Ivanka Trump, former White House Senior Advisor to her father President Donald Trump, announced in April that she “highly recommends” the new parenting book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt.
The writer suggests that parents protect their children by denying them smartphones before high school, banning phones from schools, and denying access to social media before the age of 16.
President Trump’s former White House Press Secretary, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, also recommends the book which she says “should alarm every leader in the nation” which is why, according to Huckabee Sanders, she sent a copy of the book to every Arkansas legislator and U.S. Governor.
“The Anxious Generation” should alarm every leader in the nation, which is why I sent @JonHaidt’s book to every Arkansas legislator and US governor.
— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) May 9, 2024
Here are ideas to get us started:
•No smartphones before high school
•Phone-free schools
•No social media before 16
•More… pic.twitter.com/uxio2COJ9N
Note: There are 100 representatives and 35 senators in the Arkansas General Assembly and, of course 49 other U.S. governors besides Huckabee Sanders. That’s a total of 184 copies of The Anxious Generation, which if she bought (on sale for $20 each) would total $3680, without taxes and shipping.
(Sanders may have spent more, if she included on her gift list Arkansas’ two U.S. Senators and four U.S. Representatives.)
Haidt is also the author of the 2012 book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, in which “he shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns.”
