Jonathan Haidt

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1. 01

   Between 2010 and 2015, play-based childhood was replaced by a phone-based one, and adolescent anxiety and depression indicators rose sharply across several countries in the same window.

   The Anxious Generation · 2024

   Overprotected in the real world, underprotected in the virtual one.

   Haidt assembles data series from several English-speaking and Nordic countries and shows turning points tightly clustered in time, around 2012–2013, for psychiatric admissions, self-harm and reported depressive symptoms, more markedly among adolescent girls. He proposes four mechanisms: sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, social isolation despite permanent connection and, for girls, permanent visual social comparison. His thesis about overprotection is the necessary complement: in the same years children lost unsupervised free play, which is exactly the training ground for risk and conflict from the Nordic and Eastern European lessons. The scientific debate is real and worth stating: researchers such as Candice Odgers and Andrew Przybylski argue that the measured average effects are small, that correlational data does not establish causal direction and that other explanations — the financial crisis, school pressure, changes in symptom reporting — are not excluded. What stays solid on any account is the practical recommendation, because it is cheap even if the effect is small: no phone in the bedroom at night, no social media before late adolescence, more real autonomy outside the house.

   “We have overprotected children in the real world and underprotected them in the virtual one.”

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