The Anxious Generation

Introduction
GROWING UP ON MARS

Suppose that when your first child turned ten, a visionary billionaire
whom you’ve never met chose her to join the first permanent human
settlement on Mars. Her academic performance—plus an analysis of her
genome, which you don’t remember giving consent for—clinched her a
spot. Unbeknownst to you, she had signed herself up for the mission
because she loves outer space, and, besides, all of her friends have signed
up. She begs you to let her go.
Before saying no, you agree to learn more. You learn that the reason
they’re recruiting children is that they adapt better to the unusual conditions
of Mars than adults, particularly the low gravity. If children go through
puberty and its associated growth spurt on Mars, their bodies will be
permanently tailored to it, unlike settlers who come over as adults. At least
that’s the theory. It is unknown whether Mars-adapted children would be
able to return to Earth.
You find other reasons for fear. First, there’s the radiation. Earth’s flora
and fauna evolved under the protective shield of the magnetosphere, which
blocks or diverts most of the solar wind, cosmic rays, and other streams of
harmful particles that bombard our planet. Mars doesn’t have such a shield,
so a far greater number of ions would shoot through the DNA of each cell in
your daughter’s body. The project’s planners have built protective shields
for the Mars settlement based on studies of adult astronauts, who have a
slightly elevated risk of cancer after spending a year in space.
[1] But
children are at an even higher risk, because their cells are developing and
diversifying more rapidly and would experience higher rates of cellular
damage. Did the planners take this into account? Did they do any research
on child safety at all? As far as you can tell, no.
And then there’s gravity. Evolution optimized the structure of every
creature over eons for the gravitational force on our particular planet. From
birth onward, each creature’s bones, joints, muscles, and cardiovascular
system develop in response to the unchanging one-way pull of gravity.
Removing this constant pull profoundly affects our bodies. The muscles of
adult astronauts who spend months in the weightlessness of space become
weaker, and their bones become less dense. Their body fluids collect in
places where they shouldn’t, such as the brain cavity, which puts pressure
on the eyeballs and changes their shape.
[2] Mars has gravity, but it’s only
38% of what a child would experience on Earth. Children raised in the low
gravity environment of Mars would be at high risk of developing
deformities in their skeletons, hearts, eyes, and brains. Did the planners take
this vulnerability of children into account? As far as you can tell, no.
So, would you let her go?
Of course not. You realize this is a completely insane idea—sending
children to Mars, perhaps never to return to Earth. Why would any parent
allow it? The company behind the project is racing to stake its claim to
Mars before any rival company. Its leaders don’t seem to know anything
about child development and don’t seem to care about children’s safety.
Worse still: The company did not require proof of parental permission. As
long as a child checks a box stating she has obtained parental permission,
she can blast off to Mars.
No company could ever take our children away and endanger them
without our consent, or they would face massive liabilities. Right?
AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM, TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES BASED ON THE WEST
Coast of the United States created a set of world-changing products that
took advantage of the rapidly growing internet. There was a widely shared
sense of techno-optimism; these products made life easier, more fun, and
more productive. Some of them helped people to connect and communicate,
and therefore it seemed likely they would be a boon to the growing number
of emerging democracies. Coming soon after the fall of the Iron Curtain, it
felt like the dawn of a new age. The founders of these companies were
hailed as heroes, geniuses, and global benefactors who, like Prometheus,
brought gifts from the gods to humanity.
But the tech industry wasn’t just transforming life for adults. It began
transforming life for children too. Children and adolescents had been
watching a lot of television since the 1950s, but the new technologies were
far more portable, personalized, and engaging than anything that came
before. Parents discovered this truth early, as I did in 2008, when my two
year-old son mastered the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone.
Many parents were relieved to find that a smartphone or tablet could keep a
child happily engaged and quiet for hours. Was this safe? Nobody knew, but
because everyone else was doing it, everyone just assumed that it must be
okay.
Yet the companies had done little or no research on the mental health
effects of their products on children and adolescents, and they shared no
data with researchers studying the health effects. When faced with growing
evidence that their products were harming young people, they mostly
engaged in denial, obfuscation, and public relations campaigns.
[3]
Companies that strive to maximize “engagement” by using psychological
tricks to keep young people clicking were the worst offenders. They hooked
children during vulnerable developmental stages, while their brains were
rapidly rewiring in response to incoming stimulation. This included social
media companies, which inflicted their greatest damage on girls, and video
game companies and pornography sites, which sank their hooks deepest
into boys.
[4] By designing a firehose of addictive content that entered
through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person
socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human
development on an almost unimaginable scale. The most intense period of
this rewiring was 2010 to 2015, although the story I will tell begins with the
rise of fearful and overprotective parenting in the 1980s and continues
through the COVID pandemic to the present day.
What legal limits have we imposed on these tech companies so far? In
the United States, which ended up setting the norms for most other
countries, the main prohibition is the Children’s Online Privacy Protection
Act (COPPA), enacted in 1998. It requires children under 13 to get parental
consent before they can sign a contract with a company (the terms of
service) to give away their data and some of their rights when they open an
account. That set the effective age of “internet adulthood” at 13, for reasons
that had little to do with children’s safety or mental health.
[5] But the
wording of the law doesn’t require companies to verify ages; as long as a
child checks a box to assert that she’s old enough (or puts in the right fake
birthday), she can go almost anywhere on the internet without her parents’
knowledge or consent. In fact, 40% of American children under 13 have
created Instagram accounts,
[6] yet there has been no update of federal laws
since 1998. (The U.K., on the other hand, has taken some initial steps, as
have a few U.S. states.
[7])
A few of these companies are behaving like the tobacco and vaping
industries, which designed their products to be highly addictive and then
skirted laws limiting marketing to minors. We can also compare them to the
oil companies that fought against the banning of leaded gasoline. In the
mid-20th century, evidence began to mount that the hundreds of thousands
of tons of lead put into the atmosphere each year, just by drivers in the
United States, were interfering with the brain development of tens of
millions of children, impairing their cognitive development and increasing
rates of antisocial behavior. Even still, the oil companies continued to
produce, market, and sell it.
[8]
Of course, there is an enormous difference between the big social
media companies today and, say, the big tobacco companies of the mid-20th
century: Social media companies are making products that are useful for
adults, helping them to find information, jobs, friends, love, and sex;
making shopping and political organizing more efficient; and making life
easier in a thousand ways. Most of us would be happy to live in a world
with no tobacco, but social media is far more valuable, helpful, and even
beloved by many adults. Some adults have problems with addiction to
social media and other online activities, but as with tobacco, alcohol, or
gambling we generally leave it up to them to make their own decisions.
The same is not true for minors. While the reward-seeking parts of the
brain mature earlier, the frontal cortex—essential for self-control, delay of
gratification, and resistance to temptation—is not up to full capacity until
the mid-20s, and preteens are at a particularly vulnerable point in
development. As they begin puberty, they are often socially insecure, easily
swayed by peer pressure, and easily lured by any activity that seems to offer
social validation. We don’t let preteens buy tobacco or alcohol, or enter
casinos. The costs of using social media, in particular, are high for
adolescents, compared with adults, while the benefits are minimal. Let
children grow up on Earth first, before sending them to Mars.
THIS BOOK TELLS THE STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED TO THE GENERATION BORN AFTER
1995,
[9] popularly known as Gen Z, the generation that follows the
millennials (born 1981 to 1995). Some marketers tell us that Gen Z ends
with the birth year 2010 or so, and they offer the name Gen Alpha for the
children born after that, but I don’t think that Gen Z—the anxious
generation—will have an end date until we change the conditions of
childhood that are making young people so anxious.
[10]
Thanks to the social psychologist Jean Twenge’s groundbreaking work,
we know that what causes generations to differ goes beyond the events
children experience (such as wars and depressions) and includes changes in
the technologies they used as children (radio, then television, personal
computers, the internet, the iPhone).
[11] The oldest members of Gen Z
began puberty around 2009, when several tech trends converged: the rapid
spread of high-speed broadband in the 2000s, the arrival of the iPhone in
2007, and the new age of hyper-viralized social media. The last of these was
kicked off in 2009 by the arrival of the “like” and “retweet” (or “share”)
buttons, which transformed the social dynamics of the online world. Before
2009, social media was most useful as a way to keep up with your friends,
and with fewer instant and reverberating feedback functions it generated
much less of the toxicity we see today.
[12]
A fourth trend began just a few years later, and it hit girls much harder
than boys: the increased prevalence of posting images of oneself, after
smartphones added front-facing cameras (2010) and Facebook acquired
Instagram (2012), boosting its popularity. This greatly expanded the number
of adolescents posting carefully curated photos and videos of their lives for
their peers and strangers, not just to see, but to judge.
Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with
a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and
into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and—as I
will show—unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in
that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness—
perpetually—to managing what became their online brand. This was now
necessary to gain acceptance from peers, which is the oxygen of
adolescence, and to avoid online shaming, which is the nightmare of
adolescence. Gen Z teens got sucked into spending many hours of each day
scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances, and
distant influencers. They watched increasing quantities of user-generated
videos and streamed entertainment, offered to them by autoplay and
algorithms that were designed to keep them online as long as possible. 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.
The members of Gen Z are, therefore, the test subjects for a radical new
way of growing up, far from the real-world interactions of small
communities in which humans evolved. Call it the Great Rewiring of
Childhood. It’s as if they became the first generation to grow up on Mars.
THE GREAT REWIRING IS NOT JUST ABOUT CHANGES IN THE TECHNOLOGIES THAT
shape children’s days and minds. There’s a second plotline here: the well
intentioned and disastrous shift toward overprotecting children and
restricting their autonomy in the real world. Children need a great deal of
free play to thrive. It’s an imperative that’s evident across all mammal
species. The small-scale challenges and setbacks that happen during play
are like an inoculation that prepares children to face much larger challenges
later. But for a variety of historical and sociological reasons, free play
began to decline in the 1980s, and the decline accelerated in the 1990s.
Adults in the United States, the U.K., and Canada increasingly began to
assume that if they ever let a child walk outside unsupervised, the child
would attract kidnappers and sex offenders. Unsupervised outdoor play
declined at the same time that the personal computer became more common
and more inviting as a place for spending free time.
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