Growing Up on Mars: How to Reach an Anxious Generation

Imagine someone offered to send your ten-year-old to grow up on Mars.

The trip is safe, they promise. The technology works. But you are not going along, and no child has ever been raised there before.

You would say no. Of course you would.

That is the picture social psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses to open his bestselling book The Anxious Generation. His point is simple: We would never willingly send children into an environment we do not understand. And yet, in little more than a decade, much of childhood has moved into a digital world unlike anything previous generations experienced.

The questions Haidt raised when his book was published in 2024 have only become more urgent.

In August 2026, Meta reached a landmark multibillion-dollar settlement with U.S. states over allegations that Facebook and Instagram were designed in ways that harmed and addicted young users. The agreement includes significant new restrictions for teens, including daily time limits and nighttime blocks. Haidt’s work helped shape the broader movement advocating for greater protections for children online.

At the same time, researchers continue to debate what is actually driving the rise in youth anxiety. Psychologist Peter Gray, for example, argues that smartphones are receiving too much blame and points instead toward academic pressure, declining independence, and the disappearance of free play.

For those of us seeking to reach and disciple the next generation, one thing is clear: childhood has changed, and understanding how it has changed matters for how we serve young people.

When Childhood Changed

For years, rates of teen anxiety and depression held fairly steady. Then, around 2010, they began climbing.

Haidt believes a major part of the explanation is that childhood itself changed shape. He describes a shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood.

Play-based childhood happens outside, with other kids, in person. Mistakes are usually small and quickly forgotten.

Phone-based childhood happens on a screen. It can be constant, public, and difficult to escape.

A child who trips on the playground might get laughed at for an afternoon. A child who posts the wrong thing online can watch it resurface through screenshots, reposts, and comments long afterward.

For ministries serving children and youth, this distinction matters. The young person walking into a church, opening a Bible app, or joining a discipleship group may already be carrying hours of comparison, stimulation, social pressure, and digital noise with them.

Why This Matters to OneHope

At OneHope, research helps us listen before we create.

If young people are spending more of their lives online, struggling with loneliness, navigating constant comparison, and searching for identity and belonging, then Scripture engagement cannot simply compete for another few minutes of their attention. Our programs must help young people encounter Jesus in ways that speak meaningfully into the world they are actually living in.

That means asking deeper questions as we research and design programs: How do we use digital platforms without simply contributing to digital overload? How can technology lead young people toward meaningful relationships rather than replace them? How do we create opportunities for reflection, conversation, Scripture engagement, and discipleship instead of passive consumption?

Those questions are part of why research like Haidt’s matters to our work.

What the Research Shows

Drawing from large, long-running studies, Haidt points to several changes happening alongside the rise of smartphones and social media:

• Between 2010 and 2020, the time young people ages 15 to 24 spent with friends dropped sharply.
• An increasing number of teens are sleeping less than seven hours a night.
• Teens receive roughly 192 phone notifications a day, which works out to about one every five minutes.
• About one in five American high school seniors agreed with the statement that life often feels meaningless.

The effects also appear differently among boys and girls. Haidt points to research showing that girls who spend five or more hours a day on social media are significantly more likely to report depression than girls who do not use it. Girls are also more likely than boys to be heavy social media users.

Boys face a different set of challenges. Haidt describes how gaming, pornography, and other forms of digital entertainment can increasingly pull boys away from face-to-face relationships and experiences in the physical world.

Many young people recognize the change themselves. One Canadian college student described arriving early to a lecture and finding 30 classmates sitting together in complete silence, each looking at a phone. They were physically together, but no one wanted to be the first to speak.

Too Protected in One World, Too Exposed in the Other

One of Haidt’s central arguments is that adults have increasingly overprotected children in the physical world while underprotecting them in the digital one.

We may hesitate to let a ten-year-old walk to a nearby store alone, yet that same child may carry a device offering nearly unlimited access to strangers, algorithms, comparison, explicit content, and public judgment. At the same time, children have fewer opportunities to explore, take manageable risks, solve problems, and discover what they are capable of.

Haidt describes two modes: discover mode and defend mode.

Discover mode asks, What happens if I try this?

Defend mode asks, Am I safe? What will people think of me? What could go wrong?

Interestingly, this is one area where researchers on different sides of the smartphone debate find some common ground. Even Gray, who disputes Haidt’s emphasis on phones, argues that children have lost too much independence and unstructured play.

Maybe the question, then, is bigger than whether phones are “good” or “bad.” It is what kind of experiences are forming our children.

What This Means for Ministry

Haidt recommends delaying smartphones and social media, creating phone-free schools, and restoring more independence and free play. Others disagree about the causes and solutions.

For churches, parents, and next-generation ministries, there is no need to wait for every researcher to agree before responding to what young people are already telling us.

We know young people need something a phone alone cannot provide: adults who know them, unhurried relationships, places to ask difficult questions and make mistakes, opportunities to contribute rather than simply consume, a community where they belong, and, ultimately, a foundation sturdy enough to tell them who they are and why their lives matter.

That is why understanding digital culture matters to OneHope. Our calling is not simply to compete for young people’s attention with better content. It is to understand where they are, meet them there, and intentionally help lead them somewhere deeper.

We can already see this approach taking shape in some of OneHope’s digital evangelism programs. A young person may first encounter God’s Word privately on a phone in a place where walking into a church or asking questions about Jesus may feel difficult or even unsafe. From there, they can connect with a trained online missionary who listens, answers questions, shares Scripture, and begins building a trusted relationship.

The screen becomes a starting point, not the destination. When it is safe and possible, that online missionary can help connect the young person with a local church, where digital engagement becomes face-to-face community, and an initial Gospel encounter can grow into ongoing discipleship.

As OneHope teams continue designing programs for a generation growing up online, the opportunity is not to choose between digital ministry and meaningful human connection, but to thoughtfully build bridges between them. We can do so by using technology to bring God’s Word into the spaces young people already inhabit while creating pathways toward relationships, belonging, the local Church, and a life rooted in Jesus.

Technology will keep changing. Researchers will keep debating its effects. Childhood itself will continue evolving.

So we keep listening. Because the better we understand the world young people are growing up in, the better equipped we are to meet them there—and help them encounter the hope of Jesus in ways that can move beyond a screen and into every part of their lives.

Share this article to help more parents, leaders, and churches understand the world young people are growing up in, and how we can help them flourish.