This is my book of the year. The central claim in this book is that these two trends— overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world-are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.
The author presents research showing that a phone-based childhood disrupts child development in many ways. He describes four foundational harms: sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.
There are facts about the decline in teen mental health and wellbeing in the 21st century, showing how devastating the rapid switch to a phone-based childhood has been. The decline in mental health is indicated by a sharp rise in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm, beginning in the early 2010s, which hit girls hardest. For boys, the story is more complicated. The increases are often smaller (except for suicide rates), and they sometimes begin a bit earlier.
The Great Rewiring of Childhood pulled young people out of real-world communities, including their own families, and created a new kind of childhood lived in multiple rapidly shifting networks. One inevitable result was anomie, or normlessness, because stable and binding moralities cannot form when everything is in flux, including the members of the network.
As with social media for girls, spending hours "connecting" with others online produces an increase in the quantity of social interactions and a decrease in the quality of social relationships. Boys, like girls, became lonelier during the Great Rewiring. Some boys use video games to strengthen their real-world packs, but for many others, video games made it easier for them to retreat to their bedrooms rather than doing the hard work of maturing in the real world.
Another issue is the negative impact on spirituality and prevention of self-transcendence. Social media keeps the focus on the self, self-presentation, branding, and social standing. It is almost perfectly designed to prevent self-transcendence.
Most religions urge us to be less judgmental, but social media encourages us to offer evaluations of others at a rate never before possible in human history. Religions advise us to be slower to anger and quicker to forgive, but social media encourages the opposite.
Tech companies can be a major part of the solution by developing better age verification features, and by adding features that allow parents to designate their children's phones and computers as ones that should not be served by sites with minimum ages until they are old enough.
The author suggests 4 reforms for a healthier childhood in the digital age :
1. No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children's entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (roughly age 14).
2. No social media before 16. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers.
3.Phone-free schools. In all schools from elementary through high school, students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked pouches during the school day. That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers.
4.Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That's the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.
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