By Tejal Toprani

Tejal is a social worker, therapist and mom living in Arizona.

I recently recommended the book The Amazing Generation to my ten-year-old son, Avyaan. Surprisingly, he took it to school. And finished it in one day. This does make sense, however as his school limits “technology” to a basic computer skills class three times a week, and he has plenty of time to read there. And he actually forgets to charge or even wear the communication watch we got him for drop-offs and events.

Which honestly says two things:

1. The book is incredibly readable.
2. My child is not yet screen addicted
3. And my child may already be concerned about the collapse of civilization.

A few months ago, I went to a supper club where guests played one of those “get to know you” icebreaker games. You walk around with a sheet of questions, trying to make meaningful human connection while balancing a cocktail and pretending this doesn’t feel like corporate team-building with better lighting.

One of the questions was:
“What is the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen?”

I asked this of a woman in her seventies. Now, from what I later learned about her, she had lived.

She had traveled extensively.
Raised a family.
Spent time with adult children and grandchildren.
Ran a thriving family-owned restaurant.
Built a career outside the home.
Experienced actual life in all its messy, textured, analog glory.

But do you know what she told me the most amazing thing she had ever seen was?  “A Facebook video.” The most amazing thing she had ever seen was a Facebook video –

Not childbirth.
Not Paris.
Not falling in love.
Not watching her children grow up.

A Facebook video. The video involved a woman getting pulled over by the police for holding her phone while driving. The twist — and apparently the hook — was that the woman did not actually have a right hand. The woman at my table leaned in while telling me this story. There was going to be a “trial,” apparently, because both sides insisted their version of events was true. 

She was riveted. I smiled politely and said, “Wow, that’s crazy.” But internally? I was haunted.

Because this woman had lived a full human life, and somehow the most amazing thing she could think of was content specifically engineered to keep her watching. Not living. Watching other people live. And I say this without judgment because honestly? We are all vulnerable to it.

I fall into that strange microgeneration sometimes called Xennials — old enough to remember life before smartphones, but young enough to have fully merged with technology like reluctant cyborgs.

We remember:

• house phones
• getting lost without GPS
• boredom
• waiting
• silence
• not being reachable every second of the day

Our children do not. For them, technology is not an invention. It’s oxygen.

And that’s why I gave my son the book. And it’s also what makes The Amazing Generation feel less like a parenting book and more like a cultural intervention. The author, Jonathan Haidt, argues that we accidentally traded a “play-based childhood” for a “phone-based childhood.” And once you see this, you cannot unsee it. 

Kids are safer physically than ever before. But emotionally? Many are struggling more than ever. Anxious. Lonely. Disconnected. Chronically stimulated but somehow undernourished. As a therapist and a parent, I see this constantly.

Children are losing opportunities to:

• tolerate discomfort
• navigate conflict independently
• develop confidence through real-world experiences
• experience boredom without immediately anesthetizing it

And adults are not immune either. We are all being trained, little by little, to confuse stimulation with meaning. To confuse consuming with connecting. To confuse watching life with living it. The thing is, if you ask people about their favorite memories, almost nobody says:

“Honestly? Probably that seven-hour scroll session I had in 2023.”

They talk about:

• road trips
• summers
• inside jokes
• heartbreak
• friendships
• sports teams
• campfires
• college roommates
• babies
• terrible apartments
• laughter so hard you couldn’t breathe

Real life.

The uncurated kind. And this is where I think parenting gets complicated. Because we are raising children inside an environment that even we do not fully understand yet. We hand kids devices because everyone else has them. Because we’re tired. Because we need to make dinner. Because modern parenting is exhausting and relentless and occasionally you just need someone to watch YouTube so you can send one coherent email.

I get it. But I also think many of us feel a quiet unease. Like maybe something sacred is being slowly traded away. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just one scroll at a time. One less conversation. One less bike ride. One less moment of boredom that could have turned into imagination. One less fully lived day.

I’m not anti-technology. I use it constantly. I am literally writing this on a computer while probably ignoring three texts and an unread email from Costco. But I do think we need to ask ourselves harder questions about what kind of childhood we are protecting. And what kind of adulthood are we drifting toward? Because I don’t want the most amazing thing my children ever see to be content optimized for engagement.

I want it to be their actual lives.

The Amazing Generation makes a compelling case that our society has shifted from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood” and as a result, has directly contributed to the rising rates of anxiety and loneliness in children. As both a therapist and a parent, I felt it was vital for my ten-year-old son, Avyaan, to read this book; I wanted him to understand that good memories are made through living in the present, off-screen, and true resilience and emotional strength aren’t found in a digital interface, but are built through the messy, unpredictable experiences of the real world.

The most powerful outcome of his reading the book, however, wasn’t just his understanding of the theory, but his immediate application of it: he asked to play a board game together as a family when he came home from school the day I gave him the book. This was a small, uncurated moment—a simple step back into the “oxygen” of real life that the book advocates for, one that gave him deep, quiet contentment and a sense of happiness with himself, who he is, and who we are as a family – even while surrounded by peers with greater tech access.