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Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University. He has long examined the effects of contemporary Western culture on young people and his earlier books, including The coddling of the American mind (with Greg Lukianoff), have sparked interest among psychotherapists. This is mainly due to their intersections with fundamental psychoanalytic concepts: the shaping of the self and anxiety across developmental stages. Haidt’s use of the concept of ‘antifragility’ – that young people need manageable adversity to build resilience – resonates with our observations as clinicians of children raised in overly-protective or digitally saturated environments.
In The anxious generation, Haidt argues that childhood has undergone a radical transformation: from play-based to phone-based. This ‘great rewiring’, beginning around 2010, has had profound effects on children’s neurological, emotional, and social development. Drawing from developmental psychology, neuroscience, and longitudinal data, he connects this shift to the growing prevalence of anxiety, depression, and social disconnection among young people.
For child psychotherapists, Haidt’s writing provides an illuminating external lens which can help us understand increasingly common presentations: attention fragmentation,
frustration intolerance, diminished capacity for symbolic play, and heightened relational anxiety. His work encourages us to consider not only the inner world of the child but the cultural ecology in which that world is developing.
In part 1, Haidt poses an urgent question: why has there been a sudden rise in anxiety, depression, and self-harm among youth born after 1995? He uses a futuristic story – children growing up on Mars – to describe the alien environment of digital childhood. Haidt then draws on international data to highlight a spike in internalising symptoms around 2010–2012, especially among girls, with parallel increases in self-harm and suicide. He