“The Anxious Generation” author #JonathanHaidt explains how the move to a phone-based childhood led to skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression #DailyShow #AnxiousGeneration

Something happened in the early 2010s, and my argument in the book is a tragedy in two acts. The first act is the loss of the play-based childhood. You were out with your friends after school. There was nobody supervising. You had to learn how to work out conflicts, how to face adversity. So that's what kids have had for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. It's part of being a mammal. You play, you develop skills. We began to crack down on that, to lock kids up in the 90s, to not let them out. So we're restricting what they most need, which is play, from the 90s through the 2000s. But mental health doesn't collapse then. It's actually pretty stable. Then we get act two, which is the arrival of the phone-based childhood. And what that is is in 2010, everybody had a flip phone. The iPhone had come out, but most teens had a flip phone, no front-facing camera, no social media on the phone, no high-speed data. And by 2020, 2015, everyone's got all those other things. Now suddenly everyone has a smartphone, a front-facing camera, high-speed Internet, social media, especially Instagram on the phone. And almost like someone turned a switch in 2013, girls in America and many other countries suddenly become very anxious, depressed, and self-harming.