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

Are you feeling uneasy about children and young people’s use of new digital technologies? Do you worry that social media could be damaging and that Generation Z is losing touch while spending too much time glued to screens?In The Anxious Generation, Social Psychologist and Author Jonathan Haidt undertakes an eye-opening exploration of these issues and what he calls ‘The Great Rewiring’. Haidt noticed a downward shift in the mental health of young people starting around 2010, interestingly enough, around the same time as the widespread introduction of smartphones such as the iPhone. This change, Haidt established, was the time when childhood shifted in the Western world from ‘play-based’ to ‘phone-based’