The Anxious Generation, Lifting Each Other Up, and a Pork Tenderloin Recipe that Will Leave You Licking the Plate

This month’s book is one that everyone is talking about: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.

I will do my best to synopsize this book (Haidt really helped me out with ‘In Sum’ bulletpoints at the end of this chapter. Thanks, Haidt!) but I suggest reading the whole thing yourself if you can…he makes a really compelling and convincing argument for his theories and suggestions, and when reading this book, I felt a strong, internal “YES”….It is not too late to turn the tide on the wave of anxiety, depression, and isolation our children are feeling, and it compels the parents of small children to prevent this crisis from continuing. Here we go…

Children born in the late 1990’s (Get Z) were the first generation to go through puberty in the virtual world. Starting in 2010, and the introduction of smart phones in the hands of children, social lives began to migrate into the virtual world with the introduction of social media, online gaming, and internet-based activities. Haidt has deemed this time (2010-2015) the Great Rewiring of Childhood. This first generation who went through puberty with smartphones in hand because more anxious, depressed, self-harming, and suicidal. This surge of mental illness hit girls harder than boys, and preteen girls worst. But it also hit boys, whose mental health also suffered. Suicidal rates began rising in 2008 and got much higher in the 2010’s. This trend of suffering happened at the same time in the UK, Canada, much of Europe, and five Nordic nations.

As mentioned in many of the other books I’ve reviewed, a lot of brain growth and development happens for adolescence during puberty. Because of this extreme plasticity of the brain during puberty, “the neurons and synapses that are used infrequently fade away, while frequent connections solidify and quicken,” Haidt writes. Evolution attuned childhood for three major motivations for learning: for free play, attunement, and social learning. In “real world” interactions, children can satisfy these motivations through play. When the play went largely online, children “no longer got he full benefit of actin ion these three motivations.” “Play is the work of childhood,” Haidt insists. Play helps develop social skills including “self-governance, joint decision making, and accepting the outcome when you lose a contest….requires suppression of the drive to dominate and enables the formation of long-lasting cooperative bonds.” He also emphasize the need for play with “some degree of physical risk” as essential because “it teaches children how to look after themselves and each other.” Furthermore,“when parents get involved, it becomes less free, less playful, and less beneficial.” Mistakes “are generally not very costly,” and it is in unsupervised free play where children learn to “tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair.” Unstructured time with friends “plummeted in the exact years that adolescents moved from basic phones to smartphones—the early 2010’s.” Of course, it wasn’t just children who got smartphones….it was also the parents. Pew Research has found that “17% of American parents report then are often distracted by their phones when spending time with their child, with another 52% saying they are sometimes distracted.” (Lies, I say. More like 99% in my humble opinion!) Humans were designed to attune to each other, through play, and especially through movement. (Oftentimes including music!) By 2014, nearly a third of teen girls were spending over 20 hours a week on social media sites.

“We are physical, embodies creatures who evolved to use our hands, facial expressions, and head movements as communication channels, responding in real time to the similar movements of our partners. Gen Z is learning to pick emojis instead,” Haidt contends.

Another way that we evolved as humans is by copying, and by copying the right people. (Conformist bias and prestige bias). When kids move to middle school, and “EVERYONE HAS A CELL PHONE!!!!,” they naturally feel left out, a middle schooler’s cryptonite. Furthermore, as soon as they get on IG, “they learn how most of the people they follow use the platform, which makes them prone to using it that way too.” Social media is “the most efficient conformity engines ever invented. They can shape an adolescent’s mental models of acceptable behavior in a matter of hours.” (And, as discussed in previous newsletters, they are designed to get and keep adolescent’s attention for as long as possible.) The second strategy these developers use is prestige bias. Kids detect prestige and copy the prestigious. That’s why the developers of the social media platforms created ways to quantify: likes, shares, retweets, comments, and counting followers. Sean Parker literally called this “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

During these critical periods, aka ‘sensitive periods’ of human development, “a cultural meaning system for interpersonal relationships appears to become a salient part of self-identity to which they are emotionally attacked,” says researcher Yasuko Minoura. Gen Z was the first generation to go through puberty during this sensitive period for cultural learning on smartphones.

One of Haidt’s major points (and probably the main take-away I had from this book) is that we are overprotecting in the real world and under protecting in the virtual world.

In 2023, the Wall Street Journal ran an exposé that shows how “IG connects pedophile and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests.” Even the most careful parent knows that kids find loopholes to view what they’re curious about online. IG is hidden in a calculator app (I didn't even know you could do this….but the kids know!) I’ve heard many stories of kids changing parental controls on parents computers without their knowledge.

“The human brain contains two subsystems that put it into two common modes: discover mode (for approaching opportunities) and defend mode (for defending against threats). Young people born after 1995 are more likely to be stuck in defend mode, compared to those born earlier. They are on permanent alert for threats, rather than being hungry for new experiences. They are anxious.”

By nature, children are anti-fragile. Overprotection interferes with the development of strength and self-reliance and renders young people to be more fragile and fearful adults.

Kids need a lot of free play especially risky physical play. Kids seek the risk and thrill they are ready for, and they master their fears and develop competencies this way.

Because of the fear-mongering news reporting in the 1980s and 19980s, parents became more fearful, lost trust in each other, and started bringing kids inside, supervised, and on screens instead of playing outside.

When children are chronically stressed, they suffer terribly and cannot develop into sell-adjusted, healthy adults.

Haidt suggests that we ramp responsibilities and freedoms for children in two-year increments. 6 years old-small list of chores and small weekly allowance. 8 years old-allowed to play in groups without adult supervision. Maybe a phone or watch in which they can call or text a few individuals. 10 years-freedom to roam. A flip phone with a few apps but no internet access. 12 years old-finding adult mentors and role models beyond parents. Start earning their own money doing chores for neighbors/relatives. Age 14- Work for pay, join athletic team. Reasonable target age for first cell phone. Age 16-May open social media accounts. Age 18- Adulthood, transition in to a new phase of life by making their own decisions, more self-responsibility. Age 21-Full legal adulthood.

The average teen spends more than seven hours a day on screen-based leisure activities NOT including school and homework.

My other major takeaway from this book: It is the opportunity cost that is hurting our kids as much as it is the content of what they’re viewing online. In other words, the time spent in the virtual world is time NOT spent in the real world.

Four foundational harms to online childhoods:

1. Social Deprivation. Time with friends in face-to-face settings plummeted.

2. Sleep Deprivation. Sleep declined in quality and quantity after kids went into virtual childhoods.

3. Attention fragmentation. “Many adolescents get hundreds of notifications a day, meaning that they rarely have five or ten minutes to think without interruption.” Where is the room for imagination? Creativity? New ideas? Self-reflection? Furthermore, there is evidence that the fragmentation of attention may interfere with development of executive function.

4. Addiction. These platforms are designed to ‘hook’ kids, and they do it well. Dopamine release ‘is pleasurable, but it does not trigger a feeling of satisfaction. Rather it makes you want more of whatever you did to trigger the release.” Children are increasingly developing behavioral addictions with withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.

What’s Happening to our Girls?

There is a “clear, consistent, and sizable link between heavy social media use and mental illness for girls…the more time a girl spends on sisal media, the more likely she is to be depressed. Girls who say that they spend five or more hours each weekday on social media are three times as likely to be depressed as those who report no social media time.”

Why girls in particular? Boys tend to be drawn to text-based platforms such as Reddit, multiplayer video games, or You Tube videos. Girls tend to be heavy users of visually oriented platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Tumblr. So why are girls more vulnerable to these platforms?

1. Girls are more affected by visual social comparison and perfectionism, and with the use of filters, AI enhancement, and apps like Facetune, girls self-satisfaction plummeted in the 2010’s. “Socially prescribed perfectionism (where a person feels that they must live up to very high expectations prescribed by others) is closely related to anxiety and those who suffer from anxiety are more prone to it.”

Even more upsetting, researchers from the Center for Countering Digital Hate “created a dozen fake accounts on TikTok, registered to 13-yr old girls, and found that TikTok’s algorithm served them tens of thousands of weight-loss videos within a few weeks of joining the platform.”

2. Girls’ Aggression is more Relational. Social media can be used for trolling and repetitional destruction, and cyberbullying is always at their fingertips.

3. Girls More Easily Share Emotions and Disorders. Researcher Nicholas Christakis and political scientist James Fowler analyzed data from a long-running survey of residents of Framingham, Mass, where they discovered that when one person became happier, it increased the odds their existing friends would become happier. Unfortunately, depression was significantly more contagious, and it spread only from women. When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression of her close friends by 142%. You may also have heard of the surge in mental disorders and self-diagnosing among tweens. Many “mental health awareness” influencers on social media are the most prestigious, with many followers and likes. The ones with the most extreme symptoms are the most likely to get the most attention, and watching these videos affects the algorithm for being fed these types of videos. #mentalhealth had more than 100 billion views on TikTok. #Trauma had more then 25 billion. Doctors began to see huge upswings in Tourette’s syndromes (which typically emerges from ages 5-10 and 80% male) among tween and teen girls. The Germans researchers who investigated wrote “We report the first outbreak of a new type of mass sociogenic illness that in contrast to all [previously reported episodes is spread solely via social media. Accordingly, we suggest the more specific term ‘mass social media-induced illness.” Haidt contends that this trend also includes gender dysphoria.

4. Girls are more subject to predation and harassment. Apps make little or no effort to restrict interactions between adults and minors. Sharing of nudes has become commonplace, and boys sometimes use the nudes they solicit to blackmail girls by threatening to blast them on social media and publicly shame them. Some suicides have even been reported after internet sites target young women, blackmail them for nudes, and threaten to expose them unless the young women meet their demands.

But Mom, everyone’s on these sites….

According to Haidt, “Digital substitutions for real-world social engagement reduce the drive to be social but don't satisfy emotional needs….they superficially satisfied the drive to connect with other people, but that connection was shallow, immaterial, and unsatisfying.”

(Note: I find this to be so true for myself. Friends wonder why I call them instead of texting. I no longer know the mundane details of many of my best friends’ lives because we don't talk every day anymore. I find myself often lonely though I am in constant contact with my friends on What’s App, IG, and group texts. I feel like I am getting bread crumbs of friendship until the next time we can find a time to sit over a meal. If I am feeling this at age 43, what must they be feeling at 13, when those friendships are literally a reason for being, for understanding who they are and their place in the world, and in their sense of themselves?)

What is Happening to Boys?

Boys also got more depressed and anxious in the early 2010’s. But unlike girls, “boys experienced a slow decline since the 1970’s in achievement and engagement in school, work, and family life.”

“Boys and young men ‘withdrew much of their time and effort from the physical world (which was increasingly opposed to unsupervised play, exploration, and risk-taking) and invested it in the rapidly expanding virtual world.” They’re at a greater risk of “failure to launch” where withdrawal to their safe bedrooms becomes more appealing than the rejection of real life.

Free, hardcore pornography has become a problem for many adolescent boys, and like social media platforms, porn companies make it easy to satisfy powerful evolved desires while altering their sense of what is attractive, satisfying, or what a real relationship and loving sexual relations might look like in life.

Video games have become an addiction for about 7% of adolescent male users. Like other platforms, theses games make it easy to retreat in to the virtual world and not engage in relationships of substance in the real world.

Spiritual Degredation

Do you remember my newsletter from March, about the importance of Spiritual Development in children, especially in puberty? Well, according to Haidt, “The phone-used life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.”

Bottom line, “People who live only in networks, rather than communities, are less likely to thrive.”

Humans evolved to be religious by being together and moving together. That is why so many ancient religions have movement as part of their rituals. Also true for eating together. When everything is done online, “you cannot activate the neural circuits that evolved along with spiritual practice, so it is much more difficult to enter the realm of the sacred.”

Most major spiritual practices encourage people to serve, forgive, think about others, restore dignity, justice, and humanity to the world. Social media, however, encourages one to think about themselves first: materialism, judgement, boast, petty commenting, and seek glory through likes and followers.

Less connection to nature. Nature is a great-and non-religious-way to experience spirituality through awe and reflection. Yet so many of our children (mine included) say “Take a picture!!!!” when they see a beautiful scene in nature. It robs the moment of its spiritual significance, and it robs us of connection to each other and our world. Haidt suggest finding opportunities to experience nature (with and without our kids) in nature and without the use of our phones. (My plan: Next time we go on a hike, I’m telling the kids that I will not be taking the phone out at all unless there is an emergency where I need to call for help. Setting clear expectations is always the best way to get their buy-in).

So What Do We Do?

1. Assert a Duty of Care. Beeban Kidron made online child safety her top priority after making a documentary about the lives of teens in the online world. She wrote a list of design standards that tech companies could adopt, which became known as the Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) and was enacted in the UK in June 2020. It includes setting all defaults for privacy and geolocation data to highest standard, as well as being transparent about what the platforms are doing. The State of CA adopted its own code which was passed into law in 2022. Some states have passed other versions. If Congress acted (for instance on the Kids Online Safety Act), more could be done in the US to protect kids.

2. Raise the Age of Internet Adulthood to 16

   13 was a political compromise, which is how the age of internet adulthood became that number….but developmentally, it’s not appropriate, and Haidt contents that it should be 16. To be clear, “this is the age in which a minor can enter into a contract with a company to use the company’s products ts. We’re talking about the age at which a child can open an account on YouTube or TikTok and being uploading her own videos and getting her own highly customized feed, while giving her data to the company to use and sell as it says it will do in its terms of service.”

3. Facilitate Age Verification. Haidt suggests that we require social media platforms to require age verification in order to open an account. There are several ways the companies could do this.

4. Encourage Phone-Free Schools. “There is surprisingly little evidence that digital technologies enhance learning in the typical classroom.” (I had a hunch, didn’t you!?)

5. Stop Punishing Parents for Giving Children Real-World Freedom. Free the kids!

6. Encourage more play in schools. Bring back recesses.

7. Design and Zone Public Spaces with Children in Mind. Ideally, these spaces would include free play zones, and would be easily accessible where kids and adults could hang out, play, eat, etc.

8. More Vocational Education, Apprenticeships, and Youth Development Programs. This would be especially helpful for the lives of kids who are not good candidates for college programs.

Advice for Parents

For Parents of Young Children (Ages 0-5)

More and Better Experiences in the Real World. Have kids play in mixed age groups, and plenty of it. Put your own phone down and give full attention to your child when playing. Give kids small responsibilities. Limit non-educational screen time to one hour per weekday and 3 on weekends. 18-24 months, screen time limited to watching educational programming with caregiver.

For Parents of Children 6-13

Practicing letting kids out of your sight without having a way to reach you. (I know, this one makes me uncomfortable, too….Haidt suggests that exposure therapy helps here….do it and it’ll get more comfortable over time).

Encourage sleepovers and don’t micromanage them. Do, however, take away smartphones.

Encourage walking to school in a group.

After school is for free play (not enrichment activities). If this isn’t possible, consider “Free Play Friday.”

Go Camping. (Do I have any camping friends!?!?)

Find a sleep away camp with no devices and no safetyism.

Form child-friendly neighborhoods and playborhoods. Have things like cardboard boxes, hula hoops, chalk, balls, shovels, sand, etc.

The average 8-12 year old spends between 4-6 hours a day on recreational screen activities, across multiple screens…..6-12 year olds should get no more than two hours per day.

Learn how to use parental controls and filters.

Focus on maximizing in-person activity and sleep than on total screen hours.

Provide clear structure to the day and the week. Consider a digital Sabbath day for the family.

Look for signs of addiction or problematic use. (Does it interfere with daily routines and commitments? Do they have strong cravings? Do they lie/deceive in order to use? Does it prevent them from getting 8 hours of sleep? Would they choose it over in-person activities?)

Delay the use of social media until 16 years. Talk to your kids about the reasons and risks. Listen to them.

For Parents of Kids Ages 13-18

Increase their mobility. Let them bike, take the subway, bus, etc. Encourage them to get license and drive themselves.

Rely more on your teen at home. Teens can cook, clean, run errands, and do laundry. Let them help. Insist on it!

Encourage your teen to find a part-time job.

Find ways for them to nurture and lead.

Consider a high school exchange program

Bigger thrills in nature. Backpacking, rock climbing, canoeing, hiking, swimming, etc…

Consider a gap year after high school. Let them discover their interests, let them work to earn money, travel, volunteer, and discover their passions. gapyearassociation.org for more.

To Learn More

AnxiousGeneration.com

www.afterbabel.com

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So much amazing stuff happening in my world!

I debuted a song called “Lift Each Other Up” from my upcoming album at the Mirman School in Los Angeles this week. (Photo includes Justin Stein on Bass, John Schmidt on Guitar, and behind me but blocked, Justin Rumstin on Drums.)

We are in the very last couple of days of tweaking the mixes of all the songs for the new album, and it’ll be sent off to get Mastered this week! PR starts next week with the wonderful Elizabeth Waldman (of Waldmania PR), and I finished up an amazing couple weeks of photo shoots with Robert Hayman Photography this weekend! Can’t wait to share more when I have them!

I am singing, in the meantime, in this concert in March. Tickets HERE!

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Bored with the same old grilled chicken, turkey tacos, and pasta bolognese? Here is a recipe I developed years ago for a food blog I had, and people have been known to lick the plate. Little fun fact, I got to the semi-finals of Master Chef auditions with Gardon Ramsey with this recipe!

Apricot and Feta-Stuffed Pork Tenderloin with Orange Brandy Sauce

Pork goes really well with fruit, so the apricots and the orange in the sauce pair nicely with the super-tender meat. Alcohol cooks off, but if you’d rather not cook with alcohol, replace with chicken broth.

1 pork tenderloin, trimmed of fat
10 dried apricots, chopped
1 shallot, minced
1 Tablespoon chopped fresh thyme
1 Tablespoon reduced-fat feta
1/2 c. orange juice
1/4 c. brandy
salt and pepper
e.v.o.o.
Twine

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

2. Cut pork tenderloin lengthwise 3/4 of the way through to create a pocket for stuffing, but not going all the way through.

3. Heat 1 Tablespoon or so of olive oil over medium heat in oven-proof pan. Throw in shallot, apricot, and thyme, and sautee until shallots are soft, 3-4 minutes. Remove from pan and let cool completely. Add feta.

4. Stuff pork with apricot mixture and tie pork with twine to keep filling in. Salt and pepper the outside of the pork generously.

5. In the same pan, heat another Tablespoon of olive oil over Medium-High heat until glistening. Put in the tenderloin and don't touch. Let brown--it will easily move (won't stick to the pan) when brown. Brown on all sides.

6. Transfer pan to oven and let finish cooking, 15 minutes or so.

7. Take out of pan and let pork rest. Put oven mitt on handle of pan to make sure you don't burn yourself on the stove, and put the hot pan back on the stove over medium heat. Add the orange juice. Take off the heat and add brandy. Expect a flame when you put back on the stove as the alcohol burns off. Reduce to a glaze.

8. Remove the twine, cut the pork across the grain and finish with glaze.