Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation observes that young people are shifting from a play-based to a phone-based childhood, in what he calls the “Great Rewiring.” If this Great Rewiring is real, it will have profound implications not only for the health of Generation Z but also for American democracy.
Haidt tells a story of declining agency abetted by technological advancement. “[T]he general pattern for children in elementary and middle school up through the 1980s was that after school and on the weekends, kids were on their own to play in their neighborhoods in mixed-age groups, seek thrills, have adventures, work out conflicts, engage in antiphobic risk-taking, develop their intrinsic antifragility, enjoy being in discover mode together—and come home when the streetlights came on,” he writes. Starting in the 1980s, though, parents became overprotective and started to micromanage their kids’ lives. In Unequal Childhoods, sociologist Annette Lareau writes that some parents began practicing a “concerted cultivation” model of parenting, which, according to Haidt, “begins with the premise that children require an extraordinary degree of care and training by adults.” By the early 2010s, most every kid got an iPhone or an Android; a 2018 report by Adobe focused on the United Kingdom found that members of Generation Z spent an average of 10.6 hours per day engaging with online content. Young people wouldn’t have had time for free play even if parents and schools were actively encouraging it.
These realities carry many lessons, including some for national politics. The first: getting together and playing without adult supervision, purely for the fun of it, teaches kids skills essential to citizenship in a liberal democracy. Peter Gray, a professor of developmental psychology at Boston College, says that “play requires suppression of the drive to dominate and enables the formation of long-lasting cooperative bonds.” Free play teaches us to take others’ feelings and desires into account; if we don’t do so, they won’t want to play with us, and the game will be over. Play teaches kids how to take turns and share, how to negotiate, and how to handle winning and losing. In a pluralistic society where compromise is the route to policymaking, these are key skills.
Emotional resilience also matters politically. Free play involves risk: Sarah might get a black eye from a wayward soccer ball, or Johnny might fall out of a tree. But these experiences build strength. When Johnny falls out of a tree, he learns that life doesn’t end. More importantly, he learns that he can climb the same tree again and not fall out—that he can face down a risk and overcome it. As Haidt and lawyer Greg Lukianoff write in The Coddling of the American Mind, the child’s brain “is ‘expecting’ the child to engage in thousands of hours of play—including thousands of falls, scrapes, conflicts, insults, alliances, betrayals, status competitions, and acts of exclusion—in order to develop.”
Economic and political liberalism is inherently rough-and-tumble. In a capitalist system, the rewards can be great; so can the dangers. Meantime, our political opponents are probably going to win office at some point and pass laws that we dislike. Socially, our fellow citizens are free to say and do things that offend us. Anyone who has spent time on social media knows that people will take advantage of this freedom to say some heinous things. Liberalism offers many benefits, but a bubble-wrapped life is not one of them.
If young folks aren’t being raised to tolerate risk, they might look at this system with terror and seek to sand off the rough edges. Evidence suggests that this is happening. According to a 2019 poll, 41 percent of college students believe that the First Amendment should not protect hate speech. A 2021 poll found that fully 54 percent of Gen Z adults held a negative view of capitalism, compared with just 36 percent of Americans as a whole. About the same number of Gen Zers—just over half—had a positive view of socialism. For a generation too often deprived of free play and the attendant opportunities to learn to cope with risk, a cradle-to-grave safety net can look appealing.
Members of the youngest generation are increasingly isolated and lonely. According to data from Monitoring the Future, the number of teens who say that they meet up with their friends “almost every day” has plummeted over the past three decades: from almost 60 percent in 1991 down to roughly 30 percent in 2017 for boys, and from 45 percent in 1991 down to under 30 percent in 2017 for girls. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy notes that the “rate of loneliness among young adults has increased every year between 1976 and 2019.” A 2024 poll by the American Psychiatric Association found that 30 percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 said that they were lonely every day or several times a week.
Our growing isolation might be contributing to a decline in social trust, as Harvard’s Robert Putnam has surmised. As we “bowl alone,” inviting neighbors to fewer block parties and spending less time volunteering at Rotary Clubs, our trust in our fellow citizens diminishes. But a liberal social order relies on the broad assumption that our fellow citizens are trustworthy. It operates on the notion that our neighbor will generally do right by us; even if he doesn’t, we can have a civil conversation with him and probably work things out. If, instead, we assume that our neighbor is a liar and a thief, then we’ll be less eager to grant him the freedoms of liberalism—and more likely to vote for a bigger government to protect ourselves. And if open conflict does arise, we’ll be more likely to seek intermediation from the state.
Finally, our social order is threatened by the Great Rewiring in another, more straightforward respect: living online tends to produce less real-world charity. An AmeriCorps report found that members of Generation Z volunteer less than members of almost any other generation. The report looked at rates of “formal volunteering,” which includes people working through organizations and other formal institutions, and rates of “informal helping,” which involves assisting others outside of an organizational context, such as lending a neighbor your tools or running errands. On both measures, Generation Z ranked near the bottom of the generational pack.
These numbers represent the reversal of what had seemed a promising trend. Writing in 2000, Putnam had noted: “Without any doubt the last ten years have seen a substantial increase in volunteering and community service by young people.” In 1998, an astounding 74 percent of college students volunteered during their senior year of high school. Putnam hoped that “a new spirit of volunteerism is beginning to bubble up from the millennial generation.” It was not to be.
Limited government relies on a robust civil society and private social networks to fill in the gaps. It cannot offer a cradle-to-grave protective system. When Americans fall on hard times, we have historically counted on nonprofits and neighbors to come to our aid. If people volunteer less, those nonprofits might be less able to do so. If we engage less in informal helping and neighborly decency, then we’ll buffer fewer of our fellow citizens against the ups and downs of life in a market economy. In a world where nonprofits and our own neighbors are less willing to take care of us when tragedy hits, we might start clamoring for a more powerful state to pick up the slack.
If these problems really do pose a threat to liberalism, what can we do to head them off?
For starters, the federal government should raise the minimum age required to open a social media account to 16. Teens are the victims of two powerful forces that conspire to keep them more socially isolated than members of previous generations: “push” factors that prevent them from fully engaging with the offline world, and “pull” factors that entice them to spend more time online. Such a regulation would need to be enforced. Today, no such enforcement exists for the minimum age of 13; anyone, of any age, can create an account and simply say that they are 13. Many kids do.
Could laws also facilitate children playing outside more? Let Grow, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting childhood independence and co-founded by (among others) Haidt and Gray, advocates for “reasonable childhood independence” laws. One factor that inhibits children from interacting fully with the outside world is that some states and local governments regard it as neglect or even abandonment when a parent lets a child play outside without direct supervision. Haidt tells the story of Debra Harrell, who let her nine-year-old daughter play in a popular neighborhood park (surrounded by friends and even some of her friends’ parents) while Harrell was at work. A woman at the park called 911, and police charged Harrell with child abandonment and threw her in jail. Stories like this scare parents into not letting their children play outside. But eight states have now passed “reasonable childhood independence” laws, and more could follow suit.
American kids have hit a wall. It’s not their fault; it’s ours. We need to start giving them the tools they need to become resilient, socially connected, and philanthropically minded again—so they can grow into the citizens our republic needs.
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