Smartphones Rewired Childhood. Here's How to Fix It.
Honestly with Bari Weiss: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones Rewired Childhood. Here's How to Fix It.
Episode webpage: https://www.bariweiss.com/
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been explaining the human condition to us better than anyone else. He first did it with his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, which explored why people were so passionately divided over politics and religion, and argued that people are fundamentally religiously inclined creatures. Then, he did it again with The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, which laid out why kids today—especially on college campuses—have become so intolerant of opinions that conflict with their own.
Now, he’s done it once more with his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. This time, Haidt explains what so many parents have been confused by for the last decade: Why are kids today more anxious than ever, more depressed than ever, more risk-averse than ever, lonelier than ever, and less social than ever?
It’s pretty simple, Haidt argues: We changed childhood.
The mass migration of childhood, Haidt says, from the real world to the virtual world has completely changed what it means to be a kid. By replacing free and independent play and quality time with friends with the isolation of screens and phones, we instigated what he calls the “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” What resulted, he argues, is a childhood that is “more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.”
Today, Haidt explains how this massive change happened, its detrimental effects on kids, and what actions we can take—both in our own lives and legislatively—in order to reverse course and free the anxious generation.
Transcript
Social psychologist Jonathan Height will be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the 21st century. And that's not because he's sending spaceships to Mars, or because he's working on fusion energy, or because he's figured out how to solve the chip problem. It's because Jonathan has been explaining our condition to ourselves better than almost anyone else out there.
He did it first with his book The Righteous Mind, which helped explain why people are so passionately divided over politics and religion, and which also made the argument that human
beings are fundamentally religiously inclined creatures.
Then, he did it again with the coddling of the American mind, which he co-wrote with Greg Lukinov. That book laid out why kids today, especially kids on college campuses, have become so intolerant of opinions that conflict with their own, and how that intolerance has impacted the culture and the country. And now, John Height has done it once more, with his new book The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. This time, John explains what so many parents have been confounded by for the last decade. Why, despite all of our luxuries and privileges and wealth, are kids today more anxious than ever, more depressed than ever, more risk averse than ever, more lonely than ever, and less social than ever before? Well, it's pretty simple, John argues. We fundamentally changed childhood. The mass migration of childhood from the real world into the virtual one has completely transformed what it means to grow up. In replacing free play and interaction with friends and other people, and really just the world, with the isolation of screens and phones, we instigated what he calls the great rewiring of childhood. What he means by this is that childhood, as he writes, was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.
A few weeks ago, we had a conversation on this show with Abigail Shrier about many of these topics and questions. It sparked a huge response and a lot of letters to the editor, some of which we published on the Free Press. But what we heard was loud and clear, conversations about parenting and childhood aren't just important for parents, they're important for everybody because the kids of today are becoming the people that will lead our culture and our country in the future. That future, the one all of us will live in, is inextricably linked with how we raise the next generation of adults. So today, we are absolutely thrilled to bring back Jonathan Haidt.
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John Height, thank you so much for being here today.
Thanks for having me back.
So you were born 20 years before me. You were born in 1963. And if you would, just tell me a little bit about your childhood. How did you grow up?
Well, now I recognize that I had just the quintessential post-war America childhood. I grew up in Westchester County in the suburb North of New York City. And the key thing is that it was just assumed that kids are on their own when they don't have to be somewhere. And by 2nd and 3rd grade, I was walking over to my friend's house who lived about half mile away. We would come up with games to play. Me and my best friend, Christor, or we'd meet up with a couple other kids. Or once how we had a rock fight with some kids at a nearby school, just you have adventures.
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Basically, I had a free range childhood, like everybody, as everybody else did back then.
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And that kind of ended in the 90s.
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It's almost like you and I grew up in a different world.
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It really is.
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Paint the picture for us.
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What does the average American childhood look like today?
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So kids are locked up until they're in middle school.
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You don't see eight-eight-year-olds walking around the way we did when we were kids.
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And the latest data that I've seen Gallup has a survey out from last year, if you just look at social media, just social media.
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And that includes TikTok and YouTube videos, which is the biggest time suckers those two.
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It's five hours a day, seven days a week.
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For girls, it's even higher.
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That's just social media.
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Now you add in video games and all the other stuff.
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You're up around nine hours a day.
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That's the average.
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There are many kids who are spending a lot more than that.
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So I want to make the point that first, the quantity is just hard to comprehend.
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It's mind-boggling.
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The most stunning thing is that Gen Z, kids born after 1995, Gen Z has been giving up time with friends outside of school.
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You label all of these changes as the great rewiring of childhood.
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But the change didn't just happen with the advent of the iPhone or the Android or with the like button.
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You trace the change to sort of the 1980s and with the transformation away from free play to a much more fear-based childhood.
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What drove the sort of shift away from letting kids like you go and play on their own and figure out how to stone each other without killing each other in the westchester?
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When did that begin to shift and why culturally?
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Yeah.
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So it's not just like, oh, the phones are hurting our kids.
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It's like, here's what childhood is.
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Because human childhood is this amazing evolutionary adaptation.
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It's really different.
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How the hell evolution figured out that females would secrete nutrients from their chest skin and then infants would, like, completely insane.
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We have like, whatever, 300 million years of evolution to get that.
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We have this long dependency as mammals on the female body.
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And then as the brains are growing in primates, the big jump is to the genus homo, hominids, much bigger brains.
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And then you get to homo sapiens and homohydobragensis.
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We have really big brains.
And it's thought that the last part of that, the huge size, isn't just like, oh, man, the tool user, it's actually much more for social life.
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It's for culture.
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We have this incredible adaptation called culture.
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And it requires a large frontal cortex and a long, long period of learning in order to fill it in with these cultural skills.
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And is that long period of learning the thing we called childhood?
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Exactly.
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You once could have the basic motor skills down.
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They love to run and jump and hide and practice avoiding predators.
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So it's very physical.
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Kids are very physical.
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They want to play all the time.
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But once they reach around age six or seven, now they really want to play in groups.
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They're so exciting to play with another group of kids.
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And that's all over the world.
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You travel anywhere in the world.
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You'll find kids of that age, you know, five or six up through 10 or 12.
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They're out playing in groups.
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That's what they want to do.
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That's how they learn best.
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You know, and you asked me at the opening, what was my childhood like?
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You know, it was like that.
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But then in the 90s, we decided to change it.
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We freaked out about child abduction.
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We became incredibly overprotective.
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We totally focused on college admissions.
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And you know, the point of childhood is to do well on the SAT and assemble a resume to get into college.
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And there's a graph in the book, 96 was the peak year of change.
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That's the year that suddenly women began spending a lot more time with their kids and fathers did too.
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Why did that happen?
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So first there was a real crime wave and I was just listening to an episode about the 1970s.
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And I forgot how completely nuts everything was.
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I mean, there were serial killers biting off people's ears.
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You know, there was a lot of craziness in mayhem.
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There were a lot of terrorism and bombs, street crime, you know, things really did get more dangerous, especially in urban areas.
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But you know, suburban areas like yours and mine were still quite safe for kids to be outside.
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But fear began to spread in part through the media because, you know, when there were three networks, they didn't have a lot on child abductions.
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But once you have cable networks, well now some of them are carrying, you know, there are like a hundred true child abductions every year in this country.
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It's tiny, but you know, some of them get a huge amount of attention.
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There was the milk cartons with this photos of missing kids.
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So for a variety of reasons are thinking about childhood begins to change in the 80s, but kids lives don't change that much until the 90s.
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A lot of these trends, the overprotection started among more educated upper-class people.
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They're the ones who began to do what the sociologist Annette LaRoe calls concerted cultivation parenting.
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You know, I will shepherd you around to, you know, math lessons and Mandarin lessons and these things will make you Ivy League material.
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But they've actually spread to everyone now.
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There's another aspect to this that I think is under discussed, which is as people had fewer children, their obsession over those children got more intense.
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How important of a factor is that?
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Yes.
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That is huge.
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There are several like major sociological trends that drove this change of childhood.
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And I just talked about one, which is changing media.
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Oh, in a second, a true rise in crime.
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The third, I think, is prosperity and education.
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So the normal human thing is you have lots of babies and some of them die on the way to adulthood.
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You don't invest all that much in anyone.
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You just have a lot of them.
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And as long as you have a lot of them, well, there are a lot of kids around.
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They're all playing with each other and, you know, you've got a lot of work to do.
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You're not going to be playing with them.
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Let them play with each other.
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And so people used to grow up with siblings.
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Well, you know, talk to people in China now, especially once they got the one child policy.
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They got to the point of a while ago where you have one child with no aunts and uncles and four grandparents.
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You have one child, two parents, four grandparents, all doting on this one child.
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All of their hopes, genetic and cultural are invested in this one child.
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And especially in East Asian societies, which are very much test-based.
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You know, they have this ancient meritocracy around tests.
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There's a lot of pressure on the kid.
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My wife is Korean American.
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We've been to Korea together.
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And, you know, childhood in Korea is all about just practicing for college entrance exams.
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It's really sad.
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But so as a society modernizes, as women are, as everyone's wealthier, women are more educated, costs of living go up, for all these reasons, large families decline.
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And we have a large family.
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You can't oversupervised.
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And you can expect the kids to look out for each other.
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And when you have two college educated parents and one child, boy, are they going to try to engineer the best outcome?
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So for all these reasons, again, it's just the 70s, 80s, and into the 90s.
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Just huge sociological changes, huge changes in American family structure.
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And all of these contribute to the rewiring of childhood, away from free play and towards concerted cultivation, preparation for college.
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So these fundamental changes begin happening in the 80s and then especially in the 90s, where we have fewer kids in the family, less unsupervised play, more fear in paranoia coming from the media and therefore to the parents.
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And then more helicopter parenting.
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Combine all of these for me.
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What do these do to kids?
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Before the smartphone even enters the scene?
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So two big things.
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One is it deprives them of what they most need to develop anti-fragility.
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So anti-fragility, hope is familiar to your listeners by now.
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It's the concept that is from Nassim Taleb, my NYU colleague, it's the opposite of fragility.
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It means that you actually need to get knocked around.
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You need to have setbacks in order to get strong.
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Also the immune system is the classic example if you protect your kids from bacteria, you're preventing the immune system from developing.
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It needs bacteria, it needs to get ill in order to develop immunity.
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So the vast over protection is very much like raising your kid in a germ-free bubble.
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You are going to cause your kid to have autoimmune diseases.
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And I think depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and self-harm are sort of the psychiatric equivalence of autoimmune disease.
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The other big thing is we raise them in an environment of fear.
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So we teach them the world is dangerous.
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Now in fact, the world has gotten unbelievably safe.
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I mean, the death rate from all causes just keeps dropping and dropping, especially with the consumer revolution in the 60, 70s, 80s.
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The odds of a kid dying today are tiny compared to 50 or 100 years ago.
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So the world gets safer and safer, but we get more and more afraid of it, and we teach that to our kids.
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To the point where our kids are told stranger danger, don't ever talk to strangers.
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Now yes, our kids should be wary if a stranger comes up to them and says, "Oh, come with me, of course, that's terrible."
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Right.
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But when you and I are growing up, if you need directions, you talk to a stranger.
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Like you say, "Excuse me, sir.
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Can you tell me how to get to zone?"
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So there's a wonderful book, "Parented Parenting" by a British sociologist, Frank Verady.
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He says, "The center of all of this is the spectacular collapse of adult solidarity, which is a fancy way of saying, "Adults used to kind of assume that we'd help each other out with our kids and that if your kids in trouble, and I'm there, I'll help them."
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That's kind of what decent societies have always assumed.
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But once we had all these satanic panics and sexual abuse scandals, and some were real, and many were not, we get the feeling that we can never trust any other adult.
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No adult can ever talk to our kids.
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And so there's a general sense of paranoia about everyone.
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Now, if you raise your kids in the safest environments that have ever been, and then you send them to the colleges, universities which are like the socially safest environments that have ever been, but you tell them that everything is dangerous, everyone's out to get you, you can't succeed, there's so many obstacles.
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So this is not this sort of paranoia, this negativity is just not a good way to raise kids that are going to become confident, competent, and capable.
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There's a beautiful metaphor you use in the book where you compare the raising of resilient children to a reaction in trees that makes them strong, something I never heard of called "stresswood."
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And here's what you write, "Trees that are exposed to strong winds early in life become trees that can withstand even stronger winds when full grown."
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Conversely, trees that are raised in a protected greenhouse sometimes fall over from their own weight before they reach maturity.
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"Stresswood is a perfect metaphor for children who also need to experience frequent stressors in order to become strong adults.
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What are those healthy stressors that kids need to develop that they're no longer getting?"
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It's all the little small stuff that was unpleasant as a child, so it's being excluded, it's vital that kids be excluded.
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Can you imagine?
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So your daughter is what, how old are you?
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Two, three.
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Yeah, she's less than two, yeah.
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We're not at the excluding mean girls' phase yet.
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But so suppose we'll get there.
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That's right, you will.
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Given that she's going to get there, if I gave you the option, I said, "If you sign this deal, I can guarantee that she will never face exclusion before her 18th birthday.
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Would you sign it?"
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No.
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Right.
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Because we know intuitively that they have to experience it.
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Otherwise, it's going to be devastating when they're 18.
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And it's the same thing for, let's say, losing.
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It's very important that children lose a lot in competitive games.
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I remember when my kids were young, it was very painful for them to lose.
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They would sometimes get upset.
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But after a while, then they just, you know, then they get used to it.
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And now you can have a lot more fun because they know we're going to play 20 games and I'm going to lose a bunch of them and win a bunch of them.
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So winning and losing, being excluded, certainly falling down and getting hurt and then getting hurt when there's no adult around.
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So, you know, like I remember crashing on my bicycle and you have to kind of limp home and maybe the pedal is bent and but you get home and then you realize, oh, I can do that.
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I can get home.
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There's many fascinating charts in this book.
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One of those charts is a chart of hospital admissions for unintentional injuries of children between 2000 and 2018.
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And it shows just this unbelievably sharp decrease.
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And you also add in the book and this is something that I think will be familiar to many listeners that teens and young adults just aren't experimenting as much.
308
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They don't drink as much.
309
00:17:07,260 --> 00:17:08,740
They're having less sex.
310
00:17:08,740 --> 00:17:13,900
And I think someone might see these figures, a decrease in unintentional injuries, a decrease in drinking, a decrease in sex and say, what's the problem?
312
00:17:18,340 --> 00:17:23,060
You know, less car accidents, fewer hospital admissions, isn't that a good thing?
313
00:17:23,060 --> 00:17:24,260
What do you say to those people?
314
00:17:24,260 --> 00:17:29,060
Oh, what I said is that is if, you know, if everything else were equal and we could have fewer boys with broken arms, I would say, of course, we want fewer boys for your kids with broken arms.
317
00:17:34,820 --> 00:17:38,140
But here's, let me find the graph because this is one of my favorite graphs too.
318
00:17:38,140 --> 00:17:40,500
It was one of the most shocking.
319
00:17:40,500 --> 00:17:46,420
So the CDC gives us data on hospital admissions for various causes and one is unintentional injuries.
320
00:17:46,420 --> 00:17:47,940
So this is not self harm.
321
00:17:47,940 --> 00:17:51,300
You fall down, you know, you fall on your bicycle, whatever.
322
00:17:51,300 --> 00:17:54,140
And who do you think of all the ages and of the two sexes?
323
00:17:54,140 --> 00:17:57,380
Who do you think has by far the highest rates of injuries, you know, broken arms?
324
00:17:57,380 --> 00:17:58,380
Who would it be?
325
00:17:58,380 --> 00:17:59,380
Teenage boys, yeah.
326
00:17:59,380 --> 00:18:00,380
Teenage boys.
327
00:18:00,380 --> 00:18:01,460
And that used to be true.
328
00:18:01,460 --> 00:18:06,220
And what is stunning is that when you see all of the age groups and both genders next to each other and you see that, you know, there has been an overall drop in injuries for most age groups, but the teenage boys and then also the boys in their 20s used to be much higher than the others.
332
00:18:17,700 --> 00:18:23,700
And now they have dropped so fast and so far, especially since 2012 that teenage boys in America today are slightly less likely to get injured than 50 year old men back and they're slightly less likely to get injured than teenage girls were 15 years ago.
335
00:18:34,660 --> 00:18:39,060
And the reason is that boys are not doing anything that could break their arm.
336
00:18:39,060 --> 00:18:43,360
You come home after school, you're on your screen, you're on your, you plug into your game console, yeah.
338
00:18:44,360 --> 00:18:45,460
Yeah, that's right.
339
00:18:45,460 --> 00:18:49,020
So, you know, if someone says, oh, you know, it's great that they're not getting injured, I would say, well, okay, you know, look at the suicide rate.
341
00:18:51,500 --> 00:18:54,820
The injury rate is down, but the suicide rate is way, way up.
342
00:18:54,820 --> 00:18:57,820
And you know, we'll get into the details more about what's happening to boys.
343
00:18:57,820 --> 00:19:04,620
But there's a pervasive feeling of uselessness, of inability to do anything that matters, loneliness.
345
00:19:06,300 --> 00:19:12,460
So yeah, we have kids with unbroken skeletons sitting there feeling disconnected, ripe for recruitment by all kinds of politically extreme organizations.
347
00:19:16,660 --> 00:19:18,580
This is not a good trade off.
348
00:19:18,580 --> 00:19:24,460
One thing you talk about in your book that really interested me is the cycle of incompetence that we have created in children.
350
00:19:26,780 --> 00:19:28,700
Can you say a little bit about that?
351
00:19:28,700 --> 00:19:33,780
So because we came to see our children as vulnerable or fragile rather than antifragile, if you see your kids as antifragile, say, go out and play.
353
00:19:36,340 --> 00:19:40,620
And if they say, oh, it's cold, you say, you know, tough it out or if they fall, you're okay, go back.
355
00:19:41,620 --> 00:19:43,380
So that's what you would do if you think kids are antifragile.
356
00:19:43,380 --> 00:19:47,060
If you think kids are fragile, you're going to never leave them unsupervised, which means they never learn to work things out for themselves.
358
00:19:49,500 --> 00:19:52,060
And you're going to swoop in at this first sign of trouble.
359
00:19:52,060 --> 00:19:53,060
And so what happens?
360
00:19:53,060 --> 00:19:56,300
If you assume that they're incompetent and fragile, then they don't have the experience that would make them competent and non-fragile.
362
00:19:59,540 --> 00:20:02,620
So you're actually making them incompetent and fragile.
363
00:20:02,620 --> 00:20:06,220
And then you look at these incompetent fragile, you know, fifth graders.
364
00:20:06,220 --> 00:20:07,940
And then you say, well, how can we trust you?
365
00:20:07,940 --> 00:20:09,780
I can't let you walk to the store.
366
00:20:09,780 --> 00:20:10,780
What if you get lost?
367
00:20:10,780 --> 00:20:12,820
It's a cycle, a vicious cycle.
368
00:20:12,820 --> 00:20:14,260
And so that's what we have to break.
369
00:20:14,260 --> 00:20:15,260
Okay.
370
00:20:15,260 --> 00:20:16,780
So let's get to the phones.
371
00:20:16,780 --> 00:20:22,380
The next big shift in childhood was not as many people might believe when the first smartphone dropped around 2007.
373
00:20:24,340 --> 00:20:31,500
But you argue it's when the iPhone four dropped in 2010 and kids mental health just plummets.
374
00:20:31,500 --> 00:20:36,940
What was special about the iPhone four and about the iteration of that specific device that really sent kids over the edge?
376
00:20:39,260 --> 00:20:42,860
So that's the first smartphone that has a front-facing camera.
377
00:20:42,860 --> 00:20:46,460
And that means that now all the photos kids are taking of others.
378
00:20:46,460 --> 00:20:48,700
Now they start taking more about themselves.
379
00:20:48,700 --> 00:20:52,580
But I don't want to say that that was the thing that did it, rather what I want to say is there are about three or four different technological innovations that all came together around then.
382
00:20:57,980 --> 00:21:02,400
So if a kid got an iPhone in 2007, very few did, it was great.
383
00:21:02,400 --> 00:21:04,300
It was not harmful in any way.
384
00:21:04,300 --> 00:21:08,220
It was, as Steve Jobs said, Apple is releasing three products today.
385
00:21:08,220 --> 00:21:13,820
A phone, an iPod, and was an internet browser, was the third or whatever.
386
00:21:13,820 --> 00:21:15,980
But it's three products all in one.
387
00:21:15,980 --> 00:21:17,540
And then there's also a flashlight.
388
00:21:17,540 --> 00:21:20,660
It was an amazing, amazing digital Swiss army knife.
389
00:21:20,660 --> 00:21:21,660
And there were no apps.
390
00:21:21,660 --> 00:21:23,620
There were the apps from Apple, but there was no app store.
391
00:21:23,620 --> 00:21:25,460
But then two critical things happen, right?
392
00:21:25,460 --> 00:21:27,940
You have the app store launching in 2008.
393
00:21:27,940 --> 00:21:34,020
And then in 2009, Facebook introducing the like button and Twitter introducing retweets.
394
00:21:34,020 --> 00:21:35,020
That's right.
395
00:21:35,020 --> 00:21:39,980
So what I want to get across to listeners is that the internet came in in two waves.
396
00:21:39,980 --> 00:21:43,020
And you know, you millennials surfed the first wave and it was great fun.
397
00:21:43,020 --> 00:21:47,820
You had AOL, you had web browsers, you know, you had all kinds of, it was like a world opening up.
399
00:21:48,820 --> 00:21:52,540
I've seen no evidence to suggest that there are flip phones, harmed them.
400
00:21:52,540 --> 00:21:54,380
So what happens in the end of 2000s?
401
00:21:54,380 --> 00:21:55,380
It's the things you said.
402
00:21:55,380 --> 00:21:59,380
The iPhone comes out with a touch swipe, you know, interface much more engaging, which is good, you think you get social media becomes much more viral in 2009.
404
00:22:05,260 --> 00:22:09,620
And so before then they were called social networking systems and you put up your page and you linked other people's page that you connect.
406
00:22:11,620 --> 00:22:15,860
But then as they put in the like button, the retweet button, it's much more about virality.
407
00:22:15,860 --> 00:22:17,540
They have much more information on each user.
408
00:22:17,540 --> 00:22:19,340
They can use algorithms much more.
409
00:22:19,340 --> 00:22:20,700
It's all about the news feed.
410
00:22:20,700 --> 00:22:24,900
So social media fundamentally changes and becomes much more about performance, which opens up much more room for cruelty, mob interactions, cancel culture, all the craziness and universities could not have happened if there wasn't the retweet button and the share button.
413
00:22:35,580 --> 00:22:38,260
The internet wasn't as super viral as it became.
414
00:22:38,260 --> 00:22:39,460
So you have that coming in.
415
00:22:39,460 --> 00:22:41,500
Another big one is high speed internet.
416
00:22:41,500 --> 00:22:47,340
So in 2007 and even all the way up to 2010, very few kids have an unlimited data plan.
417
00:22:47,340 --> 00:22:50,460
You know, back then you had to pay for texts like every text, you know, is going to cost you a few pennies.
419
00:22:51,740 --> 00:22:56,780
So you had a limit, your consumption and your sending and it wasn't fun to, you know, just sit there waiting for slow internet to load.
421
00:22:59,020 --> 00:23:03,380
So that's 2010 and that's when the front-facing camera comes out and that's when Instagram comes out, although it's not popular till 2012.
423
00:23:05,940 --> 00:23:10,260
2012 is basically the last year before the epidemic begins.
424
00:23:10,260 --> 00:23:13,980
Some of the numbers go up in 2012 but for the most part it's kind of, that's the elbow and it's really 2013 that all the numbers of pathology begin to rise and rise very quickly and especially for girls.
427
00:23:21,180 --> 00:23:27,300
So my argument in the book is that the first wave of the internet with computers and web browsers, that was not harmful and the millennials, you know, you guys got through it in time.
429
00:23:31,620 --> 00:23:34,220
You went through puberty in time.
430
00:23:34,220 --> 00:23:39,780
But Gen Z, if you're born in 1996, you might have gotten a smartphone in middle school when you were like 15, 16, you might have gotten on Instagram and you went through puberty, especially if you're born, say, by 2000.
433
00:23:46,460 --> 00:23:52,620
You went through puberty, posting photos, selfies and then wait anxiously for people to comment and then you spent a lot of your day tracking down who like this photo, what did they say?
435
00:23:57,540 --> 00:23:58,700
Why didn't they like this photo?
436
00:23:58,700 --> 00:24:00,500
Why do they like someone else's photo?
437
00:24:00,500 --> 00:24:06,060
And so especially for girls, it's a fundamental shift in consciousness away from interacting with other kids and toward managing your brand all day long.
439
00:24:10,540 --> 00:24:13,780
And this is a sick thing to do to kids, especially in middle school.
440
00:24:13,780 --> 00:24:19,100
I think it's pretty obvious to any adult who has a phone and finds themselves scrolling Instagram or Twitter late into the night that it's bad for any human being, let alone kids.
442
00:24:25,140 --> 00:24:31,340
But you write in the book that there are four specific harms that began to emerge for teenagers.
443
00:24:31,340 --> 00:24:33,460
Or let's say middle school teenagers.
444
00:24:33,460 --> 00:24:35,660
One is social deprivation.
445
00:24:35,660 --> 00:24:37,660
Two is sleep deprivation.
446
00:24:37,660 --> 00:24:39,900
Three is attention fragmentation.
447
00:24:39,900 --> 00:24:41,500
And four is addiction.
448
00:24:41,500 --> 00:24:46,580
So I would love for us to take each of those interns beginning with social deprivation.
449
00:24:46,580 --> 00:24:51,580
The average amount of time that kids between the ages of 15 and 24 years old spent with their friends each day went from about two and a half hours in 2003 to just barely more than 40 minutes in 2019.
452
00:25:00,540 --> 00:25:04,340
And many people are communicating with their friends only through the phone.
453
00:25:04,340 --> 00:25:09,940
You've also seen that kids have seen a steady drop in the number of friends they have since the late 90s.
455
00:25:11,940 --> 00:25:17,940
Meantime the percentage of kids who report feeling lonely has increased since the late 90s.
456
00:25:17,940 --> 00:25:19,420
It's like such a fundamental question.
457
00:25:19,420 --> 00:25:21,220
All this feels weird asking it.
458
00:25:21,220 --> 00:25:27,700
But what are kids losing without friends without that personal interaction and what negative habits are they replacing time with friends with?
460
00:25:30,860 --> 00:25:31,860
Yeah.
461
00:25:31,860 --> 00:25:36,820
So if you think about, what if we were to replace all of the food that kids eat with a science-based formula that had the right amount of starch and sugar and protein and all that, would that work?
464
00:25:43,300 --> 00:25:47,340
No, it wouldn't because there's so many phytonutrients, so many things we need from plants.
465
00:25:47,340 --> 00:25:54,140
You can't just take away all of our evolved programming for digestion and metabolism and swap in some radically new simple science formula.
467
00:25:57,580 --> 00:26:02,460
And in the same way, when kids started spending all this time on these devices, I didn't know that it was going to be bad.
469
00:26:03,460 --> 00:26:06,740
I thought, actually, I remember thinking, you know, it seems weird to me.
470
00:26:06,740 --> 00:26:11,460
To tweet about the hamburger that you just had and then have 25 people comment on your tweet.
472
00:26:12,460 --> 00:26:16,180
It seems kind of stupid to me, but maybe it's like hyper-sociality.
473
00:26:16,180 --> 00:26:20,260
I remember thinking around 2010, 2012, like young people to death, they might actually come out super social, so much social stimulation.
475
00:26:22,620 --> 00:26:25,220
It might actually be better than what we had before.
476
00:26:25,220 --> 00:26:26,660
And that was a theoretical possibility.
477
00:26:26,660 --> 00:26:28,660
It's one that has radically failed to materialize.
478
00:26:28,660 --> 00:26:30,780
In fact, the opposite has materialized.
479
00:26:30,780 --> 00:26:33,620
The more time kids spend doing this, the more lonely they are.
480
00:26:33,620 --> 00:26:37,380
The more time kids spend doing this, the more likely out-of-cub themselves.
481
00:26:37,380 --> 00:26:42,380
What I think is happening is that real world interactions have a few features that are part of our evolutionary history and virtual interactions lack those features.
483
00:26:46,700 --> 00:26:48,700
The most obvious one is embodiment.
484
00:26:48,700 --> 00:26:51,700
If you look at chimpanzees, they all groom each other a lot.
485
00:26:51,700 --> 00:26:56,420
There's a lot of interesting speculation about, since humans don't groom, which is a huge, a major, major social interaction for all the other primates is grooming.
487
00:27:00,380 --> 00:27:04,740
We don't groom physically, but we do groom with gossip, at least that was Rob and Dunn Bar's theory.
489
00:27:05,740 --> 00:27:08,100
You might say, "Oh, well, social media is great for gossip.
490
00:27:08,100 --> 00:27:09,540
You can gossip all day long."
491
00:27:09,540 --> 00:27:11,020
It's not the same.
492
00:27:11,020 --> 00:27:14,860
First of all, we are still embodied creatures, and that is why I think we do like to touch and hug and things like that.
494
00:27:16,980 --> 00:27:19,340
Virtual interactions deprive you of embodiment.
495
00:27:19,340 --> 00:27:21,940
Virtual interactions are usually asynchronous.
496
00:27:21,940 --> 00:27:25,060
Zoom call, a phone call, those are synchronous.
497
00:27:25,060 --> 00:27:27,940
I talk, you talk, we have a sense of turn-taking.
498
00:27:27,940 --> 00:27:33,740
Most of the kids' interaction is posting and commenting and emojis.
499
00:27:33,740 --> 00:27:34,740
That's asynchronous.
500
00:27:34,740 --> 00:27:37,900
You don't have the same sense of being in sync with another human being.
501
00:27:37,900 --> 00:27:41,020
You're much more off in your own pod.
502
00:27:41,020 --> 00:27:46,340
A third one is the frequency of one to many communications.
503
00:27:46,340 --> 00:27:47,820
Kids really need a small group.
504
00:27:47,820 --> 00:27:48,820
They need a best friend.
505
00:27:48,820 --> 00:27:50,980
They need a group of three or four friends.
506
00:27:50,980 --> 00:27:55,660
Kids don't need to be on a soapbox, speaking to thousands of people and waiting for thousands of people to judge them.
508
00:27:56,860 --> 00:28:01,860
That's just a terrible thing to do to children, but these new social media platforms do that.
509
00:28:01,860 --> 00:28:06,860
The final difference is that if you get a conflict with a kid in your class, you can't just delete them or block them.
511
00:28:09,580 --> 00:28:13,180
You actually either have to work it out or you're going to have to suffer for a long time with this strain relationship.
513
00:28:14,940 --> 00:28:18,620
The real world forces you to practice working out relationships.
514
00:28:18,620 --> 00:28:20,340
That's practice for a democratic society.
515
00:28:20,340 --> 00:28:25,380
All of this is practice for being self-governing in a democratic society.
516
00:28:25,380 --> 00:28:31,860
When kids lose almost all of that and get it replaced with virtual interactions, it's like they're losing all the nutrients.
518
00:28:33,340 --> 00:28:35,820
It's like we're giving them just white rice to eat.
519
00:28:35,820 --> 00:28:38,140
White rice has plenty of calories, just eat white rice.
520
00:28:38,140 --> 00:28:40,300
You're going to be deficient in almost everything.
521
00:28:40,300 --> 00:28:44,420
That's what we've done by swapping in virtual sociality for real sociality.
522
00:28:44,420 --> 00:28:48,420
That's why the loneliness statistics, all the questions on monitoring the future about sometimes I feel lonely.
524
00:28:49,940 --> 00:28:51,660
My life has no point.
525
00:28:51,660 --> 00:28:54,140
All these questions, it's like a hockey stick.
526
00:28:54,140 --> 00:28:56,780
They're flat until 2012.
527
00:28:56,780 --> 00:29:02,500
Once kids are moving on to Instagram and other platforms, boom, everything explodes.
528
00:29:02,500 --> 00:29:04,700
So that's social deprivation.
529
00:29:04,700 --> 00:29:07,900
Let's go to the next topic, which is sleep deprivation.
530
00:29:07,900 --> 00:29:13,700
So sleep for everyone, but especially for teens, has gone down in the last decade.
531
00:29:13,700 --> 00:29:19,340
Nearly half of eighth, tenth, and twelfth grade boys are getting less than seven hours of sleep,
532
00:29:19,340 --> 00:29:23,940
which is pretty astonishing considering how much sleep your body needs to get in those critical years of puberty.
534
00:29:26,140 --> 00:29:29,820
And these percentages jump significantly in the early 2010s.
535
00:29:29,820 --> 00:29:35,740
And you directly connect this to kids staying up late at night looking at their phones.
536
00:29:35,740 --> 00:29:43,580
Talk to me about why sleep deprivation is such a serious public health consideration and the effects that it has on the mental health and even the physical well-being of kids.
538
00:29:48,820 --> 00:29:53,900
So the basic data on sleep amount, there was a substantial drop in the 90s.
539
00:29:53,900 --> 00:29:58,700
I don't know if that was television, cable TV, the internet, just a lot more stuff to look at late at night.
541
00:29:59,700 --> 00:30:02,900
And then it kind of levels off in the early 2000s and then it begins dropping again in the 2010s.
543
00:30:03,900 --> 00:30:08,420
Now, as for why sleep is important, your body does all kinds of biological repair processes.
544
00:30:08,420 --> 00:30:12,740
On your brain, I wish to God I had gotten more sleep that I'd taken it more seriously.
545
00:30:12,740 --> 00:30:14,260
It helps the brain regenerate.
546
00:30:14,260 --> 00:30:16,540
The deep sleep is when you flush out broken proteins.
547
00:30:16,540 --> 00:30:19,740
There's all sorts of things that need to happen in sleep.
548
00:30:19,740 --> 00:30:23,620
And teens need a lot of it eight or nine hours depending on the age.
549
00:30:23,620 --> 00:30:28,020
And if they're getting less than eight hours, they're not letting their brain and body regenerated.
550
00:30:28,020 --> 00:30:33,140
It has extraordinary effects then on mood and concentration the next day.
551
00:30:33,140 --> 00:30:39,140
And so if we want our kids to go to school and have a good time with their friends and learn from their teachers, I think that pretty much is what we all want for our kids when they go to school.
554
00:30:43,540 --> 00:30:47,260
But if they don't get enough sleep, they're going to be crankier, more irritable and anxious.
555
00:30:47,260 --> 00:30:50,780
Their social relationships will worsen and they won't be able to pay attention.
556
00:30:50,780 --> 00:30:52,060
They won't learn as much.
557
00:30:52,060 --> 00:30:56,220
It's not a coincidence that we had 50 years of educational progress when you look at the NAEP, the National Educational Assessment.
559
00:30:59,020 --> 00:31:05,860
50 years of slow but steady progress in how much our kids know in this country until 2012.
560
00:31:05,860 --> 00:31:07,180
And then it begins to drop.
561
00:31:07,180 --> 00:31:09,820
And everyone says like, oh, look, COVID, look what COVID did.
562
00:31:09,820 --> 00:31:14,700
And it's true that keeping kids out of school, COVID restrictions really did damage kids learning.
563
00:31:14,700 --> 00:31:19,060
And you see a COVID drop, but the drop actually began after 2012.
564
00:31:19,060 --> 00:31:24,140
So it's just insane that if we want our kids to grow physically healthy, have good, friendly relationships and learn, then if they're not getting enough sleep, all three, all three of those goals are compromised.
567
00:31:30,740 --> 00:31:37,100
You write that in 2022, one third of teens said they were on one of the major social media sites almost constantly.
569
00:31:40,380 --> 00:31:44,700
And you see this, I feel this in myself as an adult whose brain came online before the great re-riaring, I feel the way that these devices and platforms have majorly harmed my ability to focus the way that a distraction, something more exciting, something more enticing and it's just one swipe away.
573
00:32:00,500 --> 00:32:06,580
Tell us about how social media, the phones, but social media specifically has affected kids' ability to focus deeply, both at school and in other areas of life.
575
00:32:12,420 --> 00:32:16,580
The brain grows very quickly in the first few years of life and then it actually slows down a lot.
577
00:32:17,740 --> 00:32:19,700
And from then on, it's not so much growth.
578
00:32:19,700 --> 00:32:26,020
It's re-riaring, it's neurons connecting, it synapses forming, it's neurons fading away, if they're not used.
580
00:32:27,180 --> 00:32:31,500
So there's a lot of re-wiring going on and that speeds up during puberty, especially early puberty around age 11 or 12 to around 15, 16 is a huge amount of change as the brain basically sort of like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.
583
00:32:40,900 --> 00:32:45,540
You have the young form of a human brain kind of rewires now that it's learned culture, it sort of rewires to lock down into the format of an American or a sweet or whatever.
585
00:32:52,180 --> 00:32:55,900
And this is exactly the period, unfortunately, when we put our kids on social media and let random weirdos on the internet control how the brain is rewiring.
587
00:32:59,860 --> 00:33:03,260
One of the main things that is happening is in the prefrontal cortex, that's the last part to really go through the change, which is the seat of executive function that is
589
00:33:06,980 --> 00:33:12,540
the ability to formulate a goal, figure out the means to achieve the goal, and then execute the plan to achieve the goal.
591
00:33:14,340 --> 00:33:18,100
So if you want to do your homework, I want to watch this TV show at 10 o'clock tonight, so I have an hour, I better do my homework, I have one hour, kids struggle to do that, especially if you don't love doing your homework, it's going to take concentration and willpower to stay on task. But what happens?
596
00:33:29,060 --> 00:33:33,460
You have an infinite number of really fun digital experiences just waiting for you if you touch the right buttons, but it's much more than that because you don't have to touch the right buttons.
599
00:33:37,660 --> 00:33:41,820
The pop-ups are going to be popping up saying, "Come play, come out, come look what someone just said about you."
601
00:33:43,420 --> 00:33:48,500
So they're getting, I think on average now, 250 notifications a day is what American teens now get.
603
00:33:49,500 --> 00:33:52,420
That's 250 times a day that their attention is interrupted.
604
00:33:52,420 --> 00:33:54,540
Most of them don't put it on a focus mode.
605
00:33:54,540 --> 00:33:58,060
They just take it as normal, that any company that wants to take some of their attention can just take it.
607
00:33:59,340 --> 00:34:04,820
So it was always hard for teens to focus and do their homework or do anything, but doing that gives you practice in doing it and if you do it repeatedly, you're actually helping your brain to develop good executive function.
610
00:34:12,980 --> 00:34:16,540
So what would happen if you have a teen who never gets to practice that they literally never get an hour without an interruption? I think it could lead to permanent decrements in their ability to function as an adult.
613
00:34:23,940 --> 00:34:29,940
And is the average American, let's just say, 7th, 8th, 9th grader, having their phone in their pocket with them at school as it's pinging these notifications?
615
00:34:35,260 --> 00:34:38,820
Yes, the great majority of schools say that they have a cell phone bill.
616
00:34:38,820 --> 00:34:40,060
It's complete bullshit.
617
00:34:40,060 --> 00:34:44,700
All they mean is, "Oh, our rule is you're not allowed to take out your phone during class unless your teacher asks you to."
619
00:34:46,460 --> 00:34:47,700
That's the rule.
620
00:34:47,700 --> 00:34:51,780
And what that means is that kids have to make some effort to hide their phone use.
621
00:34:51,780 --> 00:34:55,460
They have to at least sit in the back row where they can't be seen or they just put in a book.
623
00:34:56,460 --> 00:35:01,960
But if the kids put it this way, if any kids in your class are texting during the school day, then you have to check your texts.
625
00:35:05,060 --> 00:35:09,660
Otherwise, at lunch, you're going to be the only one who doesn't know the thing that so and so said, which everyone is laughing at.
627
00:35:11,700 --> 00:35:14,380
You don't care if the teacher is mad at you, but you really don't want to be humiliated in front of your friends by being out of the loop.
629
00:35:17,020 --> 00:35:19,780
So as long as anyone is texting, they're going to check their phone.
630
00:35:19,780 --> 00:35:22,780
They're going to check their texts and social media dramas.
631
00:35:22,780 --> 00:35:23,780
And they do.
632
00:35:23,780 --> 00:35:28,020
That's time you're talking to any group of young people, 45 minutes in, ask them, how many of you have actually already checked your phone while I was speaking?
634
00:35:30,660 --> 00:35:32,740
How many of you do this typically during a class?
635
00:35:32,740 --> 00:35:34,300
Or almost everybody?
636
00:35:34,300 --> 00:35:38,540
So I think it's completely insane that we allow phones in school.
637
00:35:38,540 --> 00:35:41,620
We wouldn't let them bring their television sets into school and watch television during class.
639
00:35:42,620 --> 00:35:44,140
Why do we let them have their phones?
640
00:35:44,140 --> 00:35:45,740
It's just distracting.
641
00:35:45,740 --> 00:35:50,460
The word addiction, John, as you know, gets thrown around a lot in our culture.
642
00:35:50,460 --> 00:35:52,300
Sometimes I think it's sort of overused.
643
00:35:52,300 --> 00:35:55,100
But would you argue that social media is a true addiction?
644
00:35:55,100 --> 00:35:56,100
And why?
645
00:35:56,100 --> 00:35:57,100
Yeah.
646
00:35:57,100 --> 00:36:00,740
So here I'll have to respect the term concept creep, which you referred to.
647
00:36:00,740 --> 00:36:03,660
And in the calling of the American mind, Greg and I said that addiction is one of those terms that has spread out.
649
00:36:05,260 --> 00:36:09,660
So no, I would not call anything an addiction, unless you're very careful about it.
650
00:36:09,660 --> 00:36:13,460
I also know that in the addiction research literature, there's a big debate about this and some of them say, no, we shouldn't call it addiction.
652
00:36:16,420 --> 00:36:20,740
Now as far as I'm concerned, gambling is an addiction for many people.
653
00:36:20,740 --> 00:36:24,300
And if you watch someone who is a gambling addiction, they're pulling the slot, they get into a zone, they lose track of time, their life sucks, they hate their life, but for those two hours, they don't feel the pain.
656
00:36:30,460 --> 00:36:32,820
And that's why they keep doing it and that makes their life worse.
657
00:36:32,820 --> 00:36:35,340
So I'm willing to call that an addiction.
658
00:36:35,340 --> 00:36:40,260
And I think many addiction researchers are some, not most, but some kids have that with social media.
660
00:36:41,260 --> 00:36:44,740
The better term to use is what they call problematic use.
661
00:36:44,740 --> 00:36:50,140
So if you're spending four hours a day on Instagram, but you're still seeing your friends, you're still getting good grades in class, it's a time suck, but you can't say that it's in your fearing with basically love and work of the two areas that psychologists look at love and work, basically relationships and either work or school work.
665
00:37:03,820 --> 00:37:07,580
So if you're doing fine on those, well, okay, then maybe it's your choice.
666
00:37:07,580 --> 00:37:13,060
But wherever we look, the numbers come up between 5 and 15% as having problematic use.
667
00:37:13,060 --> 00:37:15,020
So video games are tremendous fun.
668
00:37:15,020 --> 00:37:18,100
Boys really defend them and they don't want them taken away.
669
00:37:18,100 --> 00:37:23,060
But it turns out that 5 to 15% have problematic use where they can't stop.
670
00:37:23,060 --> 00:37:24,940
They're surly with their parents.
671
00:37:24,940 --> 00:37:28,740
If they're deprived for a day or two, they get really surly and maybe even aggressive.
672
00:37:28,740 --> 00:37:33,140
It's interfering with their ability to, with their school work, with their ability to function with friends.
674
00:37:34,140 --> 00:37:37,540
So people say, oh, you know, my kids are fine or you know, most kids are doing, okay, sure, most are.
676
00:37:38,540 --> 00:37:42,500
But can you think of any consumer product in the world where if there was a one in ten chance that your kid uses it, they're going to get hooked and have problematic behavior to the point where it's going to interfere with other life domains.
679
00:37:50,540 --> 00:37:53,940
And if they do it for two or three hours a day over many years, it could change the brain development.
681
00:37:54,940 --> 00:37:58,060
Is there any other product that we would ever let our kids use?
682
00:37:58,060 --> 00:37:59,740
So that's the way I think about it.
683
00:37:59,740 --> 00:38:01,580
You have to be careful using the word addiction.
684
00:38:01,580 --> 00:38:03,620
But it certainly is a behavior addiction.
685
00:38:03,620 --> 00:38:05,500
It's a psychological dependency.
686
00:38:05,500 --> 00:38:07,740
And I think it alteres developmental pathways.
687
00:38:07,740 --> 00:38:11,780
Anything you do hours a day every day for years is going to alter developmental pathways.
688
00:38:11,780 --> 00:38:18,260
So, John, beyond the sort of four buckets of harm that we just went through, social deprivation, sleep deprivation, inability to pay attention and addiction, the overall mental health of American teens has absolutely plunged.
691
00:38:27,580 --> 00:38:34,220
Rates of depression, anxiety, self harm and suicide have more than doubled over the last decade.
692
00:38:34,220 --> 00:38:38,780
Now the skeptic could look at all of those and say, well, I know the answer to that, religion has plummeted.
694
00:38:39,780 --> 00:38:41,620
Polarization is plummeted.
695
00:38:41,620 --> 00:38:48,180
Kids are lonely and atomized and we're living in a culture that has a sense of sort of meaninglessness.
696
00:38:48,180 --> 00:38:51,180
And that's the real reason why it's not the phone.
697
00:38:51,180 --> 00:38:52,180
What do you say?
698
00:38:52,180 --> 00:38:56,700
So, there's some truth to that and then there's some reverse causality there.
699
00:38:56,700 --> 00:39:01,140
Why is it that this catastrophe, this mental illness epidemic, it all the English-speaking countries in the same way at the same time?
701
00:39:03,260 --> 00:39:05,540
We find strong evidence in Scandinavia.
702
00:39:05,540 --> 00:39:10,340
We find that in Eastern Europe, actually the numbers are getting a little better, in Southern Europe they get a little worse but not a lot.
704
00:39:12,380 --> 00:39:17,540
Well, this pattern is basically what Emil Dirkheim observed about suicide rates 120 years ago, that the Protestant cultures which have the most freedom are more subject to animie or normlessness.
707
00:39:23,980 --> 00:39:29,420
Now these same Protestant countries were the happiest countries in the world for a long time.
708
00:39:29,420 --> 00:39:33,740
Freedom, individualism, this is the liberal ideal, people should be able to construct lives that they want to live and the anglos in the Scandinavian countries they always top the lists of happiest countries in the world.
711
00:39:40,720 --> 00:39:44,420
And their young people were the happiest young people until 2012.
712
00:39:44,420 --> 00:39:49,140
And you can see this in the graphs of Canadian data where it used to be until 2012 it was the late teen and early twenties girls women who were the happiest compared to older women.
714
00:39:55,700 --> 00:39:59,500
And then right after 2012 it plunges and now they're the least happy.
715
00:39:59,500 --> 00:40:05,460
So something about religious societies seems to confer some immunity whereas if you're in a secular society you're more vulnerable to the effects of the great rewiring.
735
00:41:21,320 --> 00:41:26,760
A few weeks ago, we had Abigail Shryer on the podcast.
736
00:41:26,760 --> 00:41:27,760
I know you know her.
737
00:41:27,760 --> 00:41:28,760
Yeah, I listened to her.
738
00:41:28,760 --> 00:41:29,760
That was a great discussion.
739
00:41:29,760 --> 00:41:30,760
Thank you.
740
00:41:30,760 --> 00:41:31,760
So I thought so too.
741
00:41:31,760 --> 00:41:32,760
Listeners loved it.
742
00:41:32,760 --> 00:41:36,440
And here's what she said about smart phones when I pushed her on the extent to which they have been detrimental.
744
00:41:37,960 --> 00:41:42,000
She said, the phones don't completely explain the rising generations, poor rates of mental health.
746
00:41:43,000 --> 00:41:46,480
First of all, the decline in mental health is the story that began in the 1950s.
747
00:41:46,480 --> 00:41:52,040
Second of all, in 2016, already one in six kids between the ages of two and eight had a diagnosed mental disorder.
749
00:41:53,040 --> 00:41:56,920
That's a lot of little kids who obviously don't have a smartphone and aren't on social media.
751
00:41:57,920 --> 00:42:01,680
And then the last reason she added to think that smartphones don't explain everything is that there are Western culture countries like Japan and Israel that are saturated in smartphones where kids got smartphones even younger than us.
754
00:42:09,040 --> 00:42:10,600
They're also in social media.
755
00:42:10,600 --> 00:42:14,560
And yet their mental health is much better, at least than our American teens.
756
00:42:14,560 --> 00:42:15,880
There's sort of two things in there.
757
00:42:15,880 --> 00:42:17,880
How do you respond to both of them?
758
00:42:17,880 --> 00:42:19,520
There's three things in there.
759
00:42:19,520 --> 00:42:21,480
Oh, I'm so glad you asked because I listened to the episode.
760
00:42:21,480 --> 00:42:25,580
I listened to that and I could see, okay, Barry is channeling John Heighten, Gene Twengey here to see what Abigail says.
762
00:42:28,360 --> 00:42:29,360
That's right.
763
00:42:29,360 --> 00:42:33,400
So first, on the timing, it's true that mental health has been declining in a slow steady way since the 1950s.
765
00:42:35,600 --> 00:42:37,960
That is true, but it hasn't been a straight line.
766
00:42:37,960 --> 00:42:39,640
Gen X was actually in much worse shape.
767
00:42:39,640 --> 00:42:43,200
And I think she's also referred to something like the suicide rate being higher a while ago.
769
00:42:44,200 --> 00:42:45,200
That's all true for Gen X.
770
00:42:45,200 --> 00:42:48,880
And as I said, I think that's in part because they had the highest rates of lead poisoning from the huge amount of lead that was dumped at the atmosphere in the 60s and 70s.
772
00:42:52,800 --> 00:42:57,400
In any case, if we go from the 90s on, mental health is actually getting better.
773
00:42:57,400 --> 00:43:04,000
So if it was just the general rise of therapy, of over therapy, then we would see more steady increases in rates of mental illness in the 2000s and into the 2010s, but we don't.
775
00:43:10,320 --> 00:43:17,000
We see actually slight improvements in the 2010s and then exactly in 2013, we see everything take off.
777
00:43:18,000 --> 00:43:19,400
And that doesn't fit with Abigail's story.
778
00:43:19,400 --> 00:43:22,360
Now to be clear, she has a piece of the story that I missed.
779
00:43:22,360 --> 00:43:23,360
And I think she's absolutely right.
780
00:43:23,360 --> 00:43:28,040
I found that so compelling that, as a psychologist, we all know, psychotherapy works.
781
00:43:28,040 --> 00:43:29,200
There's a lot of evidence.
782
00:43:29,200 --> 00:43:31,240
It's a good thing for adults.
783
00:43:31,240 --> 00:43:35,880
It never occurred to me that adults, as she says, adults are in therapy because they chose to and they want to work on a problem.
785
00:43:37,880 --> 00:43:40,280
And kids are usually there because their parents are sending them.
786
00:43:40,280 --> 00:43:44,120
So she definitely has a piece of the story and she has a piece that I did not work in. I missed.
788
00:43:45,440 --> 00:43:49,000
But her argument saying that phones are less important, I think there's three points.
789
00:43:49,000 --> 00:43:53,760
One is the one I just made that actually no mental health really got worse in 2012.
790
00:43:53,760 --> 00:43:55,600
It wasn't slow and gradual.
791
00:43:55,600 --> 00:44:01,080
The second one was your point that a lot of younger kids are beginning to have these diagnoses.
792
00:44:01,080 --> 00:44:06,600
Now she's right that part of that is from the therapy culture, but it's not as though kids had a normal childhood until they reached 11 and got their first smartphone.
794
00:44:12,000 --> 00:44:15,920
The deprivation of play began in the 90s and 2000s.
795
00:44:15,920 --> 00:44:21,080
And the great increase in devices began as soon as the iPad came out.
796
00:44:21,080 --> 00:44:25,760
So a lot of my family videos and when my son was two or three years old, they end with him reaching for the phone saying, "I want iPhone, I want iPhone."
798
00:44:30,760 --> 00:44:33,080
Because there was amazing magical devices.
799
00:44:33,080 --> 00:44:35,320
And we sometimes gave our kids their phones to play with.
800
00:44:35,320 --> 00:44:37,440
And then the iPad comes out.
801
00:44:37,440 --> 00:44:40,040
And this is just so suited for kids.
802
00:44:40,040 --> 00:44:42,360
And this is the best deal for parents.
803
00:44:42,360 --> 00:44:43,960
You give your kid an iPad. It's much better than sitting in front of a TV set.
805
00:44:45,920 --> 00:44:47,320
He'll stay quiet for longer.
806
00:44:47,320 --> 00:44:49,160
Oh, and he's making himself smarter.
807
00:44:49,160 --> 00:44:51,320
It's not like sitting in front of TV, which makes you stupid.
808
00:44:51,320 --> 00:44:52,760
No, this is active.
809
00:44:52,760 --> 00:44:56,760
So it's true that five and six-year-olds don't have iPhones, but they have iPads.
810
00:44:56,760 --> 00:44:58,960
Or they have access to them a lot.
811
00:44:58,960 --> 00:45:02,560
So I think childhood has been rewired, not just for adolescents, but even for children at elementary school and earlier.
813
00:45:04,440 --> 00:45:06,200
That's the third point, briefly, is the International.
814
00:45:06,200 --> 00:45:08,320
No, she's right, that East Asia seems to be different.
815
00:45:08,320 --> 00:45:14,520
East Asia is intensely digitized, but East Asia is also a much more collectivist.
816
00:45:14,520 --> 00:45:18,320
East Asia, there's much more of an interdependent sense of self.
817
00:45:18,320 --> 00:45:20,680
And so this offers a lot of protection.
818
00:45:20,680 --> 00:45:24,320
It's the freest kids in the freest societies. They're the ones who got washed away between 2010 and 2015.
820
00:45:27,920 --> 00:45:33,680
There's an anecdote in your book that was sort of so powerful in which, just speaking of the iPad, you're with, I think, your daughter who's five or six years old at the time.
822
00:45:37,960 --> 00:45:39,880
And what does she say to you?
823
00:45:39,880 --> 00:45:41,440
She says, she calls out from the next room. I'm at breakfast at a country in. And she says, "Daddy, can you take the iPad away from me? I'm trying to take my eyes off it, but I can't."
827
00:45:50,280 --> 00:45:53,000
So kids don't have executive control. They don't have executive function. They're easily hooked.
They're easily addicted.
831
00:45:56,760 --> 00:46:01,680
This is why we don't let minors experiment with addictive drugs and activities.
832
00:46:01,680 --> 00:46:06,200
But the iPad is very good as a behaviorist train, which is like having BF Skinner right in front of your child saying, "Here, do this. I'll reward you. Do this.
836
00:46:10,280 --> 00:46:11,280
I'll reward you.
837
00:46:11,280 --> 00:46:15,280
And after a few tens of thousands of times, your kid's brain is rewired."
838
00:46:15,280 --> 00:46:21,440
So for relatively long time, people have been writing about the obvious detrimental impact that the social media apps and platforms have on girls.
840
00:46:26,120 --> 00:46:28,720
And you say in the book, the evidence is overwhelming.
841
00:46:28,720 --> 00:46:32,920
Give us a little bit of that evidence and then I want to talk about boys, which is a subtler story.
843
00:46:33,920 --> 00:46:38,440
So I'm in a debate with other researchers because they look at the correlation between hours on social media and mental health.
845
00:46:41,440 --> 00:46:45,800
And there is a correlation very steadily around 0.15 for girls, which I think is big enough to explain a lot and they think is not.
847
00:46:48,280 --> 00:46:51,080
But that's just one avenue of harm.
848
00:46:51,080 --> 00:46:55,680
And in fact, there's like 15 different ways that girls get harmed on social media.
849
00:46:55,680 --> 00:47:00,120
And so a few that we read about and that I read about the book, so visual social comparison we already talked about.
851
00:47:01,120 --> 00:47:02,120
That's the obvious one.
852
00:47:02,120 --> 00:47:04,400
Another one is perfectionism.
853
00:47:04,400 --> 00:47:06,760
Girls and boys are sometimes subject to perfectionism.
854
00:47:06,760 --> 00:47:08,280
It's a kind of an anxiety disorder.
855
00:47:08,280 --> 00:47:10,000
It can be kind of crippling.
856
00:47:10,000 --> 00:47:14,720
But one kind is called social perfectionism, which is what you're concerned about is entirely what others are thinking of you.
858
00:47:16,520 --> 00:47:18,160
It's not internally driven.
859
00:47:18,160 --> 00:47:24,080
And that is higher in girls and boy does, boy, do sites like Instagram bring that out.
860
00:47:24,080 --> 00:47:26,520
Something has to be perfect about your life because you're going to be judged for it or you're afraid you'll be judged even if people actually don't care that much.
862
00:47:30,040 --> 00:47:33,400
Another is relational aggression, which we've actually, we've already talked about that.
863
00:47:33,400 --> 00:47:37,320
Boys aggression is ultimately backed up by the threat of physical force and domination punching fighting.
865
00:47:38,520 --> 00:47:41,120
And that's how a boy gets dominance over another boy.
866
00:47:41,120 --> 00:47:42,120
But girls have always done it.
867
00:47:42,120 --> 00:47:44,200
Certainly, you know, mean girls shows this.
868
00:47:44,200 --> 00:47:47,800
You damage and other girls reputation or relationships.
869
00:47:47,800 --> 00:47:50,120
And that's been part of the cruelty of girls.
870
00:47:50,120 --> 00:47:53,760
And social media just makes it a lot easier to do that.
871
00:47:53,760 --> 00:47:56,160
And then they're going to be mislead and on weekends as well.
872
00:47:56,160 --> 00:48:01,480
So girls just are exposed to just much more relational aggression than they were before.
873
00:48:01,480 --> 00:48:04,080
Girls also share emotions more than boys do.
874
00:48:04,080 --> 00:48:08,200
You know, if a few girls are anxious and then they all get on social media and talk about their anxiety, that is literally going to spread to other girls.
876
00:48:12,600 --> 00:48:15,400
Whereas if a boy is anxious, he's not going to talk about it as much.
877
00:48:15,400 --> 00:48:16,560
And boys are kind of socially clueless.
878
00:48:16,560 --> 00:48:18,520
They're not going to pick up on it as much.
879
00:48:18,520 --> 00:48:23,360
So boys, in a sense, had some protection against the mental and this contagion that social media spreads among girls.
881
00:48:25,760 --> 00:48:27,880
And I could keep going, there's just so many different ways.
882
00:48:27,880 --> 00:48:32,840
I mean, we haven't even touched on getting contacted by strangers, getting sex-storted.
883
00:48:32,840 --> 00:48:34,440
It's unbelievable.
884
00:48:34,440 --> 00:48:39,720
Once scammers can get a child boy or girl, once they can get the child to send them a picture of themselves naked or, you know, part of their body, now they've got them.
886
00:48:43,960 --> 00:48:47,160
And then they reveal themselves like, oh, no, I'm not, you know, a kid flirting with you.
887
00:48:47,160 --> 00:48:49,240
I'm actually, you know, a 40-year-old man.
888
00:48:49,240 --> 00:48:51,680
And now I've got you and you have to do what I say.
889
00:48:51,680 --> 00:48:57,360
And there's the story of this one girl, they forced her to carve their names, this group. She had a carve their names in her thigh with a knife while they watched and laughed. She had to behead her pet hamster in front of them on camera. And then they said, now we want you to kill yourself. If you don't do this, we're going to spread these photos far and wide. You're going to be humiliated. At this point, I'm sure the girl was already thinking about suicide because she felt trapped and humiliated. And thank God she told her mother at that point. And then the mother was able to save her.
899
00:49:23,760 --> 00:49:30,000
But the idea that we would never let our children wander in a bad part of town unsupervised for months, we would never let them go into, you know, a war zone or a brothel.
901
00:49:35,080 --> 00:49:38,000
But we let strangers do this to them.
902
00:49:38,000 --> 00:49:41,040
It's unbelievable to me that we have done this to childhood.
903
00:49:41,040 --> 00:49:47,520
Well, you write in the book about a girl named Alexis Spence, whose life sort of unraveled because of social media platforms that is currently suing meta.
905
00:49:50,640 --> 00:49:54,520
Tell me a little bit about what happened to her because I think in a way her story, not the fact that she's suing, but her story is sort of emblematic of what happened to girls.
907
00:49:59,000 --> 00:50:03,160
So she was this, you know, fifth grade girl, grown up on Long Island. And she had webkins, you know, it's like a toy that you can trap online. And she thought that was fun, but some of her friends made fun of her for this childish thing. No, you should get Instagram. So she gets Instagram. And any interesting beauty before you know what you'll be being sent dieting, videos and content about extreme thinness and anorexia and the skeleton bride diet and all sorts of horrible, horrible things. And she develops very severe eating disorders and she's hospitalized multiple times. And in one of the longer hospitalizations, she goes without her phone for a while. And the mother says, it's like I got my daughter back. Once she was not on the phone for a month or two, she became her normal self again. And this is a story I hear from parents and kids about summer camp as well when kids get off of their devices because the thing is they get off and so does everyone else.
922
00:50:54,880 --> 00:50:56,760
They're around kids who are not on devices.
923
00:50:56,760 --> 00:50:58,240
So they actually talk to each other.
924
00:50:58,240 --> 00:51:00,640
They play together and they get healthy again.
925
00:51:00,640 --> 00:51:03,240
So Alexis, she was suicidal.
926
00:51:03,240 --> 00:51:06,240
She had severe malnutrition for a long time.
927
00:51:06,240 --> 00:51:07,240
She's recovered.
928
00:51:07,240 --> 00:51:13,040
She's now in her early 20s, but that was a harrowing 10 years for her and her family.
929
00:51:13,040 --> 00:51:15,360
And it starts in fifth grade.
930
00:51:15,360 --> 00:51:20,760
And Congress passed one law, exactly one law to protect children online, cop at the Child Online Privacy Protection Act in 1997, I think it was.
932
00:51:24,940 --> 00:51:28,200
That act was completely inadequate, but at least it said that there was a minimum age to sign a contract in terms of service and give away your data to a company.
934
00:51:31,680 --> 00:51:32,680
It's 13.
935
00:51:32,680 --> 00:51:37,540
Oh, but the companies are not liable for that unless they have positive evidence that a kid is under 13.
937
00:51:38,540 --> 00:51:40,840
So as long as they don't know, then they're okay.
938
00:51:40,840 --> 00:51:41,920
They can't be sued.
939
00:51:41,920 --> 00:51:46,400
And so I argue that we need to raise the age of 16 and enforce it, but for God's sakes, can't we at least ask the companies, require the companies to enforce the age of 13?
941
00:51:51,160 --> 00:51:53,040
Like, that's the only thing we have in law.
942
00:51:53,040 --> 00:51:55,600
There's been nothing since then, and that's not even enforced.
943
00:51:55,600 --> 00:52:00,760
So let's talk about how much of this you lay at the blame of tech companies.
944
00:52:00,760 --> 00:52:02,080
Here's what you write in the book.
945
00:52:02,080 --> 00:52:07,000
A few of these companies are behaving like the tobacco and vaping industries, which designed their products to be highly addictive and then skirted laws limiting marketing to minors.
948
00:52:13,000 --> 00:52:17,400
You also make the analogy in the book to oil companies that fought against a ban on lead and gasoline, even though the evidence was clear that lead in the atmosphere affected brain development.
951
00:52:24,580 --> 00:52:29,720
So I want to know, did they know in Silicon Valley what they were creating? Did they understand they were making a kind of heroin for kids and they did they decide to do it anyway? Or did they sort of stumble as backwards into something that is perhaps more addictive than cigarettes or vaping?
956
00:52:43,000 --> 00:52:44,000
Yeah.
957
00:52:44,000 --> 00:52:45,000
So I think it's some of both.
958
00:52:45,000 --> 00:52:48,240
I think it's nobody had bad intentions.
959
00:52:48,240 --> 00:52:53,000
Nobody said, hey, let's try to addict American kids and ruin their lives.
960
00:52:53,000 --> 00:52:58,280
But once you start a company and you have a product and it is good for some people and it does some social good in some ways.
962
00:53:00,400 --> 00:53:02,960
So just normal human abilities to rationalize.
963
00:53:02,960 --> 00:53:07,160
If we really give them the benefit of the doubt, we might say, they might have suspected that their products were harming kids, but they had enough plausible deniability.
965
00:53:11,280 --> 00:53:14,320
There were some psychologists who said, no, the evidence isn't very good.
966
00:53:14,320 --> 00:53:18,240
So being very charitable, we might say, well, maybe they didn't know.
967
00:53:18,240 --> 00:53:19,720
Maybe they didn't believe it.
968
00:53:19,720 --> 00:53:23,640
Maybe they weren't trying to harm kids, but maybe that's all it was.
969
00:53:23,640 --> 00:53:25,120
But then we have the whistleblowers.
970
00:53:25,120 --> 00:53:27,400
We know that they were warned.
971
00:53:27,400 --> 00:53:31,960
Francis Hogan brought out documents showing they had seminars on teen psychology and they showed images of the brain and they said the frontal cortex doesn't mature until late teens early 20s and at the earlier ages, kids are especially vulnerable to social concerns and here's how we can get them to spend more time on the platform.
975
00:53:44,720 --> 00:53:47,360
Here's what we can do to keep them engaged.
976
00:53:47,360 --> 00:53:50,720
So they knew what they were doing and they did it anyway.
977
00:53:50,720 --> 00:53:54,680
In fact, there's a quote, I think I have in the book from one of the early founders of Facebook. He said about Facebook and all the other platforms. He said, this is exactly what a hacker would do is hack into the psychology of prestige, give you a little hit of dopamine, keep you clicking.
981
00:54:05,640 --> 00:54:08,880
He said, we knew what we were doing and we did it anyway.
982
00:54:08,880 --> 00:54:11,760
God only knows what we're doing to our children's brains.
983
00:54:11,760 --> 00:54:13,120
So no, they knew.
984
00:54:13,120 --> 00:54:19,400
Now, tobacco, they were pushing a product that was undeniably addictive.
985
00:54:19,400 --> 00:54:24,200
But I think to be said about tobacco is a kid could choose to not smoke.
986
00:54:24,200 --> 00:54:25,760
There was some pure pressure.
987
00:54:25,760 --> 00:54:31,920
But I found the numbers in 1997 was the peak year of high school age smoking, 37% of kids smoked in 1997.
989
00:54:33,520 --> 00:54:36,000
And that means that two thirds of kids didn't smoke.
990
00:54:36,000 --> 00:54:37,680
So you could choose to not smoke.
991
00:54:37,680 --> 00:54:39,760
You can't choose to not be on social media.
992
00:54:39,760 --> 00:54:43,320
Now, I'm sorry, it's not that you can't at all, but it's much harder, especially because it hits you much younger.
994
00:54:44,800 --> 00:54:47,360
You know, we're talking high school kids for smoking, but we're looking at middle school kids for social media.
996
00:54:50,040 --> 00:54:54,360
So I think in many ways social media is worse than tobacco, worse than let it gas.
997
00:54:54,360 --> 00:54:59,440
And again, 11, 12, 13 year old kids, these kids, they're little, they haven't gone through puberty, they're incredibly vulnerable and easy to exploit.
999
00:55:03,120 --> 00:55:05,960
And we're just standing back and letting the companies exploit them.
1000
00:55:05,960 --> 00:55:09,200
For God's sakes, make them enforce their own age limits.
1001
00:55:09,200 --> 00:55:14,040
For God's sakes, Congress repeal or modify section 230's that it does just what the original intent was.
1003
00:55:15,120 --> 00:55:18,400
It doesn't protect the platforms from any lawsuits.
1004
00:55:18,400 --> 00:55:20,960
The platforms should be liable for underage use.
1005
00:55:20,960 --> 00:55:25,280
They should be liable for putting an architectural features designed to lure in and addict kids that we need to make them liable and we're not.
1007
00:55:29,320 --> 00:55:33,560
In March 2021, Mark Zuckerberg appeared in front of Congress. And he insisted that the research that we've seen, and this is a quote, is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental health benefits.
1010
00:55:42,360 --> 00:55:44,480
What do you say to that?
1011
00:55:44,480 --> 00:55:48,120
The natural inclination of an academic is to say, well, let's look for the arguments on both sides.
1013
00:55:49,120 --> 00:55:51,120
There's some pluses and there's some minuses.
1014
00:55:51,120 --> 00:55:55,800
And while that's true, when we look at the pluses of social media, what Zuckerberg was talking about is reports, if you survey kids and you say, how does it make you feel?
1016
00:56:00,800 --> 00:56:02,280
And they'll often say positive things.
1017
00:56:02,280 --> 00:56:06,640
In fact, as he pointed out correctly, even in the Francis Hogan revelations of the study that Facebook commissioned, more kids said that it had positive effects than negative effects.
1019
00:56:12,520 --> 00:56:16,600
Okay, so you have a consumer product that is only harming a third of its users.
1020
00:56:16,600 --> 00:56:18,120
Okay, you know, maybe that's not so bad.
1021
00:56:18,120 --> 00:56:20,200
So that is incredibly terrible.
1022
00:56:20,200 --> 00:56:24,320
Secondly, to say that there's some mental health benefits, all he really means is they said it makes me feel better.
1024
00:56:26,400 --> 00:56:30,960
When you actually look at any other measure of actual mental health problems, you only see harms. Now, some studies find nothing, it's true.
1027
00:56:34,400 --> 00:56:38,400
But if there was no effect, if it was, if the null hypothesis here was true, then what you'd expect is that some studies show a positive effect, a positive correlation or positive experimental effect, some show a negative, maybe there's some publication bias, so maybe it shifts towards the negative.
1031
00:56:50,560 --> 00:56:54,040
But you would have a lot of studies where the correlation between heavy social media use and happiness or mental health was positive, but you don't, you don't find them.
1033
00:56:58,880 --> 00:57:03,160
And you'd find a lot of experiments where having kids do more social media made them happier, but you don't.
1035
00:57:04,360 --> 00:57:08,880
So the null hypothesis is definitely false and very confident of that.
1036
00:57:08,880 --> 00:57:12,440
And what Zuckerberg was pointing to was a couple of crumbs here and there that allowed him to say, here's a study I can point to where there is some sign that kids say it makes them happier and more connected.
1039
00:57:18,600 --> 00:57:20,960
That's true, but it's still devastating their mental health.
1040
00:57:20,960 --> 00:57:26,120
It seems to me that this is a really stratified problem economically.
1041
00:57:26,120 --> 00:57:31,160
The people who live in Northern California that invented a lot of these apps send their kids to Montessori schools where there are absolutely no screens and they play with wooden blocks all day.
1044
00:57:36,400 --> 00:57:43,640
The people that don't have the luxury of sending their kids to a private school use these devices it seems to me often as a kind of babysitter.
1046
00:57:47,880 --> 00:57:53,240
And if you look at the numbers, the average screen time spent in kids in a single parent home and in low income families and among black and Hispanic families are higher.
1048
00:57:57,480 --> 00:58:00,000
I'd love for you to comment on that.
1049
00:58:00,000 --> 00:58:04,440
The digital divide used to be that rich kids have computers and poor kids don't, so we'd better get computers to the poor kids.
1051
00:58:07,160 --> 00:58:11,080
And oh, you know, our heroes come in, the tech companies will provide a Chromebook, will provide devices for the kids and that will even things out.
1053
00:58:15,200 --> 00:58:19,400
Well, that might have been the digital divide 20 years ago, 30 years ago.
1054
00:58:19,400 --> 00:58:24,880
But now the digital divide is that kids with two married college educated parents probably are trying to put on restrictions, probably are concerned about the mental health effects and they're struggling and probably failing to really do a lot, but they're trying. Whereas kids who have a single parent, kids who are from less educated or less wealthy families, these kids, they have fewer protections, fewer limitations.
1059
00:58:44,880 --> 00:58:48,120
The mother has to, you know, is using this as a babysitter.
1060
00:58:48,120 --> 00:58:53,280
And so yes, the digital divide now is that it's the wealthy kids and the white and the Asian kids and the kids and married families.
1062
00:58:56,520 --> 00:59:01,080
They're the ones who have at least slightly healthier environments, whereas all the other groups
1063
00:59:01,080 --> 00:59:07,080
I think have the worst of all worlds.
1064
00:59:07,080 --> 00:59:11,840
After the break, the most important part of the conversation, John tells us what action parents can take, stay with us.
1072
01:00:52,440 --> 01:01:02,440
What can I possibly do about it?
1073
01:01:02,440 --> 01:01:06,680
To explain that, I have to first say what the solution is and then we'll talk about how policy makers can support that.
1075
01:01:09,000 --> 01:01:14,240
The key idea in my book is that we're stuck in a set of collective action problems.
1076
01:01:14,240 --> 01:01:17,760
The main reason why people are giving their kids a smartphone in fifth grade is because everybody else in their school is doing it and you don't want your kid to be left out.
1078
01:01:22,480 --> 01:01:26,120
Once we see that, we're each doing this because everyone else is and the kids are spending so much time on these platforms because everyone else is.
1080
01:01:29,440 --> 01:01:33,720
The key is we have to act together and what I'm doing in the book is I'm saying, if you're with me that there's a mental health crisis, if you're with me that it's caused by the rewiring of childhood, we have to unwire.
1083
01:01:39,880 --> 01:01:41,520
We have to roll it back.
1084
01:01:41,520 --> 01:01:42,840
We do that with four norms.
1085
01:01:42,840 --> 01:01:46,280
Just four norms will do most of the work.
1086
01:01:46,280 --> 01:01:49,360
Just list the four norms and I'll say where legislators can help.
1087
01:01:49,360 --> 01:01:52,320
The first norm, no smartphone before high school.
1088
01:01:52,320 --> 01:01:54,760
Just give them a flip, flip phones did not harm the millennials.
1089
01:01:54,760 --> 01:01:56,120
They're just for communication.
1090
01:01:56,120 --> 01:02:00,440
The second norm is no social media till 16.
1091
01:02:00,440 --> 01:02:03,840
Parents should say no and it's very hard to say no if your kid is the only one who is not on a platform.
1093
01:02:05,480 --> 01:02:09,400
But if a third or a half of the other kids aren't on it, then it's easy to say no.
1094
01:02:09,400 --> 01:02:14,120
The third norm is phone free schools, which is just a no-brainer.
1095
01:02:14,120 --> 01:02:17,600
Everything good happens from letting kids keep the phone in the pocket and this is really happening.
1097
01:02:18,600 --> 01:02:21,320
Schools are really moving this way because the teachers all hate it, the administrators all hate it.
1099
01:02:22,320 --> 01:02:24,080
The fourth norm is the only one that's actually hard.
1100
01:02:24,080 --> 01:02:30,800
The fourth one is more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world.
1101
01:02:30,800 --> 01:02:35,360
Because if we're delaying smartphones and social media until high school, we can't just expect our middle school kids to just sit home doing nothing.
1103
01:02:38,360 --> 01:02:41,360
We have to let them out to play with each other again and have adventures and have a childhood the way most of their parents did.
1105
01:02:44,040 --> 01:02:46,240
So those are the four norms.
1106
01:02:46,240 --> 01:02:50,200
Any talent, any community that does the four, I can almost guarantee that the rates of mental illness will come down within two years.
1108
01:02:52,560 --> 01:02:54,280
It's going to be really, really good for the kids.
1109
01:02:54,280 --> 01:02:56,360
Now how can legislators help?
1110
01:02:56,360 --> 01:02:58,520
No social media till 16.
1111
01:02:58,520 --> 01:03:03,920
Congress passed a law in 1997 or 8 saying that you have to be 13 in order to sign up for any service that takes your data and it's not enforced.
1113
01:03:07,360 --> 01:03:12,000
And the biggest thing Congress could do would be to raise the age to 16 and require the companies to enforce it.
1115
01:03:14,200 --> 01:03:18,480
We don't let kids into bars and casinos and strip clubs and we don't say, well, it's the parents job to enforce that.
1117
01:03:20,000 --> 01:03:22,920
You can't expect the bar or the strip club to check ID.
1118
01:03:22,920 --> 01:03:24,080
You can't expect that.
1119
01:03:24,080 --> 01:03:25,080
That's the parents do.
1120
01:03:25,080 --> 01:03:26,080
No, that's impossible.
1121
01:03:26,080 --> 01:03:27,080
It's not working.
1122
01:03:27,080 --> 01:03:30,720
Unless we keep our kids away from the internet, we can't keep our kids away from social media unless the government helps us by making the companies do something to check age, to do age verification.
1125
01:03:36,520 --> 01:03:37,680
There's lots of different ways.
1126
01:03:37,680 --> 01:03:41,920
So if they have to find solutions, they're going to find solutions very, very quickly.
1127
01:03:41,920 --> 01:03:47,240
There's two arguments that I hear that would be the push back to your claim.
1128
01:03:47,240 --> 01:03:50,000
One is the parents who say, but John, it's too late.
1129
01:03:50,000 --> 01:03:51,760
The train is left the station.
1130
01:03:51,760 --> 01:03:56,640
And the second are the technologists who are defensive of this technology.
1131
01:03:56,640 --> 01:04:01,440
You know, Mark Andreessen, the famed venture capitalist recently tweeted that banning phones in the internet for kids would mean that everything they get outside the family is from official authority figures, which would make everything worse.
1134
01:04:09,640 --> 01:04:12,080
Seriously, check out today's authority figures.
1135
01:04:12,080 --> 01:04:14,600
How do you respond to those two arguments?
1136
01:04:14,600 --> 01:04:17,720
So the first is that people often confuse, I think, accidentally.
1137
01:04:17,720 --> 01:04:20,200
They confuse social media with the internet.
1138
01:04:20,200 --> 01:04:23,240
And, you know, we generally all agree the internet is amazing.
1139
01:04:23,240 --> 01:04:24,760
We don't want to ban the internet.
1140
01:04:24,760 --> 01:04:27,480
We don't want to keep kids off the internet entirely.
1141
01:04:27,480 --> 01:04:30,200
But the problem for the kids isn't that they have access to the internet.
1142
01:04:30,200 --> 01:04:31,520
They need it from many things.
1143
01:04:31,520 --> 01:04:36,320
The problem happens when kids have 24/7 to the internet privately in their bedroom.
1144
01:04:36,320 --> 01:04:38,600
That's when they get hooked by sex dorshinist.
1145
01:04:38,600 --> 01:04:41,960
That's when they get into the other really bad stuff I'm told.
1146
01:04:41,960 --> 01:04:45,760
Especially happens at night, late at night when a girl is in her room alone with her phone for six hours, instead of sleeping.
1148
01:04:48,000 --> 01:04:52,440
So sure, you can make a strong man argument saying, you know, some people want to ban the internet for everyone under 18.
1150
01:04:54,120 --> 01:04:55,120
Like, no, that's absurd.
1151
01:04:55,120 --> 01:04:56,840
Nobody wants to do that.
1152
01:04:56,840 --> 01:05:01,440
What I want is an internet that has some guardrails so that kids can just walk into the most disgusting pornographic sites at any age.
1154
01:05:05,400 --> 01:05:09,200
And limitations so that the existing law of 13 is enforced.
1155
01:05:09,200 --> 01:05:11,680
What I want is really pretty modest.
1156
01:05:11,680 --> 01:05:15,400
And you know, the argument that the train is left at the station is just resignation.
1157
01:05:15,400 --> 01:05:21,040
So imagine I'm a parent in a school, maybe it's a public school, or even a private school.
1158
01:05:21,040 --> 01:05:23,040
And the school claims that they're banning phones.
1159
01:05:23,040 --> 01:05:27,120
But as you said earlier in this conversation, they're not actually banning phones.
1160
01:05:27,120 --> 01:05:31,040
I don't want to be a helicopter parent, but I really, really want to stand by these foreign dorms that you've laid out.
1162
01:05:41,040 --> 01:05:43,040
What should I do?
1163
01:05:43,040 --> 01:05:44,040
Practically speaking.
1164
01:05:44,040 --> 01:05:48,040
You go to anxiousgeneration.com, which is the website for the book.
1165
01:05:48,040 --> 01:05:49,040
You go to the tab about the book.
1166
01:05:49,040 --> 01:05:55,040
We have all kinds of resources, including the text of a message you can send to the principal administrator of the school.
1168
01:05:56,040 --> 01:05:58,320
The key to addressing collective action problems is to act collectively.
1169
01:05:58,320 --> 01:05:59,320
And I can tell you almost all the principles that head school, they all hate the phones.
1170
01:05:59,320 --> 01:06:00,320
It makes their lives miserable.
1171
01:06:00,320 --> 01:06:02,520
They can't get on these platforms with the kids.
1172
01:06:02,520 --> 01:06:04,920
So they all hate it.
1173
01:06:04,920 --> 01:06:05,920
Why don't they ban it?
1174
01:06:05,920 --> 01:06:07,560
I always ask, why don't you go phone free?
1175
01:06:07,560 --> 01:06:10,720
And whenever I speak to a principal about this, they give the same answer.
1176
01:06:10,720 --> 01:06:14,320
Because some of the parents will freak out, they'll get so upset, and so we just can't do it.
1178
01:06:15,320 --> 01:06:18,840
Well, yes, there are some parents who will freak out because they think it's their God-given right to communicate with their child while he's in math class.
1180
01:06:22,040 --> 01:06:23,720
And it's not their God-given right.
1181
01:06:23,720 --> 01:06:27,800
The school needs to educate the kids, and it can't do it if the kids are attending to their phones instead of the teachers.
1183
01:06:29,720 --> 01:06:34,320
So, but what the leaders need, and this is just basic politics, what they need is to hear from the majority that want something done.
1185
01:06:37,480 --> 01:06:40,960
And most parents, I believe, do, or they certainly will once they understand what this is doing to their kids.
1187
01:06:42,280 --> 01:06:47,520
So a simple step you can take is just start a text thread with at least one of the parents of each of your kids' best friends.
1189
01:06:48,840 --> 01:06:52,280
If your kid has a group of three or four kids that hang out together, start a text thread saying, hey, I heard this podcast with Barry Weiss and John Hyde, and they said that if we all should delay, not till eighth grade, eighth grade is too early, we should all delay until high school.
1193
01:07:03,640 --> 01:07:04,640
I'd like to do that.
1194
01:07:04,640 --> 01:07:05,640
What do you guys think?
1195
01:07:05,640 --> 01:07:10,000
And so just start a text thread and probably the other parents are also concerned.
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01:07:10,000 --> 01:07:14,240
And if you start that mostly, whatever I go, people are incredibly supportive.
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01:07:14,240 --> 01:07:17,880
I'm facing no opposition, no one's arguing against me.
1198
01:07:17,880 --> 01:07:19,560
It's the most extraordinary thing.
1199
01:07:19,560 --> 01:07:23,040
So we really just need to coordinate and we can solve this problem.
1200
01:07:23,040 --> 01:07:29,400
But when push comes to shove, I suspect that certain parents in theory will pay lip service to everything you've been talking about, but will hesitate to actually do it because they're scared of pissing their kid off.
1203
01:07:36,480 --> 01:07:41,320
They're scared of being the lame, strict, disciplinarian, authoritative parent.
1204
01:07:41,320 --> 01:07:43,360
Yes, that is true.
1205
01:07:43,360 --> 01:07:46,760
And that is true if you are the only parent doing it.
1206
01:07:46,760 --> 01:07:51,080
There was a review of the anxious generation in the Times in the UK, a very positive review by Helen Rumbolo.
1208
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And so here's how she ended it. She said, when I caught one of my teenagers between squirrels and asked her, would you have liked a social media ban until you were 16? She asked, would the ban affect everyone? And she paused to think. Then she said, yes, I'd have liked that, she said. And then the journalist says it was an IRL moment that made me sadder than almost anything I'd read.
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Because the young people themselves don't want to be trapped, but they're trapped. They feel trapped.
1218
01:08:22,480 --> 01:08:28,560
And so a ban, or rather, I should just say, raising the age to 16 and enforcing it would free them.
1220
01:08:29,560 --> 01:08:32,720
And that's why we're calling the movement free the anxious generation.
1221
01:08:32,720 --> 01:08:37,800
You write that kids in America today and in the Westward generally are coming of age in a confusing, place-less, a-historical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad.
1225
01:08:52,520 --> 01:08:58,000
A process that plays out over many generations, young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why videos showing young people reacting positively to a psalm of bin Laden's thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.
1229
01:09:12,240 --> 01:09:19,120
Talk to us about is the last thought, what's at stake here if we don't change course? What's at stake is the loss of a generation or two or three to many things, the loss of their connection to everything that came before.
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01:09:29,920 --> 01:09:32,800
So my first book was The Happiness Hypothesis. It was about ancient wisdom and all that ancient civilizations and societies learned about how to live a good life and have a good society. And we learned all kinds of lessons in the 20th century about communism, fascism, about economics. We've learned an awful lot as a species and as a culture. And if kids grow up on social media, they don't have any room in their input streams for any of that. They don't know it really anything that happened before 2010. And so they're growing up without roots, without any historical and any inheritance from the past. So we're talking about the loss of Western world civilization and culture. That's bad enough. We're also talking about a generation that has no time to actually do anything that goes outside the bubble.
1246
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So if you have to spend, the Gallaudet is nine hours a day on your phone, your other screens, there's not time for anything else.
1248
01:10:24,360 --> 01:10:26,960
And if you're walking down the street, you're listening to something.
1249
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There's no time to think. There's no time to daydream. There's no time to be bored. And so if you have no attention to give, no time to do anything, you're not going to do anything.
1254
01:10:36,160 --> 01:10:40,520
My prediction is that is that Gen Z, they're certainly smart.
1255
01:10:40,520 --> 01:10:42,920
They certainly want to be successful.
1256
01:10:42,920 --> 01:10:46,160
But they're very risk averse and they have very little attention to give.
1257
01:10:46,160 --> 01:10:50,280
So I think we're going to see fewer companies started, fewer risks taken.
1258
01:10:50,280 --> 01:10:51,800
They'll go for safer jobs.
1259
01:10:51,800 --> 01:10:53,440
There'll be less innovation.
1260
01:10:53,440 --> 01:10:55,040
Now maybe AI will make up for that.
1261
01:10:55,040 --> 01:10:59,280
Maybe AI will be so creative that we can afford to have all human beings from now on just sit back and consume and not think anything, not do anything productive.
1263
01:11:03,200 --> 01:11:05,480
I sure as hell don't want to live in that world.
1264
01:11:05,480 --> 01:11:08,840
But that I think is, I hate to be so apocalyptic at the end.
1265
01:11:08,840 --> 01:11:10,720
I'd rather end hopefully.
1266
01:11:10,720 --> 01:11:16,080
But if we don't act, if we just let it go as it is, I don't see how this turns around by itself.
1268
01:11:17,200 --> 01:11:22,440
We would have a generation that is not really able to take on the massive challenges that we left them.
1270
01:11:23,520 --> 01:11:27,120
They bear no responsibility for the mess the world is in.
1271
01:11:27,120 --> 01:11:30,720
But we are making them poorly equipped to handle it.
1272
01:11:30,720 --> 01:11:33,960
So that would be the negative apocalyptic side.
1273
01:11:33,960 --> 01:11:39,080
The hopeful ending that I hope we can end on is that in our divided society, where it seems
1274
01:11:39,080 --> 01:11:43,800
like we can't really fix anything, this is the one issue that we can fix.
1275
01:11:43,800 --> 01:11:48,040
This is an issue where how much money would cost to fix this to do my fore-norms?
1276
01:11:48,040 --> 01:11:49,040
Zero.
1277
01:11:49,040 --> 01:11:50,040
Zero.
1278
01:11:50,040 --> 01:11:52,040
Yeah, you'd have to buy some phone lockers, but that's about it.
1279
01:11:52,040 --> 01:11:53,360
It's cost nothing to fix.
1280
01:11:53,360 --> 01:11:55,040
You know what the political division is on this?
1281
01:11:55,040 --> 01:11:56,040
Tell me.
1282
01:11:56,040 --> 01:11:57,040
Zero.
1283
01:11:57,040 --> 01:11:58,240
Everyone has kids.
1284
01:11:58,240 --> 01:12:00,280
So there's very little political divide.
1285
01:12:00,280 --> 01:12:03,320
It's one of the most bipartisan issues in Congress.
1286
01:12:03,320 --> 01:12:04,760
So it costs nothing.
1287
01:12:04,760 --> 01:12:06,400
There's no political divide.
1288
01:12:06,400 --> 01:12:09,400
There's really no organized opposition other than of course that meta is some sure of our all kinds of lobbyists, but other than that, there's really not political opposition.
1290
01:12:15,360 --> 01:12:19,960
And the kids themselves, not that all would vote for it right away, but they're really dissatisfied with what they have.
1292
01:12:22,440 --> 01:12:26,640
And whenever I speak to Gen Z audiences and I lay it out, they want it.
1293
01:12:26,640 --> 01:12:29,240
They say yes, we would like to break out of this.
1294
01:12:29,240 --> 01:12:31,800
So I actually think that we're going to be successful.
1295
01:12:31,800 --> 01:12:39,320
I think that by the end of 2025, norms about 10-year-olds spending their day scrolling on a screen like that's going to be seen as an incredibly destructive, sad thing to do.
1297
01:12:44,760 --> 01:12:45,760
And some will still do it.
1298
01:12:45,760 --> 01:12:49,160
I'm not saying we'll get to zero, but I think right now the norm is you kind of have to do that if you want to keep up.
1300
01:12:50,800 --> 01:12:51,800
We're going to free them.
1301
01:12:51,800 --> 01:12:56,840
We're going to free the anxious generation from the need to constantly, constantly be online checking up on everyone else.
1303
01:12:59,280 --> 01:13:02,200
Well, John Hyne, as always, it's a total pleasure.
1304
01:13:02,200 --> 01:13:04,840
His new book is the anxious generation.
1305
01:13:04,840 --> 01:13:10,160
How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
1306
01:13:10,160 --> 01:13:12,000
Thank you so much.
1307
01:13:12,000 --> 01:13:13,000
Thank you, Barry.
1308
01:13:13,000 --> 01:13:17,560
Thank you for all you're doing at Free Press.
1309
01:13:17,560 --> 01:13:18,680
Thanks for listening.
1310
01:13:18,680 --> 01:13:22,480
If you liked this episode, please share it with your friends and family, especially the
1311
01:13:22,480 --> 01:13:26,240
parents you know, and use it to have a conversation of your own.
1312
01:13:26,240 --> 01:13:30,960
If you want to learn more again, John's new book is called The Anxious Generation.
1313
01:13:30,960 --> 01:13:32,640
It's out March 26th.
1314
01:13:32,640 --> 01:13:34,800
You know, add that this isn't just a book for John.
1315
01:13:34,800 --> 01:13:35,800
It's also a movement.
1316
01:13:35,800 --> 01:13:40,080
It's an attempt to really change the course of what's going on with our kids.
1317
01:13:40,080 --> 01:13:45,800
You can find out more about that movement at freetheanxiousgeneration.com.
1318
01:13:45,800 --> 01:13:49,280
Last but not least, if you want to support, honestly, there's just one way to do it.
1319
01:13:49,280 --> 01:13:54,080
If by becoming a free presser, it's becoming a subscriber to the free press, by going to
1320
01:13:54,080 --> 01:14:00,520
vfp.com, THefp.com, and becoming a subscriber today.
1321
01:14:00,520 --> 01:14:02,560
We really appreciate the support.
1322
01:14:02,560 --> 01:14:03,200
We'll see you next time.
1323
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♪ ♪
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[MUSIC]