2010, ISBN: 9780593655047

THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceFrom New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigat… Mehr…

THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceFrom New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.“Erudite, engaging, combative, crusading.” —New York Times Book Review“Words that chill the parental heart…  thanks to Mr. Haidt, we can glimpse the true horror of what happened not only in the U.S. but also elsewhere in the English-speaking world… lucid, memorable… galvanizing.” —Wall Street Journal[An] important new book...The shift in kids’ energy and attention from the physical world to the virtual one, Haidt shows, has been catastrophic, especially for girls. —Michelle Goldberg, The New York TimesAfter more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life. Digital Content>E-books>Psychology>Study of Psychology>Study of Psychology, Penguin Publishing Group Digital >16<

2009, ISBN: 9780593655047

From New York Times bestselling co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse in youth mental health—and a scientifically proven path … Mehr…

From New York Times bestselling co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse in youth mental health—and a scientifically proven path to health and strengthThere is no bigger public health story now than the collapse in youth mental health. The numbers are terrifying and dominate our headlines. There has been much debate over how we got here, and what to do next, and bestselling author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is at the white-hot center of that discourse. Haidt has spent his career speaking wisdom and truth into the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the perfect storm contributing to a public health emergency for Gen Z.For the cohort that hit puberty around 2009, their sense of self developed as the threads of three dramatic technological and social changes unspooled: smartphones and life with the constant companionship of a screen, front-facing cameras and the bevy of apps that thrived on selfie-culture, and social networks that reduced engagement and affirmation to likes and hearts alone. But phones aren’t the only villain here; the ground for this crisis was seeded by a decades long shift from play-based childhoods to ones defined by over-supervision, structure, and fear.The Anxious Generation is a penetrating and alarming accounting of how we adults began to overprotect children in the real world while giving essentially no protection in the brutal online world. Haidt documents the four fundamental harms of the phone-based childhood: sleep deprivation, social deprivation, cognitive fragmentation, and addiction. He then shows the unique harms affecting boys, and the unique harms affecting girls. In the last section of The Anxious Generation, he offers concrete and scientifically based advice with separate chapters addressed to parents, schools, universities, governments, and to teens themselves. He draws on ancient wisdom and modern psychology to help everyone understand what healthy development would look like in the digital age. Digital Content>E-books>Psychology>Study of Psychology>Study of Psychology, Penguin Publishing Group Digital >16<