#EIE23: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones vs. Smart Kids

[Music] it's it's really a pleasure to be here to be back uh for a few reasons one is that I have not heard so much reasonable talk about education since the 20th century so uh I'm excited to be here in the land of normal people who think about education um another reason is because I had a great time when I was here with you last four years ago I came and gave a talk with that that table of contents just but from Curiosity how many of you were here for that raise your hand if you

were here okay good so most of you this for most of you this will be fresh material now actually it is all fresh material um because um I just finished or I'm just about to finish this book I'm I've got to go back to my hotel room and work on the uh the modifications to it but it'll come out on March 26th uh the anxious Generation Um and I have a lot more to tell you now than I did four years ago um in fact I'm going to try to lay out six six points about

what has happened to uh to people people born after 1995 or gen Z and I'm going to end with very specific asks of you I what's so exciting about this conference is that you can actually do something about this you can actually Implement policies and change laws that will have a direct impact on mental health and that will make it so much easier for the rest of us all of us parents are in a bind all of us are in a trap all of us feel pressure oh you know if I don't give my my

daughter a phone or social media she she's the only one who's left you can help us break out of these Collective action traps so here's here's the story and here's what I hope you can do so let's start with just the basic facts about what has happened to young people uh in the in the 2010s um jenz uh people born after 1995 sort of snuck up on us we the the students who arrived on campus in um uh in 2014 were different from those who were were arriving a couple coup years before they had higher

rates of those things that you see there but the really characteristic feature of gen Z is very very high rates of psychological disorders and it's not all psychological disorders it's mostly anxiety and depression so if you look these were the rates reported by college Mental Health Centers um in 2008 2010 but as we go on in the 2010s this is what happens and uh it's not that everybody was getting more anxious in the 2010s if we look at the differ by generation they weren't very big in 2010 but over the course of the 2010s something

hits jenz and the younger Millennials but it's really hitting genz it doesn't touch older people and it's not evenly divided between the Sexes so there's always been uh it's always been the case that girls and women uh experience more internalizing disorders and anxiety depression uh but as we go through this period it's the girls who really get hit now boys are not doing well either uh but the being depressed or anxious is now a normal part of being an American girl and I want to point out something you'll see in a couple of the graphs

the 2020 data was collected in early 2020 before covid restrictions the 2021 data is after covid restrictions so you can see the effect of covid right if you squint you can see the effect of covid this was all baked in by 2019 now some said and still say that oh this is just another moral Panic the older folks they always freak out about digital you know whatever communication technology the young people are using and you know this is not even a real epidemic it's just self-report the young people are self-reporting that they're anxious and depressed

that's a good thing that they're they're not ashamed but this is not true and we know that because if we look at behavior that is not self-reported we see the same thing so this is the number per 100 uh in the US population that of young girls 10 to 14 who end up in emergency rooms because they harmed themselves mostly cutting and what you see uh is that um the rate for boys didn't go up well it went up somewhat but the girls rate tripled nearly tripled uh pre-teen girls didn't used to cut themselves and

now they do and tragically we see it in completed suicides so this is these were the rates for uh for girl for boys on top now and girls and again in this period um so this is not self-report and there's a really striking shocking feature of this graph which is a 67% increase in suicides in one year what happened in 2012 such that many more girls were killing themselves in 2013 well 2012 is the year that all the girls got on Instagram and it's not just here it's happening in all of the englishspeaking countries here's

self harm data in the UK same in Australia New Zealand um looking at it a different way uh in Canada question is your mental health excellent or very good on a fivepoint scale and the Top Line there is the young girls the uh teen and young young girls young women and what we see is they used to be the happiest and then in the 2010s they plummet and now they're the least happy so why why do you suppose this could be happening at the same time in many countries it's happening in the Scandinavian countries two

I looked at those as well um and why is it hitting girls and especially younger teen girls the hardest H I wonder why that could be um I've been developing an explanation um called the Great rewiring of childhood and I keep asking people whenever I write I say if you disagree tell give me another theory is there a second place theory that can explain why this happens in so many countries because people say oh you know school shootings you know new town was 2012 that must be y yeah that's why all the numbers went up

in New Zealand right in Canada and the UK and Sweden um so nobody has yet come up with another theory other than this one which is that the play-based childhood that we've had for millions of years basically ended around 2010 and was replaced by a phone-based childhood so let's talk about those so you know if you think back think what were your Fondest Memories of childhood the most fun you ever had okay um for how many of you was there a screen present including a TV screen raise your hand if you know your greatest memories

were watching TV or some sort of screen okay not many for how many of you were you outside with other kids raise your hand okay that's going to be most of you for how many of you was there some element of risk like you there was some risk in your play raise your hand okay okay so this is what childhood always was because because if you give kids something to take risks on they will do it and we might think oh well that's terrible we should stop them no no you should not um these are

my kids we were we were in in Iceland and they saw this like wall and there was some like handh holds so they you know they they just called out the the wall called out to them they just ran over and just started scrambling up um kids need Thrills kids literally need risk uh there's a a really interesting paper that came out in 2011 there's an update of it now um that we evolved childhoods in which young people are motivated to take risks so that they learn how to act in the world they learn what

the limits are and they expand their limits in fact taking risks is how kids get over anxiety as they say here as the child's coping skills improve these situations and stimuli may be mastered and no longer feared thus fear is reduced as the child experiences a motivating thrilling activation while learning to master age adequate challenges and so if you block risk and thrills you keep your child fragile and fearful you prevent them from maturing um so the the play-based childhood which almost everyone in this room had began to decline especially in the 1990s and there's

a great book uh by Frank fady a British sociologist called paranoid parenting and he's a sociologist which is great because he really brings in all these other factors so much social change happening in the 80s and 90s smaller families there are not so many kids outside anymore working moms you don't have you know eyes on the street as Jane Jacobs had put it um you have sex real sex abuse scandals and you have fake sex abuse scandals like the daycare sex abuse scandals uh and the media loves all this and and both in the US

and UK we all get the sense that everyone out there is molesting children and my God I better keep my CH I better be so careful I better not trust anyone and when adults stop trusting each other with their kids this is a disaster because now you have to do everything yourself you have to verify you have to always be watching you begin to put Safety First safety above everything safety above growth safety above emotional development safety safety safety you can see this astonishing change happened in the United States this is uh time use studies

how much time do women spend um uh parenting or engaged in whatever the definition was that was given in the survey and what you see is that in the 1990s suddenly mothers who are now they're moving ever more into the Work World so they have less time available they have fewer children but they're spending more time with each child and it's the same pattern for fathers as well so something happens in the 90s we no longer have the idea that kids can just go out and play and I'll do other stuff here at home we

have the idea that I have to be watching my kid at all times and I can prove it to you uh probably just with the people in this room um I did this demonstration four years ago let's let's see if how it works now um I want you to all think about the age you were when you were let out that is when you could go out the door you know buy Mom buy Dad I'm going over to Bobby's house you know Bobby lives five blocks away and then the two you're going to go down

to to a park or a forest or the store whatever but you're out on your own so if if that was you in first grade then your number is six um if you didn't do that until seventh grade then your number is 12 okay so everyone has everyone have their number don't say anything yet now we're going to do this by generation so I'm going to first ask everyone who was born before 1981 to raise your hand okay so just you you folks are Gen X and Baby Boomers okay so just you put your hands

down now now what I'm going to do is I'm going to uh sweep my finger around the room and when I when you see me pointing at your section radially here I want you to yell out your number you know 6 8 10 12 whatever it is okay ready ready [Applause] go okay so there's a battle between the first graders and the third graders um okay now let's try it with Gen Z so that's what I that's what I always find um now let's try it with Gen Z I'm going to skip the Millennials I'm

sorry but you're just not that interesting because you're transitional you're just in the middle okay so um okay so I I assume we have some gen ZZ in this room so if you were born uh in let's even make it 1995 if you're born in 1995 or later raise your hand High okay we don't have a lot but we you know we have you know a dozen or two dozen okay so okay so now jenz we're relying on you to yell it out real loud okay everyone please be very quiet very quiet okay just gen

Z just yell it out when I point to you ready go okay so what happened is that we cracked down on junk driving the crime rate plummeted we took perverts off the street and put him in jail the world got really safe in the 1990s safer than it had ever been to be a child outside and we just decided you know what you have to have two digits in your age before we'll let you outside and so childhood complet changed and look what we do to kids now this was sent to me by a friend

um friend at Berkeley this is a uh an elementary school in in Berkeley and you see kids on a playground and there's a sign behind them what does the sign say football rules and it gives you rules for how to play football it resolve disagreements with rock paper scissors the worst here's the worst one of all football and this is touch football because it says only touch no tackle touch football can only be played if an adult is is supervising and refereeing the game because if not children might learn skills of negotiation and conflict resolution

that are necessary for Democratic Society it gets worse tag how do you play tag we have to tell kids how to play tag once again resolve disputes with rock paper scissors one finger touch because you don't want to like hurt the person when you tag so one finger the kids are delicate and um so what we are doing what schools are doing when they do this nonsense is they are they are creating a cycle of incompetence which goes like this adults now assume social and physical incompetence of children they can't do anything they'll get hurt

if they try so we ban risky play and conflict we don't understand that they're antifragile they need risk they need setbacks they need conflicts so we ban things that would help them grow guess what this causes kids to be socially and physically incompetent what effect does that have it validates our assumption that they are socially and physically incompetent uh and so uh you get things like this which I recognize as a college professor we've created a safe non-judgmental environment that will leave your child ill-prepared for life and that's why I think beginning in 2014 we

had students on campus saying we need protection from Shakespeare asop anybody who might say anything that might offend anybody because words are violence words can hurt literature can hurt so that's the decline of the play-based childhood and that's I that's the essential backstory to the really dramatic change that happens between 2010 and 2015 there's never been a social transformation as fast as this one so this is a graph this shows technology adoption and you know when radio comes in there's always a period when everyone seems to be getting it so the curve goes up very

very sharply until it gets to 90 you know 90% so radio came in very fast color TV came in very fast I'm showing you this because I didn't realize until I found this graph that the internet came to us in two distinct waves and the first was amazing so we got personal computers in the early 80s but what could you do with them where perfect you know word star whatever it was called um but then once the internet comes in wow the internet is incredible and now there's really a reason to get a computer and

do you remember how we all thought that this was going to be like the best thing ever to happen to democracy right and this was going to be the best thing ever to happen to education like wow this is going to be a golden age the end of History endless progress and prosperity but then the second wave comes in social media which begins around 20 around 2004 all the platform major platform and the smartphone now the smartphone is adopted faster than any technology in human history um in 2010 most kids didn't have one and by

2015 they did um and that's I believe why mental health plummets around the world between 2010 and 2015 we went from this a childhood where kids were out on their own you know in the 1980s it was considered just normal for a 9-year-old kid to ride around on a bicycle with an extraterrestrial in his basket that was just what kids did but by 2015 that had become impossible because this is childhood today a child sitting alone with a device this decimates their social life again time use surveys how do Americans spend their time how much

time do you spend with your friends uh in a typical uh on a typical day and as you see young people spend a lot of time with their friends until 2012 I mean what else are they going to do older people we're married we have jobs we're not hanging out with our friends all day but you know 15 to 24 you're hanging out with friends until you all get iPhones and then you stop hanging out with friends and here again I want to point out 2019 was before covid 2020 was collected after Co began do

you see the co effect I don't because technology had already C caused American children to be socially distanced before Co arrived now obviously Co decimated many it was bad for many kids but I'm pointing out is that in terms of their sociality on average the decline wasn't any bigger than it was the year before and even if they're with their friends they're not really with their friends and it's not just the teenagers who are living this way this is a video someone sent me last week a video from Tik Tok a father was very proud

of his son look at the amazing things that his son can do watch this he just sits there he can play a video game he can build a you know Minecraft thing now imagine a boy's brain hours a day doing that that's going to change neural development and we give our kids Smartphones at very very young ages it keeps them quiet it entertains them we can do our work uh a friend just sent me this in his child's daycare they have toy iPhones toy iPhones so the babies can do what Mom and Dad do and

then this is something that you'll find on the internet um this is a child in China presumably um and he's it yeah he's been swiping all day long he his nervous system is rewiring around swiping he can't stop and it's very upsetting to him imagine doing this to children for their whole childhood the damage that we're doing to kids goes far beyond mental health I'm engaged in all kinds of debates with other psychologists who say oh the correlations are small they're not big enough to explain the damage and there's all kinds of complicated social science

issues around um around correlations and measurements and experiments versus correlational studies and on my substack the the after bab substack I'm engaged in that debate I I hope you'll go check it out I I give all the geeky details there but what I want to point out is that while the scientists are all off arguing about the connection between screen time and depression and anxiety there's like 20 other kinds of harm that we're doing to the kids uh now here I don't have time to go into them I'm just you know just as I finish

the book I just made up this slide to show you what's in the book in chapter five I go through five foundational harms these happen equally to boys and girls they happen to everyone so the opportunity cost my students spend you know well the research shows teenagers spend 7 to9 hours a day on their phones or on I should say non School related screen based activities so leisure activities 7 to9 hours there's not a lot of time left in the day for anything else um social deprivation I already showed you sleep deprivation is up sharply

since 2013 attention fragmentation students can't sit and read it's very hard for them because they have to always be checking checking checking and the phone's always buzzing in their pocket because they get hundreds of notifications my students get a get a notification a buzz every time they get an email message they just leave on all the notifications and I work with them say shut them all off except for three you can pick three to keep on out of the 300s on your phone um and then behavioral addiction which is really devastating and is clearest for

boys um as I'll show you in a moment um so now there's all kinds of additional harms to girls um so the evidence of the harms of social media is much stronger for girls than boys uh and it makes sense girls suffer from visual social perfectionism I mean a girl imagine imagine a 14-year-old girl on Instagram millions of comparisons she's going to see over the course of a month or two uh perfectionism relational aggression emotional contagion girls share emotions they catch each other's emotions more than boys do uh and therefore girls catch mental illnesses more

than boys do you can catch a mental illness from Tik Tock um in particular Tik Tok is is is leading to various sociogenic mental illnesses like Tik Tok Tourette syndrome and also um girls are more subject to sexual predation can you imagine if 20 or 30 years ago we said to parents hey we're going to have this great thing it's going to allow your 13-year-old daughter to talk to any man in the world without your knowledge what do you say let's do that huh I mean what are we doing then uh there's a whole chapter

on boys because the story for boys is different now at first I couldn't really I couldn't find the evidence linking any specific thing to boy mental health but once I read Richard Reeves book and you're so lucky I mean he's he's wonderful you'll see tomorrow he's a friend of mine we we co-edited a book together um Richard really I think has laid out out the evidence that boys have been just retreating from The Real World since the 70s you know more power to girls and women they you know huge progress in education and the work

and the workforce um but boys are disengaging from educ from school and work and family and marriage and parenting and this is of course a disaster for society in the book Richard doesn't talk a lot about digital technology so in chapter 7 I go way much deeper and the story basically is the virtual world gets really really attractive you know in the 70s or early 80s think about a kid who loved computers think about a kid who could build Hardware who knew what a motherboard was that kid was a boy right almost always boys were

attracted to computers in the early days and then they get better and more Visual and then you get video games so boys are drifting off into the virtual world in the 80s and especially the '90s then we get these incredible incredibly immersive online multiplayer games GES so the boys are just retreating retreating retreating oh and then porn becomes not just available but incredibly high definition um you know so boys now have so much stimulation uh in their in their ancient evolutionary interest in coalitional violence or war or Sports um and pornography or sex so the

boys are sort of removing themselves from from uh human life and many are getting addicted um depending on how you count it somewhere between 2 and 10% I would say of boys um seem to become addicted or have behavioral um have uh you know have have a um it's called problematic use where they become their their their brain is uh habituated their dopamine receptors have been reset because they spend so much time stimulating themselves on video games or porn so then when they're not doing that now life is painful and they become more sirly and

irritable and negative raise your hand if you've seen this in a boy that you know okay so this is happening all around the country it's not to most boys but to a lot of boys we would never allow a consumer product that damaged 2 to 10% of its users if they were children especially so that's the story that's a just a preview of the story for boys basically boys are failing to do the things that would turn them into men so what can we do what can you do you are in the best position to

do something about it most of you are parents we're all struggling as parents and I've heard some stories from parents who just lay down the law they just say this is how it's going to be and they and they stuck to it but most of us are having trouble doing that so what can you do that would really make it easier for us let's start with rolling back the phone based childhood because there's no point in giving kids more freedom in playtime if they have all their devices they're just going to sit outside and do

Instagram so you have to get them off the devices you have to give them you have to first roll back the phone based childhood before we can restore the play based childhood so what I'm trying to do in the book is lay out four Norms that will solve Collective action problems a collective action problem or a common dilemma is where if any one of us does the right thing like I tell my daughter you can't have a phone in seventh grade and she says but everyone else does I'm isolated I won't know what's going on

and so it's hard for me and my family because she's the only one but what if half of the kids what if half the families did it well then it would be easy because all she can say is but Daddy some of the kids have phones that's not a very compelling argument so if we could if we could just establish these as Norms guidelines these are minimum standards no smartphone before high school it is insane to give a distraction device an experience blocker basically to a child especially when they're just beginning puberty now yes you

want to be able to text your child you want to be able to communicate give them a flip phone flip phones are great they're made for communication the Millennials went through puberty on flip phones and that's why they're okay gen Z went through puberty on iPhones and Instagram and that's why they're not okay uh second Norm no social media before 16 I'm not saying 16 is a safe age it still will cause some damage but not nearly as much as at 13 right now in the US the law says the age of Internet adulthood is

13 that was set in Capa had nothing to do with mental health it was about when kids can make can sign contracts with tech companies to give away their data so set to 13 with zero enforcement as long as meta doesn't know that you're underage they're fine in fact until recently when you go to open an account they suggest that you were born 13 years ago and then you can change that so let's raise the age to 16 and then enforce it and thank you to the states that are doing that uh third and this

is the easiest one and the most urgent this is the one you can get done by September which is phone- free schools it's completely insane to allow phones in schools I'll show that in a moment uh and then I'll get to the next the the mor replay we'll get to in a moment um so I wrote an article in the Atlantic uh called get phones out of schools now I reviewed all the evidence on what happens when kids have phones in schools I mean if some kids are texting everyone has to check otherwise they're left

out and they and everybody else will know something that they don't know that's why as we heard Ian say um kids used to go to the bathroom a lot more uh when they had when the uh you know when they were not supposed to take out their phones but they had them the only way to stop kids from checking their phone is a Yonder pouch or a phone Locker if you just say as as my kids schools did oh we have a phone ban you're not allowed to use your phone during class you have to

keep it in your pocket you know that would be like a you know a heroin Recovery Clinic that said you can take your heroin in to the to the our facility but you must not shoot up in the bathroom um so there are all kinds of harms that come from kids having a phone in their pocket so already it was referred to this morning I think Ian referred to it that uh nape scores dropped off um because of covid you can see that drop there right we're all concerned about that and that is a big

drop but actually the drop began after 2012 because once kids have a distraction device in their pocket they're not going to they're not capable of paying full attention to a teacher they're not of paying full attention to the kids sitting next to them in the lunchroom because they have their phone in front of them they're all multitasking nobody is fully present there's a beautiful line um uh oh from Sher turl at MIT she said with because of our phones we are forever elsewhere so and it's not just academic progress that tanks when kids have phones

in their pockets it's also social belonging and inclusion so buried within the Pisa survey uh a friend in New Zealand alerted me to the fact that there are six items about like loneliness and belonging in school and what you see there is that from 2000 to the 2012 Administration there was no real change in how students responded to that this is the percent who responded above a certain threshold on six items like that but then what do we see um by 20 by the 2015 Administration most of the kids have smartphones and now they do

feel lonely in school so if you care about mental health or education by show of hands who here cares about either mental health or education raise your hands okay so this is all of you please if you have the power to do this either mandate phone free schools I know in some states that can be done I was talking with some representatives from Pennsylvania last night where you have local control you can't mandate but what what you could do is just say we'll pay the you know the $7,000 per school that it costs to have

a contract with Yonder we'll pay that um so any school that wants to go go you know do Yonder pouches will pay or if you want to buy phone lockers which is even better because Yonder pouches can be defeated just go on YouTube you'll find out how um but it but they do make a difference they're not perfect but they they are good but phone lockers are the best because they you know the kids can't get the phones out um so uh so you state reps Senators you can actually make this easy for schools to

do second if you have the power to introduce or enact laws that there a few ways to do this either raise the age for social media to 16 that's what I'm advocating in my book that we have that as a norm even if we get never get help from Congress or from from from State legislatures um that the norm should be 16 so if states can mandate that that will really that will really help it become a national Norm but I think the Utah approach of saying you know what if you're a minor you need

your parents permission I think that's also good so saying that until you're 18 you need parental permission either approach I think is good but I think we need to have a national consensus that social media is a product designed for adults zero safeguards for children it was never thought about it now is known to be very dangerous for children um we just should not have children on social media okay and then the last part of my talk uh so this is how that was how you can roll back the phone based childhood but and I

really want to emphasize this if you just take away all your kids devices and say oh this NYU Professor told me this would be good for you so I'm taking away your devices go ahead have fun look at the wall okay so you can't just do that you have to give them back a play-based childhood you have to really help them spend time with friends with other kids that's what they need to be doing so uh how can you do that um so of the four Norms how do we give far more free play and

Independence now everything I'm about to say um was either written or developed by my friend and colleague Lenor ski who wrote the wonderful book Freer range kids I urge you all to read it uh it really changed the way my wife and I raised our raised our children we trusted them more we let them out in you know in parks in New York City they had a great time um and so uh Lenor and I co-founded an organization called let grow I hope you'll all go to it let grow.org um and we have some very

very simple programs and they cost essentially nothing like zero um so here's what we put in the book Lenor helped me write these chapters on what schools can do um so if we want a playful school that is the kids are starved for play kids get very little play um con convicts in in high security prisons get more yard time than children in school do even in first grade um so there's some very simple things you can do please give or mandate or encourage longer recess think about when you were a kid how would you

how would you would you be fine with one 20-minute recess that's horrible kids need a lot more recess than they're getting and if you think well they need to work on their academics too well yeah give them more recess give them more play and they'll be able to focus more they'll be able to learn more uh and it really easy easy way that costs again almost nothing um and doesn't take away from academic time is open the playground 30 minutes before class let them run around before class rather than rushing to school getting in their

seat home room so you can add play in the morning you know you need one person to be around now don't they should not supervise you don't want someone out there blowing the whistle saying no you you know you you don't you touch him don't you just want someone in case someone gets hurt but the kids need minimally or unsupervised playtime um another program it's so simple is we call it the play Club most kids are stuffed full of after school activities piano lessons on Monday soccer practice on Tuesday you know math tutoring on Wednesday

in other words we're turning into Korea where kids have no childhood they just study all day long and this is really bad of course there are some after school activities and learning some things after school is good but what they most need is to play they need to play with each other but how do I find other kids they're all on their video games at home so we we have a manual on how to do this is very simple but you identify one day let's start with Friday Friday is the best day start with Friday

on Friday your school offers play club and parents can sign up for it it's a regular after school activity every Friday after school your kid and you know 25 other kids have play club they're just on the playground and you you put out you know loose Parts play you put things out for them to play with not just the swing set um and they will invent stuff if just give them stuff junk boxes they'll invent stuff they have an amazing time and they'll have such a good time on Friday that they're going to say to

each other hey what are you doing tomorrow and then they'll meet up and play on the weekend rather than just doing video games all weekend so it's so simple but we need a central coordinating device to help the parents do this together and finally our most powerful uh program is called the let grow experience or the let gr project originally so again go to let grow.org you'll find the instructions basically it's it's a homework assignment this is important the teacher assigns this to the kids the kids go home and they say Mom Dad I'm supposed

to do something new on my own something I haven't done before and I'm supposed to do it without you let's think of something you know I think I'm ready to walk the dog or I think I'm ready to go to the store down the street and and buy a quart of milk what do you think and then so the parents and children agree the kid does it they almost always succeed and if they fail they learn even more and then they try it again so they do it and they come back and they're just jumping

with joy I did this with my own with my own daughter they're just jumping with joy it's very exciting then they go into school and they just write write down what they did it's a leaf on a tree and they're building a tree and if you do this if you when kids do this multiple times like if you just do this 10 times 10 weeks in a row what happens uh Lenor um and and a colleague um um uh wrote an essay in the New York Times um about about what happened uh this actually reduces

anxiety was a very small sample size uh Camila Ortiz was the the colleague who did the research it was a small sample size but it's very promising and this is what the parents all say that their kid is less anxious but here's the most important part the parents are less anxious the first time you let your kid walk six blocks to get a quart of milk you're going to be like oh my God is she ever going to come home like what what if what if what if and then she comes home and then you

do it again and by the third or fourth time you do it it's like oh yeah can you go get us you know uh get go get some orange juice sure um and that's normal childhood um and then the last resource I want to give you is um uh I want to ask you to pass a reasonable childhood Independence law because in the United States it is not technically illegal to let your child out but it's ambiguous and if you send your eight or nine-year-old kid down the street to the store and a neighbor calls

because she hasn't seen an unaccompanied child since the 9s what is that thing quick call 911 and once the police get involved then they're going to refer to child protective services and before you know it you are under supervision for years to come because you let your kid out and so a lot of parents are afraid to do this especially in Suburban areas and so the safest thing is just keep them home stunt their growth so Utah was the first state we worked with Utah uh obviously Spencer Cox is fantastic on all these issues he

really wants to make Utah a familyfriendly state do you want your state to be family-friendly good place to raise kids pass one of these laws um it says that giving your child Independence cannot be taken as evidence of neglect on its own there has to be evidence of neglect um so uh Utah was first and then six other states uh have have joined and I hope that your state will be next and then finally one other one other program I want to offer you um so everything I've been talking about has been really targeted at

K through 8 especially and and I haven't said much that as much that's relevant to to high school high schools and to parents of high school kids um so in my other life I worry about uh uh political polarization the Left Right culture War America coming apart and so uh Caroline Mel a really brilliant Millennial who was working with me on some other projects um she and I came up with this project of um of of uh teaching students how other people think and originally was just what are the best ideas on the left and

the right but let's make you understand why people think that so it's designed to bridge the partisan divide and it's developed further than that it's now you know it's it's automated it's it's a it's six half hour modules they're really fun I I do them with my students at NYU um and the students say afterwards like wow now I don't feel so afraid to talk about politics with other students um so visit constructive dialogue. org uh and we the program is called perspectives um so to conclude uh this is the story that I've told you

about the international epidemic that just emerged out of nowhere around 2012 2013 um I've suggested that the reason is because our kids were weakened by the loss of play this happened in all the english- speaking countries not as much in Scandinavia so but they still have the same problem so I think this is a big part of it uh but the phones as you'll see are the phones I think are harmful on their own in any case in the United States we've weakened our kids by depriving them of the play-based childhood it's as though we

said how about if you never have any more vitamin C let's just take away vitamin C um and instead we gave them phones and the birth of a phone-based childhood I've shown you that there is damage not just to mental health but to all kinds of Social and cognitive development and academic performance and I've shown you how you especially those involved in legislation and policy at the state level can do a lot to reverse this um if we can all Embrace these norms and legislation and policies uh to support them I think that we actually

can restore adolescent Mental Health for almost no cost thank you please welcome the president and CEO of the Daniels fund Hannah [Applause] scander I think we can conclude after your um Ted talk we'll call it a TED Talk that uh your book is living proof life is not a bow of cherries so we'll just start there um it used to be but not so yes not so much anymore um but let's start at the beginning you are a social psychologist that specializes in the psychology of morality what does that mean um so when I was

in graduate school I um getting my PhD at Penn I picked the topic of morality and I began to notice that you know morality is really different around the world but yet there's so much that's similar you know if you read you know you know you read the Hebrew Bible you've got all this stuff up here in pollution and then you read in ethnography far away similar practices around Purity and pollution so I got really interested in how is it that that our brains make us respond to certain things about the world uh things like

care fairness Authority Liberty loyalty Purity um so that's what I began doing and then it turned out that um the the American left and right were becoming as different as different countries on opposite sides of the planet yeah yeah I was reflecting as you were talking do you think this is more of as you were talking about young people today is this a parenting issue or is it a social media issue how would you differentiate those so yeah so you know we're used to thinking that parents have a lot of influence on their children um

but in Psychology what we've learned in the 80s from twin studies is that we don't really shape our kids' personalities that much we do shape their values at least we used to think about the amount of stuff going from you to your child's brain 30 40 years ago you would talk to them meals let's say so you had some input you would take them to events take them to church or synagogue so parents used to have some direct input into their children's brains once they get a smartphone now you've got a thousand times more stuff

coming in from the phone and they have to pay attention to it or they're left out there really isn't much room for you to have any influence on your kids anymore I'm exaggerating obviously you can have some influence but not nearly as much as you could have 20 years ago so in a sense it's a parenting issue but this is a problem that parents can't really solve on their own I mean parents who who really try hard and are willing to put up with you know with all kinds of difficulties and are willing to monitor

I mean it's hard and my goal is to make it easy for parents who are already harried and this is also an equity issue because married parents so you know it used to be we thought oh the digital divide you know rich kids have computers and poor kids don't we need to get everybody a computer we thought not really at least not in class now it turns out that rich kids with married parents have the least screen time and the most the safest digital lives whereas single parents parents without much resource they just let the

kids be on screens all day what else are they going to do yeah so um uh yeah yeah you provided some Norms that if we Implement and and abide by these Norms things would probably be better and you alluded to your own family and your your kids how have you thought about uh in your own family did have you implemented all these Norms did you do it from the beginning did you do it mid stride was it hard easy what's it look like in your own home well so I have two kids my son is

17 and when he was two I got my first iPhone and he mastered it and I cannot believe I didn't put all my money into Apple stock on that day but um so you know he grew up playing with it and we we didn't know any better back then now I'm very lucky that my son is very high in conscientiousness responsibility self-control um so I told him he couldn't have fortnite in sixth grade when all the boys were getting on it um and that he couldn't have Instagram when everyone was getting on in sixth grade

um and and later on he thanked me on the Instagram thing although he still wishes he'd been on fortnite because that's where the boys were um so with my son fortunately his disposition is such that it's been actually easy uh my daughter has much less self-control she's much more spontaneous and fun and free and irresponsible and not conscientious and she is the sort who would have been just destroyed by Instagram and I'm so lucky that when she entered sixth grade she saw the girls on Instagram and she said these girls are really stupid I don't

want to be with them so it's actually been very easy with my daughter as well that's great great I'm not going to lie before I ask you this next question I'm just going to speak as a parent and say thank God I have a boy because some of your data is are pretty uh it's heavy it's heavy particularly for our girls and just thinking um I mean we can see the trend lines and on the other hand I feel like Teenage social pressure has always existed and bullying has been an issue for a long time

do you think it's the content on these social media apps or the platform itself and we you know and all the algorithms and all the things so this is what uh so if you've ever heard the phrase if you ever heard of Marshall mclan uh you know who was a major theorist in the 20th century when we were going through the television age so you you get a major change in technology of how people communicate you get major social changes as well and Marshall mclen Neil Postman they wrote about this brilliantly we need to all

read them today and mclen said the medium is the message and what he meant was don't pay so much attention to the words and images coming through the television set that's not what's so influential it's the fact that television makes you a passive consumer and that meant that politics became entertainment and that set the stage more for Ronald Reagan let's say so I'm just saying that it just you know uh the the nature of our engagement with technology that's almost the whole thing yeah whereas we're all thinking about the content and so parents are think

oh my God these violent video games you know we we have to stop that you know I don't like them either but I the research doesn't suggest that it's the violence that is causing the problems it's the addiction it's spending all your life doing that rather than out with other kids so don't pay so much attention to the content I don't even think much about content moderation because we're not going to tweak this and make Instagram safer for 11year old girls or even 14-year old girls we have to recognize the basic mechanism the basic platform

of millions of social comparisons in a shallow way that emphasizes your looks and your body and your skin for teenage girls is going to be incredibly harmful even if it's all nice yeah thank you um I couldn't help but think um we you've shared all the data about our young people and did a comparison for older Generations um and I was thinking of my two-year-old son who when I would pull out my phone when we were on a walk would say put phone away mom and when I didn't put it away he would say wake

up whoa so I wonder how much when you think about this yes we have a a generation that we're deeply concerned about but what about the adults now in this generation yeah so when um when the the scientific Focus was on um anxiety depression mental illness there wasn't much linking it for adults so I I I didn't look into that and I focused on teens but when I was almost done with my book and I was it was all about kids there was I felt like there's still so much more that's happening here and the

only word that I the only way to sort of put it all together was the word spiritual that is there's a kind of a spiritual degradation and starvation that a phone-based life causes now I'm I'm a Jewish atheist I'm not a religious person I belong to a synagogue U I have a lot of respect for religion anyone can see that if in the Righteous Mind um so I I thought about all that I've written and read about spiritual life and spiritual practice IES uh and I have a lot TED talks and academic articles and I

said wait a sec when you when you when an adult adopts a phone based life it makes you violate almost everything the Ancients told us about how to live a rich and good life so you know um you know judge not lest you be judged I don't think that's the motto on Twitter um and you know um religious rituals are always embodied you you know you bow you move you sing together and that con you to others I'm a fan of a durkheim religion is all about creating a community we're so lonely when we grow

up without a community and and when you grow when you grow up in a community you develop roots and you develop connections and then as an adult you can use Network so I I use Twitter it's very useful I hate it but I use it um we can use LinkedIn adults grew up in communities and then we can use networks what we're doing now is we're saying kids grow up on a network transient people people avatars people come and go you can enter effortlessly you can leave effortlessly you don't have to make relationships work out

we're trying to raise kids in networks it's like raising them in outer space it's just not going to work so anyway the point is just that a phone-based life doesn't make adults necessarily dep clinically depressed but it robs us of almost everything that you would think of as spiritual elevation or advancement love forgiveness humility patience calm mindfulness awe Joy um other other question I you shared fair amount of international data and basically you know the takeaway for me quickly was this is not just an American thing let me flip that around though were there countries

that didn't have or that don't have these trend lines did you see any anomalies and any hypothesis about the anomalies yeah so um so a lot of this work was done with my fantastic research uh um my fantastic researcher Zack Rous who has become the world's expert on on suicide stats and mental health stats around the world and so if you go to my substack the after ble substack you'll find his amazing posts going through all these countries and he so we started with the countries where we had good data and we had reason to

think that that there was a lot of individualism that there was going to be these big effects and so all the Anglo countries all the Scandinavian countries all have the same thing um some studies of Europe as a whole show much smaller effects and Asia is just very different um in Asia they don't have good mental Health the kids in Korea and Japan are not doing particularly well but they're not showing necessarily the same patterns as us so it's very different they're using different apps so I'm going to have to spend a lot of time

studying Asia but first we're just going to try to figure out the rest of Europe and here's our hypothesis from what we see so far um it's famously um southern Europe Catholic Europe people are more rooted in communities durkheim talked about this um uh Max vber talked about this the Protestant work ethic so there's a lot more individualism in the north of Europe and in the Anglo world the Protestant World well individualism is great for happiness if you also have good families and communities you're free the the world's your oyster you've got gender equality you've

got all these amazing things in the in the Protestant countries more so than than southern Europe or Catholic Europe or Eastern Europe but then when the tornado comes and everyone gets on social media it's the kids the individualistic countries they have no roots they just get whisked away whereas the kids who have to go to church every SU day and they live with their grandmother those kids didn't get whisked away and I can add in a very important point which is when you break down the American data by gender I've shown you when you do

it by politics you find all the effects are bigger for young people on the left than the right all the effects are bigger for those who don't go to church or don't have no religion they say the question is is religion how important is religion in your life and those who say not important versus those is very important so it's especially um secular liberals and especially secular liberal girls that's where you see I mean just it's just like through the roof they were just Carried Away by social media into very dark places and I think

frankly we're seeing the expression of that on campuses this month um in terms of the willingness to embrace ideologies that are bizarre uh and antisocial and divorced from reality and history thank you um Jonathan