A child’s brain is not built for the world we handed it. It is built for the world humans evolved in over hundreds of thousands of years: a world of embodied play, face-to-face relationships, physical risk, community rituals, and slow cultural apprenticeship. Between roughly 2010 and 2015, we pulled an entire generation out of that world and dropped them into something radically different without understanding what we were doing or measuring what happened next.
Haidt calls this the Great Rewiring of Childhood. It was the shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood. And it produced an international epidemic of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide among adolescents that is still with us today.