The book that took me back to those days came out last year. It is entitled: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Re-wiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Written by Jonathan Haidt and based on extensive research, it presents the case for a careful examination of how we can give kids a healthier childhood before they reach puberty and through their middle school years. Part II, entitled The Backstory: The Decline of the Play-Based Childhood, took me back to those formative years in my life.
And beyond the farm, when I went to college (1976-1980) other students from cities and suburbs would talk about their adventures in play as well. Pick-up games of baseball, basketball, patio hockey and soapbox derbies were all the rage. Remember how popular the 1993 movie, The Sandlot, became as it took us all back to our childhood days. It is a perfect example of what this book, The Anxious Generation, describes as a play-based childhood that has now been replaced by a phone-based childhood.
After hearing about this book at conferences and seminars after it came out in 2024, I decided to read it. Part IV calls for collective action from governments and tech companies, schools and parents for a healthier childhood. To get there, the author outlines how families, parents and schools must act collectively, because the social pressure for kids who are “the only ones” that don’t have a smart phone or are not on damaging social media apps is just too great.
I read this book not just in light of my own experience growing up, but alongside my firsthand knowledge of family life over the course of the past 40 years, and especially in light of recent conversations with parents who are trying to do some of what the author suggests. Families who band together with other families who are raising children of the same age, are finding support for healthier parenting. This also brings their children together into a community that exists in real time, which is not phone-based living. The challenge is to trust that there is something better for children than simply a phone-based childhood, while giving children exposure to some screen time. Parental limits help children also grow up with play-based experience that together will serve them well in their adolescences and beyond.
Because “the great rewiring of childhood,” according to the author began to take place around 2010-2012, there is a new generation of young adults who missed out on some of the healthier play-based childhood that most of us over 40 takes for granted. Some of those who grew up with a phone-based childhood are also now the age to enter seminary formation. Already in 2016, Church leaders updated the Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis, the fundamental rationale for seminary formation, as the world began to recognize a number of formative deficiencies in young people presenting themselves as candidates for priestly formation. The new PPF 6 (Program of Priestly Formation, 6th edition) now requires those entering seminary formation to participate in a “propaedeutic” (preparatory) year, an intensive focus on various aspects of human formation, preparing men to then undertake the work of priestly formation.
Simple observation tells us a lot about people, though it also leaves us open to some false conclusions. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to watch how children behave when they are on their phones and when they are without the option to escape into the world of technology. When they are looking at screens, they have little idea of what is going on around them. There is no engagement with the real world as they are drawn into the virtual world. Their social skills are minimal, and their anxiety levels increase. When children are limited in the time they have on screens, their anxiety is lower, their social engagement with those around them is better and their creativity can be stimulated. It is important to take action before children lose their play-based children to a phone-based existence.
Since I read the book, I have been paying closer attention to the marketing and advertising of technology, especially to children and adolescents. Frankly, I don’t live in that world, but I hear parents talk about what their children want or what they are getting or NOT getting their children in the realm of technology. The author of The Anxious Generation recommends regular outdoor events, retreats and vacations that include technology fasts throughout the entire time they are away. After a couple days, parents begin to notice how they “have their children back” from the phone-based world that too often engulfs them.
Likewise, all of us might begin to limit our own use of screens and apps, as convenient as they make life and as attached to them as we have become. It might do us all some good to realize the downside of our constant use of technology, so that what is true and good and beautiful about the human person may not only survive but once again thrive. On a regular basis, let’s all go out and play, without our phones, and pay attention to what life is like when we do.
