What Every Parent Needs to Know About “The Anxious Generation”
We have to stop overprotecting kids in real life and under protecting them online.
If you’ve listened to a parenting podcast or read The New York Times Best Sellers List lately you’ve come across Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation. It's a phenomenally well-researched book (he is an academic at NYU) that makes a clear case that heavy technology use is hurting the mental health of kids.
The book begins by imagining a fictional future where parents can choose to let their children grow up on Mars, even though we don’t know how it will impact them. It’s a little silly, but the point he makes is that we unknowingly experimented on teens by giving them smartphones with unfiltered and unlimited internet access at young ages.
It’s a problem with two parts. Parents have been under protective online while also being overprotective in real life.
We’re Under Protective Online
The first isn’t hard to imagine since most full-grown adults have trouble disconnecting for any length of time. Adults are not immune to experiencing online bullying on social or other sites, but our life experience offline works as a protective buffer. The self-confidence and identity of kids, especially tween and teen girls, are especially fragile and seem to strongly correlate with anxiety, eating disorders, depression, and thoughts of suicide.
I’ve seen the “receipts” of this through my work in mental health, especially when I began to write about the conversation themes at Crisis Text Line, which has analyzed almost 10 million conversations of people, mostly young people, in crisis.
I’m not here to tell you that screen time is the enemy. We would not have gotten through the pandemic without 8 hours of Daniel Tiger each day— though now we try to stick to the APA guideline of 2 hours or less each day. I also strategically use that TV time when I’m still working and my daughter needs to decompress after school.
In Anxious Generation, Haidt proposes four collective actions that we can all take to help the next generation come of age online in a developmentally appropriate way. There’s been a lot of coverage on these collective actions, and I’m planning to dig in deeper at a later point.
Today, I’m focusing on how parents become overprotective in real life and why and how we need to walk that back for our kids.
We’re Overprotective in Real Life
The stranger danger movement of the 1980s and 1990s led parents to limit unsupervised play inside and outside. The real world was actually quite safe during that period though Unsolved Mysteries and 20/20 made parents believe otherwise. As a result, kids turned to cable and Nintendo and lost crucial opportunities for risk-taking, adventure, and building resilience.
As the product of the somewhat earlier “free range” 1980s style parenting, at first, I was a bit skeptical that parents were being overprotective. I knew that childhood had changed significantly since my day, but I assumed all of this additional parental involvement was good.
According to Haidt, these well-intentioned acts of modern parenting are limiting kids' potential for play. Here are a few ways parents have become overprotective in real life.
Micromanaging Play
When children play, they need to be able to take risks, solve problems, and make up their games and rules. Unstructured play helps them develop creativity and problem-solving skills. They need to develop the confidence to go up to another child on a playground and communicate in some way. They need to be able to try the monkey bars even if they aren’t ready without Mom running over to spot them.
Less Time and Space to Play
There’s universal agreement between pediatricians and public health experts that school-aged children need 1-2 hours of physical activity daily, plus additional time for imaginative or creative play.
Yet, if you look at the schedule for most school-age kids, play is kind of an afterthought. Even recess has been limited, shrinking from more than an hour in the 1970s to 25-27 minutes per day (CDC).
And where they play matters as well. For the most part, you don’t see even young teens riding bikes alone through neighborhoods or meeting up at a playground. While it may be a stretch to send your toddler off to run errands, as in the Japanese reality show Old Enough, he argues that school-age children need thrills that come with exploring and living in “Discover Mode” where they view life as an environment to discover versus “Defend Mode” where they view the outside world as a place to fear.
Too Many Scheduled Activities
Activities are important and provide much-needed physical activity, but there is an opportunity cost to spending a childhood in the backseat being chauffeured around to sports, music lessons, and tutoring. These activities can suck up time for spontaneous, creative activities that help kids develop.
Today’s Little League is no Sandlot. If you’ve met one parent who is participating in a travel sports team, you know that the commitment involved with elementary school-age kids is intense. There are dozens of positive reasons to be involved in team sports – and I certainly hope we can find one for my daughter – but adult-led sports with league rules and uniforms are just not offering the same skill-building potential that kid-led play can.
What I’m Doing Differently
I’m trying to unlearn those protective behaviors that didn’t exist in my 1980s childhood, but have become part of a cultural norm since. I want to share a few little experiments I am doing with my 6-year-old daughter to help her nurture free play and exploration. To be clear, these are experiments for me – to see if I can be chill and not buckle under the judgy eyes of other parents.
Freedom to Roam. We started by letting her go to the restroom alone in restaurants around age 5 when we could basically see the door of the restroom and if it only had one person in it. Once she was able to master that, we expanded the boundaries a bit more. Now, I will regularly let her be on another aisle at CVS. These are tiny little actions to give her confidence that she is OK even if she can’t see me – and vice versa. It doesn’t seem like much, but, when we were recently at a wedding in Brooklyn, I “allowed” her to walk around the venue with another flower girl as much as she wanted as long as she didn’t leave the space. It was maybe the proudest moment of her life.
Taking the Bus. When our daughter started Kindergarten last year, at a school just one mile from our home, I was hellbent against her riding the bus. I was worried about her getting lost, hanging out with the wrong crowd, and getting in trouble (projecting much?). Every time I thought about the bus, I imagined Julia Louis Dreyfus in this “Heroin AM” SNL sketch.
This year, she is taking the bus for a one-way 9-minute ride home and I am positive that she will be fine. She loves it – and meeting her at the bus stop is a favorite part of our new routine.
While it may feel counterintuitive, giving kids the freedom to navigate the world—both on and offline—helps them build resilience and self-confidence. By encouraging unstructured play, setting digital boundaries, and allowing them to take risks, we give our kids the best chance to grow into happy healthy adults.