Jonathan Haidt And Kirstie Allsopp On The Anxious Generation
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Good evening everyone and welcome to tonight's very special 5x15 event with Jonathan Haidt and Kirsty Alsop in partnership with Smartphone Free Childhood. With so many of us glued to our screens it can seem harder now than it's ever been to reconnect with what's important to rediscover time spent in the real world but as we're about to learn there is another way.

Published to huge acclaim earlier this year, Jonathan Haidt's instant bestseller, The Anxious Generation, has galvanized a global movement seeking change around smartphone usage. It cites smartphone usage as one of the most significant factors in the epidemic of mental illness among adolescents, and it's changing the conversation around teenage mental health.

We're so pleased that Jonathan is joining us today from New York to discuss his work with the brilliant Kirsty Orsopp, presenter of Location, Location, Location, Love It or List It, Kirsty's Handmade Christmas and a great advocate for these issues. I'm sure you'll have lots of questions for Jonathan today. You can post these in the Zoom Q&A box at any point during the event. We'll get to as many as we can in the last 15 minutes or so of the conversation.

You can also order your copy of The Anxious Generation from the wonderful Newham Bookshop. More information about how to do that is being posted in the chat. Finally, we'd like to thank our partners today, Smartphone Free Childhood, a grassroots movement on a mission to protect children from the harms of smartphone and social media. You can find more information about their important work in the chat as well. So without any further ado, a very warm welcome to Jonathan and Kirsty, over to you.

All right. Well, thanks so much, Jack. And thank you, Kirstie. I'm so pleased we get this chance to talk. You know, when you had your big moment in this, in the, I was going to say spotlight, but I suppose it's crosshairs for letting your son out. So many people were mailing me the articles. Oh, you got to talk to this woman. You got to talk to this woman. So I think, so for the audience, I think what we're going to do here

uh is is this i'm going to just give a brief overview of of why was there this madness surrounding kirsty's simple parenting decision where where are we with with gen z with with people born after 1995 um and then we'll get into uh what kristy did and then we'll interpret that in terms like what's going on with you know with with parenting and free-range kids

kids. So, and then I think we'll stop by 45 minutes after the hour and take, and we'll both respond to questions from the audience. So, so the big picture is this. In both of our countries, in the US and the UK, teen mental health was fairly stable from the late 90s to about 2010, 2011. There's really not any sign of a, of any trend, any big thing happening.

And then all of a sudden, around 2012, 2013, it's as though someone turned on a light switch and girls in particular, girls in both of our countries began checking into psychiatric emergency wards. They began cutting themselves, overdosing on psychiatric medications. It was a very, very sudden dawn of a youth mental health crisis in both of our countries.

And I begin to touch on that in my previous book, The Coddling the American Mind, but I didn't know whether smartphones had anything to do with it. I did talk about overprotection in that book.

Well, it turns out, since I've been studying that ever since, it turns out it's not just the U.S. and U.K. It's actually also Canada, Australia, New Zealand. All five of these main Anglosphere countries are identical. It's stunning. It's bizarre. But we all experience the exact same mental health trends at the same time in the same way. Boys are doing badly, too, and I hope we'll talk about that. But in terms of the very sudden increase in anxiety and depression, that's sharper in girls in all of our countries.

It's also happening in Scandinavia, less so in Southern Europe and Eastern Europe. And we can come back to that, the role of community and binding people in. But it's a giant sociological and mental health mystery. What happened to our kids, especially girls, in the early 2010s? And how did that set us up for a decade of weirdness and the generation that's having a lot of trouble, a lot of trouble making the transition to adulthood now? So...

In The Anxious Generation, I proposed a very simple formulation. We have overprotected our children in the real world, and we have underprotected them online. And

Almost all of the conversations I've had, whenever I talk with journalists, we spend almost all our time talking about smartphones because everyone sees the weirdness of our kids hunched over. Everyone sees the problem with smartphones. And that just requires us ultimately to take away certain technologies from our kids.

The harder part is how do we get over the overprotection in the real world? Because that requires us to overcome our fears. We have to let go. We have to let kids explore the real world. So this is the hardest one. And this is the one that doesn't usually come up as much in my conversations.

So that's why I was very pleased to accept this invitation to talk with Kirstie, because Kirstie was the news item for a number of days because she let her son Oscar take a train trip and she had the audacity to write about it.

And this is exactly what happened to Lenore Skenazy back in 2009. She is an American journalist who wrote the book Free Range Kids. She let her nine-year-old son ride the subway in New York City by himself. He wanted to try to get home by himself. And he did, and he was thrilled, and he was excited, and she wrote about it. She's a journalist.

And boy, was there a storm. And she was called America's worst mom. How dare you let your son ride the New York City subway? He could have been abducted. He could have been pushed onto the tracks. Anything could have happened to him.

And so Lenore went on to write a book called Free Range Kids. And that really influenced me and my parenting. So anyway, as I said, our countries are twinned. We're going through the same things. So let's let's work through the case. What happened to you, Kirstie? Tell the story of what happened and why you did it. Why did you let Oscar go on this trip?

I let Oscar go on this trip because that is traditionally what European children do after. As you know, in the UK, we have these things called GCSEs, which are exams you take at 15, 16, and then you stay at school for another two years and do your A-levels. And it's traditional for kids to do something really special and independent after this set of exams. That might be going to a festival. It might be going to a holiday island in Greece.

It's all sorts of things. And it's not necessarily, it's something that's across the board. Obviously, each trip depends on the finances of each family, but it's very common. When I was younger, after GCSEs, we all travelled, all my friends travelled. That's what happened. So when Oscar came to me and said, I want to go on this inter-railing trip, it never occurred to me to think it was strange because that's what we'd all done.

He's young for his year. His birthday is the 21st of August. So I've always had to swallow that a bit and bear in mind that he's going to be younger when he does things than other kids do.

Either that or I ban him from doing things with his cohort, which would be very unfair. He's very sensible. He's traveled quite widely. He had a period at school in Switzerland. He is the youngest of four boys. He's competent and confident. And I felt that, you know, there was no reason to say no. He's never been in any kind of trouble. He's never given me any reason to doubt his ability. Yeah.

So he went on this trip. He started off in Paris where there was the Olympics. Then he went to Amsterdam. He went to Barcelona. He went to Belgium. He went to Berlin. He went to all over the place.

And this was all with a friend? This was all with a friend who was over 16. And the reason he went with a friend who was over 16, because some of the hostels, the young people's hostels, have a problem if you're under 16. It's very interesting. The interrail pass is available for people between the ages of 12 and 27. Many of the European airlines allow you to fly unaccompanied from the age of 12.

So there was not obviously breaking any laws or regulations or anything like that. And he had a lovely time. And in the middle of the trip, we met up with him in Switzerland. I did a lot of laundry over the course of 48 hours. And then he went back off again for the latter part of the trip.

All great. End of the trip. I was very inspired by what he did. I don't talk about my children publicly very often. Usually ends in disaster when I do. And so I said to Oscar, do you know what? I'm going to tweet about your trip. And he said, don't mum.

People won't understand my trip. And I was like, no, don't be silly. He was right. And I was wrong. And he's been very kind about the fact that me being wrong ended in quite a sort of exposure for him. Tell us what do you mean by he was right and you were wrong? Like, so what actually happened? Obviously, people get upset on Twitter. But was that it? Was it just that some people said...

People, actually, the majority of people were supportive, very supportive. But it did create a huge amount of discussion and interest. We have a popular news radio program here in the UK called the Today Program. And within 24 hours of my tweet, they got in touch with me and said, will you come on and talk about this? I was a bit surprised.

Because it just seemed to... What's there to talk about? What's there to talk about? And there was an enormous amount of discussion. And then I got a telephone call from my local authority social services, which shocked and upset me a great deal. And they asked what safeguarding I had put in place for Oscar.

And I was very shocked and I was angry because they called me on the Thursday before the busiest weekend in the entire calendar for this area. I live in the borough of Kensington, Chelsea. We're the home of Notting Hill Carnival. So they are very, very busy that weekend. And for someone to find the time to call me about the welfare of a child is,

who would obviously come back from a trip healthy. It angered me and it angered quite a lot of other people as well. And I wrote a piece for the Mail on Sunday about my experience and about what happened.

I felt that it meant. And what's extraordinary, John, is that we'd never met or spoken, but I had read The Anxious Generation of a young man who works at your publisher, who knows me, had sent me a copy of the book. Oh, wow. Because he knew that I had often tweeted about free range parenting. And so I did tag you into my original tweet because I was a

I believed in what you were saying and I believed in what Lenore was saying. And I have, in all, I've got two step-sons who are now 25 and 22. And I have two sons of 18 and 16. And I have always believed that the way in which I was brought up, which was to be able to widely go around the lanes of Wiltshire in the countryside on my bicycle with my brother, free as birds,

was the right thing and that children could only learn by themselves because they have to have their own experiences. Much as we might want to learn with them or for them, much as we might want them to learn from our mistakes, they can't. I always use the analogy of the iron. We've all been in a situation with a child where we've told them that something is hot, but

They have to reach out and touch that thing for themselves. And that is a necessary part of growth. And I've always believed that and felt that. And it was no different with this experience for Oscar.

Wow. So, I mean, you're absolutely right about learning from experience. We can lecture our kids all we want, but human beings, our brains are neural networks. We engage with the world and it's when we get feedback, especially about success and failure. That's what tunes us up. Lectures go over our heads. At the same time, we are learning from adults by just having a sense of what are they doing and sort of what is the right way to behave in our culture. And on

Unfortunately, that's what a lot of our kids have lost because we don't let them out to observe adults, to observe what happens in the world. We keep them home with us. And then we put them in front of a screen where now they're getting tuned up by random weirdos on the internet who are selected by algorithm on a social media platform. But let's just dig a little deeper into your story. You said that it was normal when you were young for 16-year-olds to go interrailing across Europe. Mm-hmm.

And it was normal to wander around your town and, you know, play ball and go to the candy store and things like that as it was in America. Now, in America, we have a lot more crime and we had a huge crime wave here in the 70s and through the 80s. It ended in the 90s. So I grew up, all people my age and younger, we grew up during a giant crime wave, but we all went outside and played. It's

Tell me what happened in the UK. Are you telling me that it was, was it like a gradual drop in both in a, in a small town like yours or in London or other cities? Like today, do you still see kids out playing or has that changed? Has that gone away? You don't often see unaccompanied children, to be honest. My children did walk to school and they had other friends who walked to school. But, yeah,

I mean, we've never had, because of the ways that our houses are with all the gardens at the back, we haven't had that front yard culture that you've had. But children did used to walk to the shops by themselves. And I became aware, particularly because friends of ours used to come and stay in Devon.

and we had a local sweet shop and I used to let the children walk to the local sweet shop as long as they were two together that was fine and uh I did actually one day come home and the boys were walking back up the drive and they were in their pajamas I put my foot down at that point I said boys it's absolutely fine you're not to go in your pajamas um but they uh

I saw what would happen is people come and stay and I would say, oh, the kids are going to go and, you know, go to the, there was a playground very near to where the sweet shop was. And parents would be surprised at that and anxious about it.

Yeah. Yeah. So it sounds like, you know, what's happened, what happened to you is that you, you did something that was perfectly normal when you were young. And there's a lot of psychological evidence to support everything you've said. Kids need gradual independence. They need to become self-supervising. The only way they can learn to do that is by being self-supervising.

In America, kids come to college at the age of around 18. They come to university. And a lot of them have really never been out. They've done very little on their own and they're having trouble adapting to being self-supervising at university. So it sounds like in the UK, as in the US, you have people who have not seen an unaccompanied eight or nine-year-old in 20 years. And it freaks them out. It freaks them out. From what I hear, it sounds like

the anger goes especially to mothers. So if a father is, you know, exposing the kid to risk, oh, he's toughening them up. But there seems to be a real, almost a cruelty in savaging mothers who don't anticipate every possible threat. Do you feel that in the UK? Well,

Well, it's extraordinary that you say that, John, because this is the first time I've said this. I was amazed by the fact that I got so few messages and it's as if he was. Well, no, it was just that people didn't ask what his father's opinion was on the episode. It is if I'd made that choice all by myself and not discuss it.

I am definitely the more cautious of the two of us. You know, my partner is 10 years older than me. He was the youngest child in his family and his parents were both immigrants. His father was brought up in India, his mother in South Africa, and they were very robust parents. You know, his father joined the Arctic convoys when he was 16 at the end of the second world war. So, and his mother, my mother-in-law traveled over here from South Africa. So,

You know, we are definitely more cautious than how... Yes. But it was... You're so right. It was so focused on my mothering choice. And nobody said...

What about his dad? What did he think about it? Yeah, that's right. That's right. And so and so that's what that's what we're trying to do at Let Grow. So I'll just I'll just add in as I began to see how serious this problem was in the United States, I went to Lenore Skenazy with with a friend, Daniel Shookman, in 2017. And we said, Lenore, you've got this great book, Free Range Kids. You've got the right message. This is what everyone needs to hear.

We have to give you a bigger platform. You can't just be an author with a book traveling around now and then. We need you to have an organization. And so we co-founded Let Grow. So if people go to letgrow.org, we have, it's Lenore Skenazy is the president.

And we have all kinds of amazing materials. So, well, actually, well, we'll get to that in a moment. Like, what can you do to change the culture? But that's what we're after. We're trying to make it safe, normal, legal and fun to give kids independence. And it sounds like your son had a blast and came out better for it. So so that's that's what we're trying to do. Let's see. Do you remember, John, the feeling that you had the first time you were allowed to go out alone?

I can't remember the first time because, you know, when I was growing up in the suburbs of New York City, it was, you know, first or second grade, which is about age six, around age six. I do remember, you know, walking down to, you know, the village of Scarsdale, which is about less than half a mile away, walking down with my sister there.

And it was like we were, you know, exploring, you know, a rainforest. It was like we were exploring an unknown, you know, it was so exciting. And some of my most exciting memories of childhood are that my sisters and me and a few of our friends

We would go down. This is beginning, you know, my younger sister at the time was probably six or seven and I was eight or nine. But we would go down to that village, that little commercial area of our town after dark when all the shops were closed and you could run around the blocks and there was a, there was a, um,

a passageway through one of the blocks. So, so we played tag at night around the town. And that was just totally normal. And, and, and those are some of the most thrilling memories. I also remember other things that stand out are my friend, my best friend and I, this is probably about fourth or fifth grade. So about nine or 10 years old, we cut through a church parking lot and the kids in the church school didn't like that. And they taunted us and threw rocks at us and we threw rocks back at them and boys being boys,

We agreed, how about we meet tomorrow and continue this rock fight? And so we did. And, you know, we had rules like you can't aim for the head. But this is what boys need to do. Boys need to practice coalitional competition. You can call it coalitional violence if you want. You can call it sports if you want. But boys really need to develop the sort of the camaraderie teamwork and they come together best in competition with others.

That's one thing. The other big thing is exploration. All kids are interested in the world, but boys do tend to roam further away. Boys are just more programmed to be interested in exploring the physical space far away. Girls are more focused on the social world. Girls have much more elaborate, detailed social maps of who's related to who, who's fighting with who. Boys are a little clueless about that.

But boys love to explore. And that's what I really had the explore bug all the way through. I did my first interrail trip across Europe after university. So I was 21 at the time. I traveled alone for two months all over Europe and down to Morocco. And that too was one of the most thrilling things I'd ever done. And I grew so much from it. So anyway, the point is,

When you talk, look, as you just did with me, you asked me for some memories and they come pouring out and it's so exciting. This is what always happens when I talk with audiences of parents who would never let their kids out before the age of 12 or 13. In America now, it's around 11 or 12 is when we let our kids out unsupervised.

And I go through this with them and say, remember your own childhood. And you can't stop them talking. Like they're laughing, they're telling each other their stories. So this was childhood. This is the best part of childhood. This is an incredibly nutritious part of childhood. Independent exploration, adventure with risk. Let me say that again, with risk. Risk turns out to be

an essential ingredient. If you give kids experience without risk and they never face risk until they're 18, you're crippling. They're not going to grow into competent people. They have to be able to face small risks, make decisions for themselves, and then they learn to face larger risks. What do you think? I couldn't agree more. And I've suddenly remembered when you were speaking, you asked me when I kind of realized that things had changed in the UK. And I've remembered when it was.

I went to Norway to film my Christmas show. And the Norwegian people give the British people a Christmas tree every year. And I went to the ceremony in which that tree is cut down. There were two school groups and they were all dressed very sensibly, you know, all outdoor clothes, suits, boots, everything. And there was a fire and each child was given a sharp stick and a sausage stick.

And they all roasted their sausage and ate their sausage. Then they basically ran around poking each other with the sharp stick, putting it back in the fire, making it all hot, trying to, you know. And there was a wood and a stream and they were all jumping about. And I stood there with my colleague and I looked at this group of children and I thought my children would not be allowed to do that if they were out with their school.

And I felt deeply sad. And it was a really strong realization that that just wouldn't be allowed. That the idea of children and sharp sticks and fire and running around in a wood was just too much. And I do think there is a huge part to play in this with the insurance industry and the legal profession.

And I think that's something we need to address is that increasingly schools and organisations that are about play and adventure are becoming so cautious and so scared that

And that fear of lawsuits and being accused of being part of the injury or, God forbid, death of a child has started to dominate. Yes, I think that's exactly right. There are a number of reasons why we changed.

So one of the big ones is the one that you just said. Now, I'm especially sad for you in the UK because in America, we have more crime, more reasons to worry than you do. And we have many more lawyers than you do. We have a much more litigious culture. So it's very hard to change things in America. But I'm saddened to hear that the same thing that you're, you know, I guess as in so many things, you know, we develop these terrible ways of living in the US and eventually for one reason or another, they spread throughout the world.

But I think you're right to put your finger on the institutions because at least in the United States, parents can often, I think they're allowed to sue public schools. They can sue anybody for anything is the rule. You can sue anyone for anything. You may not win, but you can sue anyone for anything, anytime.

And because of that, every principal, so like my kids went to New York City public schools. My daughter is in high school now. My son just graduated. And the playground that they had in elementary school, now it's a relatively small playground. You know, it's an urban school, relatively small playground. But they had rules like no running, no touching, no wrestling, right?

And those were the best parts of recess when I was a kid. My friends, we'd wrestle all the time. We'd put our arms around each other. And so you take away almost all the real physical contact, all the rough and tumble. And boys especially need rough and tumble play. This is true for, you know, for many species, not just human kids. So we take that all away. And I think you're right to put your finger on institutions because...

What is the right level of risk? What is the right number of injuries you want on the playground in a given year? It's not zero. If it's zero, that means you're being way too cautious. If no one's ever banging their head or skinning their knee or having to go to the school nurse, you're being way too cautious. The kids are not getting enough risk. And the heads of the schools are so concerned. If a kid ever gets hurt, I could get in trouble. The school could get in trouble. And so it's a one-way ratchet down.

That's why I think what we need to do is we need a norm change in what seems normal. Because of course,

in a lawsuit, in a jury trial, the jurors are going to have their intuitions. What? You mean you let the kids run around with sharp sticks? Oh, you should never have done that. You're guilty. But if we can get a culture change to the point where everyone understands, you know what? We need to let kids take small risks. It's bad for us to be supervising them all the time. Then maybe we give the heads of those institutions a little room to step back and give the kids freedom more like Norway. As far as I can tell,

the insane overprotection, the insane helicopter parenting, snowplow parenting, concierge parenting, whatever you want to call it, it's spreading across the Anglosphere. New Zealand, when I was there, I think it was the last...

English-speaking country that would let kids climb trees at recess. Like, it's unthinkable in America that a school would ever let a kid climb a tree during recess if there was a tree out in the playground. But even New Zealand, I hear, is succumbing. Whereas the Germanic countries, the Scandinavians and the Germans, the Northern Europeans, they still let their kids out. So they have a big advantage. Now, I was talking with a Finnish journalist recently

And I said, don't you let your kids out? And she said, oh yeah, we do, we do. But now you'll see an eight-year-old walking around outside, staring down at his phone. Which is so dangerous. That is the thing, is that you are so much more likely to get run over when you've got a smartphone. Because you're...

You're looking at it. That's right. And sex predators, meeting a sex predator. You know, when I was a kid, there were things called flashers. There were men who would flash. You know, I haven't heard of that in a long, long time, but it was a thing in the 70s. And those were, you know, they were perverts and sexual predators. And we didn't used to lock them up. But now we do. We lock them up. You almost never hear about them.

But also, you don't hear about them because they're all on Instagram. That's where they went. They're all on social media because I shouldn't say all, but the great majority are on social media. The Wall Street Journal had all kinds of reporting on this about Instagram facilitating child sexual abuse material among pedophiles. So this idea that we're keeping our kids safe, if we don't let them out for experience, we keep them at home on a screen talking with strangers all around the world who might sextort them. It's completely bonkers what we have done to childhood.

It's very interesting that you say that about the Scandinavian countries, the Germanic countries, because as I mentioned, my sons went to school in Switzerland for a few what you'd call semesters, what we call terms. And I was amazed by the difference there.

You don't have to sign any forms. And tell us about it. Well, in the UK, if there's a trip, there's all sorts of forms to be filled in. And, you know, the teachers have to do all sorts of things.

In Switzerland, if a teacher wants to walk out of the classroom with another teacher and a large group to go up a hill or teach outside or... Go to a dairy farm. Exactly. Go to a dairy farm. I remember my son once went on a trip to the local police station. And the only reason I knew about that trip is because he was sick and I had to come and pick him up because he'd puked up in the police station. But the fruit...

The freedom of that and the freedom of the teachers. And it's also, it empowers teachers. They have authority. The children respect that. The teachers are the ones in charge. I think...

one of the damaging things about this idea that we sue teachers and sue schools and all of this is that somehow it gives the kids too much power. That's right. And that isn't a good thing. And it was very marked, the difference between Swiss school and UK school. And don't get me wrong, I was very happy with the school that my children went to. They were as free as they could possibly be. But

It wasn't anything in comparison to the Swiss. And what was extraordinary about Switzerland is that the first day I went to pick up my sons from their new school in Switzerland, I turned up and they weren't there.

And they had gone down the little hill to the coffee shop and they were all milling around outside the coffee shop because I didn't need to sign them out. They were free to walk out of school. And I mean, yes, there are different safety aspects, but it was an extraordinary contrast. Yeah, that's right. So let me add on one more reason why our country's changed and it'll relate to what you just said.

So there is a wonderful British sociologist named Frank Ferrati who wrote a book called Paranoid Parenting back in like 2000, 2001, something like that. And he goes through the madness that descended in Britain in the 90s. And it's just like what happened in America in the 90s. And his analysis, he doesn't talk so much about the lawyers. He has this very interesting sociological explanation, which is,

What happened in the 90s in both of our countries was what he says, the collapse of adult solidarity. And what that means is that for centuries before, and certainly throughout the 20th century,

If kids were out as I was with my friends on our bicycles all around town, if I had wiped out and was bleeding and banged my head, we didn't have phones back then. Everybody knew. My friends could just go knock on a door and say, excuse me, miss, can you call his mom? And we know that adults will help out. Adults help out with other people's kids. We're not afraid of the adults in our town anymore.

getting close to our children or talking to them. We used to ask for directions all the time. My kids are, I can't get them to ask anyone for directions. They're just so afraid of talking to a stranger danger. That's right. That's right. So especially in the Anglo countries, we had, because we did have sexual abuse scandals. Now, some of them were very real.

in the Catholic Church, in the Boy Scouts. So there were longstanding sexual abuse that was covered up. And so it was very important that we prosecuted that, that we warned the kids, that we teach the kids to tell us right away, even if the man says don't tell. But a lot of them were also fake. There was such paranoia that there was this, the idea that daycare centers full of young women who love kids, that these were somehow sexually abusing the kids. That was complete nonsense, but it freaked everyone out.

And we started in both of our countries wanting to have video cameras in the daycare center so we can check up on it. We don't trust them. And that's the exact opposite of what you just described in Switzerland, where the teachers can teach and the parents trust the teachers and they're not monitoring. We're not going to sue them.

So that is the other big change. And that is going to make it harder for us to fix this. But I want to turn our conversation to what we do to fix this. Unless, do you have any other comments on that? Or should we turn to... No, no, no. I'm fascinated to know how best you think we should fix it. Okay. So given what we've been talking about here, and given that we now have norms for us, we have smaller families. So there aren't lots of kids around anymore. Our kids are mostly inside, whereas they used to be outside. Right.

much more. And we don't trust our neighbors as much as we did. So for all these reasons, it's going to be very hard. You know, what I really want to do, we have, I see we have 270 people on this call. The great majority, I'm sure our parents probably have relatively young kids. And I think, you know, what we want to do is we want to encourage people to their kids have the kind of independence that you gave to your kids, that Lenore gave to her kids, that we, that I write about in the anxious generation. And we can't just say,

Go send your kids out. The phrase in America that older people always say is, get out of here. Don't come back until dinnertime or don't come back until the streetlights come on. Once it gets dark, you come home, but you don't come back until then. Get out of here.

And so we can't just say that because if we kick our kids out for three hours, there's nobody out there to play with. And if they find another kid, he's being supervised and he's on his phone probably. So it's useless. So what this means is we have to be much more deliberate, more intentional, more strategic to give our kids these opportunities, just as you did. You found a great one for a 16-year-old, obviously not appropriate for a 12-year-old, but what you did was great for a 16-year-old, 15, 16-year-old.

So let me suggest this as the most powerful technique we have at Let Grow. It's this great, great

project. It's so simple. It's called the Let Grow Experience. And I urge everyone, go to letgrow.org and you'll see it, the Let Grow Experience. All it is, is this. You can do it at home, but it's designed for schools. So the teacher, let's say, for us, third or fourth grade, it's really any grade, first through eighth, which is age about six through 12, 13.

But let's take, so eight-year-olds, most of the kids are eight years old. That's a good age, I think, to have people going out. The teacher gives them a piece of paper that says the instructions. And the instructions are, go home, talk to your parents, come up with something that you think you can do by yourself. Something that you've never done before that you can do yourself with your parents' permission, but without your parents' permission.

And then we give some examples. Maybe, perhaps, maybe you've never walked the dog before by yourself. Maybe you've never gone to a corner store or a store down the street to buy a quart of milk. Maybe you've never made dinner. Maybe you've never done your own laundry. So we suggest a bunch, but the kids come up with all kinds. The kids and the parents together come up with all kinds of things. And so a couple of things about this are super duper powerful. So the kid does it and

And then they are usually thrilled. Sometimes they fail, which is great too, because they've learned from failure. And then they make the cake. Some of them, like they make a cake, you know, and it's really hard to make a cake and it comes out terrible the first time, but then they do it again and they've mastered it.

The most exciting ones to me are the ones where the kid goes to a store, where the kid goes or walks, you know, a quarter mile to a friend's house. Those are the most exciting because what happens in those is the kid is often a little nervous and anxious, and then they do it, and then it's overcoming that nervousness. That's what makes you more confident. You're now less nervous the next time. And before you know it, you're confident enough to walk around your neighborhood.

But here's the really powerful thing. Two other really powerful things. One is that the parents are super anxious the first time the kid is out of their sight. And that's very important because if...

If you're anxious and then your kid does it and survives, and not only that, but they always have the reaction that your son did. They're so thrilled. They're jumping up and down. They're so excited when they succeed. When the parent sees that, then the next time they're less anxious. And so what the Let Grow experience does is it treats anxiety in the kids. It makes them less anxious, more confident. But it also treats anxiety in the parents.

And here's the third thing it does, which is also super powerful. When you do it as a school, you're resetting the norms in your town.

Because imagine, because no one in your town or mine, no one has seen an eight-year-old walking on their own, you know, since 1994, let's say. But if a town does this, if all the schools in the town do this for eight-year-olds or nine-year-olds, then suddenly everyone is seeing eight-year-olds walking to the store and paying for a quart of milk or a candy bar and walking home and surviving. Right.

And so this is what I mean when I say we have to be a lot more deliberate. We have to have thoughtful interventions to change these norms so that everyone feels the freedom to make their own parenting decisions. In America, many of us are more afraid of our neighbors reporting us than we are of kidnappers coming to kidnap our kids if they're walking down the street. So do you think that would work in British schools? Can you see them doing that?

I think it would be really, really wonderful. And I think it is something. It's very interesting what you were saying.

I completely agree that I think doing something alone, you know, with your sibling or with your dog or with your next door, with a friend is fine. But just going on that first trip to the, I remember when both my boys went on their first solo trip to the supermarket. Were you nervous? Yes, I was nervous. I, I, I'll admit something, John, I am nervous.

quite nervous quite often. And I fight that in myself because I did read a lot about the importance of independence when I was younger. I was very homesick as a child. I went away to boarding school when I was quite young, when I was eight, didn't enjoy it at all. Luckily my mum brought me home, but I, I battle with it. I've always battled with it. I, I,

And so I totally understand the desire to hold one's children close. I received an amazing message from a journalist when there was all the furor around Oscar's travels. And she had lost her son when he was 21 in a tragic, very simple accident in their hometown. And she said one of the things that

that brought her some comfort was the fact that she had allowed her son to enjoy his life to the full in the short period that he had. And she said, I'm glad I let him live a free life because, you know,

And I believe that so often we cannot see into the future. And in my case, whenever my children have been hurt, it's so often the things which I didn't anticipate. Right. You know, I've been to what we call A&E,

And numerous times you've got four boys, you know, two sons, two step sons, they ski, they go on motorbikes, bicycles. One of them rides absolutely brilliantly, you know, they break things. And so I've had that experience and I've had the terror of seeing my child go on to general anaesthetic because he had to have an arm reset and all of that stuff.

So I do feel the anxiety. It's not that I'm some kind of person who just doesn't feel it, but...

I believe in the importance of the freedom. And I believe everything you've said and many others about that their happiness, independence and resilience comes from them feeling joy in their own independence. Beautifully put. I'll add on my own experience. I'm not generally very anxious. I'm not generally overprotective. My wife is much more cautious, much more concerned about risk.

But even still, I did as you did. Like, you know, I read Lenore Skenazy, like, okay, we've got to send them out independently. And the first time we sent my son when he was, I guess, eight or so, just across the street from our apartment building into a supermarket that he'd been in many times. The first time I sent him to pick up something and gave him some cash, I followed him.

I followed him behind and I went to the supermarket to see if I was nervous. And the first time, then my daughter, she was only six or seven. My wife gave her a lunch for me to bring to my office.

which is just two blocks away here in New York City. But she had to cross a street, which is somewhat busy. And, you know, she said she can do it. And, you know, we'd seen her do it before. And I was nervous. And I went out and I spied on her because I didn't, you know, I was...

I was nervous too. So it's totally normal to be nervous. The first time you let your little bird fly from the nest without you there, it's totally normal to be nervous. And if you give into that, if you take that nervousness as a sign that you're doing something wrong, you don't do it, you're preventing your baby bird from ever learning to fly. So we have to change this. We have to change the norm. Now let's just link this a little bit to just briefly to the phone side of things. And then we'll open it up for questions.

The main point I want to make here is that, actually, I'll just give, so here are the four norms that I talk about in The Anxious Generation. We all got trapped into this because of what everyone else is doing. We can't let our kids out anymore because no one else does. We have to give our kids a phone when they're 10 years old in America, 10 or 11. In Britain, five or six. It's insane how your age of first smartphone is several years younger. It's terrifying. Yeah, terrifying. When I was there last, Ofcom found...

25% of your five to seven-year-olds have a smartphone. Well, once most kids have a smartphone, then your kid comes to you and says, mom, everyone has one. I have to have one. They're making fun of me. So because we got into this mess because of a collective action pressures, a collective action trap, the way out is through collective action. With four norms, we can roll back the phone-based childhood.

Those four norms are no smartphone before age 14. Just give them a flip phone or a basic phone if you need to contact them. But no, don't give them the internet in their pocket. Two is no social media before 16. We've got to raise the age. Governments have to raise the age. Australia might be leading on this. So just raising the age, put some burden on the companies to verify. There are lots of ways they can do that.

The third norm is phone-free schools. And this one is thrilling. This is happening all over the UK, all over the US. It really is. Because the teachers have hated the phone since they first came out. They can't reach the kids. The kids are playing video games and watching porn during class. So anyway...

Phone-free schools is the third norm. And the fourth norm is far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world, which is what we've been talking about. Now, the link between them is if you are taking away the phones and delaying so that the kids aren't spending their whole... You only get one childhood, and if you spend most of it on a phone, you're missing out on most of your childhood. But if we take away the screens to some extent, we

We can't just let the kids sit there at home looking at the walls. I mean, yes, they could read books. That would be nice, but they're not going to read books eight hours a day. We have to give them back adventure and excitement in the real world. And if we give them adventure and excitement in the real world from the age of eight or nine, and they have a smartphone with them, what do they do? They sit down on a bench, possibly next to another kid, but they're all on their phones. They're not having adventures. They're not playing. They're not getting the benefit. So you have to do both sides. You have to do the screen limitations.

But you have to replace that with a fun, exciting childhood that gradually gets you ready to be an independent, functioning young adult, one able to travel across Europe at the age of 16. I think that's actually, for Europeans, I think that'd be a very good benchmark. Is your kid ready to take some sort of a train trip on their own at the age of 15 or 16?

So I think that's how we do it. Yeah, it's very interesting how many people got in touch with me and said that their child had never, you know, traveled alone. I mean, you know, I had a very costed, adored childhood. But when I was nine, my mother had my sister and my dad was working in London. We were living in the countryside. I walked to the end of our drive, which was quite a long walk.

A local lady picked me up who was being paid by a local authority to pick up another child, drove me into our local town. And there I caught the bus from Hungerford to Newbury. That was when I was nine. There is no way on God's earth there is any nine-year-old in the UK or the US doing that today. Not today, but in a few years, yes. That's what we want to do. We want to make it safe so that anyone who wants to do it, they won't be alone. We're not going to change everyone's mind in three or four years.

But if we can get 20% of parents to be on board with us, then nobody will be alone. There'll be other kids, there'll be other families, and then your kids won't feel alone. That's when childhood gets really exciting. If you're giving your kid a free range childhood and you can agree with the parents of your kid's best friends, well, now you've got a group, a gang. That is the most exciting thing of all. So, okay. We, uh, we only have, I think, 13 more minutes. Let's take a few questions.

Can you see a question there? Let's see. Oh, yeah, I can. Yeah, actually, yeah, I can click on that. I've got some questions. The first one, it says, please, could you give some age-appropriate examples of small risks we could give our children? I think...

they should go to the website, the let grow.org. And they will. Yeah. I would say, yeah, no, some others that I would say is just letting them play unsupervised in the backyard, even just letting them play, you know, when they're very young, letting them play unsupervised, you know, in your, in your basement or, or other part of your house, just, just, you know, when they're, when they're two, three and four, I'm not saying two, three and four year olds, they, they, you know, can pull down a cabinet on top of them. I'm not saying that.

But I think around seven or eight, I think we should develop a norm of out by eight. Like at eight, kids really can handle it. Give them some responsibility, some chores, some things to do in the world where they're unsupervised. That's the key thing is that they're unsupervised for at least a little bit. And then gradually you can expand that. I also think one of the things that's happened is we've become very frightened of sharp objects.

When I was a kid, I did things with knives. My God, my brother had a collection of pen knives. And, you know, you hadn't lived until you'd cut yourself quite a few times. That's right. When I was a kid, a Swiss army knife was my favorite toy. And now Lenore tells stories of families in which a 11 or 12 year old has never cut their own steak because knives are sharp. So mommy does it for them. Yeah.

Yes, a 12-year-old can handle a steak knife. A nine-year-old can handle a steak knife. You teach them how to do it. The worst thing that would happen is that they would cut themselves. They're not going to die. It's very rare that they'll do that. But as with the burning example, kids can learn how to handle a knife. They've been doing it for literally hundreds of thousands of years. This question is, are all smartphones the problem, or do you think some options are better than others for less addictive usage, et cetera? Oh, absolutely. Perhaps.

Right. Okay. Oh, yeah. No, just, yeah, just briefly. A lot of people seem to think that the choice is, do you give your kid a smartphone or are you going to just have them out there and you can't reach them? And I really want to make a big, big distinction between basic phones or flip phones, which is what the millennials had. The millennial generation grew up with flip phones. You use it to text and call other people. That's it. That's all you can do with it. Text and call other people that you know.

Whereas once you give them a smartphone, data just came out from Snapchat because they're being sued by 30 different states in the U.S.,

their own internal documents showed they're getting 10,000 reports of sextortion every month. 10,000 reports of kids who are sick or young people who are sextorted. They got tricked into sharing a naked photo of themselves or some other sexually compromising material. And now someone's demanding money. 10,000 a month. And that is a small number because those are just the ones that are reported to them. And what do they do about it? Nothing. They tell the people, if they respond at all, they say, well, you should block the person.

So this is what's insane, is giving our kids a thing in their pocket that connects them to the world. That might sound nice, but that means the world can get to them. Everyone who wants to sex-stort a child, who wants to exchange sexual photos, it's just completely insane to do this to children. And we're so afraid to let them out in the world because we think they'll be kidnapped. Yeah. I mean, there aren't that many naked people walking up and down our street as there are on any phone. That's right. Yeah, that's right.

This is an interesting question, but it's particularly UK. We've recently moved our children into private school where we have found they're given far more freedom and opportunity to take age-appropriate risk. Why can private schools do this but state schools not? Is it a cultural difference or do state schools have more red tape around them which is stopping them from letting children have more freedom? This would lead me to a question of how do...

How do we involve governments and local governments? How do we make this a political imperative?

Yes. So what we've done in the U.S. at Let Grow, one of our biggest successes is we drafted a law, a responsible independence law that's that and seven we've gotten eight states now to adopt it. The law simply says that giving your child reasonable independence cannot be considered child abuse or child neglect. Right.

It's insane that you have to say that, but we put it in law in eight states, which means that if a neighbor calls the police on you because your son was walking to a park, the state can't prosecute. They can't put you in jail. They can't take away your child. They can't put you into the purgatory of child protective services. So I don't know what the legal equivalent would be in the UK. Weirdly, we've never had a law. There's no law in the UK, which is the youngest age that you can leave a child alone. So we don't have quite the same problem, I guess,

but a lot of people think there are laws where there aren't any. One of the things that I often talk to people about is what age did you start babysitting? Yes, yes, that's right. It was 12 for me. Yeah. And what age would you now allow a babysitter to babysit your child? And that has shot up. Yeah, that

That's right. That's completely insane. Let's see. Wait. Oh, what was it going to... What was it going to... Oh, just tell me about the case of if you drive to a store and you leave your eight-year-old child in the car while you go in for five minutes to pick up something. Is that something British people will do and not worry about? Or is there a chance you could get in trouble for that? You wouldn't get in trouble for it. Okay, thank God. As far as I'm aware. Okay, yeah. In the US, you can't do that because someone can call the police and, you know, like...

But the child could have suffocated in the car. Well, they could just open the window. My eight-year-old knows how to open a window. So that's good that you don't have that level of insanity as we do. It is extraordinary, the infantilizing of children, the assumption of it. That's right. Now, John, I've got a question here. It says, and this I think is particularly for you, hi, how can I get the phone out of my 16-year-old's hands when he is now so totally addicted without it destroying our relationship?

Yeah, no, that is a great question. It's one I get a lot because it's so easy to tell parents of young children, just delay, don't let it get, don't let them get into the phone-based childhood. But of course, everyone who's 13, 14 or older is deeply in it. So for there, for that, I would say the thing to do that we all should do is structure, you still get to set the rules in your house,

What kids are terrified of is not being restricted. It's being cut off from their friends, being cut off from the social life that is their lifeblood. And so imagine structuring your day like this, having rules like this. The phone, all phones, all screens, laptops, everything out of the bedroom at, say, 10 p.m. Because that's when I'm told that's when the worst stuff happens, the grooming and extortion. It's especially overnight. The kid is on at night. So all screens out from at 10 p.m.

Okay, then in the morning you might say, you don't get your phone until you head off for school or you don't get it, 'cause what my students do here at NYU, the very last thing they do before they close their eyes is check their messages.

and DMs and social media. And then the very first thing when you open your eyes in the morning, same thing. So they're doing it all day long. If we can compress that time so they're not doing it from 10 p.m. to 8.30 a.m. or maybe they're going to check on their way to school or on the bus or whatever it is.

But now you've given them a window of like, you know, eight hours, nine hours in which they're not on. Their brain can begin to adapt to the real world. Okay. Now, then your kids are in school for six hours. Push like hell. Push really hard to get your school to be phone free. I see we have a question here about Eaton where the boys are on iPads whenever they want. And, of course, terrible things happen. The school must be phone free. That gives them six hours. Now,

Then after school, what happens? Well, it's looking like the best thing your kids can be doing is team sports. That's always been healthy, but it's physical, it's with a group, and then they can't be using their phones. So now they've basically been off

from 10:00 PM all the way through 5:00 or 6:00 PM the next day. And they come home for dinner. Of course, at dinner, you must have a rule, no phones at all at the table. Even if someone wants to look up something that we're talking about, no, we do not bring out phones at the table.

So if you do it this way, now you really just have the evening is what you have to regulate. And, you know, of course, they need their computer for homework. They, you know, you can let them have the phone for, you know, for a while. But what we really need to break out of is the always on. In America, half of our teens say that they are online almost all the time. So even if they're talking to you, they're actually thinking about work.

with the drama. And then as soon as they can, they're going to weigh in on the drama that's going on. So that would be my main piece of advice. Structure the day to at least keep reducing it so that it doesn't take over all their waking hours. I might also add what I'm really guilty of is not practicing what I preach.

And that is a problem I find because I get messages from work. I use social media for my work. And I do at times find it difficult to practice what I preach. And it's definitely something that one needs to have an open conversation with the kids about is we're expecting you to be phone free. Yes, we are adults. We have a different relationship with our phone. But let's be honest about

we're not always on our phones for work. And we're not always on our phones for communication with our friends or our siblings. There are times when we do doom scroll and do all the things that we don't want our kids to be doing. And I think we have to be sort of honest about what we do. And I think that

That really helps. Yeah. No, I think that's right. But I don't think our kids... Our kids aren't copying us. Now, when they're very little, they do. But when they're teenagers, they're, you know, if I start reading The Economist magazine, the last thing my daughter's going to do is feel that she should read The Economist magazine. So...

But what we do need to model, what I think is very important is when you're with a person, you're with the person, you don't let the phone interrupt. And so a lot of us do, especially with younger kids, what's called continuous partial attention. Oh, you know, we're reading a story. Oh, yes, look, the dragon. But we're checking other things. That is a terrible thing to model. That is pushing away the kid. That is showing them that you're not responsive to them. So I think we really we need to avoid the continuous partial attention. We need to model that.

presence, connection, um, being with the people that we're with. That's the, that, that I think is very, very important. Um, but I don't, don't think that your kids are copying you just because you do it, even though they will point it out because they're very good legal reasoners and they will try to get out of something by saying, but you do it, you do it. Yeah. So, yeah, no, that's absolutely true. Um, uh, I think that, um, it, uh, it's the thing about the, um, uh,

I recently, one of the boys weren't responding. I sent them a text message on WhatsApp and I didn't get a reply. And someone said, well, WhatsApp them. They always use WhatsApp to message. And so I set up, not WhatsApp, Snapchat. I set up a Snapchat account. Oh my giddy aunt, the number of alerts they send. It is constant. It's,

staggering and I think a lot of us talk about phone free and everything without entirely realising how many thousands of pushes and interruptions they are getting it blows

It blows my mind to think, I mean, I can't concentrate with all of that going on, nevermind the kids. - That's right. So let's end with this last question here, which is my 13 year old feels left out because she is the only one without TikTok, Instagram. I'm not gonna allow access. Is there any sensible compromise?

To the point that you just made, Christy, once you let your kid on, it's going to expand like a gas to fill everything. It's going to have push notifications. My 14-year-old daughter keeps asking for Snapchat because she's the only one. Everyone else in our high school has Snapchat.

But as we learned about Snapchat, there's just so much terrible stuff happening on Snapchat. I ask my students, should I give my daughter Snapchat? And most of them say, no, don't do it. And I would say the same to this parent. Don't give your kid TikTok or Instagram. Now, what you should do, if you possibly can, is to see if there's anyone else in your daughter's circles who will, the parents will go, will do this with you.

All of this is so hard when you're doing it on your own. And my congratulations to the parents who have the strength to do it on their own, despite the really ferocious pushback from their kids. But if you can at all get a small group to do it together, that takes off a lot of the pressure because what the kids are terrified of is being the only one. Everyone else is off doing something and I'm isolated. So I would urge that parent who asked the question to hang tough. TikTok and Instagram,

Our particular instrument is particularly bad for girls and TikTok does all sorts of things to decimate attention. So I would urge her to hang tough and keep it for a while. What I'm trying to recommend is a norm of 16. We need to raise the age. This stuff is wildly inappropriate for minors. Let's at least set a common minimum age of 16.

I would, I would agree with everything you've said. I was, my son was the third last in his class to have a smartphone and it was really, really tough. And I, you know, I gave in at a certain point and then what happened is because I gave him to him, it altered his relationship with his younger brother who didn't have one. So I gave him to him and I, I,

I am deeply envious of the parents of a child that is now nine and seven because I don't think they will go through what we have been through. I think the phones caused more, phones and iPads and all the screens caused more dispute, unhappiness, aggro issues.

between parents and children amongst this generation because we are realizing how negative it is, but the genie has been out of the bottle. But I do think this is a genie that we can get back into the bottle. That's right. That's right. That's what is so amazing to me. Let's end on this moment, on this note of hope.

despite the awfulness of what has happened to kids around the world, and it's not just mental illness, it's also education scores are dropping, attention spans are dropping. Despite the awfulness of what's happening, I'm incredibly optimistic because I have never seen social change happen this fast.

Everyone was ready to go. The norms are simple. No smartphone before high school, before 14, no social media till 16, phone-free schools, more independence and free play. The norms are so simple if we do them together. And guess what? We are doing them together. The

The world looks really different now from what it did six months or a year ago. So parents on this call, just team up. And that's part of the genius of smartphone-free childhood is that you should not be alone. I think there was just a Guardian article about smartphone-free child just today or something. So parents, you're not alone. Link up, sync up, and together we can roll back the phone-based childhood.

Thank you, John, so much. My pleasure, Christy. What a pleasure talking with you. Really nice. Thank you so much. That was fascinating and hopeful. And you've given us so much to think about, so much food for thought. And thank you to everyone for watching at home and for all of your great questions. Sorry we couldn't get to all of them. Remember that you can order a copy of The Anxious Generation from Ewan Bookshop and there are details about how to do that in the chat. Thank you to Smartphone Free Childhood. Thank you, John, Kirsty again. Thank you, Jack.

Good evening, everyone. Bye-bye. Thanks so much.