Anxious Like Me

If you are a parent, know a parent, or have eavesdropped on a parent lately, you likely have heard about Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation. The thing is pressed into hands and discussed with an urgency I haven’t seen since my childhood inner circle discovered the oeuvre of Judy Blume (or since my contemporary cohort came upon Miranda July’s All Fours). In the book, Haidt argues that youth mental health is plummeting due to the twin foils of the ubiquity of smartphones and the decline of the independent, free-play childhood of ye good olde days. Parents need to worry more about the dangers lurking in the dark corners of the Internet, he says, and less about the theoretical bugaboos of the real world. Skinned knees and solo trips to 7-11 good; Pornhub bad.

Now, whether due to some innate hyper vigilance, a mild case of PTSD resulting from my son’s premature birth and extended stay in the NICU, or the fact that I am just kind of a weenie, I found the first directive — to worry more — delightfully refreshing.

I can’t imagine that the reams of evidence pointing to the dangers of being constantly connected to the Internet before one’s brain is fully formed came as a genuine shock to anyone, but still, it’s nice to be vindicated. Indeed, every time I explain to my child that YouTube is a brain-sucking cesspool designed not to entertain but to monopolize and monetize his attention; refuse to let him play with my phone, even though — he swears, though I suspect he’s largely full of crap — everyone else’s mom does; or deny his request for the Wi-Fi password in order to play Brawl Stars with his best friend on the grounds that ImYrBestFriend249 is not his best friend at all but likely some random perv; I allow myself to bask, just for a moment, in the warm glow of my growing pile of imaginary gold stars.

The real-life stuff on the other hand, the worry-less portion of the program? Not so easy.

It’s not that I don’t let my son dabble in independence and take physical risks; I do. I make myself scarce when friends are over to play or when he’s outside with neighborhood kids, letting them create their own adventures. When he grows tired of the grown-ups yakking while lingering over drinks and frickles at Harry’s, we’ve been known to send him to Chaucer’s. At a recent family-reunion-type affair in a faraway land, I took him aside, knelt down, and said: “I am going to be up here hanging out with these people. Now look: The sea is over there; a cliff is over there. Make good choices.” And then I turned him loose, into the literal heart of the Bermuda freaking Triangle, with a pack of other 8-year-olds he’d known for all of five minutes, to conduct god knows what sort of Lord of the Flies–variety shenanigans.

(Hours later, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to find him covered in wet sand. “Mom,” he said, “we need showers.”)

I remembered being at a decades-earlier iteration of this event, equally left to my own devices, with an equally feral pack of once-a-year friends, tromping through waters, emerging covered in mud, and generally making our own fun while the grown-ups were otherwise occupied, unworried, up to shenanigans of their own. Granted, that was the norm then. I am very much a child of the come-home-when-the-streetlights-come-on generation.

This pedigree does not, however, make me un-anxious.

There are times, many of them, when I force myself to say “Yes, have fun,” though my heart says something like, “This parenting shit was a whole lot easier when you were tucked safely inside my womb, kiddo.”

Rational thought is no match for that instinct to protect. Nor, it would seem, is personal experience. To be sure, I frequently feel like a total hypocrite, spinning out over some worry when the evidence is clear that I love a good dance with danger. My lifetime CV includes a summer hitchhiking around Egypt (hitchhiking!), several leaps out of perfectly fine airplanes, and a high school career’s worth of bad decisions it seems miraculous to have survived. College, too.

Some things were more dangerous then; some are far worse now. While I’m writing this, news is breaking of another school shooting. More children killed. In their classrooms. Parenting in this country can feel an act of brutal, terrifying bravery.

None of this changes the importance of freedom, though; I realize that. And yet, sometimes, despite my best intentions and Haidt’s data and my own desire to not be a weenie, I just say no.

Last weekend, we were at a favorite beach when, after hours of surfing, my son and his buddies exhaustedly came ashore, dropped their boards, and headed toward the charmingly dubbed “toilet bowl” — a rocky, swirling cauldron that is beautiful from a distance and hides a natural tub inside. My son and his friends played in the bowl, while bigger kids stood on its outer edge, some leaping into the chaotic break below.

Soon, my son came running toward me, wild-faced. “Can I jump off the rocks?”

Before I could check myself, I replied. “I don’t think so.”

And his sweet, young face broke apart — into a huge smile of something that looked like intense relief.

“Okay!” he said. Then he turned, and ran back to his friends, back out into the world.

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Editor’s Note: Serendipitously, UCSB Arts & Lectures just added a talk with Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness to their schedule on Thursday, February 20, 2025. See artsandlectures.ucsb.edu for details.