May 2025 - The Anxious Generation - Jonathan Haidt

For our fifth book of 2025, we have one of our non-fiction selections for the year.

'After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. 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.'

This book is available on Kindle. For international delivery you can find it from Blackwells and it may also be available at the library or an English language book store.

We are a "real" book club, which means we do read the book before the meet-up and discuss it. New members are always welcome.

We need to notify the venue about how many will attend, so please make sure your RSVP status is accurate.

Hope to see you there!