This recommended reading highlights The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, which comes from Sawyer. He'll provide his reasoning for the recommendation below and follow it with Amazon's summary.
Disclosure: This writing reflects my honest and unbiased opinion. I have not received any compensation, free copies, or other benefits from the author, publisher, or any affiliated parties. My views are solely my own, and my intention is to provide an understanding of why I'm recommending this book for potential readers.
Those who know me know I love finding inspiration for my professional work through books. I've been a strong proponent of continued learning for education professionals on all sides of the desk (college admissions, high school counselors, and independent educational consultants). I believe so strongly in this kind of reading that we have a webpage dedicated to recommended reading and curated a shorter list in one of our most popular blog posts, 5 Tips for Aspiring Independent College Counselors.
When I began working in college admissions in 2016, I spent the vast majority of my 80+ days traveling annually across my recruitment territory devouring any material related to my new profession. The highlights, underlines, and annotations within each of these revered texts laid the groundwork for both my educational knowledge base and shaped my educational philosophy as a young education professional.
As the tried-and-true classics for college-side admissions lingered on my bookshelf, I encountered a different perspective that seemed to be largely ignored by many of my colleagues. Enter The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids by Madeline Levine. This book awakened a latent interest, exploring how to combine my experience and knowledge within the admissions system with the fascinating ideas of adolescent development, mental health, and social psychology. My work with young adults through the college admissions process is more than just regurgitating statistics or facts, it is about guiding, mentoring, and advocating for young adults as they prepare to navigate and succeed in a difficult, tumultuous, and ever-changing world. As education professions, we can do more than talk policy, we can strive to understand what a student needs to know, how a student can learn that information, and how to collaboratively work with young adults to empower them through a holistic growth journey.
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt is a book that has once again sparked my passion for helping students in a way that reminds me of why I enjoyed starting my higher education journey eight years ago. I firmly believe we cannot meaningfully, effectively, and efficiently guide these students unless we understand the context of their lives and the major systemic influences that shape the next generations. With the rapid progression of technology, adult education professionals find themselves further removed from the modern-day teenage experience with each passing year. Just as the cost and admission policies of colleges have changed, so have the lives of the students we serve. To keep up with one, but deny the importance of the other is, in my opinion, a dereliction of duty to the higher calling that fuels my passion for working with young adults.
Imagine that you are quickly driving a car down the road. As you approach the intersection you see the green light turn yellow, and you must make a decision. The impulsive side of your brain, perhaps the anxious side if you are late, compels you to run the light. The cautious side remembers that doing so could result in a fine/ticket or, even worse, a major accident. For whatever reason, you stop while the car next to you decides to accelerate. Before your eyes you witness the speeding car t-boned by another unseen vehicle from your periphery vision. The air feels thick, as if time itself has slowed, and everything unfolds in surreal, fragmented moments. The screech of tires piercing through the air, a desperate cry of rubber gripping asphalt, trying and failing to stop the inevitable. It's a sound that seems to drill into your chest, reverberating in your bones, more felt than heard. In your mind one thought: that could've been me.
I will admit, this metaphor of the car crash permeated my brain as I read The Anxious Generation. I was born in 1992 and during the next 18 years of my life, technology and its effect on young people would change dramatically. I am fortunate enough to remember a childhood before having home internet, the frustration of dial-up, accessing high-speed internet for the first time in 2004, the launch of the iPhone in 2007, the creation of the "like" and "retweet" button in 2009, the addition of front-facing cameras in 2010, and Facebook's acquisition of Instagram in 2012. More than just being alive for these impactful events, I was living on the frontline through the early stages of what Haidt dubs "The Great Rewiring" (2010-2015). He argues that this timeframe completed a transition started in the 1980s from a "play-based" to a "phone-based" childhood. This timeframe also highlights "a sudden and very large upturn in... disorders related to anxiety and depression" for teens not only in America but across the globe. While this book focuses on Gen Z (born post-1995) and Gen Alpha (born early 2010s), Millennials (born 1981-1995 [especially late Millennials born in the 1990s]) and parents of Millennials will recognize the red flags and warning signs that peppered their adolescence. As a younger Millennial raised on technology and dealing with anxiety in my daily life, I will admit to some bias reading about the pitfalls which I and my friends fell face first into. Within the pages I felt a strange mixture of catharsis, acknowledgement, and the undeniable fear that, although I left this time period relatively unscathed, the horror stories seen amongst adolescences nowadays could've easily been me.
In many ways, most people will see this as a "parenting" book for those raising Gen Z and Gen Alpha children. While there is nothing wrong with that interpretation, I would challenge a wider audience to become involved and knowledgeable about these systemic concerns facing the next generations. Millennials looking to confront some of the most dystopian, toxic, and traumatizing parts of their technological experiences as children and teens will find much catharsis. Parents of Millennials, long checked out of the education system game by this point, might gain insight into the challenges faced by their children and how these challenges have only become more extreme for their grandchildren. I also encourage educators (or any adult involved with guiding students and/or young adults) to explore these topics. Lastly, and maybe most importantly, I recommend this book to both populations of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. They, more than perhaps anyone else, are aware of this technological manipulation and are eager to stop it. Aligned with purpose and a common care for one another, surely the collaboration of nearly four generations of Americans can collectively curb the damage being done.
There has been much talk about mental health crises and many students' inability to navigate day-to-day with a myriad of obstacles. More recently, high school teachers, college professors, and educators like me have been ringing alarm bells about many high schoolers lacking writing ability, reading comprehension, internal motivation, and commitment to follow through with responsibilities and tasks. I am here to tell you, with a generally optimistic outlook on life regarding the youth I work with, that this is not a drill. What originally presented itself as anecdotal frustration has grown into a substantial pile of evidence (both correlational and causational) dealing with the effects of technology, social media, and smartphones on at least three generations of our planet.
To be abundantly clear, I am not a mental health counselor or a social psychologist, but I spend the vast majority of my days interacting virtually and in person with a wide diaspora of young adults across a vast geographical and socio-economic range. I have arrived at a damning conclusion that I can't seem to shake, that we as a society have willingly martyred generations of children to the altar of technological progress for a mixture of convenience and hardwired pleasure responses too easily manipulated by large corporations seeking to hack our brains for profit. I challenge myself, and you, to learn about the concessions we as a society have made and ask yourself if the price of this "progress" is too steep. No single individual can address these large systemic concerns, but perhaps together we can make micro-level changes to better protect and guide the youth of our world.
After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why? In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies. Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood. Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.
With all my support,
Sawyer Earwood
Independent College Counselor
Co-Founder of Virtual College Counselors
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