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Anna writes: “The subtitle of this book is ‘How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness’. Despite the heavy title, the book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is written in a very accessible way with bite-size sections to get your head around.
Backed up by the latest research, he argues that the introduction of smartphones to humans from an increasingly early age is having a profound impact on our real-world interactions and mental health. It’s fascinating to read about how using smartphones impacts girls and boys differently, and also contains practical advice for mitigating potential damage on children and young adults to allow them to become strong and self-governing adults.
Even if you don’t have children, or subscribe to the idea of a ‘smartphone-free childhood’ this is still a powerful read that will make you reflect on your own relationship with technology.”
Read on to find out more about the book and the author.
About the Book
After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents in many countries around the world deteriorated suddenly in the early 2010s. Why have rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide risen so sharply, more than doubling in many cases?
In this book, Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the decline of free-play in childhood and the rise of smartphone usage among adolescents are the twin sources of increased mental distress among teenagers.
Haidt delves into the latest psychological and biological research to show how, between 2010 and 2015, childhood and adolescence got rewired. As teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones packed with social media apps, time online soared while time engaging face-to-face with friends and family plummeted, and so did mental health. This profound shift took place against a backdrop of diminishing childhood freedom, as parents over-supervised every aspect of their children’s lives offline, depriving them of the experiences they most need to become strong and self-governing adults.
About the author
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992.
Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and of the New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff). He has given four TED talks. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction.
