Skip to main content

Jonathan Haidt

Biography

Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He obtained his PhD in social psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and taught at the University of Virginia for 16 years. His research focuses on moral and political psychology, as described in his book, THE RIGHTEOUS MIND. His latest book, THE ANXIOUS GENERATION, is a direct continuation of the themes explored in THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND (written with Greg Lukianoff). He writes the After Babel Substack.

Jonathan Haidt

Books by Jonathan Haidt

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
by Jonathan Haidt - Nonfiction, Parenting, Personal Growth, Psychology

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why? In THE ANXIOUS GENERATION, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development.