The Anxious Generation:
How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
by Jonathan Haidt (Penquin Press, March 26, 2024, 400 pages)
In 2010 I led a group of pastors to the Holy Land. I noticed that whenever there was free time, at least half of the group sat in the commons area of our retreat center staring at their phones. While I had a cell phone, I had not yet transitioned to the usage levels I would later attain. I still did a great deal of my work on the computer and through email.
It seemed odd to sit in a group while no one was talking for long periods of time. But they were just ahead of me—the phone and the iPad would come to dominate all our lives more and more. It seemed odd to see pastors sit for hours at a time, staring at their phones and messages. Mean-while, the Sea of Galilee was right outside our door. What was this to distract us from such a place?
Jonathan Haidt’s latest book has shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and should be at the top of the reading list of every pastor, parent, and community leader. He is sounding an alarm: we have an epidemic of mental illness that is entirely prevent- able but now out of control. If he is right, many social ills—drug abuse, suicide and depression, gun violence
and mass shootings, at least among young people, are at the least worsened by the very technology we have placed in their hands at younger and younger ages.
It is as though, Haidt writes, that we gave consent to allow our children to be placed on an expedition to Mars, a harsh world where they are completely untrained and ill-equipped to survive. Even in the 1990s and 2000s, as parents hovered over their chil- dren’s daily activities, fearful of sex offenders and kidnappings in public spaces, children were allowed to enter a far more dangerous place with insufficient help.
Most of us are aware, by observation if not through research, that our devices have taken over our lives morally, spiritually, and in ways that transform our humanity. In recent years, I read the work of Sherry Turkel and Nicholas Carr as they warned of the pro- found transformation of our perceptual and communal lives through the revolution of the internet. The rapidity of the replacement of books by online reading and information has been breathtaking. January 6, 2021, and the insurrection at the Capitol only underlined a weird disappearance of common and rational public life into the murky recesses of the virtual world. Originally Haight, a social psychology professor at New York University, set out to document the damage of social media to democracy and democratic institu- tions. Ultimately, his research uncovered an even more alarming reality about what our technology is doing to children.
And what is the net effect? Essentially that what he calls the play-based childhood of most of human history has been replaced a“phone-based childhood.” (To continue, click the link below)
The Flatpickin' Pilgrim's Progress 