Books by Jonathan Haidt

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Inspired by the award-winning phenomenon The Anxious Generation, this new book for kids and tweens is a comprehensive guide for living a happy and exciting life that isn’t hijacked by a smartphone. A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year! Jonathan Haidt’s blockbuster book, The Anxious Generation, has sparked a global conversation about the effects of smartphones and social media on young people’s development, and has inspired millions of parents, teachers, and leaders to take action. Now, Haidt and Catherine Price, author of the bestselling How to Break Up with Your Phone, have teamed up to create a new book that speaks directly to kids. Their goal? To empower young people to stand up for themselves by choosing a life not dominated by screens and social media. Whether or not kids already have smartphones or social media accounts, this engaging guide is packed with surprising facts, a graphic novel, interactive challenges, secrets that tech leaders don’t want kids to know, and real-life anecdotes from young adults who regret getting smartphones at a young age and want to help the next generation avoid making the same mistakes. But this isn’t just a book about what not to do. It’s a bold, optimistic, and practical guide to growing into your most authentic, confident, and adventurous self. Readers won’t just discover how to avoid becoming the next Anxious Generation. They’ll learn how to become amazing.

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 (pronounced "height") 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. Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.