In a single generation, the texture of childhood changed more than it had in the previous century — overwritten, fast, by a glowing rectangle that arrived in nearly every child's hand between roughly 2010 and 2015.

Childhood, Rewired is a rigorous, balanced investigation into what that rewrite actually did — to attention, anxiety, sleep, play, friendship, and identity — and, just as importantly, what it did not do that we've been told it did. Drawing on hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, it stages the strongest version of each side, names the size and certainty of every effect, and separates the well-established from the contested from the overstated.

How the book reasons. Every domain chapter runs the same honest discipline: the popular claim → the strongest evidence for it → the strongest evidence against it → the actual effect size and certainty → an honest verdict. Each finding is marked well-established, contested, or overstated against a transparent rubric you can audit in the appendices — including The Evidence at a Glance, a sortable claim-by-claim summary.

The investigation runs in three acts:

• The Before and the Flip — the last analog childhood, the five-year rewrite, and the tools to read the evidence fairly.
• What Actually Changed — attention, the anxiety and mental-health question, sleep, play and independence, friendship, identity, and the unequal rewrite that hit some children far harder than others.
• What Actually Helps — which responses the evidence actually supports, what we still don't know, and how to decide for yourself.

This is not a panic, and it is not a dismissal. It is written by the one generation that lived both childhoods whole — analog and digital — and then went and checked the data. Where a fear is justified, it says so plainly. Where the popular claim outruns the evidence, it says that too.

Read the citations. Check the sources. Decide for yourself.