The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt
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I'm speaking with Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan is a social psychologist at NYU and a best-selling author. And he just came out with his newest book, The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Now, I know that title seems heavy, and it is heavy, but this conversation is very practical and very hopeful.

We talk about the impact of phones, social media, the decline of play on our kids' mental health. And whether you have a toddler or an elementary schooler or a middle schooler or a high schooler, whether you're thinking about when to give your kid a phone or you've already given your kid a phone, this is a conversation that you want to hear. I'm Dr. Becky, and this is Good Inside. We'll be back right after this.

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Hi, Jonathan. Hello, Dr. Becky. Actually, what should I call you? Doctor? Professor? No, what should I call you? Regular Becky is totally fine. Regular Becky. Okay. Hello, Becky. Yes. I am so excited to be talking to you today. And I know our listeners are, you know, going to be really excited for this conversation as well. Your new book, The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. And I'm so excited to be talking to you today.

is right in line with so many of the things I'm thinking about and I know are on parents' minds as well. And I know we'll get into a lot of discussion around screens and the impact screens are having on our kids and how we can really empower parents with a message of hope and capability. There really are things we can do. This is not some inevitable state of our kids being impacted by this. And I'd love to start by...

jumping into this term you use, this kind of great rewiring of childhood. Let's start there. Can you tell me a little, what does that mean? And what have you found there? Well, so the whole project started because all of a sudden, around 2013...

We started noticing in universities and from other adults I talked to, suddenly young people were much more depressed, anxious, and fragile. Actually, we noticed in universities around 2014, 2015. But it turns out it really started around 2013, 2014, now that we can look back at the data. It was very sudden. And all the graphs are like hockey sticks. Like something happened in the early 2010s. And as I began working on this book,

at first i thought it was just social media and girls because there the data is very clear so i was really looking at what does social media do to girls but the problems were happening for boys too and it turns out it wasn't just social media and as as as i dug into this and my research associate zach roush we you know he made all these graphs and charts plotting every angle we could find it turned out what what was really happening

was the complete transformation of kids' daily lives between 2010 and 2015. And the way to understand this, I'm guessing a lot of your listeners are millennials. Now, millennials had flip phones when they were teenagers, and a flip phone is great for texting and calling, and that's about it. It's for communication. It's a communication device. And in 2010, only about 10 or 15% of kids of teens had a smartphone.

And the early Apple iPhone, you know, didn't have all the social media on it. It just had like, you know, a map and a browser and things. So in 2010, you still have kids making eye contact with each other, texting each other to meet up. You still have something that we can recognize as childhood.

By 2015, that's gone. By 2015, 70 or 80% of teens have a smartphone. They almost all have social media, especially the girls. And now, once you take this thing, this thing is an experience blocker. So once you give this thing to a child, that's it. Like, that's going to be the...

the thing that they see most of the day. They're looking at that most of the day. And so everything else has to get pushed out. There's less sleep. There's much less time with other kids. There's less time with family. There's no more time for books. There's no more time for hobbies. So I just call that period the great rewiring of childhood. This was not a gradual thing. Over the course of five years, childhood was changed from a form in which a human being could develop into a competent, mature adult.

to one that is in hospital for human development. Now, I don't want to overstate things. Obviously, look, most kids are okay. Most kids are doing fine. But a much larger number are not doing fine compared to kids who were born in the early 90s. So it's really the late 90s as Gen Z, early 90s as millennials, huge difference in their psychological outcomes. So,

I'm in alignment with everything you're saying. It's such a massive shift. And even just pausing to recognize that, I think is really important as a parent, right? Wow, that is a really big change. Even using phones to kind of communicate as a way of facilitating social interaction versus using phones in a way that starts to inhibit real life social interaction. That's a big shift. So one of the things I hear from parents often is,

This happens at every generation. You know, my parents were worried that we had Nintendo. And, you know, but I would be honest, for me, I feel like something inside me says, like, this is different. And so I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Sure. This is the main counterargument I get. And there's some truth to it. Every generation freaks out about whatever new technology or drug the young generation is taking. That's true. That's been going on

I mean, there are hints of it in ancient Greece, but really it's once you get modernity, once you get the Enlightenment, scientific revolution, now each generation really is a little different from the one before it. But let me point out,

The boy who cried wolf, Aesop's fable about the boy who cried wolf. So the townspeople, you know, the kid cries wolf twice and the townspeople then learn to ignore it. The wolf then comes and swallows up all the sheep. So, you know, just because we had some moral panics before, it doesn't mean that, oh, everything is always a moral panic.

There has never, ever been a time when teen mental health did this thing of like, things are okay, things are okay, and then two or three years later, it's a disaster. That has never happened before.

So there's abundant evidence that this time really, really is different. And the reason why I had to write a whole book on this rather than just like an Atlantic article is that you really have to understand what is childhood. I mean, human childhood is so different, even from chimpanzee childhood. Like, we're a really unique species because this huge amount of cultural learning is

And so that I think is one of the distinctive features of the book is I was going to just write a book about social media on girls, but it turned into like, first we have to, you know, think about the evolution of childhood and what do girls have to do? What do boys have to do? What do cultures do around the world? And then we can see you take all of that. You put a phone in the way, you throw all of that out the window. And what you have is this bizarre human experience that is not, it doesn't fit with

with what kids need to do in childhood. Yeah, and I think there's some foundations here, right? Where the experiences we go through in our early years

set up our wiring and our blueprint for how we experience ourselves and then therefore how we experience the world, right? And so those early years, a lot of the years that still a lot of parents say they don't remember that. It doesn't matter, right? They don't remember anything. We know that as soon as we realize, wait, memory isn't just what we can say with words. Memory are the patterns that feel normal and natural in our body. That's actually our most powerful form of memory. Those early years, right?

are the most important, the ones that we can't remember verbally, I would say those just play out in our body. So those are extra powerful. And so what happens zero to three, zero to five, right? These early years has a huge impact on everything that happens after it's never too late, right? We can always, but they do. And I think you and I are in agreement that one of the

formative kind of, you know, things for kids is play, is how they experience play. So can you speak to that a little bit? What is play? What are the purpose and benefits? First, let me just comment on what you just said. So you and I are both psychologists. We really understand that we don't see the world as it is. We see the world through filters and lenses that were learned in childhood, that were shaped by evolution, that were developed within our family, our culture.

The zero to three is huge amounts of brain change

But that's especially lower level systems, walking, talking, vision, all that sort of stuff. If a kid has a really bad experience, one really bad experience at age two or three, it's probably not going to leave any real effect. But what you do over and over again, day after day, if the kid is playing, that's how they wire up the frontal cortex versus on a screen hours every day for months or years, that will change, literally change the way the brain is wiring itself up.

So once you see that this huge human brain is an evolutionary novelty, and what evolution did was it said, huh, how are we going to fill up this brain? How are we going to, you know, make it configure? Well, the genes have very little information in them. The genes don't tell the brain how to develop. They just get the ball started. And then we have what's called experience expectant development. So the baby's brain is expecting to have a lot of back and forth. The infant is like, you know,

"Peek-a-boo, ha ha ha, peek-a-boo, ha ha." Like you do that thousands of times and that develops the social centers. So in the early years especially, it's the things that you're doing for hours and hours. Those really do change the course of development. But then the brain does a funny thing. It's growing and building new neurons up until around age five or six. And then it kind of stops and it's almost full size. And then you have this key period of childhood around age six or seven to the beginning of puberty,

where the kid is basically, it's like a cultural apprenticeship. The kid is basically like looking at adults and looking at the baker and the construction worker and like, oh, you know, what are they doing? They're trying to sort of understand what's going on around them. And then they hit puberty. And at puberty, the body begins to grow very fast, whereas it had slowed down before. Growth was much slower in mid-childhood. So in puberty, then, the brain is rewiring even faster. So we have to really pay attention for what we're talking about. We have to pay attention to the whole

period, but they're different. Okay, so now to the question about play. So most of your listeners will have had a puppy or a kitten at some point in their lives, or at least they played with one that a friend had. And if you have a puppy or kitten, I mean, they need to play all the time, and those are puppies. And it's the most exciting thing for them to play. And

And that's true for all mammals. That's the thing. All mammals play. It's part of being a mammal. Being a mammal is about this long childhood that the parents or the mother especially invest a lot in. But the parents are there basically to give the kid security to go out into the world and do things. That's where the learning happens. It's not when they're

It's like, those are the experiences they need to have thousands and thousands of times.

And the richest kind of experience they can have, the most nutritious, is a few kids. It could just be two, but especially when you get three or four kids playing together and the adults are not telling them what to do and the adults are not resolving the conflicts. Let them play. There are going to be some conflicts. That's the most nutritious thing you can do. And we kind of, we cut way back on that because we were so afraid that our kids would get hurt. And that really comes in in the 90s, this incredibly fearful parenting.

What counts as play and what doesn't maybe count as play? Sure. That's a good question. It's one of these concepts which is prototypically defined. That is, there are prototypes of play and then there are other things that are less prototypical, but they're still sort of play. So I'd say the prototype, the best kind of play, the most nutritious kind of play is mixed age. So not just two seven-year-olds, but kids who are different ages in the neighborhood, contrasting.

coming together outdoors, able to invent whatever they want to play. They get to choose. They then have to make the rules about it. That's really important. And ideally, there's some risk of getting hurt, at least falling down. Because it turns out the fear is

makes things thrilling. The fear changes the brain so that, and we can all see this, our kids, they're afraid of certain things, but they're also attracted to them. And so, they want to look over the edge of the railing. They want to build something to the point where it might fall off. I mean, when a kid learns to skateboard, they're then going to skateboard down the staircase and they're going to fall. Why is that? Why are kids looking to get hurt? And the answer seems to be,

This is a work from this really wonderful Norwegian play researcher, Ellen Sandseeder, is that kids need the feeling of thrill, that fear you have, and then you overcome it and you're exalted. You're like, yes, I did it. And that is what rewires your brain to move it away from the sort of the fear, you know, the defend mode over to a sort of a competent discovery. I can do it. I did this. I can do more. I'm going to do more.

So, that's the best kind of play. And it's not that kids have to always be doing that, but if you can find a way for your kid to play with a group of other kids unsupervised, that's the best thing. Now, then, of course, there's pretend play, which doesn't have fear, doesn't have risk, but has special properties. And kids engage in a lot of pretend play. So, that also is very different from the physical running around, but that's also very valuable. And then there are things like video games. Definitely, there's a playful element. They're exciting.

You know, but when my son, I didn't let him play Fortnite in sixth grade when all the boys were on. I did let him on in eighth grade when COVID hit. And that was a good thing. I mean, that was, you know, there was no other way for the boys to talk to each other, practically, it seemed.

But what was really interesting is the character is doing all these thrilling things. They're jumping out of planes. They're parachuting into dangerous territory. They're having knife fights. They're getting killed. And there's zero fear. It's just fun. And so video games are playful, definitely, but they don't have that nutritious thrill fear element to it. So I don't think they help boys mature into men. I think they teach boys a set of skills that are completely useless in the outside world. Hmm.

You know, when you were talking about that feeling of kind of there's risk here, could I get hurt? Is this dangerous? I'm going to kind of try to figure it out. And maybe I then did successfully navigate that jungle gym or whatever it was. You know, it reminds me something that it's a very different context, but I think about with my kids a lot where I remember when my kids were younger, like doing a puzzle and they got to this point being like,

I can't do it. I can't do it anymore, right? And can you finish this for me, right? And I remember something that I'd say to them that I watched really resonate. And it reminds me of the same experience you're describing, right? Say, you know, look, we could take a break and let's take a deep breath and you can come back to this. But the feeling you get when you think you can't do something and then you continue and you watch yourself change.

do it is kind of the best feeling in the world. And I don't want to take that feeling away from you. And it is the best feeling. It is the best feeling. And you're right. There is, there's no physical risk, but there's, there's a little risk taking even in, you know, doing that type of play. Like this is hard. Can I push myself? And that is where I see so many parents, so many completely well-intentioned parents who,

kind of remove the frustration in a way, remove the risk. And I think what we don't realize is we're also then removing this very important feeling from our kids. That's right. The best thing you can do for your kid is raise him or her to be one who can deal with frustration because life is going to be full of frustration. And if you take the frustration out of your kid's life, you make them happier in the moment, but you're depriving them of a future of competence and success.

I think the word self-esteem is still used, and it shouldn't be. Self-esteem is not something that you should strive for. It's like happiness, as you've said about happiness. If the goal is happiness, you're going to do things that are going to make you unhappy. Happiness is a byproduct when you're making progress on the important things in life and you're doing well.

Same thing with self-esteem. Self-esteem is something that kids get when they know that they can do things and they have done things. And the big mistake that many psychologists made in the 70s and 80s was to say, we need to raise kids' self-esteem. No, you don't. You need to raise their competence. Let them do more things. Let them fail and overcome. And then they will succeed. And then they will have self-esteem. You can't give it to them.

What you can give, I think what you're talking about is called self-efficacy, the sense that I can do things. And if we're always stepping in to solve problems for our kids and they don't get to develop it. Yeah. So...

I'm curious, like, why we think this is. Why is this generation of parents? Because I see parents as they're so motivated to be good parents. Like, people really care about this. And at the same time, right, it feels harder than ever to tolerate our kids' tantrum at, you know, the puzzle or to tolerate the risk involved in letting them go to the playground without us kind of being right there. Why is that? Yeah.

Yeah. So a lot has changed. So you're a clinical psychologist. You're strong on sort of, you know, what's going on with the feelings, the emotions inside. I'm a social psychologist. So I'm especially dialed into how do we affect each other? And so norms around parenting change generation to generation. And they really hit moms, much less dads. Moms are really judged by everything they do. And the moms are judging each other. And, you know, the whole thing is really hard on women.

But let's start with the material changes. So our grandmothers probably had three or four kids. They didn't have much money. And they were raising their kids in a building in a neighborhood with a lot of other kids. And we grew up in this nice suburban town where after school, we were all on our own. There were a lot of kids around. So what's happened since then? Family size is way down. So most families, there's only one or two kids. And moms are working. So there are not eyes on the street anymore.

And so we lost, you know, because it used to be if I, you know, if my friend and I were out of line, like some other adult would say something to us, if we fell on our bicycles and we were really in trouble, we knew somebody would call our mother or, you know, somebody would help.

But in the 80s and 90s, we lost a lot of that trust in each other. And this is a really important sociological change. Actually, I learned about this especially from a British sociologist, Frank Ferretti, who has a book called Paranoid Parenting. So this happened throughout the English-speaking world. We lost trust in our neighbors. We started thinking everybody is a sex predator. If I send my kids to sports or Boy Scouts, they'll be sexually molested. And there were real scandals, don't get me wrong.

But we lost so much trust that now this amazing thing happens to moms in the 90s. Moms are working more, they're spending more time out of the home, but all of a sudden, around 1995-96, we see a huge increase in the number of hours per week that moms are spending with their kids.

So in the 90s, moms are working more and spending more time with their one or two children. And the economy is changing so that everyone's now freaking out about getting into college. So parenting became much more about how do I get my kid into a top college? How do I prepare my kid to compete with the other kids rather than

My kid needs to play. Go out. Get out of here. Come back when the streetlights come on. So parenting changed, childhood changed, kids changed. And that begins in the 80s and 90s. That kind of is the back story to the great rewiring because it didn't all happen between 2010 and 2015. That was the technological change. So there's this quote you have in the book that has really stuck with me, and I think it's a good transition to the next thing I want to ask you about. You're talking about oversight and how kind of –

I don't know, helicopter-ish we are with our kids. And one of the things you say is parents should supervise less in the real world, but more in the virtual. And I feel like we're understanding together the role of play, how play is so much harder to come by now and where maybe as parents, both less tolerant of the risks and of the frustration our kids inherently feel. And I feel like a message is this is what we as parents have to learn to tolerate more so our kids can benefit

from frustration and risk. And then we have the virtual world, right? And so we're supervising a ton in the real world. And these moments aren't happening as often. We're kind of removing those experiences. And yet our kids are developing this entire virtual kind of world as well, where I agree, us parents, maybe also because we didn't grow up with it, we're not as knowledgeable. It's not as in your face visually. We are far less

less involved. So let's jump into that. You know, that's basically a summary of my book is that we've been overprotecting our children in the real world and underprotecting them online. In the real world, we have over 100 years of experience putting in fences around pools and requiring seatbelts. It took a long time to do this, but we've created a physical world in which adults and children can both live in it and we minimize the risk to kids.

The online world comes in beginning of the 90s, and this is very important to understand. When it came in, it was miraculous. We were all like, oh my God, you mean I can get all the information ever, always, instantly? Like, this is godlike powers. And so from the 90s, when we thought the internet was so amazing, and it's going to take down dictators, and there's going to be a surge of democracy, and kids all over the world can learn and invent, it's going to be amazing. Right.

So, you know, then the iPhone comes out. It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. And so, you know, and our kids love it. And my son, I got my first iPhone in 2008. My son was two years old. Two years old. He takes the iPhone and, you know, after a couple of days, like he's swiping and tapping. But when you go back to that era, we thought we had nothing to fear. Like, hey, you know, these kids are digital natives. The technology is amazing. The internet's great. Let's let them on early. They'll get a head start. Like that's the way we were thinking in 2010, 11, 12.

So we didn't know that what we were doing was giving our kids an experience blocker that would block out almost everything they need in childhood. So that's sort of how this all started. And then once the norms were set that you just give your kid an iPad, that's what parents do. Oh, and it can connect to the internet anywhere so they can open accounts. You know, your seven or eight-year-old can open an account on Instagram because Instagram, you know, meta, they don't check. They don't want to know. They really don't want to know if your kid is underage. Otherwise, they could be responsible. Right.

So these habits developed of extreme fear about everything, nutrition, strangers. You know, I mean, think about how careful we are about our kids interacting with strangers in a park. You know, if a creepy man comes up to you in a park, like that's a terrifying thing and we don't ever want that to happen. No, no, no, stay home, stay home. Here's your computer, go on Instagram. And guess what? There are no more perverts in parks. That's too dangerous. They're all on Instagram and TikTok.

If we care about our kids interacting with creepy, strange men who are going to try to have sex with them, like, why would you let your kid, your 11, 12, 13-year-old on social media? That's where it all happens. You know, kids are harmed in so many ways. You know, there are kids who are tricked into sending a nude photo of themselves and then they're sextorted. There are kids who become objects of, you know, mob hatred. I mean, there's just so many ways that the kids can get harmed on the internet. And we're like, well, you know, everyone else is letting their kid on. So this is just what we do.

There's so many things I want to double click on and we're going to get to kind of very actionable. Well, what can parents do? Because I know you care very much about that too. We're not just presenting a problem. Like we have some ideas here. But before we get there, because I just want... You do such an amazing thorough job and really laying out kind of all of...

kind of the risks and harms to this phone-based childhood our kids are now exposed to. And you break it down. And I love when people break things down very concretely. So can you share a little bit more about that, the kind of four basic harms of this phone-based childhood? Sure. So, you know, it has different effects on boys and girls, but there are a few major effects that it has on everyone. So actually sort of the first, there's actually really five in the sense that the first one is what's called the opportunity cost.

That is, given that kids are now spending five hours a day just on social media, including TikTok and Instagram. And if you add in all the other stuff, it's around nine hours a day on average. So a lot of kids are spending more than 10 hours a day on their devices, not counting school. That's most of the day.

So that pushes out everything else. So imagine if your kid never read a book, never had a hobby, didn't go over to friends' houses. Like, that would be horrible. And that's one of the effects. So that's the opportunity cost. Yeah.

one or two close friends that they hang out with. They have a best friend. They have a group. They have a gang. That's what they really need. And kids used to do that. We have data in the book. It's amazing. Young people used to spend a lot of time with their friends, whereas older people spent much less. But what happens after 2012 is the young people start plummeting. And even before COVID, young people had mostly socially distanced themselves because it was all on their phone. So that's a very serious deprivation is time with friends.

Another really serious one is sleep deprivation. Sleep is so important for the developing brain. And so if your kid has a device in his or her room, some of them can handle it, but many can't. They're going to take it under the cover. They're going to lie to you. They've got to be on to update all their notifications and their relationships. So sleep deprivation is very serious. And that also increases a lot after 2013. The fourth one on this list is attention fragmentation.

Gene Twenge just had a sub-stack about the rapid decline of reading. Kids don't read books very much, and they're telling their teachers they can't read 10 or 20 pages because they get distracted. When you are interrupted every few minutes by your phone and sent into rabbit holes, you don't have the experience of thinking for 30 minutes straight. Some kids have never thought for 30 minutes straight. They've never had 30 minutes without interruption.

So attention fragmentation is extremely serious. If you want your kid to do well in school, to be able to think, maybe to create something someday, don't raise them on a phone. It'll fragment their attention.

And the final one is addiction, behavioral addiction. There's an argument among researchers whether social media should be called an addiction. But as far as I'm concerned, if we agree that gambling is an addiction, if we see gambling addicts at slot machines, they lose track of time, they waste money, they regret it, but they can't stop. Well, that's exactly what's happening to our kids with social media. And of course, the social media companies literally copied addiction.

Las Vegas, they literally copied like, you know, you pull down to refresh and then it kind of like spins like they took that from slot machines. So these things are engineered for addiction. And, you know, if you let your kids spend hours a day on a device that was designed to be addictive, some of them are going to get addicted. And those costs could be very serious, especially if it goes on for years and years. It really can change brain development permanently.

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So let's jump into social media. I think social media obviously has impacts on girls and boys, but why are girls especially vulnerable to social media? So boys and girls, the differences in their abilities are very small, but the differences in their interests are huge, as most parents will observe.

What they choose to do when they have freedom is very different. And boys have more of what's called a need for agency. They're out trying to break things, build things. They're much more interested in mechanical things. Girls and women are more oriented towards communion needs, relationships. They're interested in what people's relationships are. They remember each other's birthdays. They know who's mad at whom.

So they're just much more interested in the social world. So those are well-known gender differences. They start early in life. They go through all of life.

So what happens? Video games come along and they say to boys, hey, you want to break things? You want to fight? Here you go. And you can do that for hours a day. Social media comes along and says, oh, you have communion needs? Check in on what someone just said about you. Check in on somebody's relationship updates. So social media really baited its hooks for girls. They know exactly what girls' needs are, but they know exactly what girls' insecurities are. How can I get this girl away from her homework?

to come over to Instagram or TikTok. How can I do that? Because we have to, their business model is advertising based, so they have to maximize eyeballs. So for all these reasons, the social media, girls are much more likely to be addicted to social media than boys are. And what it does to them is of course the chronic social comparison, we all know about that. Every girl can feel that she is below average because what she sees is not the honest representation of her pool of friends.

And then there's so many direct harms to girls. There's much more relational aggression, bullying, which is worst in seventh grade, seventh and eighth grade. Girls share emotions more than boys do. So if a girl is depressed, it actually makes her friends depressed. Whereas if a boy is depressed, it doesn't spread as much in his network.

So for all these reasons, it's just insane that middle school kids are on social media. That has to stop. And what I say in the book is really it should be 16. You know, we need to see this. None of this is appropriate for children. This is really adult stuff. And it's even bad for us. Look, most of us are struggling with this. It's terrible for kids going through puberty. Yeah. You know, when I was working with teens in my private practice, that would come up related to how I think, yes, there are

They're spending so much time on social media has had this massive impact on how they form their sense of self. Right. And really, right. I mean, there's many ways to form our sense of self, but I think there are two roads as we learn this growing up. Do I have good, valuable things inside me? And can I gaze in?

to feel good about myself? Or do I have to gaze out and see what other people say about me to get the good outside in? And I had this one client who spoke so poetically. And she was able to say to me, when I'm not on social media, when I'm just kind of alone, I feel like I am in a room that's empty with white walls. And...

What I'm looking for and what happens sometimes, but not all the time is like I go on and I'm looking for kind of this data outside to give me color, to like make. And then if we think about that yearning and that search, and there's an addictive quality to that too, right? You're looking for something that never comes, right? But you can't stop going there. Right.

it's so terrifying for me. You said middle schoolers on social media. I mean, I think it starts much earlier. I mean, there's a lot of elementary schoolers who are spending a lot of time on Instagram and TikTok. That's right, which is horrible. Yeah, I cannot believe that that's happening. But yes, of course, it is. Fourth and fifth grade girls are getting on. So I want to get to what parents can do. And also, right, because here's what we know, me and you. Like,

Parents want to do a good job. Parents love their kids. And so we're holding that. And at the other side, we're holding, okay, so there are all these kids kind of engaging in their phones with social media in a way that we know as parents isn't good for them. And that's a conundrum. So like the most generous interpretation of why that is. Let's start with that. Why do you think this is happening? Because it's a social, it's a collective action problem.

This is the key to solving it. There are many problems you can solve yourself. If you want your kids to eat more vegetables, that's up to you. You can feed them more vegetables. But if you don't want your kids on social media or you don't want the kids to have a phone, it's not entirely up to you. Or at least you can try, but it's going to be a struggle every day to control their technologies because their friends have it. These things are socially addictive. They're engineered to do that. So, you know, I teach a class at

at NYU, a flourishing class, my undergraduate students, you know, we talk about how the terrible things that, you know, spending four hours a day on TikTok, like this is a terrible thing for a college student to do. Why don't you stop? Well, you know, I can't get off because everyone else is on. Like I need to be in the loop. I need to know what everyone is saying. So it's a trap and it's engineered to be a trap. It's designed that way.

So here's the key. All of us as parents, we've all been struggling with this. We've all been trying to regulate it. We've all been trying to set limits. And there's all these ambiguous cases and it's constant conflict. This is happening all over the country, all over the world.

It's hard to regulate if you're on your own, but it's much easier if we do it together. So the way out of a collective action problem is to act collectively. So what I'm saying in the book is four norms. If we adopt four norms, we can solve this problem most of the way. We can get most of the stuff out, especially for K through eight. Here are the norms. One, no smartphone till high school.

If you want to talk to your kid when he's at school, well, you shouldn't be talking to him during school, but you need to communicate for all sorts of reasons. Give him a flip phone. Flip phones, as we said, are not harmful. They're for communication. So no smartphone till high school. We need to make that a national norm, not a law, but a norm that kids before high school do not have smartphones because they'll be sucked into all kinds of internet stuff.

Second norm, no social media till 16, especially not TikTok, Instagram, the big ones that are designed to do this. My kids run track. There's some things that are technically social media so they can keep up with other runners. My daughter's 14. Running is her life. Like, okay, I understand. I'm going to make an exception for that. But I really held the line at TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. So no social media until 16. That's the second norm.

The third norm is phone-free schools. And this is one I really want listeners, I mean, we can change this in the next year. Every principal hates the phones. Every teacher hates the phones. I ask them, why don't you ban them? They say, because some parents freak out. They want to talk to the kid all the time. You know, they need that contact.

So if you're listening to this conversation and your kid's school doesn't require phones to be locked up during the day, please contact the principal, the head of school. Because if that person hears from a flood of parents saying, please give my child seven hours a day when she can listen to her teachers and her fellow students. Seven hours a day off of her phone. All kids need this during the school days. That's the third norm. That's really powerful. That's happening in Britain. Britain, the

parents have already begun to rise up delaying smartphones banning them in school so britain is ahead of us but this is the year that we do in america the fourth norm is more independence free play and responsibility in the real world and this is really the lenore skanezi free range kids side of the book lenore skanezi wrote this wonderful book free range kids she actually helped me on the parents chapter here she's brilliant she's funny and if we take away the phones and a lot of the screens from kids

What are they going to do all day? Now we can say, oh, read a book or learn to play guitar, and that would be nice. But that's not really a good childhood either.

If we're taking away the phones, we have to restore a play-based childhood. We have to give them each other. Not playing with us directly, but ideally, we set it up so that they and a couple of other kids, maybe they're hanging out in somebody's backyard. Maybe there's a park or a playground that they can go to publicly. Maybe they go to a coffee shop or a pizza shop, whatever. But the way we used to all grow up was after school, the kids are on their own.

And this was during the crime wave. There was a crime wave. There were drunk drivers. I mean, there were dangers in the 60s and 70s and 80s, but kids went out and they became mentally healthy. Now the world is very, very physically safe. We locked up the drunk drivers. We locked up most of the perverts or sent them to Instagram. And, you know, so it's much safer to send your kid out now than it was in the 70s and 80s. But we're afraid we have to get over that. So we have to give kids back a play-based childhood.

So there's two things I want to share with you. So one, when you talk about collective action. So one of the things, I have a 12-year-old, and when he was in first grade,

It was kind of clear, like this kind of friend group he was developing. And I was actually friendly with the parents too. And I did, I kind of called this meeting of the parents in first grade, in first grade. And back then, now I feel like kids in first grade are almost feel like, oh, are we close to giving our kids phones? But then it was like, we're so far away. And I was like, this is the time. And we met and we kind of talked about this collective set of values we did have where none of us wanted to give our kids a phone too early. Right.

And we were all aware that the social pressures, when you feel like your kid is being left out of things, nobody wants their kids to have that from an understandable place. So there are these tensions. So we said, well, what if we could remove that? What if we could come together and say, collectively, we're not going to give our kids devices till a certain age. And what was the age you picked?

So we picked the end of fifth grade, right, in Manhattan. Our kids started. So that's what we said. And I'm open to, you know, rethinking things. And I'm also, you know, you are too, a pragmatist here. Our kids, they travel around Manhattan on their own. They're on different buses. And we felt like they needed some type of communication device. That's right. But I did the same thing in my family. We didn't think of flip phones.

So I'm not saying you're wrong to give them a phone in fifth grade, but we need to start them on flip phones, not smartphones. Yes, and I also think, though, that...

And this is going to relate to my second point, where when we say we're giving our kids a phone, and I'm thinking a lot about this here at Good Inside, we don't think of what version of a phone. And one version is a flip phone. But for example, when a kid even gets a smartphone, there is no reason that kid needs to have access to apps they never had on a family iPad before. Like all of a sudden, I see people getting phones and they have every app. Where to me, there's also a gradual way of doing this thing.

You're not getting unlimited access to YouTube or to Safari. And there's a way to hold boundaries into that. Now, this is the point, though, that I wanted to talk about with you. Because to me...

I know so many parents who feel like those guidelines make sense, right? And they'd want to do them. And to me, where it tends to break down is a pattern of parenting that starts so far and so many years before anything digital, which is just the comfort parents have these days with setting and holding boundaries and letting their kids be upset with them about it. That's right. And I feel like...

This is harder than ever for parents. Oh, that's right. It is so much harder. This is like the major topic that parents want to talk about is the phones, technology, social media. Everyone is dealing with it. And what you say, it makes sense. And it sounds like, you know, let's do it gradual and let them earn more responsibility. We'll put limits on.

But then you constantly have boundary skirmishes. You have little border wars over everything. And the kids are incentivized to cheat. The kids are going to figure out ways, you know, they can download Instagram and make it look like a calculator so that you don't see it. I mean, there's all, you know, you get into this cat and mouse game. Mm-hmm.

And so I've concluded that rather than the common sense, like, oh, every kid is different, your kid may have a different path, you know, pluses and minuses, rather than that, which just leads to constant conflict, such a mess and confusion.

Let's have some very clear, a very, very clear boundary that everyone can stick to, which is no smartphone before high school. It's not even up for negotiation. Oh, you know, you need to be on something for school? You have a computer, or we have a computer in the living room. You can do that. You don't need it 24-7. You don't need it in your pocket all the time. And no social media until 16. Those are norms that we can stick to. But to your point, parenting has always required parents to...

set lines and and kids learn to live within those lines and they learn to control their wants and control themselves i agree with you that recent generations of parents are not nearly as good at holding the line as previous generations where previous generations were more rooted in a sense of obligation duty religion tradition so yes i totally agree with you on attending to boundaries and on the importance of parents sticking to boundaries you know

You know, my mother was, we knew when my mother said something, you know, like she said, if you kids don't stop fighting, we're turning the car around and going back to New York. We're going to end our trip to Washington. And we didn't stop fighting. And she turned the car around and we lost the trip to Washington. I mean, she would set boundaries and we knew she would stick to them. And, you know, my wife and I, you know, especially me, you know, I mean, you know, we...

We negotiate, you know, we think I shouldn't lay down the law. I need to, you know, be a friend and negotiate. Like, you know, sometimes you really need to have strict boundaries and just stick to them, even if in a specific case, there might be a reason for an exception. Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, you know, I often think about parents like pilots. And, you know, I think when a pilot takes flight to be a really sturdy pilot, you have to be able to say to yourself, if information changes on my flight,

If something becomes dangerous, I will make a different decision. I'll change my flight path or I will land early. And I do think

as parents, we forget that we have that ability and we need to. If I learn something, I can change screen time rules. I can take away devices. I can change devices. And if I don't give myself that power, I'm actually not going to be able to keep my kids safe. And I think one of the things you're saying about a flip phone that I think is a really good consideration is if you know as a parent, holding boundaries is really, really hard. And it's something like having a

set up boundary. Like once you have a flip phone, you can't download this app. It's just not possible. It helps you parent in line with those values and not have all those skirmishes. So tell me about the parents listening here who are thinking, I love all this. And...

It feels more complicated than that. And in my town, this isn't happening yet. There isn't this rising up. And so I would have the only kid who's not on this or who doesn't, you know, who's not invited to the party even because they're not on Snapchat or, right? How do you think about working with parents in that way? Sure. So the hardest thing to hear is, mom, I'm the only one who doesn't have a phone or doesn't have Snapchat. And I'm being excluded. That's really hard for parents to hear.

But what if your kid comes to you and says, "Mom, some of the other kids have Snapchat. I want that too." Then you can say, "Well, but look, you know, your three best friends don't because me and their moms all agreed that we're not going to give it to you until you're 16."

So, you know, I understand that you're not going to be able to join everything. But look, you have a lot more freedom and independence than those other kids do. You can actually go places. You know, you can go out for lunch with your friends in fourth and fifth grade and nobody else can. Like, aren't you proud of that? My kids really were. They walked to school early. They were, you know, ahead of the game because I'm friends with Lenore Skenazy and I kind of, you know, pushed them out to go do errands. And that made them really proud of themselves that they had these abilities and other kids didn't. So anyway, the key is

The absolute key is if you feel alone, most people do, if you feel that you're alone in this, connect with other parents, the parents of your kids' friends, that's the most important thing, and try to go through your school. And so what I would urge everyone to do, go to letgrow.org. It's a fantastic organization. Lenore Skenazy runs it. I co-founded it with her and with Peter Gray, a play researcher.

We have all these simple, simple ideas. They cost nothing that you can do at home and that your school can do. The most powerful one, which really has strong anti-anxiety effects, it's an amazing program. It's called the Let Grow Experience. It's a homework assignment. And so if the, let's say in second, third, any grade in elementary school or middle school, the assignment is...

kids, go home, find something you can do at home that you've never done before. Agree with your parents. Like maybe you'll walk the dog and you're seven years old and you've never done that. Maybe you'll cook dinner. You know, you're eight or nine years old and you can actually go to the store and do the shopping. Whatever it is, you pick something, you do it. And then a week later, we come in, we talk about it. You write it down on a little leaf. We put it on the wall. And after the kids do this 10 or 15 times, amazing things happen. Actually, after the first or second time, amazing things happen.

Kids are often anxious the first time they're walking to a store, but then they succeed. And then they feel exultant. It's that thrill we were talking about. And then they do it again and again and again. And here's the really transformative thing. Parents are afraid to let their kid walk to a store, but if it's a homework assignment and everyone else is doing it, well, now actually they're much less afraid.

If this is a homework assignment in the local elementary school, now suddenly people are seeing eight-year-olds out doing things which nobody has seen since the 1990s. So you can transform your town if you can get your schools to do the let grow experience. And you can do it at home even without your school. And one of the things I just want to add to that.

everyone listening here, it just came up as you were talking. Because I think... I live in Manhattan. And I would say I give my 12-year-old, especially, a lot more independence than a lot of his friends have. So recently, he went to his orthodontist appointment by himself. It was a check-in. And he figured out what bus to take. And he got there. And he waited. And... Right? Perfect. And I think that...

Somehow we've equated, I think, the removal of risk with actually being a good parent. Because I think parents say to themselves, how could I have let my kid skin their knee? How can I have let this happen? And it actually reminds me of COVID times when we were all so nervous to do anything, right? And one of the things I remember thinking is just,

So complete minimization of risk is not a life strategy. It's just not a way you can live life. Oh, no. It's a way to block. It's a way to block life. It's a way to block growth. Yeah. I'd like to put in a plea for nobody to ever say, stay safe. That horrible COVID thing we used to say, stay safe, stay safe. No, no, no. Don't ever say that to a kid. Stay adventurous. Stay curious. Yeah.

And so for parents to know when you're taking on these risks, like it will feel uncomfortable for you, right? And it will feel uncomfortable for your kid. And I actually think telling your kid, it probably helps to tell yourself too, right? Discomfort is always a sign I'm doing something new, not something wrong. It's really helpful to kind of

put it in a container. And so, yeah, that's new for my kid to go to the store. It's new for my kid to go to the doctor. So it makes sense. They feel uncomfortable. It's new for me to let that happen. I guess I'm feeling my feelings right too. And when you can contextualize that, we stop the narrative of, oh, I'm doing something wrong. I'm not being a good parent. And I think that actually...

is kind of a fork in the road in allowing these experiences to happen. Absolutely. No, you're so right to focus on the parents' anxiety. You know, my wife and I, when we first, because I was friends with Lenore and I read her book, Free Range Kids, so in fourth grade, we started having my son walk to school. It's about a third of a mile away in lower Manhattan. The 7th Avenue intersection is really complicated.

So we were really nervous. And that's when I gave him a phone. In retrospect, I would give him a flip phone that you can track, but gave him my old iPhone. And so we watched his little blue dot walk, and we could visualize him with his backpack on, this little kid. We watched him get to 7th Avenue, and there was a pause. And we were both hunched over the phone. You could hear a pin drop as we were watching the dot on the phone.

And he made it. He made it across 7th Avenue. And then we watched him go to school. And it was such a relief. And then the next day, we watched again. And we were much less nervous. And by the fourth day, we stopped watching. Because look, I mean, this kid is a really smart kid. He understands the subway system. He understands how traffic works. Like, this is a really capable kid. And so, we had to get over our anxiety even more than he had to get over his. Yeah.

Yeah. Any final words? That sounds so heavy. But anything that you're thinking, we really didn't get into this and I really want, you know, parents and listeners to hear this from me. Sure. So, you know, I would say there's a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness around all of this. And people say to me like, oh, that train is, that train's left the station. Oh, you know, what are you going to do? You know, you can't call this back.

No, that is not true. You know, we had leaded gas, which was poisoning kids' brains. And we said, let's ban leaded gas. Like when something is this big a public threat to our kids and it's damaging so many kids and families, we have to act. I don't want to just say like, oh, there's a terrible situation. We have to act. What I want to really communicate is,

This is actually easy to solve if we act together. The four norms that I suggested cost nothing, nothing. They're free. I mean, schools have to buy phone lockers, and it'd be nice if states put up a little money for it, but that's it. These norms cost nothing. They are totally bipartisan. This is not a left-right cultural issue. Everyone wants their kids to spend more time playing with other kids rather than on their phones all day. And if we do these four norms, they will work. We know that if kids are

are taken off screens and given a lot more play, they will be mentally healthier. So I want to leave listeners with a real feeling of hope that we've been put in a trap by the tech companies and by the absence of any helpful regulation from our government, from the Congress especially. We have to take matters into our own hands. So I want to leave parents with a feeling of hope. I think we can change childhood by the end of 2025, especially for elementary and middle school. It's harder to get the phones away from high school kids. I'm not saying we absolutely should, but

But we can stop giving fourth and fifth graders smartphones. We can at least let them get up through early puberty with a reasonably healthy childhood. And that is going to change mental health in this country. Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you, Becky. What a joy talking with you. Thank you to our podcast sponsors, Airbnb and Geranimals. Thank you for listening.

To share a story or ask me a question, go to goodinside.com slash podcast. Or you could write me at podcast at goodinside.com. Parenting is the hardest and most important job in the world. And you deserve resources and support so you feel empowered and confident for this very important job you hold.

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And even as I have a hard time on the outside, I remain good inside.