The Anxious Generation for Teachers: A Book Summary and Classroom Guide

If you’re a teacher or a parent (or both, like me), you’ve probably heard people talking about The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. I want to walk you through what’s actually in it, from a teacher’s perspective, and give you some practical takeaways for the classroom and home.

There is one theme that I believe deeply about parenting and this books reiterated my deep held belief and that is, Get the children out of the house to experience life.

Read the TLDR of this post here.

Teachers Might Struggle to Read The Anxious Generation

When this book first came out a couple of years ago, I started listening to the audiobook and gave up partway through. It wasn’t because the writing was bad. It was because I’m a teacher and a parent of kids affected by everything Haidt describes, and the information felt overwhelming in a frustrating way. A lot of it I already knew in my gut. Seeing it laid out with that much research and density was just a lot to sit with and know that it is negatively affecting my kids and the students that I teach each year.

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If you have ever been in a classroom to teach in the past ten year, there is nothing shocking or surprising about the nature of our students as described in this book.

The content is helpful, but heavy. I’m sharing this summary partly so you can get the core ideas without needing to power through all 400 pages in one go, though I do think the full book is worth returning to when you have the bandwidth for it.

The Core Argument From The Anxious Generation

Haidt’s central claim is simple to state, even if the implications are not. Kids today are overprotected in the real world and underprotected in the virtual world. We’ve pulled back on letting kids roam the neighborhood, climb trees, resolve their own conflicts, and take physical risks. At the same time, we’ve handed them smartphones and unrestricted access to social media with almost no guardrails.

Haidt calls this shift the “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” Between roughly 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved from in-person interaction to smartphones, and he argues this shift is the single biggest driver of the sharp rise in anxiety, depression, and self-harm we’ve seen since then. The result is a generation of kids who have lost a sense of purpose, usefulness, and independence, replaced by a constant, low hum of comparison and fear.

It’s worth noting that Haidt isn’t presenting brand-new research of his own; he’s synthesizing existing large-scale studies (things like the Monitoring the Future survey and CDC data) into one narrative. That’s part of why the book reads as so dense. He’s not telling one story, he’s stacking up dozens of them.

It’s also worth mentioning that Haidt gave a TED Talk in April 2026 where he said flat out that the book didn’t go far enough. He’s continued to argue that the picture is worse than what he originally laid out, particularly as AI gets added into the mix on top of smartphones and social media.

I actually think he didn’t go far enough to dive into the language lost from our ease of shopping delivery, kids don’t talk to people in society like they used to. They don’t have the chance to order food from a human at the counter of a fast food restaurant or talk to the cashier at the grocery store. We are now having our food delivered or ordering online through an app and having our groceries dropped off in the trunks of our cars or delivered at our houses. It would be really interesting to look at language study comparisons over the years. I am sure there are significant amounts of words lost that once were exchanged from child to friendly community stranger, that is no longer occurring which continues to compound everything laid out in the book.

Intro and Part 1 of The Anxious Generation

Haidt shares a lot of frustrating information throughout the book. In the introduction he shares the little protection kids have online. Companies like Facebook, Meta, Apple, and Google aren’t required to verify a user’s age, a kid just checks a box asserting they’re old enough, and from there they can go almost anywhere online without their parents knowing.

Haidt also points to the front-facing camera, introduced in 2010, as a real turning point. Once phones could take selfies, Instagram took off, and kids started posting curated photos and videos not just to be seen, but to be judged. That shift lines up almost exactly with the mental health charts he shows throughout the book.

Another idea from early in the book that stuck with me was that as kids traded a play-based childhood for a phone-based one, kids lost exposure to the kind of hard physical and social experiences that young kids and teens actually need in order to build real-world skills, get past normal childhood fears, and gradually rely less on their parents. Kids whose social lives moved online ended up spending more time in spaces built for adults, encountering adult content and adult strangers in ways that can genuinely put them at risk. Meanwhile, a lot of the same parents who were working hard to eliminate risk in the real world were, often without realizing it, giving their kids almost total freedom online.

That contrast is what makes this book hit so hard for me. We’ve gotten so good at removing small, ordinary friction from daily life. Grocery delivery means I never have to talk to anyone, I just tap a few things on my phone and the bags show up in my trunk. That convenience is wonderful (the adult me loves this featured). But it also means my kids don’t get the small, unremarkable social interactions I used to get constantly as a kid, like ordering my own food at the McDonald’s counter by actually talking to a person. Now that’s a screen too. None of these moments feel like a big deal on their own. It’s the accumulation that Haidt is pointing to, and he describes smartphones and tablets as experience blockers for exactly this reason, the years kids spend glued to a screen are years they’re not spending experiencing the real world, in real time, away from the house.

Get the children out of the house to experience life.

One more thing before moving into the harms and reforms, a lot of well-meaning parents try to compensate for screen time by signing kids up for more structured activities, travel sports being a big one in upper-middle-class families especially. This is one successful way to physically get your kids out of the house, but it doesn’t really address what Haidt is arguing for. What kids need isn’t just to be off screens, it’s unstructured free playtime where they have to figure things out on their own, negotiate with other kids, get bored, and work it out without an adult running the show. A packed schedule of practices and games can look like the opposite of screen time while still leaving no room for that kind of loose, self-directed play.

The Rise of Safetyism

Haidt goes on to share that most parents don’t actually want their kids to have this anxiety-inducing, phone-based childhood. But that it seems like the world has changed in ways that make it hard to avoid, even for parents who are trying.

One big piece of this is what Haidt (building on his earlier book, The Coddling of the American Mind) calls safetyism. We live in such a litigious culture that public works departments often respond to any injury on a playground by stripping it down. This means playgrounds and parks become lame and less fun with fewer climbing structures, less height, less risk, less anything that could lead to a lawsuit. The result is playgrounds that are safer on paper but also kind of boring, and kids don’t especially want to go play on something that isn’t fun. Haidt actually traces the history of the American playground all the way back. Long ago, playgrounds were pretty dangerous, built with very little thought toward safety. Even growing up in the 1980s, the playgrounds were made of some not so safe materials, which is what made them fun. Now, outside of the specialty pay-to-play places, most public playgrounds have swung so far in the other direction that they’re almost too tame to interest anyone but the youngest kids. He shares suggestions and ideas for making the outdoors more fun with things like play spaces that have large tired, wood boards and other things that encourage creativity. We have a slackline for our backyard that encourages fun risky play that is great for getting outside.

The Increase of Internalizing Disorders and Not Feeling Useful

Chapter one also digs into the rise in what psychologists call internalizing disorders (anxiety and depression, as opposed to externalizing behaviors like acting out). Haidt packs in a huge amount of research showing that somewhere around 2010 to 2013, multiple independent measures all shifted at once. One data point that was surprising to me was the PISA data, that’s the Programme for International Student Assessment, a major benchmark test given to 15 and 16 year olds across dozens of countries every few years, to show how school loneliness has climbed. Between 2012 and 2018, the share of teens reporting elevated loneliness at school nearly doubled worldwide, in almost every region except Asia. If you’re into education research generally, this reminded me a lot of The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way, a book that came out in 2013 and used PISA data to compare how different countries approach schooling and some of the very practical ways that they got those scores. Worth a read if this kind of international comparison interests you.

Haidt also touches on something that hit close to home for me as a teacher kids today often don’t feel useful. They don’t have many real duties or ways to meaningfully contribute at home or at school, and that lack of a role or purpose takes a toll on mental health in its own right.

One of the more unexpected charts in the book tracks hospital admissions for unintentional injury among teens. It’s a strange thing to think about tracking, but the point Haidt is making with it is that risky play is part of how kids build the belief that they can do hard things. We can do hard things. But we only get there by doing progressively harder things first. Nobody wants a kid to end up in the ER, but the rough-and-tumble play that occasionally leads to a scraped knee or a sprained wrist is also the same category of experience that helps kids develop a sense of self, learn to regulate their emotions, and build teamwork and communication skills. A recess period that isn’t overly rule-bound, where kids actually have to work things out with each other, does a lot of that work.

As a teacher, I found this part of the book validating but not exactly surprising. A lot of it is basically a chart confirming what I already see every day in my classroom. I agreed with essentially everything Haidt lays out. My struggle isn’t with the diagnosis, it’s with the reality that we live in a culture where a parent can be judged, or worse, reported, for not having eyes on their kid every second. That’s especially true for families who don’t have the money to sign their kids up for supervised programs and camps as a substitute for independent outdoor time. Knowing the problem is real doesn’t automatically tell you how to raise an independent kid in a neighborhood that isn’t set up for it.

Free play

Part two of the book gets into free play specifically, which Haidt defines as activity that kids choose and direct themselves, done for its own sake rather than to achieve some separate goal. The reason free play matters so much is that mistakes don’t carry real stakes. Kids are naturally clumsy and mess up constantly, but in free play they get immediate, honest feedback from the other kids around them. Adult-led lessons struggle to replicate this because what actually builds emotional development is lived experience, not being told information. Kids need to live through a situation and understand for themselves why a certain response works, not just be told the rule.

As a teacher I have found having gentle class conversations after someone messes up in kind of a big way for 5th grade is the most practical advice, because they are seeing in real time why we don’t do something. Giving the students those lived experiences so that they can make mistakes has created a healthy, engaged classroom culture that helps my students thrive.

Haidt makes the case that it’s specifically in unsupervised, kid-led play that children learn to shrug off small bumps and bruises, manage their own emotions, read what other kids are feeling, take turns, work through conflict, and play fair. Kids want to learn these things because they want to stay included in the group and keep the fun going. Nobody has to force it.

As a teacher, I feel this constantly, and it’s one of my biggest frustrations. On days with light, misty rain, a lot of schools default to indoor lineup instead of going outside. But so much of that comes from how far safetyism has crept into school policy. Unless we have severe weather, I feel like all we’re doing is raising kids who can’t handle mild discomfort. (More on how I actually handle this in my own classroom below, in the section for teachers.)

Discover Mode and the Need for Risky Play

If there’s one theme running through this whole section of the book, it’s simply this, get your kids out of the house to experience life. And the version of that with the most payoff is when they’re out of the house without you there too. Unsupervised outdoor play is where kids learn to handle risk and challenge, physically, psychologically, and socially. It’s what builds the confidence to face new situations, which acts like an antidote or safeguard against anxiety. It’s the same idea as before, We can do hard things, and living that out for real is what keeps us from feeling anxious about it.

This is also where Haidt lays out discover mode versus defend mode. Discover mode is curious, confident, and open to the world. Defend mode is guarded and anxious. Unfortunately, heavy screen time tends to keep kids stuck in defend mode, when discover mode is where we actually want them to be able to operate from.

Defend mode is really hard to handle as a parent. Kids who are constantly on guard and struggling with their anxieties are hard to support 100% of the time. It makes me curious if this is why we are seeing an increase in the need for neuropsychological evaluations for so many kids and why the school are seeing such increasing amounts of requests for 504s and IEP accommodations for these kids.

Haidt introduces the idea that kids are antifragile, and shares the story of Biosphere 2, an enclosed dome built in the 1980s meant to be a perfect self-contained environment. The trees inside grew tall fast, in what looked like ideal conditions, and then started toppling over after a surprisingly short amount of time. The missing piece turned out to be wind. Without it, the trees never developed the kind of strong, stress-hardened roots that comes from constantly resisting a force pushing against them. It’s a great metaphor for kids needing regular stressors to grow into capable adults.

The idea that kids are anti fragile reminded me of the kids in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, so coddled and so smothered by their parents’ need for everything to be perfect that none of them can actually survive the factory when it throws real challenges at them. Kids are antifragile the same way those trees needed wind. They need to get knocked down every so often, ideally in a reasonably safe way (that’s my safetyism talking here . . haha). A bump or a bruise here and there isn’t the end of the world. It’s part of what turns them into tougher, more resilient adults.

Haidt makes a point of saying that parents caught up in safetyism are almost always acting with good intentions. Nobody sets out to hurt their kid by protecting them from harm and negative experiences. But the more parents shield kids from every hard moment, the more they end up unintentionally blocking the development of competence, self-control, frustration tolerance, and emotional self-regulation. This kind of coddling, or helicopter parenting, is linked to higher rates of anxiety disorders, lower self-worth, and a harder time succeeding once kids get to college and have to manage things on their own.

One great way to know if this describes you as a parent is to ask yourself who carries your child’s backpack after school?

The flip side is more hopeful. As kids go through productive struggle and gain real exposure, experience, and mastery outside the house, their fear and anxiety actually start to recede. Sometimes that fear can flip into genuine pride, a real we can do hard things feeling. That’s a powerful experience for a kid to have, and it’s not one you can hand them, they have to earn and experience themselves.

The Four Foundational Harms

Chapter five is where Haidt organizes the damage of a phone-based childhood into four categories.

Social deprivation is the first, and it comes back to that same core theme, get the kids out of the house to experience life. Time spent with friends in person has dropped, and no amount of online connection fully substitutes for it.

Sleep deprivation is the second, and it’s one area that I feel gets looked over. The research Haidt cites on how little sleep kids are actually getting is significant, and it’s something I bring up every year at curriculum night. Kids will go to genuinely creative lengths to protect their screen time from sleep. I had one student who set an alarm to wake himself up in the middle of the night specifically to play video games while his parents were asleep, because his parents had strict daytime rules he was working around. I had another family that shut off the Wi-Fi at 9 PM so no one could be online, and their kid figured out the Wi-Fi password from a neighbor’s house and kept right on going. Make sure to get devices out of kids’ bedrooms entirely. A locked box, a charging station in the parents’ room, whatever works logistically, but get them away from your kids when it’s time for bed and put them in a location that they cannot reach without you knowing about it. Cutting screens before bedtime and swapping in a puzzle, a board game, or reading aloud together can go a long way toward protecting that wind-down time too.

Attention fragmentation is the third harm, and it’s a big one, both for classrooms and at home. Kids simply can’t focus the way they used to. Again, if you have ever taught in a public school in the past 10 years, you know this one is a race to the bottom, unfortunately.

Addiction is the fourth, and this one deserves extra attention from parents of neurodivergent kids specifically. Kids with ADHD, kids on the spectrum, kids who aren’t necessarily the ones playing travel sports or heading outside after school, and kids who may already struggle socially, are often the ones most vulnerable to that dopamine hit and the hardest to help regulate around it. These are frequently the same kids logging screen time well above the roughly eight-hour daily average Haidt cites. If this describes your family, it’s worth spending some time learning more about executive functioning specifically. The ADHD Parenting Podcast is a really helpful resource for any family with a neurodivergent kid, not just ADHD specifically. I’d also point you toward Smart but Scattered by Peg Dawson and Richard Guare, which does a great job explaining what’s actually happening in the brain for kids who get hooked more easily and struggle more to disengage. These are two of my most often recommended resources for families that are struggling.

It’s worth remembering, on the addiction piece especially, that the tech companies are not on your side. They have customers, not relationships, and they’re heavily incentivized to acquire those customers young, because habits formed early tend to stick for life. This reminded me of a book I read years ago, Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport (he has some really great stuff on deep work that is helpful. I also recommend this book to my 5th grade families at parent/teacher conferences), which is worth picking up alongside the Anxious Generation.

Both books point out that a lot of tech executives run, ironically or interestingly, low-tech households for their own families and send their own kids to schools that keep screens out of the classroom entirely (like the Waldorf Schools). When these families do use devices, it’s often a full-size computer rather than a phone, since a bigger screen is just easier to walk away from than something built to live in your pocket. There is something less addictive about clicking buttons and typing on a keyboard that sucks you in less, than the good old swiping of your fingers on your phone.

Unfortunately The Anxious Generation that focuses heavily on phones and social media specifically. I think the bigger and more accurate takeaway, and one Newport makes well, is that screens of any kind, not just phones and not just social apps, are the real concern, and that they cause the lack of experiencing a real life is the harm.

Get the kids out of the house, off screens, to experience life.

Spirituality and the Anxious Generation

This section might sound a little woo woo, but don’t skip over it. Haidt argues that a phone-based life produces what he calls spiritual degradation, and not just in teenagers. He frames it around a vertical dimension, does the phone-based life generally pull us upward or downward?

The way I’ve translated that for myself is pretty simple. Does spending time on social media and screens leave you feeling lighter, or does it leave you feeling heavier? I think there can be real value in these platforms when they’re used with intention, focus, and actual limits. But without that, it’s very easy to feel dragged down into a kind of mental wasteland.

The spiritual practices Haidt lays out as a counterweight are things like mindfulness, presence, and stillness, practiced regardless of a person’s specific beliefs or religion.

Another part in this section that stuck with me was his point about community. He notes that close-knit religious communities, across a wide range of faiths and belief systems, tend to be stronger, happier, and have lower suicide rates than looser networks of people. A community you show up for in person, in real time, holds together in a way that a scattered group of people logging on separately and asynchronously just can’t replicate. People who spend their lives only in networks rather than in actual communities tend to struggle more, not less.

As a teacher, the word “asynchronous” brought me back to the days of teaching remotely (and in person at the same time ) during the pandemic. Anytime a group of kids is each doing their own thing separately instead of experiencing something together as a collective, they tend to struggle more, socially and otherwise. This chapter captures a lot of what feels off about a phone-based life.

Teacher Tip: What does this affect The Anxious Generation for teachers and schools? It’s a good reminder to make sure, when able, to offer a robust sense of community and belonging within the school. Offer a wide selection of clubs at a variety of times for all students to participate. Have all kids at school complete a club interest inventory and take a good look at not only the trends for what most kids want or would like in a club, but what are some of the areas of interest the least engaged students showing an interest in?

Create a variety of opportunities for all students to engage in the school environment.

How to Start Fixing The Anxious Generation

The second half of the book shifts from what the problem is to how to fix it. Haidt proposes four general fixes.

1. No smartphones before high school
2. No social media before age 16
3. Phone-free schools
4. Significantly more unsupervised play

He’s upfront that none of these work well in isolation. That’s why he frames these as collective action problems. They need to happen at the level of a school, a friend group, or a community to actually stick.

Toward the end of the book, Haidt breaks the response down by who actually has to act. A lot of it lands at the level of government: city ordinances, public spending, and policy changes that no individual family or school can pull off alone. He also touches on the “parent taxi” problem, the fact that so many kids can’t get anywhere on their own because there simply aren’t safe walking or biking routes for them to use. That part is more of a city planning issue, trails, sidewalks, and safe pathways that let kids move around a neighborhood without needing a parent behind the wheel every time. Individual families can’t build that infrastructure, but you can request it, show up to town meetings about it, and push your local government toward it.

For further reading you can check out the book Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. It’s been a hot minute since I last read this book, but it highlights various transportation models that cities have created to make travel much easier, essentially lightening the load of the idea of a ‘parent taxi’. You can also check out the various lists of best bike friendly cities and most walkable towns when looking for a place to raise your family.

None of that is fully within reach for any one of us day to day. Not to be a downer, but I can’t personally make public parks more fun and dangerous. So, what is actually within reach for teachers and parents right now?

The Anxious Generation for Teachers: What it Means for Your Classroom

On the classroom side, one of the clearest asks from the book is simply more play, real face-to-face play, not digital games dressed up as a break. Take the kids outside for recess every day. (This is assuming there are no tornadoes or negative 75 degree days of school).

I take my class out for recess every single day for years, and I’ve noticed I have fewer behavior problems than colleagues who skip it or treat it as expendable when the schedule gets tight. My fifth grade students know we go out at 2:15 every day. If I’m mid-lesson when that time hits, I stop and we go.

Recess isn’t something they earn after finishing work, it comes automatically, every day, no exceptions. That consistency matters. Giving kids a chance to blow off steam and run around gives them what they need to hold it together for the rest of the day. It helps their focus, and it directly counters that attention fragmentation piece Haidt talks about. It also communicates something to them, that I’m doing this because it’s actually good for them, not as a reward they have to unlock (I would do recess in the mornings as well, but my school district prioritizes five days of PE with a certified PE teacher. 25 minutes of PE every single day at the same time each day.).

The book Grow Wild by Katy Bowman and all of her other books and website, Nutritious Movement are such a great resource for the idea of moving your body more for all of the mental and physical. health benefits. She also has a great podcast that is really interesting as well.

Recess & Weather

Don’t be a fair weather recess goer. Weather doesn’t have to be a significant hindrance to outdoor recess. Our school policy is that we stay in only if the real feel drops below 10 degrees. If it’s 12 degrees and a kid forgot their coat, we’re still going out, and I tell them ahead of time that we will be going out, every day, no exceptions. I prepare parents by telling them my policy at curriculum night, I send reminder emails in the weeks that lead up to the chillier days. On extra cold days, I will send a reminder email to not forget snow pants and coats. I don’t feel bad if a kid is a little chilly for a ten or fifteen minute recess. It happens once. After that, kids stop forgetting their coats, because they’ve actually lived through the natural consequence of not having one. Without that kind of real experience, kids don’t learn to pay attention to what the weather actually calls for, they just wait to be told.

Watching your class experience such joy in the snow is such a priceless feeling as a teacher. Yes it takes extra time for them to get their snow pants on and clean up the wet mess when they come back in, but there are so many life skills woven into this magical recess time.

When it gets cold, I also bring my own pair of snow pants and boots as well as my heavy parka and a goo pair of gloves and a winter hat. Check out the book There is no Such Thing As Bad Weather for more on the benefits of being outside.

Recess & Rule

I also don’t hover over the students once we’re out for recess. I want them safe, obviously, nobody should be climbing the fence, but beyond real safety concerns I let a lot of the small stuff go that I’d be stricter about at lunchtime recess.

As a class, we talk about the difference between lunch recess expectations and my classroom recess expectations at the start of the year, that recess with me runs on different rules than lunch recess, mostly because lunch recess has to manage a lot more kids at once and needs tighter structure to keep everyone safe. That conversation ends up doing double duty. It builds community and shared expectations in my own classroom, and it teaches kids something true about the real world, that different adults reasonably hold different standards, and that’s not something to be confused by.

Schools & Screens

Haidt pushes hard for phone-free schools, and I agree with the spirit of his expectations but in practice I think the more beneficial and achievable goal for most schools is not only phone-free schools, but also limited screen rather than just no phones.

Part of why this is tricky for individual teachers comes down to money. A lot of districts moved to one-to-one Chromebooks partly because of real cash savings on workbooks, paper and copier ink (and repairs on the copier when it’s jammed once every week or so), and schools actively discourage unnecessary copying now that kids can do the same work digitally.

A teacher who’d rather lean back toward paper and pencil work runs straight into a budget problem, because workbooks and printed materials cost money that has to come from somewhere, and that flexibility isn’t automatically funded just because a teacher wants it.

Limiting Screens in the Classroom

In my own district, we do have Chromebooks, and I’ve built a specific structure around them. Kids put them away in what’s basically a mailbox-style parking lot first thing in the morning, and that’s the expectation every day. I don’t trust kids to have a Chromebook sitting open at their desk and just naturally use it well.

Left unsupervised, plenty of the students will find their way to low-quality websites that aren’t educational at all, basically another route to gaming, or sneak the chromebook in their laps during teacher read aloud or some other hard to monitor situation. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves as a teacher.

Getting the devices out of their hands as part of their routine first thing and keeping them out of reach unless there’s a specific need, like typing a final draft, solves most of that problem before it starts.

Keep the Chromebooks at School

Toward the end of this past school year, I went a step further and emailed parents letting them know I’d prefer kids leave their Chromebooks at school unless there was a specific reason they needed to bring one home. Not a single parent pushed back. Every once in a while I would get a parent email requesting the use of the chromebook for a specific weekend. It went so smoothly.

If you’re a teacher considering something similar, that push and pull of building a relationship with parents and bringing them into the conversation first is worth the effort. Most parents are more on board with limiting screens than you might expect, they’re often just waiting for someone to make it the default.

What The Anxious Generation means for parents

• Delay is your friend. Every year you delay a smartphone or social media account is a year of brain development that happens without that particular pressure.
• Say yes to more unsupervised real-world independence, even when it feels uncomfortable. Walking to a friend’s house, biking to the store, being bored without a screen to fix it. These are the “foundational” experiences Haidt says kids are missing.
• Model it yourself. Kids notice when the “put your phone away” rule doesn’t apply to the adults in the house.

One resource Haidt highlights that I want to specifically point parents and teachers toward is the Let Grow Project. It’s a free program, basically a set of tangible challenges kids can work through, things like walking the dog on their own, making a meal from start to finish, or running a small errand, all aimed at building real competence and independence in bite-sized, doable steps. It works for classrooms and for individual families, and it’s worth checking out no matter which side of that you’re on.

On my own end as a parent, I’ve been thinking through a specific independence challenge for my teenagers that they’ve never done before, riding the train into Chicago on their own. My husband and I would drop them off at the station, walk them through the plan ahead of time, and then meet them for ice cream a stop or two away so they’d actually get to practice getting off at the right place. What I like about starting with the train specifically is that it runs on a fixed track, so there are only so many places they could realistically end up, which makes it a lower-stakes way to build that first layer of confidence before handing over something with more open-ended risk.

Get the Kids Our of the House

More broadly, look for small, repeatable ways to get your kids out of the house and in front of a range of people and situations. Let them order their own food at a counter. Drop them a couple blocks from home and let them walk the rest of the way and figure it out. Push for sleepovers. Take them camping. Send them to sleepaway camp. And when they’re old enough, push them toward getting a driver’s license, since that’s its own major step toward real independence. One caveat worth naming, if your child has ADHD, keep in mind that their developmental timeline for driving readiness may run a bit behind their peers, so extra guided practice before you hand over that independence is worth the extra time it takes.

Sleepaway camp deserves its own mention. Being away from your kids, and your kids knowingly being away from you, in a setting built around nature and independence, is its own kind of competence-building that’s hard to replicate any other way. When I think back to my own childhood, I went to a week of sleepaway camp most summers, and I also had a high number of regular sleepovers with friends. When I compare that number to what my own kids experience now at the same age, the difference is quite staggering. A lot of what used to happen in person, casually and constantly, has just quietly moved online instead.

Another piece the book touches on, and one that’s really hard for a parent or teacher to do much about directly, is career and technical education. I took an industrial tech class in middle school, basically a wood shop class scaled down for kids my age, and I still remember making a toolbox and a wooden clock. Looking back, I’m a little shocked at the tools I had access to at that age. It made me feel like a competent person, someone who could build real things. My own kids don’t have anything like that available to them. I’m in the Chicago suburbs, a huge metro area, and even with all that size, the hands-on, build-something-real options are limited.

That gap sent me down a research rabbit hole of my own, and I want to share where it led in case it’s useful to you too. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign runs a large 4-H program with a lot of resources available online, which is worth exploring no matter where you live, since most states have a land-grant university running something similar. I’ve also been looking into Outward Bound programs and, further down the road, the idea of a gap year after high school. Scouting is another one I wish had panned out for us. The research on scouting is strong, especially for kids who aren’t drawn to team sports and are looking for a group to belong to, but availability really depends on what’s active in your specific area, so it’s worth reaching out directly to a regional council to ask what exists near you.

Bottom line

The Anxious Generation makes a compelling, well-documented case that something real changed for kids over the last fifteen years, and that we have more power to push back on it than it sometimes feels like we do. It’s not always an easy read, especially if you’re living inside the problem it describes every day. But the second half, with its emphasis on concrete reforms, does leave you with somewhere to put all that information instead of just sitting with the weight of it.

If you’ve read it, or tried to and set it aside like I did, I’d love to hear how it landed for you.