The Anxious Generation Book Review: Part III
While Parts I and II critiqued Haidt's methodology and analysis of phone-based childhood, there's a more fundamental issue: focusing on phones and social media as primary causes of teen anxiety obscures the complex reality. Today's teenagers navigate intersecting pressures—rising academic demands, constant global crisis exposure, packed schedules, and parental anxiety about their future. These pressures form an interconnected web that defines modern teenage life.
When we make sweeping comparisons between now and then, we risk oversimplifying these massive societal changes. Just as you can't reduce the differences between the U.S. and the UK to "one is a republic, one has a monarchy," you can't attribute all changes in teenage mental health between 2008 and 2024 to social media. We've lived through a global pandemic, increasing economic inequality, climate anxiety, and massive political upheaval. These aren't background noise—they're the very context in which today's teenagers are trying to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
This shifting landscape fundamentally shapes how children play and develop. Haidt is right that unstructured, unsupervised play is crucial for child development—that's well within the scientific consensus. However, his assumption that "real" play can only happen offline, preferably outdoors, misunderstands how play works. Children have always adapted their play to their environment and available tools. More importantly, they need their play to reflect and help them understand the world around them. Just as children practice adult roles with toy kitchens and baby dolls, they need to learn how to have a healthy relationship with technology through play. Today's children aren't failing to play—they're playing differently. When kids collaborate to build complex worlds in Minecraft or coordinate elaborate role-playing scenarios in online games, they develop crucial skills: project management, consensus building, and creative problem-solving. These aren't just game skills; they're life skills for a digital age.
As I mentioned, having phones isn’t the only difference between today’s children and children growing up in the early 2000s. Today's children spend more hours in school than previous generations, face homework from an increasingly young age, and deal with unprecedented academic pressure. And we know that academic pressure is associated with all the mental health issues that Haidt seems to be worried about. Yet he doesn’t suggest that we decrease the academic pressure off students and let them be children before we start preparing them for tests that would determine their future when they’re nine years old.
I’m a firm believer in listening to children when they tell you what’s wrong. When my daughter talks about her anxieties, they rarely centre on social media drama. Instead, she worries that she's "not smart enough" because her friends seem to get better grades while studying "casually." She talks about the difficulty of facing a day of less than fascinating lessons in which she has to listen nevertheless to ace her quiz or test while not letting on that she’s working too hard. These pressures don’t just affect her grades—they shape her self-image, sense of belonging, and her understanding of her own capabilities. Would taking away TikTok solve this? Let's be real—teenage girls’ social comparison didn't start with social media and won't end with it either.
Teen mental health is complex and multi-faceted—there's no silver bullet solution, no single villain we can vanquish to make everything better. Banning phones won't suddenly make teenagers anxiety-free, just as adding more homework won't necessarily create more successful adults. We need a nuanced approach that recognizes how different pressures intersect and compound. That means listening to teens when they tell us what keeps them up at night. It means teaching them how to manage the stresses of modern life—including but not limited to social media—while maintaining their sense of agency and hope for the future.
Being a teenager sucks. I can think of nothing that would compel me to go back to being fourteen or even sixteen. When teens and young people today feel like their future is hopeless, they're not making it up—they're responding to real challenges and uncertainties. But perhaps by having honest conversations about these challenges and acknowledging the complexity of their lives instead of searching for unidimensional villains, we can help them develop the resilience they need. I’m not talking about minimizing their struggles or offering easy solutions but standing with them as they navigate this thorny terrain. The first step isn't to fix everything—it's to really listen.
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