Youth

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Racket News -  Every generation of adults thinks the next is growing up in a broken world. “It is the story of humanity,” says Jonathan Haidt, author of a new book on a youth mental illness epidemic called The Anxious Generation.  Returning to his roots as a professor of moral psychology after a perhaps uncomfortable foray into the center of America’s culture wars, Haidt’s new work describes a “great rewiring” of childhood, whose most frightening feature is its alacrity. In less than ten years, Americans went from nearly 8 in 10 teens not having smartphones to the inverse. By 2022, 46% reported being “almost constantly” online, many steeped in digital addictions causing depression, dysphoria, suicidation...

The “great rewiring” replaced skinned knees, sleepovers, and fights behind the Dairy Queen with formative years in self-enforced sensory deprivation, experiencing life “forever elsewhere,” as MIT’s Sherry Turkle put it. Haidt is convincing when he argues this screen-dominated upbringing delays neurological development and compounds conventional teen nihilism and depression, necessitating action in the form of a “no smartphones until high school” movement.