Review of The anxious generation: how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness

Abstract

The review analyzes Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024b) from the perspective of the impacts of technology on human formation and language. The objective is to examine the author's thesis on the drastic transition from a play-based childhood to a cell phone-based childhood, correlating it with the epidemic of youth mental disorders. The text details the four fundamental harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Finally, it concludes by discussing the tensions between proposals for banning smartphones and the BNCC's digital literacy guidelines, problematizing the application of global norms in scenarios of technological and infrastructural inequality typical of the Global South.