Book · Essential Reading
The Anxious Generation
Jonathan Haidt · Why this is the book behind everything on this app
The Anxious Generation is the most important book I've read on childhood, technology and mental health. Haidt makes the case that two simultaneous shifts in the 2010s created an epidemic of adolescent mental illness: the spread of smartphones and the decline of unsupervised play.
The core argument
Children need a phone-free childhood and a play-based childhood. We have given them the opposite.
What makes this book different from the usual technology panic is the rigour, because Haidt isn't arguing from anecdote, he's marshalling decades of data.