Jonathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation" attributes a significant rise in adolescent mental health issues to a dramatic shift from play-based to phone-based childhoods that occurred in the early 2010s. This "Great Rewiring" coincided with the widespread adoption of smartphones and social media, leading to social deprivation, sleep loss, fragmented attention, and addiction among young people. The text explores how overprotective parenting in the real world further hinders children's development of resilience, while the virtual world offers asynchronous and disembodied interactions that fail to meet their fundamental needs for connection and real-world experience. Haidt argues for collective action involving delayed smartphone and social media access, phone-free schools, and increased opportunities for unsupervised play to reverse this trend and foster healthier development.
