This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of W NYC Studios and the New Yorker.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

Stories about mental health and school-age kids are a constant now.

Both in the news and in our conversations with family and friends, every parent I know is talking about this.

The rates of anxiety, of depression, and self-harm

are all up sharply, trends that began in the 2010s.

The social psychologist Jonathan Hight argues that the current generation,

people born after 1995,

have experienced what he calls a great rewiring.

In other words, having smartphones and social media accounts

from childhood has affected not just their emotional lives,

but their neurology too.

Heights new book is called The Anxious Generation

and it's clearly connected with countless readers.

The book debuted at number one on the non-fiction bestseller list.

So I was raised on the, you're sitting too close to the television, your eyes will burn out,

your brain will turn to jelly from watching the Three Stooges or whatever, wherever we were watching.

And it was an incredibly powerful instrument.

There were books written like 10 arguments for the getting rid of television. I think I'm getting the title semi right anyway but there were there were such polemics

polemics not unlike your own in a way they were evidence-based, however controversial. They seem to have at least a grain of truth.

And we survived radio, we survived television. Why is this so different?

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