Breaking Down The Anxious Generation – A Community Dialogue (Presented by ÉOJHS School Council)

Have you noticed an uptick in anxiety with children? Are you a parent or guardian concerned about the significant increase in anxiety in kids and want to learn more about how to support your child? École Okotoks Junior High (ÉOJHS) School Council invites you to join us for a community dialogue to discuss Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation and its key points, providing insights into the causes, effects, and challenges associated with anxiety in children.

Event Details:

• Purpose: To discuss The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt and its key points, providing insights into the causes, effects, and challenges associated with anxiety in children.
• Date: Wednesday, May 14 at 7:00 PM at École Okotoks Junior High School
• Activities:
  • A short informative session highlighting key points of the book.
  • Opportunity to sign out a copy of the book.
  • Sign-up for further discussions on “What do we do now?”

Goals:

• Gain insights into the causes and effects of anxiety in our children today
• Learn effective strategies to support young people in managing mental health.
• Create a supportive, informed network that works together to ensure a positive future for all students in the community.

Join us for this important discussion and be part of a community dedicated to supporting the mental health and well-being of our children. Please follow the link to sign up so we can plan the space for the number of people attending. For more information, send an email to Ms. Paszkowski, Principal at ÉOJHS, paszkowskid@fsd38.ab.ca . We look forward to seeing you there!  

About the book

The Anxious Generation (2024)Jonathan Haidt

From AnxiousGeneration.com

THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health-and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

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 most 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, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the "collective action problems" that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes-communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children-and ourselves from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.