17/01/2025
I recently read this book and I would recommend that all parents, soon-to-be parents and anyone who’s even an thinking of becoming a parent one day, read it too.
It proposes a very reasonable explanation for a phenomenon that I’ve ben seeing in my practice over the last decade or so – a concerning increase in Anxiety, mood disorders, self-harming (and some curious things like a wave of tic disorders emerging across many countries back around 2020-21, following Covid).
There are some broad take-home points for me, obviously explained in much greater detail in the book. These include:
- Rates of anxiety, depression and self-harming behaviour in children increased suddenly and significantly internationally from ~2010, coinciding with the advent of the first smart phones
- Free play (face-to-face, not online) is essential for children’s physical and social development
- Children are ‘anti-fragile’ i.e. they need failures, setbacks and shocks in order to develop strength and self-reliance
- ‘safetyism’ (carers restricting what they let children do and intensifying supervision) is detrimental to children’s ability to deal with conflict, risk and frustration
- There is an ‘opportunity cost’ to a screen-based childhood i.e more time on screens = less time they are doing other things, developing gross and fine motor skills, socialising, experiencing Nature etc)
- Phone based childhoods cause damage through: sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction.
- There are differences in how screen time affects girls vs boys (social media more harmful to girls)
- It ends with suggestions for what parents, teachers and communities can do and which can be realistically applied to everyday life situations
- There are no less than 65 pages of notes and references to back up the data and hypotheses they present. Whilst Facebook has recently decided to abandon fact checks, you can rest assured that the data presented in the book, are indeed facts 😊
https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/
