Úzkostná generace - Jak zásadní změna v dětství způsobuje epidemii duševních nemocí – Haidt Jonathan (2025)

How a fundamental change in childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness

Mandatory reading for all parents.

After more than a decade of stability, the mental health of adolescents sharply deteriorated at the beginning of 2010. The rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide skyrocketed, more than doubling in many indicators.

Why?

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book The Age of Anxiety presents facts about the epidemic of mental illnesses among adolescents that has affected many countries at the same time.

He explores the essence of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to grow into capable and thriving adults.

He shows how play-based childhood began to decline in the 1980s and how it was ultimately eradicated by the rise of phone-based childhood in the early 2010s.

He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this fundamental change in childhood has affected the social and neurological development of children, covering everything from lack of sleep to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism.

He explains why social media is more harmful...