People born after 1995 are in bad mental health

On how a phone-based childhood disrupts normal development, and why social media harms girls more

- Majid Maqbool

What prompted your research on the rewiring of childhood that has led to mental illnesses in children and adolescents?

My research has been on how technologies are changing societies and how they are interfering with liberal democracy. In my previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind, I began to uncover this strange thing in the English-speaking world, which is that students born after 1995 are much more fragile and anxious and different from the millennial generation before them.

When I began working on my previous book in 2022, I thought I would start with one chapter on what happens to teen mental health, and then move on to what happens to democracies. Once I wrote that chapter, which became Chapter 1 of