BOOK REVIEW: THE ANXIOUS GENERATION
This article was published in the July 25, 2026 issue.
During its most recent term, the United States Supreme Court cleared the way for Texas to enforce a new law requiring Apple and Google to verify the ages of app store users, part of a broader effort to give parents more control over the apps their children can download.
The law reflects a broader push to protect children from the perceived harms of social media. The first people to experience those harmful effects, advocates say, were members of Generation Z, born sometime between the late ‘90s and the early 2010s.
My generation.
Born in 2001, I got my first iPod Touch at 11, my first iPhone at 13, and my first anxiety diagnosis at 15. For much of my life, I’ve heard some version of the same refrain: it’s those damn phones.
That conversation reached its peak with Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation,” published in 2024. Haidt struck a chord with parents of Gen Z kids (i.e. Lunch) because he set out to prove what many already believed, that smartphones ruined childhood.
The Anxious Generation
Jonathan Haidt
Penguin Press
400 p.
Haidt opens by comparing children’s social media use to sending them to 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 […] 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,” he writes.
You can see where this is going.
What follows is a parade of analogies, each chapter comparing children to some other unsettling thing. As you read, your child (or yourself) is likened to dogs, pigeons, cats, rats, trees, caterpillars and gambling addicts, all to argue that smartphones replaced a play-based childhood with a phone-based one, making kids less resilient and more anxious.
His evidence centers on a graph showing mental health indicators bending sharply upward around 2010 and staying there.
Reflexively, I pushed back on most of the book, mainly because it felt a whole lot like an old man shaking his fist at the world.
Like when Haidt writes that his young daughter once asked him to take away her iPad because she couldn’t stop looking at it, even though she wanted to.
No she didn’t. That never happened. Don’t piss me off.
In one of his earlier points, Haidt argues my generation missed out on learning social risk because our lives moved online. Instead of getting bruised on the playground or figuring out awkward conversations face-to-face, we became afraid of making mistakes because every mistake online amounts to “social death.”
To illustrate the point, he tells a story about his puppy. At first, the puppy was afraid to approach larger dogs. But after repeatedly charging toward them and returning to “home base” between Haidt’s legs, the puppy learned that most dogs were harmless.
He even cites declining rates of underage drinking and car crashes as evidence that kids aren’t taking enough risks anymore. I think you’re getting carried away on that one, Jonathan.
I still sang songs. I still played on the playground. And yes, I also learned social skills online. My first Instagram username, at age 10, was @paige0panda…. Yeah. I learned not to do that one again.
Learning internet slang or figuring out what’s okay to post is just a shift in where social learning happens. Kids are still learning what’s socially acceptable and what isn’t. They’re just doing some of it online.
Jonathan Haidt, however, is 60 years old. He doesn’t get that. I honestly feel like he read one New York Times story about cancel culture and became convinced that’s what every kid is subjected to every day.
The same goes for his claim that kids socialize less. That just doesn’t ring true to me.
Kids and teenagers still spend enormous amounts of time with their friends. FaceTiming and texting aren’t evidence that kids have stopped socializing, but they are evidence that socializing changed. In fact, I’ve grown out of constant texting as I’ve gotten older because I simply have less desire to be in constant contact.
What I will say, in Haidt’s defense, is that his book tells a great part of the story for most Generation Z people, or perhaps the whole story for a relatively small group of children.
But after reading beyond the book, I came away feeling that the research is much messier than he presents it. A lot of his data is cherry-picked, and mental health trends don’t follow the same pattern everywhere, and phones broadly appear to be wonderful for some kids while genuinely harmful for others.
That doesn’t make Haidt wrong, but it does make me skeptical that anyone has found the explanation for an entire generation.
Most of Haidt’s recommendations are pretty harmless. School phone bans? Fine. Delaying social media until kids are older? Sure. The hard part isn’t coming up with those ideas, but enforcing them.
My guess is that Generation Z is anxious partly because of smartphones. But also because everything feels like it’s changing all the time. And through it all, we’ve got guys in their sixties breathing down our necks telling us we’re soft because we don’t binge drink as much.
I came away from The Anxious Generation thinking it explains an important piece of why some kids struggle online. I just don’t think it explains my generation.
I think the kids will be alright.
Editor’s note: For the record, I have never encouraged Fisher to binge drink and have only served her a work deadline margarita before noon once in the past month.
Lunch’s take on Anxious Generation appeared on page 2 of the April 13, 2024 issue which you can find in thesheetnews.com online archives. The quote that stuck out for this 55-year old Gen Z parent:
“My central claim in this book,” writes Haidt, “is that the trends of overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.”
