A Lost Generation?
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in November 2025.
Jonathon Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation: how the great re-wiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness, has been on the New York Times top ten list for months. His thesis is that the combination of over-parenting our children in the real world and under-parenting them in the digital world has led to the severe injury of children, primarily by creating the conditions under which children do not develop the skill of managing fear. Gen Z (born ’81-‘95) are particularly impacted because they were born with an i-phone in their hands, enveloped in the digital world at crucial developmental points. This leads to negative, gender-differentiated outcomes (with, of course, individual variation), but too many Gen Zs crumble, beginning at puberty, into anxiety, insecurity, depression, ennui, and failure to launch.
The irony Haidt exposes is that we over-protect in the real world, which is as safe as it has ever been, and under-protect in the digital world, which is a lawless land of evil. He draws attention to the dramatic increase in age and decrease in the amount of time when children are supervised as protection from perceived danger. I expected my children to walk to kindergarten alone or with older children; if now I sent my grandchildren of a similar age to play outside without an adult present, I’d likely be having a chat with child welfare officials.
The requirement for children to be supervised increases parenting time, at a time when economic survival requires two working adults per family. The gap is bridged by offering digital entertainment. Increasingly, however, screen time is designed to be addictive and the screen goes from a pleasant distraction to a preferred/required activity. Three-year-olds scream in frustration when their screen is removed; teenagers hooked to their screens all night threaten drastic behaviour, even suicide, if screen time is denied. (An article in the Oct 25-26 New York Times – I’ll bet the writers are not parents -- suggests parents sit with their teen boys for the average ten hours a week they spend gaming to monitor and educate about the risk of such behaviour. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em?)
The damage to the developing brain comes directly and indirectly. Digital stimulation wires the developing brain in ways quite different than human interaction; the physiological foundation to learning is changed. Then there’s ‘opportunity cost’: because the child is not engaging in other activities while they are on their screen, they are not exposed to the learning offered by human interaction, particularly unsupervised play (which we used to accept as the work of childhood). Essential social skills -- attunement (reading others), synchrony (behaving in concert with others), conflict resolution, rule-making, etc – have no opportunity to develop. Humans have an unusually prolonged dependency because we are social animals, and it takes time and neural readiness to absorb the requisite skills.
The human brain develops most quickly in the first few years of life, and again at puberty. Because puberty happens earlier for girls, they are at risk for harm from digital stimuli at an earlier age. Girls are more socially attuned, so they are differently vulnerable than boys. They are harmed more by social media because they use it more and are more sensitive to visual comparisons (think body image); aggression among their gender tends to be social (think Mean Girls); they are more emotionally open; they are vulnerable to predatory older men (who are advantaged by the lawlessness of the digital world).
The vulnerability of boys starts with absence of unsupervised play where they learn how to manage fear through risky play, which would lay the foundation for a discovery mode of learning. In its absence, humans default to a defend mode which is a particularly bad fit with our view of masculinity. Haidt calls this condition fragility, which is both real (they lack the skills to assess and manage risk) and imagined (they believe they lack the skills), a feed-back loop that reinforces fragility.
Fragile boys tend to withdraw from the real world into the gaming and pornography world, both of which appeal to a version of manhood but fail to develop requisite skills. Furthermore, their withdrawal from the real world limits their access to live males who could model and teach real manly risk-management skills.
For both genders, the four foundational harms of digital envelopment are social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. The outcome for both genders, the girls earlier and faster, is mental unwellness – anxiety, depression, body dysphoria, aimlessness and hopelessness, a feeling of not belonging, social discomfort, etc..
It’s a sad picture, but not a lost cause. Haidt recommends strongly that children not be allowed an internet-connected phone until age 13, and as is becoming widely considered, that phone-free spaces be created and protected. He suggests we question the assumption of risk in the real world and allow unsupervised play. Of course reeling in the wild west of the digital world would be a good idea – it’s not clear he thinks it’s achievable.
Hard as it may be, it’s worth doing if we value our younger generations.
