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As a mom of two little girls, this book both blew me away and terrified me – I had so many reflective moments while reading this of ‘what have we done?’.

Throughout the book, Jonathan Haidt explains the major causes of the international epidemic of mental illness that hit adolescents in the early 2010s so we come to understand the ‘how we got here’ and he does offer a path forward for parents, teachers, friends, and relatives who want to help improve the mental health of children and adolescents.

I found the insights in this book to be profound and I do feel like it armed me with the knowledge I need to lead our family in the digital age. Haidt dives into the rise of mental health issues in young people, specifically anxiety and depression, and attributes it to a societal shift that he refers to as the “Great Rewiring of Childhood”. This happened due to the decline of “play-based childhood” in the 1980s-90’s followed quickly by the rise of the “phone-based childhood” in the 2010s, leaving us in this mental health crisis.

Some suggestions he leaves us with at the end are:

• Giving children more time to play with other children, even better if it’s outdoors and without adult supervision
• Embedding children in stable real-world communities
• Giving children more basic communication devices instead of smartphones with social media until high school – “wait until eighth” movement
• Limiting or banning student access to smartphones during the school day, not just during class time
• Creating minimally supervised play zones, such as streets closed to traffic or gyms open during bad weather

This book really moved me and helped me understand how detrimental it is to have our kids grow up without human connection – I strongly recommend for any parent, but especially for my fellow millenial moms who maybe didn’t get social media until they were out of that critical development period of middle school, like me. Handing our kids access to social media and the internet when their brains are still developing is detrimental.