Join our 2025 Community Reads Program, featuring: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.
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 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
Event Schedule:
- Monday, March 3 - 6:00 p.m at Luckey Branch Library
- Presentation from Brianna Snow and Amanda Like from NAMI
- Monday, March 10 - 6:00 p.m at Stony Ridge Branch Library
- Discussion Part 1
- Monday, March 17 - 6:00 p.m at Pemberville Public Library
- Presentation from Eastwood School Counselors Panel: Connie Rutherford, Nikki Ohms, and Nichole Unger.
- Monday, March 24 - 6:00 p.m at Luckey Branch Library
- Discussion Part 2