Book Discussion. The Anxious Generation. How Smartphones Harm Younger Generation

Please make note that location changed to the new place closer to Plac Zbawiciela!

Book Description

The Anxious Generation written by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt will be discussed during the meeting.

The book discuss the negative impact of internet (smartphones, social media, pornography, computer games) on younger generations (especially Generation Z - people born between 1995-2012). The book describes it in details and also tries to find solutions from the current situation.

From book cover:
After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

To be discussed in the meeting:

• Four differences between real and virtual social interactions
• Rise of depression/anxiety/suicides in last years
• Smartphones vs deprivation from social interactions
• Smartphones vs sleep deprivation
• Smartphones vs constant distraction
• Smartphones vs addiction
• Why social media are much more harmful for girls than for boys
• Discussing negative impact of internet on boys
• Ways to deal with the problem