are particularly vulnerable during puberty). The suggestions I offer are based on the research I present in parts 1 through 3.

There are four reforms that are so important, and in which I have such a high degree of confidence, that I'm going to call them foundational. They would provide a foundation for healthier childhood in the digital age. They are: No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children's entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (roughly age 14). No social media before 16. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers. Phone-free schools. In all schools from elementary through high school, students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked pouches during the school day. That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That's the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

Marcus Aurelius's advice to himself, in the second century CE: Don't waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You'll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they're saying, and what they're thinking, and what they're up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.

No matter the pattern or severity of their story, what is common among parents is the feeling that they are trapped and powerless. Most parents don't want their children to have a phone-based childhood, but somehow the world has reconfigured itself so that any parent who resists is condemning their children to social isolation.

Anxiety affects the mind and body in multiple ways. For many, anxiety is felt in the body as tension or tightness and as discomfort in the abdomen and chest cavity. Emotionally, anxiety is experienced as dread, worry, and, after a while, exhaustion. Cognitively, it often becomes difficult to think clearly, pulling people into states of unproductive rumination and provoking cognitive distortions that are the focus of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), such as catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, and black-and-white thinking.

These extraordinarily high rates suggest that even when members of Gen Z are not on their devices and appear to be doing something in the real world, such as sitting in class, eating a meal, or talking with you, a substantial portion of their attention is monitoring or worrying (being anxious) about events in the social metaverse.

If world events played a role in the current mental health crisis, it's not because world events suddenly got worse around 2012; it's because world events were suddenly being pumped into adolescents' brains through their phones, not as news stories, but as social media posts in which other young people expressed their emotions about a collapsing world, emotions that are contagious on social media.

Between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities. This Great Rewiring of Childhood, I argue, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

The first generation of Americans who went through puberty with smartphones (and the entire internet) in their hands became more anxious, depressed, self-harming, and suicidal. We now call that generation Gen Z, in contrast to the millennial generation, which had largely finished puberty when the Great Rewiring began in 2010.

How, exactly, does a phone-based childhood interfere with child development and produce or exacerbate mental illness? To answer that question, we must first consider what childhood is and what children need to do in order to develop into healthy adults. That is my goal in part 2.

Physical play, outdoors and with other children of mixed ages, is the healthiest, most natural, most beneficial sort of play. Play with some degree of physical risk is essential because it teaches children how to look after themselves and each other.

Children can only learn how to not get hurt in situations where it is possible to get hurt, such as wrestling with a friend, having a pretend sword fight, or negotiating with another child to enjoy a seesaw when a failed negotiation can lead to pain in one's posterior, as well as embarrassment.

So you can see the problem when some adolescents start spending the majority of their waking hours on their phones (and other screens), sitting alone watching YouTube videos on auto-play or scrolling through bottomless feeds on Instagram, TikTok, and other apps. These interactions generally have the contrasting features of the virtual world: disembodied, asynchronous, one-to-many, and done either alone or in virtual groups that are easy to join and easy to leave.

Even if the content on these sites could somehow be filtered effectively to remove obviously harmful material, the addictive design of these platforms reduces the time available for face-to-face play in the real world. The reduction is so severe that we might refer to smartphones and tablets in the hands of children as experience blockers.

Of course, a smartphone opens up worlds of new possible experiences, including video games (which are forms of play) and virtual long-distance friendships. But this happens at the cost of reducing the kinds of experiences humans evolved for and that they must have in abundance to become socially functional adults.

It's as if we gave our infants iPads loaded with movies about walking, but the movies were so engrossing that kids never put in the time or effort to practice walking.

They also examined a large longitudinal study to see if British teens who increased their social media use in one year would report worse mental health in the following year's survey. For those in the peak years of puberty, which comes a bit earlier for girls, the answer was yes. For girls, the worst years for using social media were 11 to 13; for boys, it was 14 to 15.

Through endless posts from influencers and other strangers when their brains are in such an open state, searching for exemplars to lock onto. They should be playing, synchronizing, and hanging out with their friends in person while leaving some room in the input streams to their eyes and ears for social learning from their parents, teachers, and other role models in their communities.

In this new phone-based childhood, free play, attunement, and local models for social learning are replaced by screen time, asynchronous interaction, and influencers chosen by algorithms. Children are, in a sense, deprived of childhood.

The site is easy to find, impossible to avoid, and has become a frequent rite of passage for kids my age. Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily. She was attentive, nearly a helicopter parent, but I found online porn anyway. So did my friends.

Children are intrinsically antifragile, which is why overprotected children are more likely to become adolescents who are stuck in defend mode. In defend mode, they're likely to learn less, have fewer close friends, be more anxious, and experience more pain from ordinary conversations and conflicts.

Children need to swing and then jump off the swing. They need to explore forests and junkyards in search of novelty and adventure. They need to shriek with their friends while watching a horror movie or riding a roller coaster. In the process they develop a broad set of competences, including the ability to judge risk for themselves, take appropriate action when faced with risks, and learn that when things go wrong, even if they get hurt, they can usually handle it without calling in an adult.

Sandseter and Kennair analyzed the kinds of risks that children seek out when adults give them some freedom, and they found six: heights (such as climbing trees or playground structures), high speed (such as swinging, or going down fast slides), dangerous tools (such as hammers and drills), dangerous elements (such as experimenting with fire), rough-and-tumble play (such as wrestling), and disappearing (hiding, wandering away, potentially getting lost or separated). These are the major types of thrills that children need. They'll get them for themselves unless adults stop them—which we did in the 1990s. Note that video games offer none of these risks, even though games such as Fortnite show avatars doing all of them.

Brussoni guided me to research showing that the risk of injury per hour of physical play is lower than the risk per hour of playing adult-guided sports, while conferring many more developmental benefits (because the children must make all choices, set and enforce rules, and resolve all disputes). Brussoni is on a campaign to encourage risky outdoor play because in the long run it produces the healthiest children. Our goal in designing the places children play, she says, should be to "keep them as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible."

This is why there is no contradiction when I say that parents should supervise less in the real world but more in the virtual—primarily by delaying immersion. Childhood evolved on Earth, and children's antifragility is geared toward the characteristics of Earth. Small mistakes promote growth and learning. But if you raise children on Mars, there's a mismatch between children's needs and what the environment offers. If a child falls down on Mars and cracks the face shield of their spacesuit, it's instant death. Mars is unforgiving, and life there would require living in defend mode. Of course, the online world is not nearly as dangerous as Mars, but it shares the property that small mistakes can bring enormous costs. Children did not evolve to handle the virality, anonymity, instability, and potential for large-scale public shaming of the virtual world. Even adults have trouble with it.

According to a 2015 report from the Pew Research Center, parents (on average) say children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard. They say that kids should be at least 12 years old before being allowed to stay alone in their own home unsupervised for one hour. They say that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go, unsupervised, to a public park. And these respondents include the same Gen X and baby boom parents who say, gleefully and gratefully, that they were let out, in a much more dangerous era, at ages 6, 7, or 8.

Kids are antifragile and therefore they benefit from risky play, along with a secure base, which helps to shift them over toward discover mode. A play-based childhood is more likely to do that than a phone-based childhood.

The human brain contains two subsystems that put it into two common modes: discover mode (for approaching opportunities) and defend mode (for defending against threats). Young people born after 1995 are more likely to be stuck in defend mode, compared to those born earlier. They are on permanent alert for threats, rather than being hungry for new experiences. They are anxious.

Puberty is therefore a period when we should be particularly concerned about what our children are experiencing. Physical conditions, including nutrition, sleep, and exercise, matter throughout all of childhood and adolescence. But because there is a sensitive period for cultural learning, and because it coincides with the accelerated rewiring of the brain that begins at the start of puberty, those first few years of puberty deserve special attention.

In fact, smartphones and other digital devices bring so many interesting experiences to children and adolescents that they cause a serious problem: They reduce interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience.

If we want children to have a healthy pathway through puberty, we must first take them off experience blockers so that they can accumulate the wide range of experiences they need, including the real-world stressors their antifragile minds require to wire up properly.

Age 6: The age of family responsibility. Children are formally recognized as important contributors to the household, not just as dependents. As an example, they can be given a small list of chores and a small weekly allowance that is contingent upon their performance of those chores.

Age 8: The age of local freedom. Children gain the freedom to play and hang out in groups without adult supervision. They should show that they can take care of each other, and they begin running local errands, if there are stores within a short walk or bike ride. They should not be given adult cell phones, but they could be given a phone or watch designed for children that would allow them to call or text a small number of people (such as their parents and siblings).

Age 10: The age of roaming. Preteens gain the freedom to roam more widely, perhaps equivalent to what their parents were allowed to do at the age of 8 or 9. They should show good judgment and do more to help their families. Consistent with their increased mobility and responsibility, a flip phone or other basic phone with few apps and no internet access might be given as a birthday present. They should not have most afternoons filled with adult-led "enrichment" activities; they need time to hang out with friends in person.

Age 12: The age of apprenticeship. At 12, which is around the age that many societies begin rites of initiation, adolescents should begin finding more adult mentors and role models beyond their parents. Adolescents should be encouraged to start earning their own money by doing chores for neighbors or relatives, such as raking leaves or working as a mother's helper for a neighbor with an infant or toddler. They might be encouraged to spend more time with trusted relatives, without their parents present.

Age 14: The beginning of high school. The 14th birthday comes around the time that high school begins, and this is a major transition during which independence increases along with academic pressure, time pressure, and social pressure. Activities such as working for pay and joining an athletic team are good ways to discover that hard work leads to tangible and pleasurable rewards. The beginning of high school would be a reasonable target for a national norm (not a law) about the minimum age at which teens get their first smartphone.

Age 16: The beginning of internet adulthood. This should be a big year of independence, conditional on showing a history of responsibility and growth since the previous step. The U.S. Congress should undo the mistake it made in 1998 when it made 13 the age at which children can sign contracts with corporations to open accounts and give away their data without their parents' knowledge or consent. I believe the age should be raised to 16 and enforced. The 16th birthday would become a major milestone at which we say to teens, "You can now get a driver's license, and you can now sign certain kinds of contracts without any legal requirement for parental consent. You can now open social media accounts as well." (There are good arguments for waiting until 18, but I think 16 would be the right minimum age to be established by law.)

Age 18: The beginning of legal adulthood. This birthday would retain all of its legal significance including the beginning of voting, eligibility for military service, and the ability to sign contracts and make life decisions. Because this birthday falls near high school graduation in the United States, it should be treated in van Gennep's terms as both a separation from childhood and the beginning of a transition period into the next phase of life.

Age 21: Full legal adulthood. This birthday is the last one with any legal significance in the United States and many countries. At this age one can buy alcohol and cigarettes. One can enter casinos and sign up for internet sports gambling. The person is now a full adult in the eyes of the law.

Safetyism is an experience blocker. When we make children's safety a quasi-sacred value and don't allow them to take any risks, we block them from overcoming anxiety, learning to manage risk, and learning to be self-governing, all of which are essential for becoming healthy and competent adults.

Smartphones are a second kind of experience blocker. Once they enter a child's life, they push out or reduce all other forms of non-phone-based experience, which is the kind that their experience-expectant brains most need.

Children have been drawn powerfully to screens since the advent of television, but they could not take those screens with them to school or when they went outside to play. Before the iPhone, there was a limit to the amount of screen time a child could have, so there was still time for play and face-to-face conversation.

Teens who spend more time using social media are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and other disorders, while teens who spend more time with groups of young people (such as playing team sports or participating in religious communities) have better mental health.

Children need face-to-face, synchronous, embodied, physical play. The healthiest play is outdoors and includes occasional physical risk-taking and thrilling adventure. Talking on FaceTime with close friends is good, like an old-fashioned phone call to which a visual channel has been added. In contrast, sitting alone in your bedroom consuming a bottomless feed of other people's content, or playing endless hours of video games with a shifting cast of friends and strangers, or posting your own content and waiting for other kids (or strangers) to like or comment is so far from what children need that these activities should not be considered healthy new forms of adolescent interaction; they are alternatives that consume so much time that they reduce the amount of time teens spend together.

Sleep-deprived teens cannot concentrate, focus, or remember as well as teens who get sufficient sleep. Their learning and their grades suffer. Their reaction times, decision making, and motor skills suffer, which elevates their risk of accidents. They are more irritable and anxious throughout the day, so their relationships suffer. If sleep deprivation goes on long enough, other physiological systems become perturbed, leading to weight gain, immune suppression, and other health problems.

One experiment found that adolescents who restricted their use of screen devices after 9 p.m. on school nights for two weeks showed increased total sleep time, earlier sleep onset times, and improved performance on a task that required focused attention and quick reactions.

In short, children and adolescents need a lot of sleep to promote healthy brain development and good attention and mood the next day.

If we zoom in on heavy users, such as older teen girls, who use texting and social media apps far more often than any other group, we are now in the ballpark of one interruption every minute. Thanks to the tech industry and its voracious competition for the limited resource of adolescent attention, many members of Gen Z are now living in Kurt Vonnegut's dystopia.

They found that performance was best when phones were left in the other room, and worst when phones were visible, with pocketed phones in between. The effect was bigger for heavy users. The article was titled "Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity."

When adolescents have continuous access to a smartphone at that developmentally sensitive age, it may interfere with their maturing ability to focus.

Can a phone-based childhood exacerbate existing ADHD symptoms? It appears so. A Dutch longitudinal study found that young people who engaged in more problematic (addictive) social media use at one measurement time had stronger ADHD symptoms at the next measurement time. Another study by a different group of Dutch researchers used a similar design and also found evidence suggesting that heavy media multitasking caused later attention problems, but they found this causal effect only among younger adolescents (ages 11–13), and it was especially strong for girls.

The sheer amount of time that adolescents spend with their phones is staggering, even compared with the high levels of screen time they had before the invention of the iPhone. Studies of time use routinely find that the average teen reports spending more than seven hours a day on screen-based leisure activities (not including school and homework).

The opportunity cost of a phone-based childhood refers to everything that children do less of once they get unlimited round-the-clock access to the internet.

The first foundational harm is social deprivation. When American adolescents moved onto smartphones, time with friends in face-to-face settings plummeted immediately, from 122 minutes per day in 2012 down to 67 minutes per day in 2019. Time with friends dropped further because of COVID restrictions, but Gen Z was already socially distanced before COVID restrictions were put in place.

The second fundamental harm is sleep deprivation. As soon as adolescents moved from basic phones to smartphones, their sleep declined in both quantity and quality, around the developed world. Longitudinal studies show that smartphone use came first and was followed by sleep deprivation.

Sleep deprivation is extremely well studied, and its effects are far reaching. They include depression, anxiety, irritability, cognitive deficits, poor learning, lower grades, more accidents, and more deaths from accidents.

The third fundamental harm is attention fragmentation. Attention is the ability to stay on one mental road while many off-ramps beckon. Staying on a road, staying on a task, is a feature of maturity and a sign of good executive function. But smartphones are kryptonite for attention. Many adolescents get hundreds of notifications per day, meaning that they rarely have five or 10 minutes to think without an interruption.

There is evidence that the fragmentation of attention in early adolescence caused by problematic use of social media and video games may interfere with the development of executive function.

The fourth fundamental harm is addiction. The behaviorists discovered that learning, for animals, is "the wearing smooth of a path in the brain." The developers of the most successful social media apps used advanced behaviorist techniques to "hook" children into becoming heavy users of their products.

When we put these four foundational harms together, they explain why mental health got so much worse so suddenly as soon as childhood became phone-based.

There is a clear, consistent, and sizable link between heavy social media use and mental illness for girls, but that relationship gets buried or minimized in studies and literature reviews that look at all digital activities for all teens.

The authors conclude that "social comparison takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluations." This means that the frequent reminders girls give each other that social media is not reality are likely to have only a limited effect, because the part of the brain that is doing the comparisons is not governed by the part of the brain that knows, consciously, that they are seeing only edited highlight reels.

When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%. When a man became depressed, it had no measurable effect on his friends. The authors surmise that the difference is due to the fact that women are more emotionally expressive and more effective at communicating mood states within friendship pairs. When men get together, in contrast, they are more likely to do things together rather than talk about what they are feeling.

Given that depression and anxiety are more contagious than good mental health, and given that girls are more likely to talk about their feelings than boys, we might expect a sudden burst of depression and anxiety as soon as large numbers of girls joined Instagram and other "sharing" platforms, around 2012.

This is the great irony of social media: the more you immerse yourself in it, the more lonely and depressed you become. This is true both at the individual level and at the collective level.

Experimental studies show that social media use is a cause, not just a correlate, of anxiety and depression.

One of the most widely noted traits of Gen Z is that they are not doing as much of the bad stuff that teenagers used to do. They drink less alcohol, have fewer car accidents, and get fewer speeding tickets. They have far fewer physical fights or unplanned pregnancies. These are, of course, wonderful trends—nobody wants more car accidents. But because the rate of change for so many risky behaviors has been so rapid, I also look at these trends with concern. What if these changes came about not because Gen Z is getting wiser, but because they are withdrawing from the physical world? What if they are engaging in less risk-taking overall—healthy as well as unhealthy—and therefore learning less about how to manage risks in the real world?

Age, the tech industry has found ever more compelling ways to help boys do the things they want to do, without having to take social and physical risks that were once needed to satisfy those desires.

Common Sense Media reported in 2019 (before COVID) that 41% of adolescent boys play more than two hours per day, and 17% report playing more than four hours per day. Just as with girls who devote that much time to social media, the time has to come from somewhere. Those heavy gamers are missing out on sleep, exercise, and in-person social interaction with friends and family. As one young man I know put it, "I really wish I had gotten to know my grandfather better before he died, instead of always playing video games when he visited."

Of course, boys are mostly playing games with other boys, so a defender of video games might argue that boys are getting more social interaction than they did before internet gaming, just as girls are getting more social interaction via social media. But is online gaming as good for social development as hanging out with friends in person? Or is gaming like social media, giving a lot more quantity but of much lower quality?

Video game play is happening within virtual worlds designed to maximize time spent on the platforms—just like social media. Video games are not designed to foster a small number of lasting friendships or to develop their players' social skills.

Boys thrive when they have a stable group of reliable friends, and they create their strongest and most durable friendships from being on the same team or in a stable pack, facing risks or rival teams. Virtual packs create weaker bonds, although today's increasingly lonely boys cling to them and value them because that's all they have. That's where their friends are, as Chris told me.

That, I believe, is what has happened to Gen Z. They are less able than any generation in history to put down roots in real-world communities populated by known individuals who will still be there a year later.

Boys are at greater risk than girls of "failure to launch." They are more likely to become young adults who are "Not in Education, Employment, or Training." Some Japanese men developed an extreme form of lifelong withdrawal to their bedrooms; they are called hikikomori.

As boys engaged in fewer risky activities outdoors or away from home, and began spending more time at home on screens, their mental health did not decline in the 1990s and 2000s. But something changed in the early 2010s, and their mental health then began to decline.

One way that smartphones—amplified by high-speed internet—have affected boys' lives is by providing unlimited, free, hardcore pornography accessible anytime, anywhere. Porn is an example of how tech companies have made it easy for boys to satisfy powerful evolved desires without having to develop any skills that would help them make the transition to adulthood.

The Great Rewiring of Childhood pulled young people out of real-world communities, including their own families, and created a new kind of childhood lived in multiple rapidly shifting networks. One inevitable result was anomie, or normlessness, because stable and binding moralities cannot form when everything is in flux, including the members of the network.

I think I can best convey what is happening to us by using a word rarely used in the social sciences: spirituality. The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.

Jefferson's use of the word "elevate" captures for all of us the feeling that we are lifted "up" in some way. Conversely, witnessing people behaving in petty, nasty ways, or doing physically disgusting things, triggers revulsion. We feel pulled "down" in some way. We close off and turn away. Such actions are incompatible with our elevated nature. This is how I'm using the word "spiritual." It means that one endeavors to live more of one's life well above zero on the z axis. Christians ask, "What would Jesus do?" Secular people can think of their own moral exemplar. (I should point out that I am an atheist, but I find that I sometimes need words and concepts from religion to understand the experience of life as a human being. This is one of those times.)

So now I want to ask: Does the phone-based life generally pull us upward or downward on this vertical dimension? If it is downward, then there is a cost even for those who are not anxious or depressed. If it is downward, then there is spiritual harm, for adults as well as for adolescents, even for those who think that their mental health is fine. There would also be harm to society if more people are spending more time below zero on the z axis. We would perceive a general society-wide degradation that would be hard to put into words.

Looking at these six practices can help us see what many of us have lost as we have entwined our lives more fully with our digital assistants. These practices point us to ways to improve our own lives, and those of children and adolescents too. These are practices that all of us can do, whether we are religious or not, to flourish and connect in our age of anxiety and fragmentation. In fact, they may be more important for those who are not religious and don't get exposure to these practices inside a faith community.

But Durkheim showed that nearly all societies have created rituals and communal practices for pulling people "up," temporarily, into the realm of the sacred, where the self recedes and collective interests predominate. Think of Christians singing hymns together every Sunday in church; think of Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca; think of civil rights marchers singing as they walked. Evidence that these two levels are available to everyone, even outside a religious context, can be found in the ways that fans of sports teams use similar techniques to bind themselves together before a game with pep rallies, the singing of fight songs, and shared consciousness alteration (usually from alcohol), along with a variety of quasi-religious rituals, superstitions, and body markings. It is a thrill to be one of thousands of fans in a stadium, all singing and stomping in unison after each goal or touchdown. Durkheim called this state of energized communion "collective effervescence."

The phone-based life makes it difficult for people to be fully present with others when they are with others, and to sit silently with themselves when they are alone. If we want to experience stillness and silence, and if we want to develop focus and a sense of unified consciousness, we must reduce the flow of stimulation into our eyes and ears. We must find ample opportunities to sit quietly, whether that is in meditation, or by spending more time in nature, or just by looking out a car window and thinking on a long drive, rather than always listening to something, or (for children in the back seat) watching videos the whole way.

He urges us to fix ourselves first, before we criticize anyone else. Social media trains us to do the opposite. It encourages us to make rapid public judgments with little concern for the humanity of those we criticize, no knowledge of the context in which they acted, and no awareness that we have often done the very thing for which we are publicly shaming them.

Yet one of the hallmarks of the Great Rewiring is that children and adolescents now spend far less time outside, and when they are outside, they are often looking at or thinking about their phones. If they encounter something beautiful, such as sunlight reflected on water, or cherry blossoms wafting on gentle spring breezes, their first instinct is to take a photograph or video, perhaps to post somewhere. Few are open to losing themselves in the moment as Yi-Mei did. One can certainly feel some kinds of awe while using a smartphone. Indeed, you can watch endless YouTube videos about people who performed heroic deeds (moral beauty). You can find the most extraordinary photos and videos ever taken of the world's most beautiful places. These experiences are valuable. But as we've seen before, our phones drown us in quantity while reducing quality. You watch a morally elevating short video, feel moved, and then scroll to the next short video, in which someone is angry about something.

If we want awe to play a larger and more beneficial role in our lives, we need to make space for it. As a result of doing my own awe walk the same week my students did them, I now take my AirPods out of my ears when I'm walking in any park or natural setting. I no longer try to cram in as many audiobooks and podcasts, at 1.5 times normal speed, as my brain can receive. As for our children, if we want awe and natural beauty to play a larger role in their lives, we need to make deliberate efforts to bring them or send them to beautiful natural areas. Without phones.

When people see morally beautiful actions, they feel as though they have been lifted up—elevated on a vertical dimension that can be labeled divinity. When people see morally repulsive actions, they feel as though they have been pulled downward, or degraded.

A phone-based life generally pulls people downward. It changes the way we think, feel, judge, and relate to others. It is incompatible with many of the behaviors that religious and spiritual communities practice, some of which have been shown to improve happiness, well-being, trust, and group cohesion, according to researchers such as David DeSteno. I described six such practices.

First, Émile Durkheim showed that human beings move up and down between two levels: the profane and the sacred. The profane is our ordinary self-focused consciousness. The sacred is the realm of the collective. Groups of individuals become a cohesive community when they engage in rituals that move them in and out of the realm of the sacred together. The virtual world, in contrast, gives no structure to time or space and is entirely profane.

Second, religious rituals always involve bodily movement with symbolic significance, often carried out synchronously with others. Eating together has a special power to bond people together. The virtual world is, by definition, disembodied.

Third, many religions and spiritual practices use stillness, silence, and meditation to calm the "jumping monkey" of ordinary consciousness and open the heart to others, God, or enlightenment. Meditation has been shown to promote well-being, even brief regular meditation in fully secular contexts. The phone-based life, in contrast, is a never-ending series of notifications, alerts, and distractions.

Fourth, a defining feature of spirituality is self-transcendence. There is a network of brain structures (the default mode network) that becomes less active during moments of self-transcendence, as if it were the neural basis of profane consciousness. Social media keeps the focus on the self, self-presentation, branding.

Fifth, most religions urge us to be less judgmental, but social media encourages us to offer evaluations of others at a rate never before possible in human history. Religions advise us to be slower to anger.

Sixth, the grandeur of nature is among the most universal and easily accessible routes to experiencing awe, an emotion that is closely linked to spiritual practices and progress. A simple walk in a natural setting can cause self-transcendence, especially if one pays close attention and is not attending to a phone. Awe in nature may be especially valuable for Gen Z.

In this short chapter, I explain what collective action problems are and I describe some of the common mechanisms used to solve them. Then, in each of the remaining chapters of part 4, I'll show what governments, tech companies, schools, and parents can do to reverse the disastrous transition from play-based to phone-based childhood.

Parents face collective action problems around childhood independence too. It was easy to send kids out to play back when everyone was doing it, but in a neighborhood where nobody does that, it's hard to be the first one. Parents who let their children walk or play unchaperoned in a public place face the risk that a misguided neighbor will call the police, who may refer the case to Child Protective Services, who'd then investigate them for "neglect" of their children. Each parent decides that it's best to do what every other parent is doing: Keep kids supervised, always, even if that stunts the development of all children.

There are four main types of collective response, and each can help us to bring about major change:

Voluntary coordination. Just as parents put additional pressure on the holdouts when they give their 11-year-old a smartphone, parents can support each other when they stick together. The group Wait Until 8th is a wonderful example of such coordination: Parents sign a pledge when their child is in elementary school that they will not give their child a smartphone until eighth grade. The pledge becomes binding only when 10 families with kids in that school and grade sign the pledge, which guarantees that those children will have others to play with and will not feel that they are the "only ones" excluded. The trap is broken and those 10 families escape together (although only until eighth grade, which is too early because it is still in middle school. I wish they would change their name to Wait Until 9th).

Social norms and moralization. A community can come to see a personal decision in moral terms and express its revulsion or condemnation, as has happened toward drunk driving (fortunately) or toward a mother who lets her 9-year-old son ride the subway without an adult chaperone (unfortunately). We can reverse the negative moralization of childhood autonomy and come to see 9-year-olds walking around without chaperones as perfectly normal, which it was until very recently.

Technological solutions. A new product or invention can change the options and incentives for everyone in a community at the same time, such as the introduction of lockable pouches for phones, the development of quick and easy age verification methods, or the introduction of better basic phones, which would reduce the pressure on parents to give their children smartphones and social media before high school.

Laws and rules. Governments can make laws, such as requiring all social media companies to verify the ages of new users, or clarifying neglect laws so that giving independence to a child is not evidence of neglect. Institutions can set policies, such as a school requiring all students to keep their phones in phone lockers during the school day.

Students no longer sat silently next to each other, scrolling while waiting for homeroom or class to start. They talked to each other or the teacher. Voss says that when he walks into a school without a phone ban, "It's kind of like the zombie apocalypse, and you have all these kids in the hallways not talking to each other. It's just a very different vibe."

The value of phone-free and even screen-free education can be seen in the choices that many tech executives make about the schools to which they send their own children, such as the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, where all digital devices—phones, laptops, tablets—are prohibited. This is in stark contrast with many public schools that are advancing 1:1 technology programs, trying to give every child their own device. Waldorf is probably right.

This suggests that smartphones are exacerbating educational inequality by both social class and race. The "digital divide" is no longer that poor kids and racial minorities have less access to the internet, as was feared in the early 2000s; it is now that they have less protection from it.

Unstructured free play addresses—head-on—making friends, learning empathy, learning emotional regulation, learning interpersonal skills, and greatly empowers students by helping them find a healthy place in their school community—all while teaching them life's most important skills like creativity, innovation, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, self-direction, perseverance, and social skills.

Those are the two whales: going phone-free and giving a lot more unstructured free play. A school that is phone-free and play-full is investing in prevention. It is reducing overprotection in the real world, which helps kids to cultivate antifragility. At the same time, it is loosening the grip of the virtual world, thereby fostering better learning and relationships in the real world. A school that does neither is likely to struggle with high levels of student anxiety, and will need to spend large amounts of money to treat students' growing distress.

In fact, Jodi was so worried about her students' anxiety levels she had each of them do 20 Let Grow Projects over the course of the year. She gave them a long list of things to choose from: Walk to town, do the laundry, ride a bus . . . and of course they could add their own. As the year was drawing to a close, Jodi had seen such a drop in her students' anxiety levels that she invited Lenore to spend an afternoon talking to the kids about their projects.

There are three big ways to improve recess: Give kids more of it, on better playgrounds, with fewer rules.

We should all be aghast that the average American elementary school student gets only 27 minutes of recess a day. In maximum-security federal prisons in the United States, inmates are guaranteed two hours of outdoor time per day. When a filmmaker asked some prisoners how they'd feel if their yard time was reduced to one hour, they were very negative. "I think that's going to build more anger," said one. "That would be torture," said another. When they were informed that most children around the world get less than an hour a day of outdoor playtime, they were shocked.

As a professor, I'm certainly in favor of reforms that increase academic performance, but the preoccupation with test scores caused the educational system to violate much of what we know about child development, the benefits of free play, and the value of time outdoors.

"Ironically, minimizing or eliminating recess may be counterproductive to academic achievement, as a growing body of evidence suggests that recess promotes not only physical health and social development but also cognitive performance." These benefits may be particularly large for boys, which suggests one more reason why boys have increasingly disengaged from school since the 1970s.

The American Academy of Pediatrics also recommends that schools not use revoking recess as a punishment for bad behavior, in part because it is precisely the kids with behavioral problems who need recess most.

Its report also recommends giving recess before lunch, rather than the common practice of combining lunch and recess as a single short period in which students wolf down their food in order to maximize their few precious minutes of free play.

The third way to improve mental health by improving recess is to reduce rules and increase trust. Essentially, schools should do the opposite of the school in Berkeley, California, that I discussed in chapter 3. That's the school that specified exactly how children should play tag, four square, and touch football, including the rule that students must not attempt to play touch football without an adult referee.

There is a Polynesian expression: "Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows." Sometimes what you are looking for is right there, underfoot, and it is better than anything you could find by looking farther away. I suggested two potential whales that schools can implement right away, with little or no additional money: going phone-free, and becoming more play-full.

Most schools say they ban phones, but that typically means only that students must not use their phones during class. This is an ineffective policy because it incentivizes students to hide their phone use during class and increase their phone use after class, which makes it harder for them to form friendships with the kids around them.

A better policy is to go phone-free for the entire school day. When students arrive, they should put their phones into a dedicated phone locker or into a lockable phone pouch.

The second whale is becoming a play-full school. The simple addition of a Let Grow Play Club—an afternoon option in K–8 schools of playing on the school playground, with no phones, plenty of loose parts, and minimal adult supervision—may teach social skills and reduce anxiety better than any educational program, because free play is nature's way of accomplishing these goals.

Schools can become more play-full by improving recess in three ways: Give more of it, on better playgrounds (such as those incorporating loose parts and "junk," and/or more natural elements), with fewer rules.

The Let Grow Project is another activity that seems to reduce anxiety. It is a homework assignment that asks children to "do something they have never done before, on their own," after reaching agreement with their parents as to what that is. Doing projects increases children's sense of competence while also increasing parents' willingness to trust their children and grant them more autonomy.

Schools can do more to reverse the growing disengagement of boys and their declining academic progress relative to girls. Offering more shop classes and more vocational and technical training and hiring more male teachers would each serve to re-engage boys. (As would offering better recess in the earlier years.)

Gopnik says that a better way to think about child rearing is as a gardener. Your job is to "create a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish." It takes some work, but you don't have to be a perfectionist. Weed the garden, water it, and then step back and the plants will do their thing, unpredictably and often with delightful surprises.

Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children's minds; it's to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it's to give them the toys. . . . We can't make children learn, but we can let them learn.

Providing children with responsibility around the house makes them feel like an essential part of the family, and giving them more responsibility as they grow could offer some protection against later feelings of uselessness.

While you cook dinner for your friends, send your kids out with theirs to the grocery store to pick up more garlic (even if you don't need it). It is only by letting your kids out of your sight, untethered, that you will come to see that this is doable, and rather great. (It is probably what you were doing by the time you were eight.) This kind of practice will help you feel more prepared to give them more independence and to hold off on giving them a phone because you'll have seen for yourself that they can do fine without one.

Just give the kids a note that they can show adults that says they have your permission to be out without you. You can print out such a card at LetGrow.org that says "I'm not lost or neglected!" and includes your phone number.

Encourage sleepovers, and don't micromanage them, although if the friend brings a phone, hold on to it until the friend leaves, otherwise they'll have a phone-based sleepover.

After school is for free play. Try not to fill up most afternoons with adult-supervised "enrichment" activities. Find ways that your children can just hang out with other children such as joining a Play Club (see chapter 11), or going to each other's homes after school. Friday is a particularly good day for free play because children can then make plans to meet up over the weekend. Think of it as "Free Play Friday."

Go camping. At campgrounds, kids are usually way more free range than at home, for a few reasons. First, they are away from their scheduled activities. Second, they're living in a small space with their parents—the outdoors beckons! Third, kids at campsites are expected to run around with the other kids. If you don't like camping, consider taking your next trip with another family that shares your ideas about independence, so the kids can play together.

Avoid camps that are essentially summer school, with academic work and internet access, or camps that do not provide children with any communal responsibilities. Try to find a camp that embraces the values of independence and responsibility. If possible, send your child there every summer, from third or fourth grade through eighth or ninth grade—or all the way through high school if they want to transition from camper to counselor. Bonus points for any camp that promises to not post pictures every day on its website. Summer camp is a great opportunity for parents and children to get out of the habit of constant contact and, especially for parents, constant reassurance that their kids are okay.

The average 8-to-12-year-old spends between four and six hours a day on recreational screen activities, across multiple screens. This is why most medical authorities and national health organizations recommend that parents place a limit on total recreational screen time for children in this age range.

If your children are spending a lot of time in person with friends, such as on sports teams or in unstructured play or hangouts, if they are getting plenty of sleep, and if they show no signs of addiction or problematic use on any devices, then you may be able to loosen up on the screen-time limit. Likewise, playing video games with a friend, in person and in moderation, is better than playing alone in one's room. Leonard Sax, author of Boys Adrift, recommends no more than 40 minutes a night on school nights, and no more than an hour a day on weekends. However, many families use the rule of allowing longer periods, but only on weekends. As with social media use, limits are hard to impose if you are the only family imposing them, so try to coordinate with the parents of your child's friends. When many families impose similar limits, they break out of the collective action trap and everyone is better off.

Delay the opening of social media accounts until 16. Let your children get well into puberty, past the most vulnerable early years, before letting them plug into powerful socializing agents like TikTok or Instagram. This doesn't mean they can never see any content from these sites; as long as they can get to a web browser, they'll get to the platforms. But there's a difference between viewing TikTok videos on a browser and opening an account on TikTok, which you reach via the app on your smartphone during every spare moment. Opening an account is a major step in which adolescents provide personal data to the platform, put themselves into a stream of personalized content chosen by an algorithm to maximize engagement, and begin to post content themselves. Delay that fateful step until well into high school.

The risks, and listen to their thoughts. Even without a social media account, all children will encounter age-inappropriate content online. Exposure to pornography is virtually certain. Talk with your preteens about the risks inherent in posting public content or sharing personal information online, including sexting and cyberbullying. Ask them what problems they see in their peers' online habits, and ask them how they think they can avoid such problems themselves.

You have to let go online eventually. But if you can keep the quantity of online time lower and the quality higher in this long period of childhood and early adolescence (ages 6–13), you'll make room for more real-world engagement, and you'll buy time for your child's brain to develop better self-control and less fragmented attention.

Adolescents have nearly all begun puberty by the time they start high school, and this is the period when rates of depression and anxiety start to rise more steeply. In earlier chapters, I made the case that helping young people feel useful and connected to real-world communities is pivotal to their social and emotional development, so it is important that adolescents take on some adult-level challenges and responsibilities. Finding non-parental role models also becomes more valuable during this period.

Let your teen hang out at a "third place" (not home or school) like the Y, the mall, the park, a pizzeria—basically, a place where they can be with their friends, away from adult supervision. Otherwise, the only place they can socialize freely is online.

Encourage your teen to find a part-time job. Having a boss who is not a parent is a great experience, even when it's not a pleasant one. Even one-off gigs are good. Shoveling a neighbor's driveway requires talking to an adult, negotiating a fee, and completing the task. Earning your own money—and having control over how it is spent—is an empowering feeling for a young person.

One modern-day program to consider is the American Exchange Project. It sends high school seniors from all over the United States to spend a week with a family in another state, in the hopes of weaving a polarized country back together. And it's free! Meanwhile, the American Field Service has been sending high school students all over the globe for decades. Teens live with a family and attend the local school. Alternatively, you can host a student from abroad. CISV International, pioneered by the child psychologist Dr. Doris Allen, fosters intercultural friendship through exchanges and other youth programming beginning at age 11. There are CISV chapters in more than 60 countries around the world.

Bigger thrills in nature. Let your teens go on bigger, longer adventures, with their friends or with a group: backpacking, rock climbing, canoeing, hiking, swimming—trips that get them out into nature and inspire real-world thrills, wonder, and competence. Consider programs that run a month or longer with organizations such as Outward Bound and the National Outdoor Leadership School, which are designed to foster self-reliance, social responsibility, self-confidence, and camaraderie (and do not require prior outdoor experience). There are also a number of free or subsidized programs, as discussed in chapter 10. As Kurt Hahn, the founder of Outward Bound, explained, There exists within everyone a grand passion, an outlandish thirst for adventure, a desire to live boldly and vividly through the journey of life.

The teen years should be a time of loosening restrictions as teens mature and gain greater ability to inhibit impulses and exercise self-control. The frontal cortex is not fully developed until the mid-20s, but a 16-year-old can and should be given more autonomy and self-determination than a 12-year-old.

Whenever you transition your teens from basic phones to smartphones, talk to them and monitor how the transition is going. You should continue to set parameters within which they have autonomy, such as maintaining family rules about when phones and other devices can and cannot be used. High school students are even more likely to be sleep deprived than middle school students, so help your teen develop a good evening routine, one in which the phone is removed from the bedroom by a set time each night. Most of my students say that the last thing they do at night before closing their eyes is to check their texts and social media accounts. It's also the first thing they do in the morning before getting out of bed. Don't let your children develop this habit.

Even if a parent rarely looks at the tracker, and even if a kid never summons Mom to come get him because his bike chain broke, the fact that this is always possible makes it more difficult for children and adolescents to feel that they are on their own, trusted and competent. And it makes it more difficult for parents to let go.

If you do one thing to be a better gardener in the real world, it should be to give your children far more unsupervised free play, of the sort you probably enjoyed at that age. That means giving them a longer and better play-based childhood, with ever-growing independence and responsibility.

If you do one thing to be a better gardener in the virtual world, it should be to delay your children's full entry into the phone-based childhood by delaying when you give them their first smartphone (or any "smart" device). Give only basic phones before the start of high school, and try to coordinate with other parents so that your children do not feel that they are the only ones without smartphones in middle school.

In part 4, I offered dozens of suggestions, but the four foundational reforms are: No smartphones before high school. No social media before 16. Phone-free schools. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.

The most important lesson here is to speak up. If you think the phone-based childhood is bad for children and you want to see a return to play-based childhood, say so. Most people share your suspicion, but they are not sure what to do about it. Speak to your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, your social media followers, and your political representatives.