Program: Inservice Courses
Audience: Educators
Dates: 7/1/2025
This course is an asynchronous book study of The Anxious Generation by Jonathon Haidt. Books can be purchased on your own or borrowed from the Peconic Teacher Center. Once you register in Frontline, use a personal email to log in with the Google Classroom Code at: https://classroom.google.com/c/Nzc5NDY0MzQ3NTYw?cjc=3jqckskx (3jqckskx). (email ptcadmin@peconicteachercenter.net if you have any problems.) All assignments for the course must be completed by the end of the school year or you will be dropped and you can re-enroll in the next section. The Google Classroom remains the same and your work will not be lost.
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. Google Classroom Code 3jqckskx Click the title to register on Frontline to get approval and receive credit