The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt

 The central thesis of this book is that the paired impact of over protecting our children in the physical world (which Haidt says began sometime in the 1980s) and failing to protect them enough in the digital world (he points to 2010-2015 as the moment when this really occurred) have resulted in the mental health crisis that currently plagues the young people of this country. He offers extensive graphs to support these shifts and likewise sites significant research to show the outcomes going as far as to indicate a causal relationship between a "phone-based childhood" and increased incidence of both clinical anxiety and ADHD. Haidt puts forth 4 major negative impacts of the phone-based childhood - social deprivation, sleep deprivation, fragmented attention, & addiction. Haidt also lays out the different impacts that the phone-based childhood + safteyism have had on girls and boys pointing to social media as the main culprits in hurting girls and porn & video games as the greatest threat to boys. I particularly enjoyed a chapter that considered the secular spiritual impact of increased screen time on our society. The final chapters shift to solutions which largely rest on collective action.

As someone who reads extensively about the impact of screens - on youth, adults, brain development, vision etc. etc. etc. - I did not find much of the content of this book surprising, but I did appreciate the cohesive organization of the argument and the clarity with which Haidt approached a subject that it's easy to end up talking in circles about.