troubled generation

Author Name: Jonathan Haidt

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This book is a seminal survey of the causes of the deterioration of adolescent mental health in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. What is the reason? In his book, *The Troubled Generation*, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of mental illness among adolescents, which affected several countries simultaneously. He then investigates the nature of childhood and the underlying reasons why children need play and independent exploration to become competent and successful adults. Haidt shows how playful childhood began to decline in the 1980s and was ultimately eliminated by the arrival of phone-based childhood in the 2010s. He also identifies more than a dozen mechanisms that have hindered the major reprogramming of children's social and neural development; It covers everything from sleep deprivation and distraction, addiction and loneliness, to social contagion, social comparison and perfectionism. It explains why social media harms girls more than boys, and why boys are withdrawing from the virtual world, with dire consequences for themselves, their families and their communities.