The Anxious Generation

The Anxious Generation

How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

By: Jonathan Haidt

 

An urgent and insightful investigation into the collapse in youth mental health, from the influential social psychologist and international bestselling author

Jonathan Haidt has spent his career speaking truth and wisdom in some of the most difficult spaces – communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the mental health emergency hitting teenagers today in many countries around the world.

In The Anxious Generation, Haidt shows 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, including time spent comparing oneself to a vast pool of others. Time engaging face-to-face with friends and family plummeted, and so did mental health.

But this is not just a story about technology; this profound shift took place against a backdrop of declining childhood freedom and free-play, 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.

In this book, Haidt makes a compelling argument that the loss of play-based childhood and its replacement with a phone-based childhood that is not suitable for human development is the source of increased mental distress among teenagers. The Anxious Generation delves into the latest psychological and biological research to show the four fundamental ways in which a phone-based childhood disrupts development – sleep deprivation, social deprivation, cognitive fragmentation and addiction. Haidt offers separate in-depth analyses of what has happened to girls, and what has happened to boys, offering practical advice for parents, schools, governments, and teens themselves. Drawing on ancient wisdom and cutting-edge research, this eye-opening book is a life raft and a powerful call-to-arms.

About the Author

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Righteous Mind and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind.

Bark Parental Controls

Bark Parental Controls

Curious about how Bark works? Learn about our parental control features, including content monitoring, screen time management, and website blocking, and discover how they provide online safety for kids.

The Light Phone

THE LIGHT PHONE

Light was born as an alternative to the tech monopolies that are fighting more and more aggressively for our time & attention. Light creates tools that respect you. Objects that empower you to be your best self. Technology intentionally designed to be used as little as possible. Things that serve you, not the other way around.

Light was founded by Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang, an artist and product designer who met in a Google experimental program in 2014. They were encouraged to make smartphone apps and taught on a deeper level how and why different products were being built and funded. It became obvious that the last thing the world needed was another smartphone app fighting for our attention. The interests and nature of these ad-driven platforms will never align with our actual quality of life.

Internet Addiction in Children and Adolescents : Risk Factors, Assessment, and Treatment

This is the first book to thoroughly examine how early and easy access to the Internet and digital technologies impacts children and adolescents. Experts in the field examine the research that shows the social, cognitive, developmental, and academic problems that can result when children spend excessive time in front of screens. As a whole. the book provides an invaluable resource for those who need to assess, treat, and prevent Internet addiction in children and adolescents.

Internet Addiction in Children and Adolescents:

Provides tools that help predict a child’s level of risk for media-related problems.
Examines how to diagnose and differentiate Internet addiction from other psychiatric conditions.
Explores evidenced-based treatment approaches and how to distinguish pathology from normal development.
Shows how to create inpatient treatment programs and therapies to address media addiction.
Highlights the psychological, social, and family conditions for those most at risk.
Evaluates the effects of the excessive use of electronic games and the Internet on brain development.
Explores the physical risks that result from excessive media use and strategies for combating the problem.
Examines school-based initiatives that employ policies and procedures designed to increase awareness of excessive media use and help educators identify students who misuse technology, and strategies of intervention and communication with parents.
Identifies signs of problem Internet behavior such as aggressive behavior, lying about screen use, and a preference for screen time over social interactions.
Outlines the risk factors for developing internet addiction.
Provides strategies for treatment and prevention in family, school, and community settings.

Practitioners and researchers in psychology, social work, school counseling, child and family therapy, and nursing will appreciate this book’s thorough review if internet addiction among children and adolescents. The book also serves as an engaging supplement in courses on media psychology, addiction counseling, abnormal psychology, school counseling, social issues, and more.

Stolen Focus : Why You Can’t Pay Attention–and How to Think Deeply Again

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER – Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a ground breaking examination of why this is happening–and how to get our attention back.

“The book the world needs in order to win the war on distraction.”–Adam Grant, author of Think Again

“Read this book to save your mind.”–Susan Cain, author of Quiet

In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions–even abandoning his phone for three months–but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention–and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.

We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers’ productivity.

Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus–as individuals, and as a society–if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.

Reader, Come Home : The Reading Brain in a Digital World

The author of the acclaimed Proust and the Squid follows up with a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies.

A decade ago, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. Since then, the ways we process written language have changed dramatically with many concerned about both their own changes and that of children. New research on the reading brain chronicles these changes in the brains of children and adults as they learn to read while immersed in a digitally dominated medium.

Drawing deeply on this research, this book comprises a series of letters Wolf writes to us–her beloved readers–to describe her concerns and her hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to digital mediums. Wolf raises difficult questions, including: Will children learn to incorporate the full range of deep reading processes that are at the core of the expert reading brain?Will the mix of a seemingly infinite set of distractions for children’s attention and their quick access to immediate, voluminous information alter their ability to think for themselves?With information at their fingertips, will the next generation learn to build their own storehouse of knowledge, which could impede the ability to make analogies and draw inferences from what they know?Will all these influences change the formation in children and the use in adults of slower cognitive processes like critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that comprise deep reading and that influence both how we think and how we live our lives?How can we preserve deep reading processes in future iterations of the reading brain?

Concerns about attention span, critical reasoning, and over-reliance on technology are never just about children–Wolf herself has found that, though she is a reading expert, her ability to read deeply has been impacted as she has become increasingly dependent on screens.

Wolf draws on neuroscience, literature, education, and philosophy and blends historical, literary, and scientific facts with down-to-earth examples and warm anecdotes to illuminate complex ideas that culminate in a proposal for a biliterate reading brain. Provocative and intriguing, Reader, Come Home is a roadmap that provides a cautionary but hopeful perspective on the impact of technology on our brains and our most essential intellectual capacities–and what this could mean for our future.

iGen : Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood–and What That Means for the Rest of Us

iGen : Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood–and What That Means for the Rest of Us

As seen in Time, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and on CBS This Morning, BBC, PBS, CNN, and NPR, iGen is crucial reading to understand how the children, teens, and young adults born in the mid-1990s and later are vastly different from their Millennial predecessors, and from any other generation.

With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults.

Born in the mid-1990s up to the mid-2000s, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person-perhaps contributing to their unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

But technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality.

With the first members of iGen just graduating from college, we all need to understand them: friends and family need to look out for them; businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to them; colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes, so goes our nation-and the world.

The Dip : A practical guide to take control of screen addiction and reconnect your family. For parents of teenagers

The Dip : A practical guide to take control of screen addiction and reconnect your family. For parents of teenagers

In a world overwhelmed with screens, the current guidelines for limiting screen use seems impossible to achieve by ourselves, let alone for our technology-dependent kids. Establishing healthy boundaries around devices is no easy task and trying to unglue our kids’ eyes from screens can be a never-ending battle. With technology being used more and more at school and for homework, it’s difficult to know where to draw the line. In an ever-evolving digital age, how can we overcome our frustration with our kids’ device addictions and establish reasonable boundaries in our homes?

In her new book, The Dip: A practical guide to take control of screen addiction and reconnect your family, Clinical Psychologist Dr Danielle Einstein provides answers to the real-life challenges of implementing the national guidelines on screen time within families. With over 20 years’ experience, Dr Einstein helps you guide your kids towards positive technology use through six concise chapters that break down and explain the following:

Why are we so addicted in the first place? The reality of smartphone and device use: understanding the factors that lure us in and play with our moods. How to develop ‘smart’ device boundaries for your family. Why should we develop our own boundaries? Ok, so how do I put this into practice? Step-by-step guide to screen-time controls.

Including quick tips, step-by-step guidelines and an informative video (on www.thedip.com), The Dip will not only help you and your kids develop healthy relationships with screens, but also learn how to re-connect as a family.

The Non-Tinfoil Guide to Emfs : How to Fix Our Stupid Use of Technology

The Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFs : How to Fix Our Stupid Use of Technology

Can you really feel years younger & make unexplained symptoms vanish with the click of a button – the “Airplane Mode” on your cell phone?

Investigative Health Journalist Nicolas Pineault used to think this all sounded like something only crazy people wearing tinfoil hats would say.

But the overwhelming amount of independent scientific evidence linking electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from wireless technologies with increased risks of cancer, infertility, insomnia, and depression sure has the uncanny ability to change a man’s mind.

The Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFs is a simple and unconventional book that will teach you exactly how to reduce your exposure to this brand new 21st-century pollution without going back to the Stone Age.

You will learn:

What your smartphone, your wifi router and your microwave oven have in common (page 9) Why policy makers and scientists all worldwide don’t agree about whether EMFs are dangerous or not (page 21) Is Electro-Hypersensitivity as popularized in the TV show “Better Call Saul” real? Or is it all psychological? (page 62) Why carrying a cell phone in your pocket can harm your fertility (201 studies prove it) (page 72) The 1-click fix to reduce cellphone EMFs by 84% (page 142) What is safer? Speakerphone, earbuds or a Bluetooth ear piece? (page 155) The #1 worst source of EMF radiation at home (page 160) Why baby monitors are worse than smartphones, and better alternatives (page 208)

It’s true. The jury is still out about whether cellphone radiation is the new smoking or just a temporary scare. But why take chances?

Instead, read The Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFs – the technological seat belt you might just need to use your new gadgets safely.

Zapped : Why Your Cell Phone Shouldn’t Be Your Alarm Clock and 1,268 Ways to Outsmart the Hazards of Electronic Pollution

Zapped : Why Your Cell Phone Shouldn’t Be Your Alarm Clock and 1,268 Ways to Outsmart the Hazards of Electronic Pollution

A groundbreaking expose of the hidden truths of electro-pollution, Zapped is the first comprehensive, step-by-step guide to counteracting the invisible hazards of everyday electromagnetic exposure. Award-winning author, nutritionist, and First for Women magazine columnist Ann Louise Gittleman combines the best of energy medicine with the latest scientific research in a user-friendly powerhouse designed to safeguard you and your family. Following her New York Times bestselling books on weight loss (The Fat Flush Plan; Fat Flush for Life) and peri-menopause (Before the Change), Gittleman offers another vital, pioneering work of health science for the new century.