Bestselling author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has spent his career speaking wisdom and truth into the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the perfect storm contributing to a public health emergency for Gen Z. For the cohort that hit puberty around 2009, their sense of self developed as the threads of three dramatic technological and social changes unspooled: smartphones and life with the constant companionship of a screen, front-facing cameras and the bevy of apps that thrived on selfie-culture, and social networks that reduced engagement and affirmation to likes and hearts alone. But phones aren’t the only villain here; the ground for this crisis was seeded by a decades long shift from play-based childhoods to ones defined by over-supervision, structure, and fear. The Anxious Generation is a penetrating and alarming accounting of how we adults began to overprotect children in the real world while giving essentially no protection in the brutal online world.