Book Review: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

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I came to The Anxious Generation late — March of this year, a full two years after Jonathan Haidt’s book took over every parenting podcast, school board, and group chat in America. Verdict from the back of the line: the discourse was earned.

Haidt’s argument, compressed: sometime around 2010, childhood got rewired. Play-based and outdoors traded for phone-based and supervised, and the numbers on adolescent anxiety and depression bent sharply upward right on schedule. The book walks through the data and proposes ways to give kids their childhoods back.

What I Loved About The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

The message matters, and it’s aimed at the exact moment we’re living in. I make my living on the internet (I’ve built an audience there, I genuinely like it there), and this book still landed, because Haidt isn’t anti-internet so much as anti-feed-first-childhood, and that distinction holds up under his data. The insights into what changed, and when, and for whom, are the kind you find yourself repeating at dinner a week later.

It also sharpened something I already believed about my own corner of the internet: the feed is real estate you rent. It’s why I moved my career onto email years ago — social media is a rented billboard, and email is the deed to your own shop. Haidt is making a much bigger version of a similar point. Don’t let an algorithm be the landlord of anyone’s attention, least of all a twelve-year-old’s.

What I Didn’t Love About The Anxious Generation

Haidt writes like the professor he is. The prose skews academic for my taste — charts, studies, careful caveats, the occasional feeling of being enrolled in a very good lecture course — and my fiction-trained brain sometimes wanted more story between the graphs. It’s a fair trade for rigor, but it’s why this lands at four stars for me instead of five.

Final Thoughts on The Anxious Generation

Highly recommend, exactly as I said on Goodreads. Read it if you grew up online, if you’re raising someone who will, or if you want to understand why everyone has been arguing about phones since 2024. It pairs well with How to Do Nothing (Jenny Odell for the adults, Haidt for the kids), and with my Uncanny Valley review if you want the view from inside the machine that built the feeds.

My final score: 4 out of 5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Do I recommend this book? 👍 Yes — and worth discussing with the group chat, ironically.

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