Seeing the Stars: A Review of The Anxious Generation

Recently while discussing the challenges of modern parenting with a friend, she offered this pearl: Too often, we try to show our children the stars while standing under streetlights.

I thought of these wise words while ruminating over Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Children Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness—which is now not so much a book as a movement. Amidst myriad reviews and responses to the book since it was published in March, stories continue to crop up from across the globe of movements to delay giving children smartphones; smartphone limits have been instituted at schools in the United States, Canada, and even Eton College; more stories continue to be written of people rebelling against monochrome anti-culture and reclaiming beauty and human scale; there are now more choices for basic phones; resources and support for screen addiction and for living a fuller life without smartphone dominance have proliferated. Even just spending a few minutes on the Anxious Generation website unlocks loads of resources and connections to fellow travelers.

For a good while now, plenty of folks have questioned the anti-human tendencies of our technocracy, and many have done something about it. They’ve sent their kids to classical schools or have homeschooled (sometimes illegally), or simply set sane limits on television and computer use (pocket, desktop, laptop, and otherwise), all while endeavoring to live well the examined life in a world that continues to treat people like machines (or like interchangeable machine parts).

But now we seem to be having a (slightly) broader wake-up call. There is increasing momentum for phone-free schools and small-scale community agreements to limit digital technology, as well as to build better community solidarity. (One of the first questions I had while reading Haidt’s book was, Is he going to talk about the disintegration of local communities? To my great relief, he does, but also there’s further research on this and other topics at his Substack After Babel: e.g., “The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was a Major Driver of the Loss of the Play-Based Childhood.”) More people are interested in critical examination of their use of technology. Paul Kingsnorth’s work has found exploding interest. The excellent Substacks School of the Unconformed and Pilgrims Against the Machine as well as Be ScreenStrong, The Analog Family (by the author of Childhood Unplugged: Practical Advice to Get Kids Off Screens and Find Balance), Gen Z writer Freya India’s GIRLS, and Dixie Dillon Lane’s The Hollow are just a few of the online spaces where folks who want to live more humanly can connect with each other. Former social media influencers like Erin Loechner (author of the new book The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can’t) are making the case for a big step back from the digital saturation of family life.

There’s now an absolute wealth of official data and online resources, and increasingly there’s more support among in-person communities such as schools and churches. And if you need studies to support the idea that climbing trees and going barefoot in the grass and dirt are essential for a child’s healthy development—you got it. If you need books with the words “data-driven” and “evidence-based” to give you age-old wisdom, such as that adversity is good for kids, safety at all costs is dangerous, and that appropriate risk, unstructured outdoor play, close-knit intergenerational families and neighbors, meaningful work, and spiritual rituals are really, really important—there’s a study out there.

Thank goodness the data has caught up to what an ordinary mom can notice around the supper table, and what an ordinary teacher can see in and outside the classroom, and what old wives and old hermits have been saying for millennia.

I suspect Haidt’s book has been so successful thus far because it not only provides a compelling narrative of how we got here, but it gives us both hope and a clear path of what to do next. Haidt summons immense research and organization to explain how and why a radical decrease in unsupervised outdoor play and an increase in time spent on pocket computer portals—especially during the most vulnerable stages of childhood—wreaks havoc on mental health and overall happiness. To begin reversing the trend, Haidt argues, the steps are simple: increase unstructured outdoor play and decrease time spent “alone together” by getting rid of the “streetlights” so that we can—slowly but steadily—not only notice the stars, but re-knit our communities. (I’ll return to these steps later on.)

“Change is possible,” Haidt writes, “if we can act together.”

It’s important to emphasize that Haidt’s “how we got here” narrative is not simplistic: it goes far beyond “and then we gave children smartphones.” (I’ll address this criticism below.) Rather, the story Haidt tells has three acts, summarized briefly here by Haidt’s research partner Zach Rausch and by Free-Range Kids author and Let Grow founder Lenore Skenazy:

We now describe The Anxious Generation as a tragedy in three acts. Act 1, the loss of community, began in the 1960s and 1970s, when local communal life and obligations began to weaken, and social distrust began to rise (as described in Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone). This loss of trust led to Act 2, the loss of the play-based childhood. That began in the 1980s but really accelerated in the 1990s when children were pulled indoors, away from the unsupervised play with peers that had been typical for most of human history. As more immersive and exciting virtual worlds emerged, kids were drawn away from the real world and into the virtual one. The early 2010s marked the beginning of Act 3, the rise of the phone-based childhood, with the advent of smartphones and enhanced-virality social media.

Of course, Haidt’s (admirably compact) narrative is part of a larger story, and many others have sounded the alarm earlier: Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder came out in 2005, and the back-of-the-book description covers much of what Haidt does (“child advocacy expert Richard Louv directly links the lack of nature in the lives of today’s wired generation―he calls it nature deficit―to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as rises in obesity, Attention Deficit Disorder [ADD], and depression”). The problem has just gotten worse: Writing in The Guardian in September 2017, Robert Macfarlane noted: “In Britain, the ‘roaming range’ (the area within which children are permitted to play unsupervised) has shrunk by more than 90% in 40 years….The headline of a 2016 report…was that British children ‘spend less time outdoors than prisoners’: climbing walls, not trees.”

And, as Haidt notes, Waldorf schools—to which many Silicon Valley tech workers send their own children—have been anti-zeitgeist for a good while with regard to children and tech. There is a long list of writers and thinkers who have challenged the tendency to overprotect kids in the real world while plugging them into virtual worlds, such as New York public school teacher John Taylor Gatto, the ever-fascinating Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, and more.

The Main Criticism

Meanwhile, there’s been criticism of the book as well, mainly along the lines of calling Haidt a fearmonger who places all the blame for modern adolescents’ ills on smartphones. Haidt has ably defended himself from the charge of fearmongering, but I think this most common/focused critique bears more examination.

The critique goes that “Smartphones and social media are melting our children’s brains and making them depressed,” and Haidt just “blames our devices – which oversimplifies the problem.”

Such criticisms are all so much straw. Haidt never “just blames” digital devices or social media for the spike in child and teen anxiety and mental illness, which the book’s jacket (not to mention a cursory reading of the book itself, or most anything Haidt has written on the subject) is enough to show. Or even just this sentence: “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.” (Note the absence of blanket or universal descriptions or statements, as well as the qualifying word “major.”) The disintegration of strong communities, the decrease in adult solidarity, and fearful, overprotective parenting combined with a complaisance and naïveté toward the communal effects of a mass adoption of digital devices (helped very much along by the predatory tactics of social media companies) are all a vital part of the picture.

This type of criticism also tends to go along with a popular type of poisoning-the-well fallacy: An easy way to dismiss someone’s arguments is to call him anti-technology or—heaven forbid!—a Luddite.

Well-poisoning is popular because it’s effective. No one wants to be seen as anti-progress or anti-technology. (How backward! Let’s be anything but backward!) And casting critics of our technocratic regime into the outer darkness of reactionary Neanderthals—especially when it seems to impinge on our own technological choices (but are they our free choice?)—is quite appealing for anyone who would much rather not critically examine how rigidly we are in thrall to the religion of techno-optimism. It keeps one comfortable.

The irony here is that Haidt’s proposals for what to do are rather simple and have little to no monetary cost. Unlike the companies who would love for us to be tripping over ourselves to keep up with the Silicon Valley Joneses, he’s not selling a product. Rather, he’s advocating for more freedom, more outside play, and fewer obstacles to children’s healthy development—as well as more gleaning from the practices of ancient spiritual traditions. He’s advocating that we remove the streetlights so that they—and we—can see. As Catherine Price puts it, “Ask your children how they feel when you use your phone and devices when you’re around them and how they might like you to change. (Prepare to be heartbroken.)”

What makes Haidt and company so valuable is that they are reminding parents—and everyone—of the power of acting together, in little platoons as well as through larger-scale policies. “People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively,” Haidt writes. “They get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.”

And we are not helpless. What too many of our children and teenagers and young adults are experiencing is not inevitable. For the good of our children, we must and can act now, Haidt argues—in wisdom, certainly, but also with courage to go against the grain.

The Anxious Generation is written to be as accessible, tight, and winsome as possible, with copious endnotes and every chapter ending with bullet-point summaries. It’s perfect for bringing to your school district or your church reading group (Haidt is an atheist who recognizes the benefits of the spiritual life); it’s accessible for normies, trads, and rads. If you’ve not been bothered by smartphone culture, this book will give you not only facts and figures but also unsettling stories to reckon with. If you’ve always been bothered by smartphone culture, but you haven’t been able to articulate why, you’ll have the evidence to back up your instincts. Above all, Haidt’s book gives us hope that we can resist. We can make a difference.

AI

There’s one place Haidt sounds a wrong note: Instead of critically examining new technology, he gives ChatGPT a pass. Why? Because the studies haven’t come out yet that gauge its long-term effects.

This is exactly what was wrong with uncritically accepting the smartphone-in-every-pocket-including-children, surveillance-and-social-media regime in the first place: As a society, we didn’t question it.

We’re much taken with “data-driven practices” nowadays. And that’s all well and good, to a point—after all, we need evidence to back up an argument. But we shouldn’t have to wait for studies to show us in neat little figures what our common sense could already tell us. We can get fresh air and make food with friends without waiting for studies giving us the statistics of how great fresh air and communal meals are.

Let’s not wait for the magic sentence beginning “Studies show…” before we ask the questions, What habits does this practice cultivate? Will this help me and my community be better people? What is the form of this tool? What limits does it require for its proper use?

To prevent such a mess as we have, we can start by relearning what it means to be a person, and discerning whether our habits and tools make the stars easier or harder to see.

Hope

While writing this review, summer break hit, and ever since my family has been mostly on the road. By the end of the summer, my children will have spent weeks with family and friends, participating in wedding and graduation and anniversary celebrations as well as various family shindigs and shenanigans; swimming in the lake and learning to ride horses and make cheese and gather eggs and pick strawberries and sell cucumbers; reading Encyclopedia Brown mysteries and listening to an audiobook of Swiss Family Robinson on long car rides; playing outside and inside with a myriad of cousins and friends; playing “ship” in a hammock for hours on end. In addition to our DIY family farm camp, they’ve also attended summer camps closer to home run by enterprising local teenagers. They’ve experienced plenty of scrapes and bug bites and sibling spats and settlements. They’ve spent time with many cousins and friends as well as aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles with different backgrounds and gifts and personalities; they’ve heard stories from family and friends who have lived all their lives in northern Minnesota, from family who have traveled the world, from cousins who have lived in Indonesia. They’ve eaten homemade ice cream while enjoying a movie night with cousins.

It’s been a banner summer, and I’ve been reeling in gratitude. Meanwhile, after several fits and starts and a few drafts, I struggled to finish this review. Why? Because there are so many other things I’d rather be doing—reading to my children, listening to my daughter’s day, working on a poem, writing about our summertime visiting family and doing farm camp, seeing what my husband has been up to in our garage wood shop (I was interrupted writing this sentence to do precisely that), play a little music, go for a walk, wash the dishes, sketch a picture—than thinking about the rising rates of anxiety and depression in young people amidst a culture that actively encourages them to treat themselves like machines rather than persons and “protects” them from reality rather than letting them dig their hands into it.

After all, considering the Problems of Smartphone Culture and the Challenge of Technocratic Society is not the most delightful way to spend a summer afternoon. But then, as the school year cranks up again and I prepare to teach online classes, as I expect to have more students whose parents tell me they struggle with anxiety, these are precisely the things one needs to think about. It’s my duty as a parent and teacher and, well, human, to be concerned with how we as a society are raising the next generation.

(There are of course different approaches we might take in response to these challenges. At one point in our summer travels, I visited a town where there had recently been a gathering of thirty-odd teenagers. No one had a phone out. The host of the party, a professor, was asked whether his own teens have asked for a smartphone. “No,” he said. “They don’t need one. None of their friends have one, so there’s no reason to have one.” This particular family had made sacrifices to find a town where they could find similarly minded people with whom to bring up their children—people with whom to team up to raise children to be courageous, wise, joy-filled adults, who have real friends and real community. I found this example to be an important one: it’s crucial to recognize that some ships have not sailed; it’s still possible to cultivate close communities, and it’s possible to raise teenagers who won’t have years of their lives lost in a digital myopia. But it’s also crucial to note that such things require sacrifices, hard choices, and faithfulness, as all good things do.)

Enacting the policy changes Haidt advocates doesn’t only matter for me and my children; it doesn’t only make it more possible for them to have a flourishing life less encumbered by technocratic tentacles, and for them to find real friends. It also matters for my students, and for the children in my neighborhood, my town, my county, my state, and beyond.

All movements have limits. But love of neighbor can be our guide.

It’s always been challenging to raise a human being. There exists no formula. And for an age that prides itself on technical prowess and scientific progress, there still exists no surefire system for raising the perfect human—and there never will be, because human persons are that which transcend system. It is through philosophy—the continual seeking after wisdom—and in the practice of virtue—of uniting ourselves with the good (that is, the Good)—that we find not the mechanism, but the path.

So, then, rather than setting thorns in our children’s path, perhaps we can at least remove them. And if we find ourselves standing under streetlights or amidst smog, perhaps we could walk further along, and bring a friend with us. If the sky clears above us, we won’t suddenly find ourselves saints. But at least, perhaps, we’ll be able to see the stars.

Image via StockVault