Jingling tricycle bells. Kids running down the block. Creaking swings on a playground. Parents chatting with neighbors as their children draw hopscotch grids on the driveway. This was the reality of kids and parents’ lives right up until technology replaced afternoon bike rides with doom scrolling into oblivion.

“The Anxious Generation,” a novel written by Jonathan Haidt and published in 2024, hooked parents aspiring to better their kids’ future and childhood experiences, which technology has dominated in the last 30 years. The book mainly focuses on the outlasting effects technology has on teens, which both students and teachers at WHS reflect.

In “The Anxious Generation”, Haidt discusses the connection between the rise of anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation, isolation, social comparison and perfectionism, to the increased availability of technology since the early “2000s.” According to Common Sense Media, about 42% of children are getting a personal cell phone as young as 10 years old. WHS students and teachers have noted that this access to technology has its advantages and drawbacks.

In the book, Haidt stresses the importance of playing and critiques how recent generations have been “overprotected by their parents in the physical world, and under-protected in the digital world.”

As the “2000s” began, social media started to rise, and Haidt noticed that, although parents are physically protecting their children, they aren’t protecting them from the online world. Mental and emotional dangers began to present themselves in place of physical ones.

“When we protect their [children’s] physical safety, it’s too much to the point where they never get hurt or they never experience pain or discomfort,” Wellness teacher John Berry said. “When they get older and they experience pain and discomfort, it’s amplified, and [now] they don’t have the tools to deal with it.”

As time has progressed from the “2000s” to now, rates of suicide, depression and anxiety have all steadily grown, with the rate of suicide increasing 48% between 1999 and 2020. Although economic, political and climate issues have undoubtedly been on the rise, Haidt argues that throughout history, there have been economic depressions and various other conflicts that have not experienced the same rise in mental health struggles like the current generation has in the past 30 years.

History teacher Laine Winokur offers The Cold War as an example of this, a world conflict she teaches to her freshman class.

“There was this underlying fear about nuclear weapons and the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union, but when you were at school in math class, you weren’t getting alerts on your phone about whatever the president was doing, or you didn’t spent your free time scrolling through Instagram and looking at these terrible things,” Winokur said. “You kind of had to go look for them.”

Questions about students’ abilities to receive criticism, work well with others and problem solve, as well as their retention of topics and quality of school work were among some of the questions asked in a survey sent to WHS students and teachers. While in the student survey the questions were personally reflective, the teacher survey was based on their observations across their career.

“I think [my change in attention span] is because of social media,” sophomore Devin Tandon said. “Quick scrolling trains your brain to only like things in short attention bursts, which makes your attention span a little bit shorter.”

Other students and teachers have picked up on this tested and confirmed suspicion. Based on 132 responses from a student survey, 66.7% responded that their attention span had decreased over the last five years. From the teacher survey with 26 polled, 96.2% said that their students’ attention spans had decreased throughout their time teaching.

At the end of the book, Haidt offers advice to parents to help their children disconnect from screens, but it is important to remember that even adults struggle with the effects of social media.

“I was even having trouble watching TV shows without doing something else while I was watching them, [like] looking at my phone, or being on my laptop,” Winokur said.

Moreover, with technology being so accessible and entertaining, it is hard to resist using it as a quick and easy form of entertainment for children.

“It’s hard as a parent when your kid is complaining, because as a parent, you have the solution,” Wellness teacher Stacey Reed said. “It’s so easy for parents to turn a screen on and give in, but it’s a short term solution that causes a long term problem.”

Since children in this generation have grown up around screens, when they are encouraged to take a break, they find themselves bored and unsure what to do for entertainment. While sometimes uncomfortable, when kids have time to sit in their boredom, they can find solutions to entertain themselves without screens.

“When I go and I cook and I leave my kids be, they find something to entertain themselves,” Berry said. “They do things together, or they do things separate, but they figure it out.”

While it is important for children to take breaks from their devices, it can be frustrating when adults ask them to get off of their phones. Children often report that they feel misunderstood by adults about their digital use. This can widen the divide between “Gen-Z”/Millennials and Baby Boomers/”Gen-X.”

“I think they see us a lot on our phones which is true, but at the same time, I guess they don’t necessarily see what’s going on on the phones,” Tandon said.

The generational gap between parents and their children leaves parents scrambling to find solutions to their worries over their kids’ time on technology. This can lead to strict restrictions on apps, screen time and waiting to give their children a phone.

The most notable of Haidt’s solutions for the harms of social media are delaying smartphones until high school, restricting social media until 16, better age identification systems in apps, banning phones in school and promoting unsupervised play.

“[Play] should be until you’re an adult, and you should be [playing] in high school and in middle school,” Reed said. “This [active play] is where you’re learning social interactions, learning how to fix a problem, learning to communicate, learning boundaries and learning what consent is at a young age, so it’s very important.”

Berry hopes to promote this by organizing a “playing day” where students supervise young children as they “just play.” Parents can get together during this time to discuss how they can bring back the “play based generation.”

“Parents are in, and we’re talking about these topics and how to solve them because it’s something that parents know [is happening],” Berry said. “This book has taken off, but now it’s kind of like, ‘What do we do?’ We all are trying to figure this out […] it’s not an easy job to be a parent.”

The “Wait Until 8th” movement gained popularity in 2017 and urged parents to band together and wait until eighth grade to give their children smartphones. Similarly to Haidt’s purpose of the Anxious Generation, the movement aims to encourage children to socialize and experience their childhood without screens.

The primary reason movements like “Wait until 8th” have a hard time gaining momentum is that for parents, the convenience of their child being able to communicate through a phone is not worth sacrificing. Students also find benefits in their time spent on devices and the ease of online communication.

“I think phones give us more things to connect on,” Tandon said. “There are more ways to stay connected with people your age and people other than your friends.”

Adults additionally find legitimate reasons for students having technology, especially in high school.

“I have kids who, when we’re doing independent work, need to be able to put headphones on and listen to music so they can concentrate or to look something up, or to take pictures for a project,” Winokur said.

The question is, especially for high school students, when does cell phone usage become too much? At WHS, teachers reported in a survey that they think their students’ work quality has decreased from a 3.69 out of five to a 2.31 out of five in their time teaching. In a similar question asked from the students perspective, the average rating of the thoroughness (quality, detail) of their work was 4.13.

Is school getting harder, do students have lower expectations for themselves or is technology actually harming students’ performance in school? A combination of these factors is, as well as the added pressure and mental health struggles many students face, is a result of technology use.

For the future, Haidt worries that mental health struggles will continue to get worse. Already, the rates of depression episodes in females have tripled and doubled for males, an increase consistent amongst all racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. Will the “great rewiring of childhood,” leave the younger generations vulnerable to social media’s grasp for the years to come?
The end of the book motivates readers to make collective changes to move back to the “play based generation.” This can be achieved when small acts of defiance against technology–based childhoods are put into action. The first step to make change is to recognize the issues that technology is posing to children, and begin to pull away from its integration into their lives at a young age.

“I think that every parent knows deep down what the answer is to start with, but it’s implementing it that is important,” Reed said.