Very few books, at least those that are uninspired, truly blow my mind and prompt immediate change in my lifestyle. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, however, sent me spinning almost every time I sat down with it. What I learned not only affected me tremendously in how I understand aspects of our modern culture; it also made me examine and adjust my own practices. To cut to the chase, pastors, parents, and Christians who use technology or know young people who do must read this book. It is that important.

The Anxious Generation examines why so many late millennials and Gen Zers have skyrocketing experiences of anxiety at a widespread level that seem not to go away. It is an unsettling trend that so many people have unprecedented levels of mental health crises. Although—depending on your persuasions about these matters—you might cast aspersions on issues like anxiety, Haidt shows how the problems go much further than stress and anxiety into true developmental problems at the cultural and sociological level. Something has changed the way that our children experience growing up and what life is supposed to be like.

Haidt frames his study around the shift in childhood experience from play-based childhood to phone-based childhood. Essentially, previous generations had more in-person contact with others during their formative years and had to learn social skills by navigating concrete situations of personal interaction. Not only the embodied aspect of these experiences but also the potential to learn through risk management during play contributed to significant measures of confidence and ability for the development of real-life skills adults need.

Several factors contributed to this shift, not all of them what we might assume. The first is the trend toward overprotective parenting. In recent decades, parents have increasingly feared for their children’s safety in physical ways, concerning danger from other adults (which fear likely increased because of media dissemination more than on-the-ground threats) and about litigation against them if others perceive their parenting as not protective enough. This factor on the parents’ side created more barriers against play-based childhood. As children were allowed to play less outside, they were pulled more inside and then onto their phones.

The second factor that stands out for most of this book is the psychological dimensions of smartphone use. We make a big deal out of “screen time” these days, as if screens themselves are the problems. Undoubtedly, screen time seems to be a certain kind of problem. Nevertheless, the charted spikes in mental health crises map directly into the timeline not for the invention of more available screens but for the smartphone and, more specifically, the rapid increase of social media use.

Although technology itself must be used with care—and we do need to monitor it holistically—the proper villain in this research is social media and how it has been delivered through smartphones. Specifically, designers purposefully crafted the bottomless scroll platform to remove any natural endpoint to social media use, then they added feedback loops such as “likes” and comments to hack into our psyches to keep us coming back for more rounds of minor dopamine hits. If you flinch skeptically at that framing, you should know that it comes directly from one of the original developers of Facebook.

Several effects stand out as noteworthy. First, the massive pull to social media put most of life for many people, usually Gen Z and younger millennials, almost entirely online. Their “real life” seemed to happen on their social media page. That was where they could develop a persona receiving immediate feedback that fed the habit. The background issue is that even when someone is not using social media, he or she is often still thinking about social media. It becomes thoroughly consuming.

Second, the physiology of the endless scroll is counterintuitively damaging. We presume that the longer we scroll, the more likely we are to find the nugget to give us that comforting dopamine hit. The truth is that the bottomless scroll exhausts our concentration. Although we think, “I’ll take a mental break with social media,” using it is the opposite of a break. It is, in reality, draining. By the time we might get the dopamine burst that is satisfying in a measure, the work has depleted our minds to such an extent that the hit cannot be enough. Essentially, to borrow Haidt’s metaphor, social media is to Gen Z what hypodermic needles were in the 1980s.

The focus on Gen Z is because they are the generation that has experienced all of childhood immersed in phone-based development. Although social media seems to have no real positive benefit (in contrast to other screen-based media that can be useful) for anyone, the real damage is done to those who are sucked into this addictive and personality-shaping use during the time of their life when neurological pathways are developing most formatively. In other words, their resilience to the negative effects is lowest, but their likelihood to maintain the habit long-term is highest. This factor is a primary reason parents must remain vigilant when making these  decisions for their children, and Haidt offers some concrete advice for each stage of life to help.

Nevertheless, these issues really do pertain to all of us living in the digital age. Even if our neural pathways are already forged before we have taken to social media, the smartphone-based experience of it can take its toll in personal and physical ways.

I do not consider myself a heavy social media user. I left Facebook a few months ago, and my iPhone’s weekly report says that I usually spend about twenty to twenty-five cumulative minutes on Twitter each week. My use is probably slightly higher because I did embrace a long scroll on my tablet just before bed and as a first activity in the morning. This is the point I need to address. I doubt my social media use would catch much flak from those who might be looking for too much wasted time. That said, I forced myself to give up those two longer sessions of scrolling, which I thought were relaxing, and limited myself to checking it only in the afternoon and not when evening was setting in. In one week, my focus and restfulness have improved noticeably. The scrolling itself was exhausting my brain and preventing deep sleep and focus.

Additionally, I would not spend much cumulative time on social media, but I would check it frequently. I was always hoping for that excitement, which I still cannot define, but this book brought the issue home to me. In pastoral ministry, when you deal with trying and troubling issues often, it is easy to think of social media as a place where you can find approval that removes you from those burdens. It is easy to forget that the usefulness of that online approval is minimal at best. There might be something real to it in terms of distributing material more widely and seeing the fruit of that effort. But the medium for that usefulness can easily get the best of us. We can crumble into building an online self too. We have to guard against such things.

Readers should know that Haidt is explicitly an atheist, and sometimes these presuppositions come out. He is overall positive about Christianity when he talks about it, though, so this book does not have a disparaging edge. He does presume an evolutionary model for how humanity has reached our current sociological condition concerning childhood development needs and the like. We do not need to accept his presuppositions about how we have reached our sociological condition. We still must reckon with the reality that we are creatures who have certain developmental needs, and the book is about how those needs are being damaged.

More pointedly, he seems to view LGBTQ orientations as normal, factoring statistics from that community into his data neutrally. This is not a major or distracting feature of the book. The reason for noting it is what he misses. He marks how the mental health crisis and its relation to social media is highest among that community. It seems to me that the swirling set of issues addressed in this book about damaged development and psychological problems ought to be brought to bear on those statistics—as they often are with other matters—that there may well be a link between some of the mental health problems and the experience of those orientations. He also seems to condone some use of pornography, although he is almost always negative about it, constantly pointing to its damaging effects.

Those caveats in place, this book is an astonishing critique of our digital practices and a clarion call to do better for our children and ourselves. We have subjected ourselves to lies about what will satisfy even at the earthly level, and it is draining our capacities and potential. We can still use technology, smartphones, and social media. We do, however, have to control it rather than letting it control us. We must be purposeful and disciplined to protect ourselves from being depleted by what promises great reward and yet offers little. The parallel instruction for our whole life of sanctification immediately presents itself.

©Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024).

RESOURCES

• Books Reviews and Notices
• Subscribe To The Heidelblog!
• Download the HeidelApp on Apple App Store or Google Play
• Browse the Heidelshop!
• The Heidelblog Resource Page
• Heidelmedia Resources
• The Ecumenical Creeds
• The Reformed Confessions
• The Heidelberg Catechism
• The Heidelberg Catechism: A Historical, Theological, & Pastoral Commentary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2025)
• Recovering the Reformed Confession (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2008)
• Why I Am A Christian
• What Must A Christian Believe?
• Heidelblog Contributors
• Support Heidelmedia: use the donate button or send a check to

Heidelberg Reformation Association
1637 E. Valley Parkway #391
Escondido CA 92027
USA
The HRA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization

Post authored by:

• Harrison Perkins

  

  Harrison Perkins (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast; MDiv, Westminster Seminary California) is pastor of Oakland Hills Community Church (OPC), a member of the of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, a Senior Research Fellow at the Craig Center for the Study of the Westminster Standards,  online instructor in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, a visiting lecturer in systematic theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary, and author of Reformed Covenant Theology: A Systematic Introduction. You can read more from him at Pastor Perks.

  More by Harrison Perkins ›