The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

Imagine sitting in a room filled with the gentle hum of evening, the world outside growing quiet as the sun sets. In this moment, we begin a journey into a story that is both deeply personal and universally shared—a story about how the very nature of childhood changed in the blink of an eye. In the early 2010s, something extraordinary happened. Across the United States, Canada, the UK, and far beyond, young people began to experience a tidal wave of anxiety and depression. The numbers were not just statistics—they were lived realities, echoing in the stories of families, schools, and communities.

What made this wave so striking was its timing. If you look at graphs of mental health, you see a sudden, sharp rise around 2012. It’s as if a switch was flipped. Hospital visits for self-harm among preteen girls nearly tripled in a decade. Rates of depression and anxiety soared, especially among girls, but also affecting boys and even college students. These changes were not isolated to one country or culture. The same patterns appeared in Canada, the UK, Australia, and the Nordic nations, revealing a global phenomenon with a shared root.

Some tried to explain the crisis by pointing to economic downturns or political upheaval, but the data told another story. The mental health crisis began after the global financial crisis had ended, and continued during years of economic growth and stability. It was not the news events or economic trends that shaped this generation’s suffering, but something far more intimate and pervasive.

Everywhere, the stories began to sound the same. Parents described constant conflict over devices, the struggle to enforce limits, and the feeling of powerlessness as their children vanished into glowing screens. Teens spent hours scrolling, posting, and comparing themselves to others, their sense of self-worth tied to likes and comments. Even when surrounded by family, many felt isolated, forever elsewhere.

It was not just what young people said. Behavioral evidence confirmed the reality: hospitalizations for self-harm, especially among girls, rose dramatically. Emergency rooms saw more adolescents with injuries from cutting, overdosing, or other forms of self-inflicted pain. This was not just a matter of teens being more willing to talk about their feelings—it was real, visible, and measurable.

So what changed? The answer lies in the devices that became ever-present in our lives. The rapid adoption of smartphones and the explosion of social media platforms marked the end of the play-based, in-person childhood and the beginning of a phone-based, digital one. By 2012, most teens had smartphones, and their social lives moved online, where the rules were different and the stakes often felt higher.

As we step into this story, we begin to see that the tidal wave of anxiety and depression is not a mystery, but a signal—a call to understand what our children need, and what we must reclaim for them. The journey ahead will take us through the backstory of childhood, the science of play and risk, and the ways technology rewired our most basic human connections. Let’s move forward, to explore how the very foundation of childhood was built—and how it began to crumble in the digital age.