The Anxious Generation and Burning Down the House

In his bestselling book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt's central claim is that "overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world . . . are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation."

We've certainly all seen it in the children we work with. We've all worried about the spike in the number of young children diagnosed with anxiety and depression. I'm agnostic about Haidt's claim about the virtual world (although I've ordered my copy of the book and will read it with an open mind), but I have, for decades now, been pointing out the harms and dangers that seem to result from a culture in which childhood play and independence has all but disappeared. 

If you've not learned that you can do things for yourself, that's a frightening, disempowering feeling. Of course they're anxious.

Lenore Skenazy, along with Haidt, is a co-founder of the Let Grow non-profit. One of the things Let Grow does is work with schools to encourage children to begin re-connecting with the power of independence by doing something new "without a parent" (but, of course, with a parent's permission). On Teacher Tom's Podcast, Lenore told me that many elementary school children take on a cooking or baking project. She said she's been shocked by how many of these kids say, in all earnestness, that they worry they'll "burn down the house."

Of course, it's possible that someone could burn down the house while cooking, but my Mom was determined that I would grow up to not have to count on others to cook for me, so the kitchen was always a "yes zone." As a person who has been cooking and baking since I was a child, it never crosses my mind to worry about burning down the house. That's probably because of the thousands of times I've successfully prepared food without burning down the house. I'm not saying the results were always edible (there was the time I baked cookies using a cup of salt rather than a cup of sugar) but being teased by my brother was the worst of it. I suppose that if I really exercise my catastrophic imagination, I can imagine a burned down house in my future, but I'm certainly not wasting any bandwidth worrying about it.

This disappearance of childhood independence goes hand-in-hand with the disappearance of childhood play and a growing sense of our world as being far more dangerous than it really is. In my lifetime, we've gone from a normal childhood being characterized by very little adult supervision to one in which most kids will spend their entire childhoods under supervision. In that same timespan, crime rates have fallen, often dramatically, as anxiety has risen.

As groundbreaking neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp wrote some 20 years ago, "No one has yet explicitly conducted a play-deprivation study in our species, even though I do suspect we are currently in an unplanned cultural experiment of that kind. Too many youngsters of our species never get sufficient amounts of natural, self-generated play. If so, that be may one of the causes of our current epidemic of hyperkinetic kids with inadequate control over their own impulses."

People keep cynically asserting that "we didn't have all these diagnoses when we were kids." They're not wrong. Some of it, of course, has to do with the fact that we are now recognizing mental health issues in ways we didn't in the past, but much of it has to do with the spike in anxiety that is the natural result of what Haidt calls "overprotection."

Sadly, it's easier to become irrationally fearful and than it is to overcome irrational fears, but that's where we are today. I once said to Peter Gray, another co-founder of Let Grow and author of the book Free to Learn, that I'm worried that the only way to help parents and educators overcome their fears is to fear-monger about anxiety, depression, and hyperkinetic kids. He replied, "I feel like all I do is fear-monger."

It was a joke. No one wants to be a fear-monger, but at the same time, it's essential that we continue to talk about the real world consequences of childhoods without play and independence. In many ways, the beginning of healing the anxious generation is for we adults to work on our own anxiousness, to step outside our comfort zones a little at a time to permit our children to do things for themselves . . . even if there's a tiny chance that they'll burn down the house. 

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders (like Lenore!) useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast by clicking here or finding us anywhere you download your podcasts.

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