The Anxious Generation

by Jonathan Haidt · 2024

Jonathan Haidt's argument that smartphones and overprotective parenting rewired childhood and drove a youth mental-health crisis.

Books mentioned in The Anxious Generation (16)

• The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt: “My first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, examines 10 'great truths' that ancient cultures East and West discovered about how to live a flourishing life.”
• The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt: “My second book, The Righteous Mind, lays out my own research on the evolved psychological foundations of morality.”
• The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt: “Greg and I finished writing The Coddling of the American Mind in early 2018.”
• iGen by Jean Twenge: “We decided to expand our Atlantic article into a book with the same title. In it, we analyzed the causes of this mental illness crisis, drawing on Jean Twenge's 2017 book, iGen.”
• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr: “Nicholas Carr, in his aptly titled 2010 book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, lamented his lost ability to stay on one path.”
• Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do by B.J. Fogg: “One researcher who explored these possibilities was B.J. Fogg, a professor at Stanford who wrote a 2002 book titled Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do.”
• Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy: “Lenore is the author of the 2009 book Free-Range Kids, which my wife and I read in 2012. It changed the way we raised our children.”
• Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax: “Leonard Sax, author of Boys Adrift, recommends no more than 40 minutes a night on school nights.”
• Paranoid Parenting: Why Ignoring the Experts May Be Best for Your Child by Frank Furedi: “In 2001, Frank Furedi, a British sociologist, published an important book titled Paranoid Parenting: Why Ignoring the Experts May Be Best for Your Child.”
• Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “...a term coined by my NYU colleague Nassim Taleb in his 2012 book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.”
• Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke: “"In her book Dopamine Nation, the Stanford University addiction researcher Anna Lembke explains how addiction plays out in her patients..." (OCR-garbled as "N HER BOOK OPAMINE ATION THE TANFORD NIVERSITY ADDICTION researcher Anna Lembke")”
• American Girls by Nancy Jo Sales: “The journalist Nancy Jo Sales followed a number of teenage girls who attended suburban American high schools. In her 2016 book, American Girls, she noted that attention from adult men online is frequent...”
• How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion by David DeSteno: “The social psychologist David DeSteno published a book in 2021 with the provocative title How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion.”
• Awe by Dacher Keltner: “In his 2023 book, Awe, the social psychologist Dacher Keltner wrote, 'As our default self vanishes, other studies have shown, awe shifts...'”
• Stolen Focus by Johann Hari: “In the important book Stolen Focus, the journalist Johann Hari describes the transformation of his nine-year-old godson...”
• Suicide by Émile Durkheim: “"In 1897, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim...wrote a book about the social causes of suicide," discussed at length with quoted passages on anomie.”