The cost of growing up online

Growing up, I was always going down rabbit holes to explore whatever caught my interest or captured my curiosity. When I felt restless or bored—or got in trouble for misbehaving—I would disappear into my room and lose myself in books or ideas, often for hours without interruption. This ability to turn idle time into deep thinking and learning became a fundamental part of who I am. 

It was also crucial to my success later on. At Microsoft in the ’90s, I began taking an annual “Think Week,” when I would isolate myself in a cabin on Washington’s Hood Canal with nothing but a big bag of books and technical papers. For seven days straight, I would read, think, and write about the future, interacting only with the person who dropped off meals for me. I was so committed to uninterrupted concentration during these weeks that I wouldn’t even check my email. 

Reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation has made me wonder: Would I have developed this habit if I had grown up with today’s technology? If every time I was alone in my room as a kid, there was a distracting app I could scroll through? If every time I sat down to tackle a programming problem as a teenager, four new messages popped up? I don’t have the answers—but these are questions that everyone who cares about how young minds develop should be asking. 

Haidt’s book, about how smartphones and social media have transformed childhood and adolescence, is scary but convincing. Its premise—that starting in the early 2010s, there was a “great rewiring” of an entire generation’s social and intellectual development—was interesting to me in part because I saw it happen in my own house. When my oldest daughter (a pediatrician who recommended the book to me) was in middle school, social media was present but not dominant. By the time my younger daughter reached adolescence six years later, being online all the time was simply part of being a pre-teen.  

What makes The Anxious Generation different from other books on similar topics is Haidt’s insight that we’re actually facing two distinct crises: digital under-parenting (giving kids unlimited and unsupervised access to devices and social media) and real-world over-parenting (protecting kids from every possible harm in the real world). The result is young people who are suffering from addiction-like behaviors—and suffering, period—while struggling to handle challenges and setbacks that are part of everyday life.  

My childhood was marked by remarkable freedom—something that might surprise people who assume I spent all day glued to a computer indoors. I went hiking on trails that would terrify today’s parents, explored endlessly with neighborhood friends, and ran around Washington D.C. during my time as a Senate page. When I was in high school, Paul Allen and I even lived on our own for a few months in Vancouver, Washington, while working as programmers at a power company. My parents didn’t know where I was half the time, and that was normal back then. While I got hurt on some of these adventures and got in trouble on many others, these experiences were more beneficial than bad. They taught me resilience, independence, and judgment in ways that no amount of supervised, structured activity could replicate. 

It wasn’t all fun and games, but I had what Haidt calls a play-based childhood. Now, a phone-based childhood is much more common—a shift that predated the pandemic but solidified when screens became important tools for learning and socializing. The irony is that parents these days are overprotective in the physical world and strangely hands-off in the digital one, letting kids live life online largely without supervision.  

The consequences are staggering. Today’s teenagers spend an average of six to eight hours per day on screen-based leisure activities—that is, not for schoolwork or homework. The real number might actually be much higher, given that a third of teenagers also say they’re on a social media site “almost constantly.” For the generation Haidt writes about, this has coincided with sharp spikes in anxiety and depression, higher rates of eating disorders and self-harm, plummeting self-esteem, and increased feelings of isolation despite more around-the-clock, on-demand connection than ever. Then there are the opportunity costs of a phone-based childhood that Haidt documents: less (and worse) sleep, less reading, less in-person socializing, less time outside, and less independence. 

All of this is concerning, but I’m especially worried about the impact on critical thinking and concentrating. Our attention spans are like muscles, and the non-stop interruptions and addictive nature of social media make it incredibly difficult for them to develop. Without the ability to focus intensely and follow an idea wherever it leads, the world could miss out on breakthroughs that come from putting your mind to something and keeping it there, even when the dopamine hit of a quick distraction is one click away. 

Another alarming finding in the book is the significant gender divide at play here. Severe mental health challenges seem to have hit young women especially hard in recent years. Meanwhile, young men’s academic performance is worsening, their college attendance is dropping, and they’re failing to develop the social skills and resilience that come from real-world interaction and risk-taking. In other words: Girls are falling into despair while boys are falling behind.  

The solutions Haidt proposes aren’t simple, but I think they’re needed. He makes a strong case for better age verification on social media platforms and delaying smartphone access until kids are older. Literally and figuratively, he argues, we also need to rebuild the infrastructure of childhood itself—from creating more engaging playgrounds that encourage reasonable risk-taking, to establishing phone-free zones in schools, to helping young people rediscover the joy of in-person interaction. Achieving this won’t come from individual families making better choices; it requires coordination between parents, schools, tech companies, and policymakers. It also demands more research into the effects of these technologies, and the political will to act on what we learn.

The Anxious Generation is a must-read for anyone raising, working with, or teaching young people today. With this book, Haidt has given the world a wake-up call about where we’re headed—and a roadmap for how we can change course.