Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets.They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviors that are essential for successful human development.

1. Overprotecting children in the real world (where they need to learn from vast amounts of direct experience)2. Underprotecting them online (where they are particularly vulnerable during puberty)

The two big mistakes we’ve made:

<ol><li class="ql-align-justify">Social deprivation</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Sleep deprivation</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Attention fragmentation</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Addiction</li></ol>When we put these four foundational harms together, they explain why mental health got so much worse so suddenly as soon as childhood became phone-based.

The 4 foundational harms:

The attachment system evolved to help young mammals learn the skills they’ll need to reach adulthood while retreating to their “secure base” when they feel threatened.Every child needs at least one adult who serves as a “secure base.”A securely attached child usually settles within a few seconds or minutes, shifts back to discover mode, and heads out for more learning.

The attachment system:

<ol><li class="ql-align-justify">Assert a duty of care: To have some moral and legal responsibility for how to treat minors.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Raise the age of internet adulthood to 16</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Develop better age verification features</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Encourage phone-free schools (with phone lockers or lockable pouches in schools)</li></ol>

What Govt and tech companies can do:

<ol><li class="ql-align-justify">Stop punishing parents for giving children real-world freedom</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Design and zone public space with children in mind</li><li class="ql-align-justify">More vocational education, apprenticeships, and youth development programs</li></ol>

What Govt can do to incentivize more real-world experience:

1. Safetyism:The worship of “safety” is called safetyism.It prevents children from getting the quantity and variety of real-world experiences and challenges that they need.2. SmartphonesOnce they enter a child’s life, they push out or reduce all other forms of non-phone-based experience.

Experience blockers:

Healthy brain development depends on getting the right experiences at the right age and in the right order.Humans have several “sensitive periods,” which are defined as periods in which it is very easy to learn something or acquire a skill, and outside of which it is more difficult.

Sensitive periods:

Discover mode turns on when you detect opportunities. Defend mode turns on when threats are detected.People who go through life in discover mode are happier, more sociable, and more eager for new experiences. (except when directly threatened)Conversely, those who are chronically in defend mode are more defensive and anxious, and will learn less and grow less.

Discover mode vs Defend mode:

Each of us, acting alone, perceives that it’s too difficult or costly to do the right thing. But if we can act together, the costs go way down.Collective action problems require collective responses from governments, companies, schools and parents.

Collective action:

9 Powerful Lessons from "The Anxious Generation" by Jonathan Haidt

THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood. “Erudite, engaging, combative, crusading.” —New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) “Words that chill the parental heart… thanks to Mr. Haidt, we can glimpse the true horror of what happened not only in the U.S. but also elsewhere in the English-speaking world… lucid, memorable… galvanizing.” —Wall Street Journal “[An] important new book... The shift in kids’ energy and attention from the physical world to the virtual one, Haidt shows, has been catastrophic, especially for girls.” —Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times 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.

The two big mistakes we’ve made:

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