The I Index

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

Next in the queue

67

/100

I Index Overall Rating

Readers

96/100

Critics

37/100

Scholars

N/A

Author:

Jonathan Haidt

Publisher:

Penguin Press

Date:

March 26, 2024

An investigation into the collapse of youth mental health, and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

What The Reviewers Say

Meghan Cox Gurdon,
The Wall Street Journal
Haidt lays out in pitiless detail what happened to the children of Generation Z when life moved online.
Tracy Dennis-Tiwary,
The New York Times Book Review
Erudite, engaging, combative, crusading.
Jessica Winter,
The New Yorker
The Anxious Generation is, to a considerable extent, a reiteration and expansion of Coddling. But it is also a vastly superior work. It’s less hung up on campus-outrage stuff, and it benefits from six additional years of research on how smartphones and social media dice the nerves and tamp the spirits of young people..
Judith Warner,
The Washington Post
Proving causation (rather than mere correlation) is an iffy proposition. It’s especially risky for Haidt in the face of a large body of scholarly literature on the psychological harms of social media that’s ambiguous at best.