The Upstream Cause of the Youth Mental Health Crisis is the Loss of Community

Today, we publish our third post on what we now call the “first act” of The Anxious Generation: the loss of community. (The second act is the loss of the play-based childhood. The third act is the rise of the phone-based childhood.) In our first post, Zach discussed Robert Putnam’s essential work on the decline of social capital and trust, which happened in part because new individualizing technologies (such as television) emerged and participation in local and communal activities waned. As communities weakened and trust eroded, so did the play-based childhood. In the second post, we featured an essay by Seth Kaplan, author and lecturer at Johns Hopkins who studies fragile states. In it, he argued that to restore the play-based childhood, we must first rebuild strong in-person local communities. In this post, Seth takes his argument one step further, asserting that the upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community. As we are offered new virtual ways to conne

Today, we publish our third post on what we now call the “first act” of The Anxious Generation: the loss of community. (The second act is the loss of the play-based childhood. The third act is the rise of the phone-based childhood.) In our first post, Zach discussed Robert Putnam’s essential work on the decline of social capital and trust, which happened in part because new individualizing technologies (such as television) emerged and participation in local and communal activities waned. As communities weakened and trust eroded, so did the play-based childhood. In the second post, we featured