I just finished Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, and let me tell you—it was equal parts validating and terrifying. Validating because it put into words what so many of us parents feel in our gut: something about childhood has shifted dramatically in the past decade. Terrifying because… well, the numbers don’t lie.

Rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm have skyrocketed since the early 2010s, right around the time smartphones and social media became pocket-sized pacifiers. Haidt doesn’t mince words: we’ve essentially conducted an unregulated experiment on our kids’ brains. Spoiler alert—it’s not going great.

For me, the book hit especially hard as the parent of tweens. I’ve seen firsthand how quickly a cheerful, curious kid can morph into a moody, phone-obsessed hermit. (Ask me about the night I caught one child watching 13 hours of a stranger playing Minecraft on YouTube. Yes—13 hours. At midnight. Yes—we have a rule that no electronics are permitted in bedrooms (he snuck it in). Yes- I removed YouTube apps under the parental controls (he pulled a 007 and watched me enter my password so he could reinstall). And yes—I’m still annoyed that he didn’t just play the game himself instead of watching some weirdo play it for 13 hours.)

Haidt lays out the stakes clearly: childhood used to be about play, independence, risk-taking, and gradual exposure to the real world. Now, too often, it’s about scrolling, comparing, and retreating into curated digital bubbles. And while we parents are doing our best, the truth is—this is bigger than any one family’s screen-time rules. It’s a cultural shift, and we’re all swimming in it.

But here’s what I loved about the book: it’s not just doom and gloom. Haidt offers a roadmap. He urges parents, schools, and communities to give kids more real life and less virtual life. To trade passive scrolling for active play. To loosen our grip on overprotecting their bodies while tightening up boundaries around their screens.

For me, the biggest takeaway was simple but profound: childhood is supposed to be embodied. Messy. Offline. Full of scraped knees, awkward conversations, and experiments in independence. Our kids don’t need perfectly curated digital childhoods—they need actual ones.

And yes, that means more battles in my house. More “You’re the only mom who won’t let me…” conversations. More sneaky attempts at bypassing parental controls. (Did I mention I thought one child would be my easy one? Joke’s on me.)

But after reading this book, I feel more grounded in my “why.” Screens aren’t evil, but they’re powerful—and right now, too powerful for developing brains to handle without limits.

So here’s to giving our kids more freedom in the real world, less time in the digital one, and maybe—just maybe—raising a generation that’s a little less anxious.