Jonathan Haidt
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
30% or so have anxiety or depression.
Yeah, that's huge.
It is gigantic.
It is normal for American girls.
If you're a teenage girl, it is normal that you have been thinking about suicide.
About 20% say that they've thought about suicide in the last year.
So this is now the new normal.
But what this goes along with is a general sense of threat in the world, a reluctance to take risks.
And a lot of surveys and behaviors bear this out.
Gen Z is very bad at risk-taking.
Now let me make clear, none of this is a criticism of them.
Building on what Greg and I argued in the Coddling the American Mind, we overprotected the hell out of them.
We never let them out of our sight.
We never let them go out onto the playground without someone watching and blowing a whistle and saying, no running, don't push.
So we did this to them.
And it was the combination of the overprotection
in the real world where they need to grow up and get tough.