Anxious Generation: What impact is technology having on young people?

“Children are not wired to be constantly wired; children are exhausted. 20% of children have behavioural issues because of screens.” - Nina Moyano

There is a scene in the film ‘Stand by Me’ (1986) where four boys in their young teens walk out into the wilderness along a railway track in search of a dead body. By modern safeguarding standards, it would be a social services nightmare: no parental supervision, dangerous terrain, questionable decision-making and a very real risk of being flattened by a train, attacked by hoodlums or savaged by a rabid dog. And yet, for many people, it represents an idealised vision of childhood. The boys are forged in wholesome camaraderie, freedom, and adventure. Friendship built in a common endeavour away from adult oversight. ‘Stand By Me’ was a 1980s depiction of an idealised 1950s childhood in the US, but some parents now want to bring back a bit of that carefree and adventurous spirit for children.

Compare the experience in that film to the average modern teenager: indoors, AirPods in, scrolling Insta alone while receiving simultaneous validation, social connection (and rejection), political radicalisation, inappropriate sexualised content, unrealistic beauty and fitness standards, and personalised, targeted advertising directly into their nervous system before breakfast. We have, in many ways, made the real world safer for children while allowing the digital world to become psychologically feral. We have tamed the great outdoor wilderness and replaced it with a digital wilderness of grifters and bad actors for our children to navigate.

To discuss these themes of protection and freedom, I sat down with parent, confidence and life coach Nina Moyano to discuss what technology is doing to young people, relationships, identity and attention - and whether adults have fully grasped the scale of the online experiment we are running on children. Nina’s work focuses on digital wellbeing, confidence and fostering behavioural change. Or, as she puts it, helping people develop a healthier relationship with technology. Not anti-tech puritanism. Not forcing everyone to live in the woods with a Nokia 3210, but asking whether our devices are making us happier?

We discussed Jonathan Haidt’s work and his hugely influential book ‘The Anxious Generation’ (2024), which argues that smartphones and social media have fundamentally rewired childhood: particularly for girls, who have experienced sharp rises in anxiety, self-harm and depression since the early 2010s. Some have argued against this, saying ‘correlation is not causation’, but it’s difficult to argue that childhoods have not changed significantly in the past 30 years due to technology. Nina is equally concerned about boys, particularly the ecosystems of algorithmically amplified content they increasingly inhabit online.

“Teenage boys like transgressive content. Girls do, too. They will always seek out what is taboo.” 

This is not entirely new. Teenagers have always tested boundaries. The difference is scale, accessibility and intensity. Previous generations found edgy material in back alleys, dodgy DVDs or badly photocopied magazines passed around at school. Now, the platforms deliver it instantly, endlessly and often privately - so there is no social judgement or censure.

Nina makes an important distinction here. “Transgression is very important for teenage years,” she says. “It helps them build their identity.” Adolescence, after all, is partly about experimenting with who you are by pushing against authority, norms and expectations. But technology can distort this developmental process. “Sometimes we did things because of peer pressure that didn’t make us feel good,” she notes. The difference now is that peer pressure no longer ends when you walk home from school.

One of the most striking parts of our conversation centred on pornography and the awkwardness adults still feel discussing it. For Nina, talking about the birds and the bees on TV cannot be put off any longer: “By eight, most children have seen explicit content, often by accident.” Many parents still approach these conversations as though they can wait until adolescence. But technology has radically accelerated exposure. The old assumption that innocence lasts until secondary school increasingly feels obsolete.

Nina believes parents need to create environments where difficult conversations can happen openly rather than defensively. “It’s not part of the curriculum enough,” she says, arguing that schools and parents alike have been too hesitant to engage honestly with what children are encountering online. This is partly why she felt the ‘Adolescence’ Netflix series became such a powerful cultural moment. Not because it provided solutions, but because it “shocked people into action”. Sometimes societies only confront uncomfortable realities when they are dramatised back to themselves.

There is another irony here too. Many modern parents are hyper-vigilant about physical safety while underestimating psychological exposure online. Nina agrees strongly with Haidt’s broader argument that “safety in the real world has been over-prioritised over safety online.” Children today are less likely to roam unsupervised, climb trees, disappear for hours with friends or get mildly lost. Yet they are increasingly exposed to adult content, social comparison, ideological extremity and addictive platform design before they have fully developed emotionally.

“We are just more aware of the risks now,” Nina says.  I asked Nina whether smaller families and modern parenting culture have contributed to this tendency towards overprotection. Are neurotic parents partly the consequence of having fewer children, each carrying greater emotional and aspirational weight?

Another thing that concerns Nina is that boredom has seemingly disappeared. “Children are not wired to be constantly ‘wired’,” Nina says. “Children are exhausted [from constant online interaction].” Childhood historically involved long stretches of under-stimulation. Boredom trained resilience, self-reliance and forced creativity because there was no alternative. The discomfort of boredom is now instantly anesthetised by screens - ‘there is almost a modern world conspiracy against boredom’ says Alain de Botton.

Nina advocates what might loosely be called digital minimalism: disabling notifications, removing apps you dislike, using greyscale settings, becoming more intentional about digital habits. Small interventions designed not to reject technology, but to reduce compulsive use that you don’t actually enjoy in retrospect.  Nina describes herself as a “parent coach, not a parenting coach.” In other words, the issue is not simply controlling children’s behaviour, but examining adult behaviour too. What relationship are parents themselves modelling for their children with technology - what habits are children observing at the dinner table, in the car, during conversations with people? Children notice contradiction with terrifying efficiency - ‘do as I say, not as I do’ has always been a tricky sell.

If adults spend every waking moment staring at their phone while lecturing children about screen time, the message tends to collapse rather quickly. And this matters because some of the most important aspects of human development still happen offline: negotiation with someone who is being difficult, reading nonverbal cues, managing social awkwardness and interpreting tone. Even pheromones and physical chemistry when meeting people in person. Human beings evolved socially in embodied environments, dealing with the challenge of disappearing social status in the tribe, not disappearing messages.

This broader concern also sits behind debates around the UK’s Online Safety Act, which Nina broadly supports but feels remains frustratingly vague in places. Age verification may help, she argues, but ultimately “we need a public health approach” to technology. In other words, treating digital wellbeing less as an individual moral failing and more as a societal issue requiring education, prevention and cultural change. The Government now wants to impose a ‘digital curfew’ on under-18s, where some of the most addictive elements of online platforms, such as the infinite scroll, are turned by default.

Perhaps the real issue is not simply that children are spending too much time online. It is that online life increasingly colonises the emotional and psychological space where identity used to develop more slowly, more socially and more experimentally in the real world - perhaps at school or at weekend clubs. The internet offers children infinite connection, stimulation and comparison before they have developed the emotional architecture to process any of it. ‘Comparison being the thief of joy’, according to Theodore Roosevelt, this creates a problem - perhaps that is what makes this generation anxious.

Not simply technology itself, but the feeling of being permanently observed, evaluated and connected before you have fully figured out who you are. Growing up was always awkward, confusing and difficult at times (THANK GOD social media wasn’t around when I was 13…).

But at least previous generations could occasionally disappear for an afternoon without the algorithm, and the whole world, following them there. We all deserve to be able to go off the grid at times, even if it is to look for a dead body.