Dr. Cristina Sevadjian

Hi Covenant Friends,

I hope you and your families have had a wonderful summer! I know the start of the school year can feel like a jolt to the system after lots of unstructured time with fewer constraints on your schedule. This year, I have a new Covenant Explorer. Coming off the summer felt a little like playing bumper cars with me feeling a little like, “wait, what is hitting me now?!” For some parents, though, the start of the fall might feel like a time of getting back to a welcome routine in family life. Wherever you may find yourself on the spectrum, I hope you and your students are settling back into school life.

In my current season of life, I do not get to read as many books as I would like, so I often have to prioritize my reading. Last spring I found myself anxiously awaiting the release of The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. I eagerly preordered it on Amazon totally committed to reading it this past March. Well, then life happened and this summer I was so thankful for a 6-hour flight delay with no children as I read most of the book on that hot tarmac in Phoenix in July. This book was so thought-provoking that our office ended up doing a summer book discussion on it. If you find yourself in a similar season of life as mine, I encourage you to read, listen, or read the end of chapter summaries from this book. If you are concerned about technology and your child, currently or in the future, this book is for you.

Haidt uses compelling data to explain the unprecedented rise in mental health concerns in teens over the past several years.  His central claim is that “two trends—overprotection in the real world and under protection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.” He provides thorough data to support his claims, and he offers simple, thoughtful, and practical solutions. 

There are two profoundly interesting aspects of this book to me. First, while Haidt is not a Christian, he highlights spiritual degradation as part of the problem with the anxious generation. And second, he insists that these problems require collective action: we as a community need to come together to solve these problems. 

With all of that being said, I want to invite every parent from Grammar to Rhetoric School to join me, Dr. Hillary Lewis (a pediatrician in our community), and other panelists at Project Standfast on September 26 as we discuss how the Covenant community can best support our children learning what we have through this book.