I recently read “The Anxious Generation: How The Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” by Jonathan Haidt. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. If you like them, buy the book here.
“If your body was turned over to just anyone, you would doubtless take exception. Why aren’t you ashamed that you have made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you, so that it automatically becomes confused and upset?” -Epictetus (16)
“Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people— unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re think-ing, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.” -Marcus Aurelius (16)
“People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.” (38)
“Everything may seem broken, but that was just as true when I was growing up in the 1970s and when my parents were growing up in the 1930s. It is the story of humanity.“ (38)
“It’s as if we gave our infants iPads loaded with movies about walking, but the movies were so engrossing that kids never put in the time or effort to practice walking.” (54)
“Girls especially come to delight in singing songs together, jumping rope together, or playing rhyming and clapping games (such as pat-a-cake) in which high-speed hand motions are perfectly matched between the partners while high-speed nonsense songs are sung at the same time. Such games have no explicit goal or way to win. They are pleasurable because they use the ancient power of synchrony to create communion between unrelated people.” (57)
“The European explorers of the 16th and 17th centuries found that on every continent, communities performed rituals in which everyone moved together to drumming, chanting, or beat-heavy music.l8 Such rituals were widely said to renew trust and mend frayed social relations.” (57)
“For girls, the worst years for using social media were 11 to 13; for boys, it was 14 to 15.” (64)
“Children are born with two innate learning programs that help them to acquire their local culture. Conformist bias motivates them to copy whatever seems to be most common. Prestige bias motivates them to copy whoever seems to be the most accomplished and pres-tigious. Social media platforms, which are engineered for engage-ment, hijack social learning and drown out the culture of one’s family and local community while locking children’s eyes onto influencers of questionable value.” (66)
“As the Stoics and Buddhists taught long ago, happiness cannot be reached by eliminating all “triggers” from life; rather, happiness comes from learning to deprive external events of the power to trigger negative emotions in you.” (73)
“the risk of injury per hour of physical play is lower than the risk per hour of playing adult-guided sports, while conferring many more developmental benefits.” (80)
“Performance was best the phones were left in the other room, and worst when phones were visible, with pocketed phones in between.” (128)
“If an experimenter assigns some adolescents to abstain from social media for a month while all of their friends are still on it, then the abstainers are going to be more socially isolated for that month. Yet even still, in several studies, getting off social media improves their mental health.” (149)
“Depression was significantly more contagious than happiness or good mental health. The second twist was that depression spread only from women.” (161)
“When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%. When a man became depressed, it had no measurable effect on his friends.“ (161)
“This is the great irony of social media: the more you immerse yourself in it, the more lonely and depressed you become.” (170)
“Though researchers have not found evidence that prayer works to change outcomes in the world, such as curing a child of cancer, DeSteno found that there is abundant evidence that keeping up certain spiritual practices improves well-being. The mechanism often involves reducing self-focus and selfishness, which prepares a person to merge with or be open to something beyond the self.“ (202)
“Rituals require bodies in motion. Prayer or meditation can be silent and motionless, but religions usually prescribe some kind of movement.” (204)
“synchronous movement during religious rituals is not only very common; it is also an experimentally validated technique for enhancing feelings of communion, similarity, and trust, which means it makes a group of disparate individuals feel as though they have merged into one.” (205)
“Humans evolved to be religious by being together and moving together.” (205)
“We are too quick to anger and too slow to forgive. We are also hypocrites who judge others harshly while automatically justifying our own bad behavior.” (209)
“The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.” -Marcus Aurelius (216)
“I would never say that we need internet-free schools or students. It’s the personal devices that students carry with them throughout the school day that have the worst cost-benefit ratio.” (251)
“Those are the two whales: going phone-free and giving a lot more unstructured free play. A school that is phone-free and play-full is investing in prevention.” (253)
“We shouldn’t blame parents for “helicoptering.” We should blame – and change – a culture that tells parents that they must helicopter.” (254)
“When we give trust to kids, they soar.” (256)
“We should all be aghast that the average American elementary school students gets only 27 minutes of recess a day. In maximum security federal prisons in the United States, inmates are guaranteed two hours of outdoor time per day.” (256)
“If your children are spending a lot of time in person with friends, such as on spots teams or in unstructre play or hangouts, if they are getting plenty of sleep, and if they show no signs of addiction or problematic use on any devices, then you may be able to loosen up on the screen-time limit.” (278)
“Most of my students say that the last thing they do at night before closing their eyes is to check their texts and social media accounts. It’s also the first thing they do in the morning before getting out of bed. Don’t let your children develop this habit.” (285)
“The four foundational reforms are:
Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence” (290)
1. No smartphones before high school
2. No social media before 16
3. Phone-free schools
4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence” (290)
Liked the quotes? Buy the book here.
