"The Anxious Generation" Book Review
As a child, I made up a game that was one of my favorites: Cutting the Big Giant’s Hair. It was a simple game that involved sitting on the soft English grass, which I pretended was a giant’s head – one that needed a haircut. It was a big job, so I had to recruit helpers, but it was risky, because some people would make fun of my game. Gratefully, others would be heartily enthusiastic about the task before us. If I chose wrong, the game was over.
With time, I grew out of the game, but what I didn’t know then was that the game would never leave me. I finished my formal education and eventually became a stay-at-home mom to five children.
Even so, my desire to cut hair endured. Over the years, I found many willing and unwilling customers. All haircuts are free, but you get what you pay for. It’s fun to look back and see that my own childhood imagination was planting the seeds of a lifelong useful skill and hobby.
What I was doing back then was what Jonathan Haidt calls “free play” in his book The Anxious Generation. He says that this loss of free play in childhood has reduced opportunities children have to overcome social challenges. As free play declines and a phone-based childhood become the norm, children are denied access to imaginative play and perhaps deny themselves the opportunity to unlock an aspect of their identity that they might otherwise come to love.
Haidt advocates for the following: 1) no smartphones before high school; 2) no social media before 16; 3) phone-free schools; and 4) far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.
I believe we in the homeschool community have an advantage with these suggestions. It is easier for us to choose a phone-free childhood for our children, because they are with us most of the time. Unsupervised play and childhood independence is also something we can incorporate into our children’s lives more easily than parents whose children go to school. We generally can preserve more free time in our schedule. However, I think the challenge for us comes when we try to prioritize this, especially in our use of social media.
Haidt’s social media concerns center around the vulnerability of the adolescent mind. He notes that the frontal cortex of the human brain is still developing in those tender years, and the relentless pace and infinite scope of social media is in many cases doing more harm than good. He argues that we are already seeing the devastating impact on our young people, who he has dubbed “The Anxious Generation.” Haidt likens social media companies and other tech giants to Prometheus,
delivering gifts to humanity from the gods. We received them gladly but perhaps don’t think of the consequences, especially for our children. As a parent, this has been a difficult journey to navigate. We are the first generation of parents to go through this, and it’s hard to get the balance right in our lives and in our children’s lives.
My biggest opposition in my giant haircutting game was my best friend at the time. She thought my game was silly and didn’t want to have any part of it, neither did she want me to participate. This added an element of strategy that I didn’t originally anticipate. There were times when I had to withdraw from playing and then other times I persevered and played despite the opposition. It was on the giants head that I learned that I didn’t always have to conform.
-Joni Harrison
Citations:
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Books, 2025.
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