Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know

What if smartphones are causing the youth mental health crisis? In this episode of the Habits and Hustle podcast, I talk with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as he reveals how the "great rewiring of childhood" between 2010-2015 led to alarming increases in anxiety and depression among children and teens. We discuss how we've created a contradictory world of overprotection in real life but underprotection online, leaving children vulnerable to predators and mental health challenges. We also dive into why play is essential (he calls it "Vitamin P"), how technology fragments attention spans, and why collective action is our best hope for change. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist, Professor at NYU, and co-founder of Let Grow, an organization dedicated to promoting childhood independence. His books include "The Anxious Generation" and "The Coddling of the American Mind." What We Discuss: 04:59 The Anxious Generation: Understanding the Rise of Anxiety 10:00 Social Media's Impact on Girls vs. Boys 14:46 The Importance of Play in Child Development 25:04 The Concept of Anti-Fragility in Children 27:56 The Importance of Risk in Child Development 32:18 The Case for Phone-Free Schools 33:55 The Impact of Technology on Education 36:08 Declining Test Scores and Educational Equity 39:46 The Dangers of Multitasking 41:12 Screen Time: Good vs. Bad Uses 43:17 Social Skills and Mental Health Crisis 44:43 The Challenges Boys Face Today 58:56 The Dangers of Social Media Platforms 01:00:49 Resources for Parents and Educators …and more! Thank you to our sponsors: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com http://therasage.com/ and use code Be Bold for 15% off TruNiagen: Head over to truniagen.com http://truniagen.com/ and use code HUSTLE20 to get $20 off any purchase over $100. Magic Mind: Head over to www http://www/.magicmind.com http://magicmind.com//jen and use code Jen at checkout. Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com http://airdoctorpro.com/ and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Bio.me: Link to daily prebiotic fiber here https://bio.me/?utm_source=Jennifer, code Jennifer20 for 20% off. Momentous: Shop this link https://www.livemomentous.com/?srsltid=AfmBOorDUIZz3psr1Qsq_n1yE8_6JTq_QUFabOO9lH65HDEXCIoJOPLj and use code Jen for 20% off Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement Find more from Jonathan Haidt: Website: https://jonathanhaidt.com/ https://www.afterbabel.com/ https://letgrow.org/ https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonathanhaidt/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hi guys, this is Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

• 0:08Jen Cohen?

  In this episode of Habits and Hustle, I'm joined by Dr. Jonathan Haidt. He's an NYU professor and the bestselling author of the book Anxious Generation. We explore how smartphones and social media are reshaping childhood, and not for the better. We dive into the alarming rise in depression, anxiety, and suicide among young people, and how screen time disrupts critical psychological development, from resilience to conflict resolution. Dr. Haidt also shares why phones affect boys and girls differently, the science behind how screens rewire the brain, and his four key recommendations for healthier tech use. Whether you're a parent, teacher,

• 0:53Jen Cohen?

  or just someone who cares about mental health, this conversation is a must-listen.

• 1:07Jen Cohen?

  Before we dive into today's episode, I first want to thank our sponsor Therasage. Their Trillight panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go, and I personally use their red light therapy to help reduce inflammation in places in my body where, honestly, I have pain. You can use it on a sore back, stomach cramps, shoulder, ankle. Red light therapy is my go-to. Plus, it also has amazing anti-aging benefits, including reducing signs of fine lines and wrinkles on your face, which I also use it for.

• 1:49Jen Cohen?

  I personally use Therasage Trillight everywhere and all the time. It's small, it's affordable, it's portable, and it's really effective. Head over to therasage.com right now and use code BEBOULLED for 15% off. This code will work site-wide. Again, head over to therasage, T-H-E-R-A-S-A-G-E.com, and use code BEBOULLED for 15% off any of their products.

• 2:29Jen Cohen?

  All right. So today on the podcast, we have Jonathan Haidt, who is the author of The Anxious Generation, probably, and in my opinion, and I think almost every parent I know's opinion, one of the best books of, I think, of our decade. It is so timely, and I am just honored to have you on this podcast.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 2:53Jen Cohen?

  It's really a pleasure to have you. I don't even know where to begin with you because you talk so much about the rise of anxiety and depression in our youth and social media, but it's not even that. I mean, I think I want to start by asking you, what was the tipping point for you in why you even wrote the book?

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Well, it was actually a kind of a sidetrack originally. I'd written, my previous book was The Coddling of the American Mind, and it was about how overprotection is really weakening our kids. And we saw the students who arrived on campus around 2014, 2015. I teach at NYU, but all of us have seen this. The students arriving in 2014 or so were just very different. They were much more fragile, much higher rates of anxiety, much more upset by things they saw or heard or read. And so I wrote a whole book on that with my friend Greg Lukianoff, and we focused on overprotection. And that's a part of the story, a very important part of the story. But at the time, we were writing this in 2017 mostly. The evidence wasn't clear that social media was harming kids. There were people, you know, people writing about it. There were few experiments. It wasn't really clear.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  So we just had a couple of paragraphs in the book saying, well, maybe social media is part of this. But then the mental health stats kept getting worse and worse and worse. And this is all before COVID. COVID made it worse still, but all of this was baked in before, by 2019. And so then I then got a contract to write a book closer to my own center of research. I study moral and political psychology. So I was going to write a book on what social media is doing to democracy, that democracy is a conversation. And when the conversation happens on Twitter, what the hell happens to us? So I started writing that book. And I thought, well, let me start the book. I have all this data left over on teen mental health. Let me start the book with one chapter on what happened to teenagers when they moved their social lives onto Instagram and a few other platforms around 2012.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  That's when Facebook buys Instagram. That's when it becomes very popular. So, once they all get smartphones, which again is around 2012, their mental health plummets immediately. So, I wrote the first chapter of that book, laying out all the graphs, like, look what happened. And then, once I saw just how vast it was, and that it wasn't just the US, that this was happening not in every country, we don't have data from every country, but almost all the Western countries, and certainly all of the English-speaking countries, the identical pattern. So, once I saw that chapter, I said, whoa, I can't just leave this in chapter one and go write a book about democracy. I've got to follow this out. And that's what became The Anxious Generation. I split the book in two. My editors were happy with that, and I ended up writing, as fast as I could, The Anxious

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

• 5:27Jen Cohen?

  And also, I think I also heard once that you were going to really focus on how social media was affecting girls. And then, you also then kind of like made it much more robust. How does social media affect boys and girls differently from your research?

• 5:42Speaker 03

  So, the data is clearest on a link between social media and girls. There, you can just look at just a simple correlation. The girls who spend a lot of time on social media are two or three times more depressed than the girls who spend little. That's a very, very crude measure, just how much time. For boys, there's a relation, but it's weaker. And so, that's how I started. I thought, okay, the central thing here is social media is hurting girls, because I was focused on the published literature. But as I got more and more into it, I realized there are many, many different harms that are not about the number of hours you spend. So, okay, let's do, here, let's do the boys, let's do, no, let's do the girls first. And then, we'll move on to the boys.

• 6:21Jen Cohen?

  Sure.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  So, think about it this way. You're a company whose business model is based on monetizing children's attention. You've got to grab their eyeballs and keep them as long as you possibly can. What is the bait that you want to use in your trap? And the way a trap works is you have to have bait that appeals to the animal. You're not going to catch, you know, catch a dog using grapes. I mean, they don't like grapes, or whatever. Some dogs do, but you know.

• 6:43Jen Cohen?

  Most don't, right?

• 6:45Speaker 03

  So you need bait. And what's the bait for girls? If you want to get teenage girls in, what are you going to show them? Who said what about whom? Who's friends with whom? What people said about you? Girls have a more, girls and women have a more developed mental map of social space. This is a common joke in every family. You know, the wife, my wife remembers, knows all sorts of things about my friends that I've forgotten. So, uh, girls and women are much more sociable in their social cognition. Boys and men are literally a bit more autistic. That is literally the difference. Males are sort of shifted over a bit on the spectrum. Not that they're autistic, but like towards that. High systemizer, low empathizer, not as socially skilled. So, social media offers to girls what everyone is saying about everyone. And once the girls go in, they cannot leave.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  They're trapped because since that's where all the girls are, they're not in the hallway talking anymore. They're not going over to each other's house and talking anymore. Everything is happening on Instagram and a few other platforms. So the girls are trapped and many girls are on there every waking moment. So that's how you trap a girl. And then what are the effects of that? Well, the sheer waste of time. So many young women, that's basically all they do. If you're on social media five hours a day, which is the average, actually for girls it's a little higher than that. That's pretty much your life. And all the things that you and I remember from childhood, knock all those out. Hanging out with friends, laughing with friends, reduce all that by 70, 80%. Being out in the sunshine, reduce it by, reading books, having hot, everything, everything in childhood. Take out 70, 80%. Oh, reduce your sleep too.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Lose about a half hour sleep a night for your entire adolescence. So it just really does a number on girls. And that's not even talking about the predation. There are so many men that want to have sex with young girls and young boys. And they used to have to go to a playground where they would be creepy men. And then we locked them up in the 90s. Well, we didn't lock them all up. They're not on the playgrounds anymore. They're on Instagram. They're on Snapchat. That's the way, it's so easy to meet children anonymously. Get them to send you a photograph showing their breasts or their penis. And then you've got them. Once you've got that photograph, you can blackmail them. You can force them to do sex acts on camera. So it's horrific what is happening. Snapchat gets 10,000 reports of sextortion.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Not a year, a month, every month, 10,000. And that's just what's reported to them. So, social media puts kids into contact with strange men around the world. It's insane that we let this happen.

• 9:10Jen Cohen?

  You know what's interesting? You said something that I I I caught. It was like, I don't know if I'm I'm misquoting it, but it's you'll get the point that we overprotect our children in real time, in real, in the real world, and we underprotect them online.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 9:26Jen Cohen?

  And it's true, because they're not, these creepers are not like in the park anymore. They're actually online. You know, a couple of months ago, I was walking in my neighborhood, which is a good neighborhood, and there were all these police cars around. And it was because there was some guy, by the way, a successful like attorney guy, who you you would never think in a million years would be the the the guy that was was going on Instagram trapping these young boys. And then they meet in a in a mall. And so they, that's what happened. And then they caught him.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Disgusting.

• 9:59Jen Cohen?

  Right? And then the guy ran away. But the guy got off. The guy got off.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  You mean, he wasn't committed?

• 10:05Jen Cohen?

  They, no, they they they, he met, he met this little, this thirteen year old boy in the mall in front of Adidas at Century City Mall. Okay. And they didn't have quote unquote proof. Because it didn't happen in, like, they couldn't prove that this was happening.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:21Jen Cohen?

  And he got off.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  Right, that's right.

• 10:24Jen Cohen?

  And and so they're using social media as the avenue to meet these people in real time. It's not happening in real time.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's right. That's right. So for all these reasons, it just crept up on us that, you know, because it started in the nineties when the internet came in, and we all thought this is amazing. And it really was amazing. And the millennial generation, those born nineteen eighty one to nineteen ninety five roughly, they grew up with the internet. And some bad stuff definitely happened on the internet. But back then, it wasn't monetized. There weren't companies that had perfected locking you in and addicting you. So some bad stuff happened, but it was mostly very exciting, and the millennials turned out fine. And so we all kind of thought, oh, computers are good. They're kind of good for kids, and this is the future. And so we didn't realize, we didn't realize that everything changed between twenty ten and twenty fifteen. And this is the heart of my book.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  It's the great rewiring of childhood. So imagine that you are, let's say you're a girl born in nineteen ninety five. So this is the last year of the millennial generation. So you turn 15 in 2010. And what that means, that you went through puberty with a flip phone, because there was no smartphone until 2007. Teenage teens don't really dive into the smartphone. They trade, it's really 2011, 2012, the big transition years from flip phone to smartphone. So you're born in 1995, you're a millennial, you're most of the way done, or halfway done really, with puberty. But you're through early puberty, which is the most sensitive period. You probably had Facebook at some point, but Facebook wasn't super viral at the beginning. It was just like, hey, here's my page, where's your page? But then you get the news feed, you get algorithms, Facebook is able to monetize time.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  They didn't have a monetary strategy early on. It's really in the early 2010s that they perfect it. And then they buy Instagram, which all the girls go on to, there's a lot of publicity. And so as kids are trading in their flip phones, they're getting a smartphone with a front-facing camera, and Instagram, and other platforms, and Tumblr, and Pinterest, and other things. And they're getting high-speed internet. So now you can do photographs and video. So, so, but if you're born 1995, you made it through. You get this stuff in late teens, but that's not as bad. Your brain is most of the way done rewiring. Okay, now what happens if you're born five years later? What happens to a girl born in the year 2000? So she's Gen Z. Gen Z begins birth year 1996. But let's look at a girl born in 2000. So she turns 15 in 2015.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  What that means is that she probably got her first phone, it was probably an iPhone, say in 2012, when she was 12. Back then, it might have been more 13, 14, but now it's 10. Kids are getting iPhones at 10 plus or minus. So she, her first phone is an iPhone. She just lies about her age when she's 12, opens an Instagram account, because they welcome you, they're glad to have you. As far as I can tell, they certainly don't try to keep kids off. She has a front-facing camera, all her friends are on Instagram. And so now she's going through puberty, taking pictures of herself and putting them up there, and trying to get followers. So, you know, the platforms are introducing you to people, hey, you might want to follow this person, hey. So she grows up basically on a stage, showing off her body, showing off her face, having strangers comment on her body and her face.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  And the sexier she poses, the more positive reinforcement she gets. That's why all the girls look the same on Instagram. They're all doing the same sort of poses that come ultimately some of them from pornography. So again, it's just, it's unbelievable that we let this happen to childhood.

• 13:39Jen Cohen?

  We have, and we've actually like eliminated the idea of play. Like, play doesn't even happen anymore.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  It's so sad.

• 13:46Jen Cohen?

  It's really sad. Can you talk about the importance of play? Why it is so important? And because of what's hap- and without it, what happens?

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Yes, so I have a whole chapter, uh, really two chapters that focus on play in the book. Because it's really important to understand our evolutionary story. So we're mammals, and what mammals are is mammals is a way of of having huge investment in a child. So the female literally makes milk from her skin. I mean, it's a miracle, but that's what evolution figured out how to do.

• 14:20Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  So you've got these long childhoods where the female is literally producing food for the child. It goes on a long time. Mammals are very smart. We have large brains. And the smarter a mammal is, or the larger brains it is, the more sociable it is. So the really sociable animals, so humans, dogs, chimpanzees, they have big brains, very, very social. How do they, how do you wire up that brain? The genes don't tell it how to grow. The genes just start the ball rolling. The brain gets wired up in play. Mammal babies, mammal children, practice the things they're gonna need as adults. And we have a puppy, now, well, she's two, but you know, puppyish. They practice the, you know, I'm gonna grab the bone and run away with it. You have to chase me. And it's a game, but it's, it lets her practice her grab the meat and run strategy.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  You know, and it's great fun. So we all play. And if you were and study, research has, they've done this. You take rhesus monkeys and you don't let them play, you raise them without play. They come out socially deformed. They're anxious. You put them in a new environment, they're very fearful. They're kinda like those college students who showed up on campus in 2014, 2015. Much more fearful, much more anxious, much poorer, poorer social skills. So play is an absolute essential. You know, if you think your kid needs vitamin C, of course he does. If you don't give your kid vitamin C, he's gonna develop rickets and have all kinds of deformities. We need vitamin C. Play is vitamin P. If you don't give your kids play, they're gonna come out anxious and socially stunted. And so the best kind of play is not with

• 15:49Speaker 03

  An adult, it's with other kids, ideally mixed ages, because then the older kids have to look out for the younger kids. The younger kids are trying to look mature for the older kids. They're not going to want to cry and be a baby. So when kids are playing in a group, that is the most nutritious thing that they can do. And most of us, you know, I'm older than you. I was born in nineteen sixty-three. But, you know, those of us born in the sixties and seventies, or so in the fifties, you know, we all grew up outside playing with other kids.

• 16:14Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  And, and there was a crime wave. I mean, it's not as though, you know, the world was perfectly safe back then. It was actually more dangerous. A lot safer now, very little crime now compared to when I was a kid. But that kids need that play. And so my book is actually a tragedy in two acts. In act one, we, we eliminate the play-based childhood in the nineteen nineties. We freak out about child abduction. We think if we, if I ever let my kid out, they'll be, he'll be abducted, there'll be a man in a white van. If I let my kid go get milk in two aisles over in the supermarket, someone will say, hey, little kid, do you want some candy? Come into my car. Like that never, okay, that did happen once in Florida. That's actually the thing. It happened once in Florida in nineteen eighty, but that's, it's extremely, extremely unlikely. Yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  So we freaked out over child abduction in the nineties. We didn't stop letting our kids out. So act one of the tragedy is we lose the play-based childhood, which is a biological necessity. But their mental health doesn't drop right then. The millennials, as I said, the millennials' mental health was a little better, actually, than that of Gen X. There's not really a difference. So in the nineties, there's no big change in their mental health. And then in act two of the tragedy is the Great Rewiring, which I just told you about. We take away the flip phones. A flip phone is a tool. You can call your friends, you can text them. You're not communicating with a hundred strange men around the world on a flip phone. So take away the flip phone, give them a smartphone. So this is what I call the arrival of the phone-based childhood.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  And giving a kid a phone-based childhood is like raising a kid on Mars. It's an alien environment. It's not good for human development. And that's what we did. So it's a two-act tragedy, and that's why, I believe, rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide surged in the early, in the early twenty-tens.

• 17:56Jen Cohen?

  And have you seen since the 2010s to now, right? In the last 15 years? What has been the surge? What percentage have you seen increase?

• 18:08Speaker 03

  So it depends on the exact survey and which subpopulation you're looking at.

• 18:11Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  But as a general rule, the numbers are pretty much always between 50 and 150%. So I'll just give you a couple. If we look at the overall suicide rate for teenagers, that is up 50% between 2010 and I forget if it's 2019 or 2022, 23, whatever. It's it's it's up 50%. But whenever we zoom in on preteen girls, we get much higher percentage changes. Now, they have a very low suicide rate, but it's up 150%, 150% increase in in younger teen girls' suicide. They didn't, it was used to be very rare. Now it's more common. Now, boys' rates are even higher. They go up a lot, too.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  But the percentage increases are always gigantic for the 10 to 14 year old girls, often well often well over 100%. But we're talking about increases of anxiety, depression, 50 to 150% is the general rule.

• 19:05Jen Cohen?

  You know, what's interesting is that when the when you reduce the when you reduce play, you know, I'm even noticing as a parent, I should, I'm going to take a step back. The other issue that we talk about beyond just social media that you speak about as well, that you speak about in the book, is I think the way that parenting has been evolved, right? There's been a real difference in how we parent. I was, you know, when I was a kid, my mom worked, she left me at home, I had to feed myself, I had to do certain things on my own.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  That was the Jan X way. You were called latchkey kids.

• 19:38Jen Cohen?

  Latchkey kids.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:40Jen Cohen?

  Exactly. But it served me well in life, right? Because I became more resourceful, I can, I have coping skills, I know how to like take care of, you know, like you learn to take care of yourself as a human being. What's happening now over, I I'm noticing just within like the social groups I'm looking at around here where I live, that this idea of this gentle parenting, these trigger warnings, these safe spaces have really damaged our children.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  That's right. Those are all harmful things. That's right.

• 20:10Jen Cohen?

  And and I guess my first question to you, how did that begin? And like, and the funny, and the interesting thing is, is like, You know, how are, how did this even happen if it happened when the kids are actually on a computer or a phone more than they're more, more anywhere else? So how did the parents even become such helicopter parents?

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:30Jen Cohen?

  If there was nothing to helicopter? You know what I mean?

• 20:33Speaker 03

  That's right. Well, there are a lot of social changes happening at the same time. And so, you know, when I was a kid, mothers generally didn't work. Most families had three or four kids. People were out playing and parents weren't spending a lot of time parenting. It was this, you know, the mom's taking care of the house, kids are out playing. And what happens in the eighties as women begin entering the workforce, as everyone's getting more educated, uh, so people with college degrees tend to have fewer children, as college admissions are getting more competitive. So we get this transformation where families now are smaller and more focused on getting the kid into college, which is very much like what they do in East Asia, like in Korea. Um, you know, there's no childhood in Korea. All of childhood is preparation to take an exam to try to get into one of three schools.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  It's really tragic what they've done in Korea, but we're on the road to doing that ourselves here in America. So you get a bunch of social changes where you get more high impact. Um, the fear that comes in in the 1990s of abduction now, now makes us think that a good mother is one who protects her child. And a lot of the burden of this really falls on mothers. The criticism, I mean, the mommy wars, you know, anything a mother does, someone's going to criticize it as being the wrong thing. Fathers, we're kind of let off the hook there. You know, if I let my son take risks, people are gonna say, oh, he's teaching him to be tough, you know, whereas mothers, it's much riskier because someone's going to judge you. And so, once you get all this criticism, a lot of women, I think, are sort of pressured into overprotecting, hovering, always being there. So I think that's part of it.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  The key psychological idea I want to give your listeners is called anti-fragility. If you think your child is fragile, you're gonna overprotect them, wrap them in bubble wrap, never let them get hurt, never let them take risks. But if you do that, then you keep your kid fragile. And those are the kids who showed up beginning in 2014 on campus, Gen Z. But if you understand that we're mammals who are programmed to take risks, watch kids play naturally, once, once a kid learns how to ride on a skateboard, they don't just ride back and forth, they try harder things, they try a bigger hill, they go downstairs, they go downstairs railings. Why are they doing that? Because their brain is pushing them to test the limits. That's how they learn. That's how you get strong. That's how you get resourceful. That's how you learn to manage risk on your own.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  You have to fall down. You can't have a child without falling down and scraping yourself and banging your head sometimes. Obviously, we want to much out for concussions. I'm all in favor of bike helmets. But if we're protecting our kids in ways that block them from having experience, then we are harming them. We're giving them a vitamin P deficiency, you might say. Our kids are anti-fragile. They have to take risks. They have to get hurt. They have to be excluded sometimes. You don't want them being bullied over days, but they have to experience conflict and criticism and exclusion at school. They have to experience that. And it hurts us. We don't want that to happen. So we jump in. We're always there for them and we're blocking their development.

• 23:24Jen Cohen?

  Yeah. The problem is it's becoming a social divide, right? It's becoming, it's becoming now, if you make mention of it, you're then on the wrong side. Like you're either this way, you're either like hardcore, strong, or you're, or you're this. Like you're either a gentle parenter or you're not, right? And there's no, there's no middle ground. That's what I find anyway. Like, how do you kind of, like, what's the path forward, right? Like, how does that happen? Because, you know, the, the truth of the matter is, it's, it's now becoming, it's becoming worse. It's not becoming better, the gentle parenting.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  True, but I think it's about to turn around. You tell me. So one of the key ideas in my book is collective action. The reason we fell into this so quickly is that once a few kids got a smartphone and social media, that put pressure on all the other kids to get it because they don't want to be left out. And that puts pressure on the parents to give in because they don't want the kid to be left out. So this is called a collective action problem where we're not making up our, you know, we're not, each parent isn't deciding, hmm, what are the pros and cons of getting a phone? We're not making our, our private decisions. It's collectively made for us. There's a lot of pressure. Similarly about how to parent. I co-founded an organization called Let Grow, letgrow.org, with a wonderful woman named Lenore Skanezy. And the reason she got into this area is that she let her nine-year-old son ride

• 24:46Speaker 03

  the New York City subway alone in the year 2008, I think it was. And he, you know, he knew the subway system. He went from a store back to his house. Everything was great. He loved it. But she went on the news and talked about this and the hate mail, people saying, you're the worst mother in America. How could you ever do that? Your kid could be abducted. And so this, you know, so this overprotection, which is harming kids, that's what led Lenore to, to write a book called Free Range Kids. And then we founded Let Grow. But my, to return to my point about collective action, many parents, mothers especially, are afraid to let their kid out because they'll be judged by others. And so the way out of this is through collective action. We can get out of this if we act together. And so in the book, I propose four norms that if we do them, and it doesn't have to

• 25:30Speaker 03

  be everybody, it can just be you and five friends first, and then it can be you and your kid's school. If we do this, we escape from the phone-free childhood. Here it is. One, no smartphone before high school or age 14. Do not give your kid a touchscreen. Laptop is not as nearly as bad, but there are issues still. An iPad, it turns out, is just as bad. It's the touchscreen technology that's super, super addictive because you get stimulus response reinforcement, stimulus response reinforcement. Television didn't do that.

• 25:55Jen Cohen?

  Oh.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  So no smartphone before 14. Give them a flip phone. You want to keep in touch with them? You're, you want them to call you? Give them a flip phone. It's a phone. It's not a way for strange men to contact them. Second rule, no social media before 16. This is really important. Social media is wildly inappropriate, even if they could remove 90% of the porn and the grooming and the violence, even if they could move 100%. These things are engineered to addict your child, take all of their available time, damage their ability to attend, take every moment. Kids, you know, now that the iPhone is waterproof, kids take it into the shower. They are never without stuff coming in. So just no social media till 16, at least, but that should be the norm. The third is phone-free schools.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  If you are able to call or text your child during the school day, I guarantee you, your child feels like she has to check her phone often because lots of kids are texting each other, direct messaging each other, sending snaps, talking about the latest video on TikTok. This is the last thing you want your child to be doing in school. You want your child to be listening to the teacher or sending notes back and forth, like literally, physically talking to their friends in school, not hundreds of people around the world. So phone-free schools is a must. If your child, if you can reach your child during the school day, your child's education is not nearly as good as it could be if she had a phone-free school. Oh, and California's going phone-free. This is really great news. The, you know, Governor Newsom signed, I think he signed the bill already.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  But California schools will be phone-free in a year or two.

• 27:27Jen Cohen?

  That's amazing.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:29Jen Cohen?

  But what about the fact that with schools, they have now computers?

• 27:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:34Jen Cohen?

  Like, they have, now everyone's doing things digitally. And on these digital computers, they're now found a way that they're playing video games on there.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  And porn and social media, that's right, yeah.

• 27:46Jen Cohen?

  Right, so doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose?

• 27:48Speaker 03

  Yes, it does, yes, it does. So two things. First, getting rid of the phones is the easy part because all the teachers hate it, all the principals hate it. So you got to get rid of the phones. Second, it's the phones that destroy lunchtime and time in between classes. They're not going to be on their laptop in the hallway, but they are on their phones. And so when schools go phone-free, the universal thing you always hear, you always see it in the news reports, is you hear a teacher or principal saying, "We hear laughter in the hallways again." We haven't heard much of that in 10 years, 15 years. So you got to get rid of the phones, that's the first step, and that's easy. Now, what you raise is the next battleground. I didn't say much about that at all in the book because I didn't know when I was writing the book. But since, since I submitted the manuscript, and, you know, a year and a half ago, I've been learning a lot more.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  And the evidence is really damning about the one-to-one technology. We all thought in the 90s and early 2000s, "Oh, rich kids have computers. We need to get computers for everyone, get a computer on every desk," we thought. And the ed tech companies and Google and Apple were thrilled, and they really pushed it, especially Google after 2012 or so. So the Chromebook is ubiquitous, it's everywhere.

• 28:55Jen Cohen?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  What effect does this have? So let me just level set by saying, I teach college students at New York University, and I teach MBA students who are 27 to 30 years old. They can't handle a computer on their desk, they cannot do it. I used to always let them take notes on a computer, because I like to take notes on a computer. But the TA would sit in the back of the room, even though I made them pledge, they had literally stand up and swear that you will only use your computer for class-related Purpose that they all stand up, they swear it. But the TA says half of them are online shopping, they're texting, they're checking their LinkedIn for the grad students. They can't do it. None of us can do it. You know, we're always multitasking when we're on a Zoom call. So college students' education is damaged if they have access to a computer during class. Okay, now let's look at nine-year-olds.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  What do we think nine-year-olds are going to do or 12-year-olds who are deep into gossip and talking about each other? There's no way in hell they're going to just do the thing they're supposed to do. So it's looking more and more like ed tech, especially, I can't say all of it. I'm sure there are some things that are good. Khan Academy is good. I don't know, you know, the teacher having a computer to present things on a screen. That's probably good, but I haven't done research on that yet. The thing we need to focus on next is get every device off of the desktop. Kids must not have a multi-function device on their desktop. If they do, they might as well just stay home. There's really no point in coming into school and having a teacher talk in front of the room if the kids are on multi-function devices.

• 30:18Jen Cohen?

  And, and you know, the T and also what happens is that what the kids start to like, they can like, they can wiggle around it. They can be like, oh, you know what? Like I'm doing my homework and they're actually not doing their homework. They're like, they're talking to their friends and they're on their, the games and all these other things. There are so many things you can do, but according to some of the teachers here that people want it like this comes from, it comes from above. And so.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  But we're turning that around. We're turning that around. And the reason why I'm confident is that it's now clear that student test scores have been declining since 2012. So test scores, we have national exam, there's the national thing, the NAP, the National Assessment of Education Progress, tracking students since the 1970s, early 70s. And what you can see is that in reading and math, the two areas, scores have been rising very gradually, slowly, but they've been rising from the 70s through 2012. And then they start dropping. Now they dropped faster after COVID. And so people say, oh, my God, COVID, you know, COVID caused this. But when you look at the graphs, what you see is that the peak was 2012 and it's downhill since 2012. And it's faster downhill from 2020 to 2022, 23.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  But and people say, oh, well, you know, it's just, it'll rebound because that was just COVID. We just got the 2024 numbers in about. A month ago, no rebound. And guess what? What happens is the the kids at the top, the kids who are the best students, their scores are kind of level over the last 10 years. They haven't dropped much. They dropped a little, but not a lot. All the drop comes from the students at the bottom. And so if you care about equity, if you care about the kids who are the worst performers, who are disproportionately going to be low SES, single parent families, the mom's overwhelmed, she can't hire babysitters, the kid is raised on a screen. These are the kids who are being devastated. Their education is being devastated. So even though we once thought that it was an equity move to get a computer on every kid's desk, it turns out it's the reverse.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Because it's the rich kids who have two married, college educated parents. They're the ones who have some limits and controls at home. Whereas the kids who don't have that, they're on their screens much more. For them, it's more like 12 hours a day on their screen as opposed to eight or nine for the for the wealthier kids. 12 hours a day, that's your whole life. And so we've got to at least give them six or seven hours a day without addiction. And that's why we have to have phone free schools.

• 32:32Jen Cohen?

  Absolutely.

• 32:39Jen Cohen?

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• 33:24Jen Cohen?

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• 34:04Jen Cohen?

  What about the fact, you've mentioned something earlier about how it's really become about college now, right? Like, parents are becoming these helicopter parenting and this, the modernized parenting about getting the kid into college. That's like a very singular thing that people are focused on, right?

• 34:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:21Jen Cohen?

  So if parents and kids and students are focused on that, how are they also on their phone the whole time? Isn't that kind of like an oxymoron?

• 34:32Speaker 03

  Like, No, because they're multitasking. And so what happens when you see, and this is what, look, I teach in a business school. I talk to a lot of people in the corporate world. They're really unhappy with their Gen Z employees. They can't pay attention. They sit at their desk. They have their phone in front of their computer. They're going back and forth, social media, this, that, some work. They're multitasking. And this, I think, is actually the biggest damage that is done. In my book, I focused on, I focused on mental illness as the outcome. I focus on what it is doing to their mental health. But now I believe that the biggest damage is actually not even the mental health. It's actually the complete shattering of attention. So I would urge your listeners, talk to high school kids now and ask them if they or their friends have difficulty watching a movie.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  A lot of kids now say they can't sit through a 90 or 100 minute movie. Now, they can do it if they have their phone because they can be going back and forth. But paying attention to a story for 100 minutes? Who can do that? I spoke with the former CEO of Netflix. He said Netflix is going shorter and shorter content, fewer movies, because younger people can't watch a movie. They can't pay attention. Same thing for books. As one of my students put it, we had a discussion about this. I teach a course called flourishing. We talk about these issues. As one of my students put it, I take out a book. I read a sentence. I get bored. I go to TikTok. Because if you've raised your kids since they were With an iPad or a multifunction device, you've conditioned their brain that at this first hint of boredom, this isn't so interesting. It's not the most interesting thing.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  There might be something more interesting over here or there or there or there. Let me check it out. And so, uh, so here, let me give you some, okay. I'm, I'm sure some of your listeners are thinking, oh, my God, you mean, I have to take it all the way? How am I going to raise my kid with no screens? What are they going to do? So let me give you, I think this comparison might help a lot of your, a lot of your listeners. I'm not saying get rid of all screens. Let's, let me just explain. Here's good screen use. Using a television to play a long story for a kid who is watching it with another kid or adult. That's good because humans are storytelling animals. We love stories. We've always raised our kids on stories for tens of thousands of years. And so if a kid is watching a story on a TV screen and it's going to play for 30 minutes or 90 minutes

• 36:45Speaker 03

  and he can't manipulate it, he can't change the channel, he's just going to watch it. And if there's someone he can talk about it with or laugh with, that's actually fine. That's a pretty good thing. I, I wouldn't say, you know, watch a movie every single day, but don't worry about your kid watching, you know, a couple of movies a week. That's totally fine because that's story time. Now here's what's really, really bad. It's fragmenting time. So the really, the worst use of screens is here, kid, here's my iPhone or an iPad. Shut up. We're in a restaurant or I'm trying to make dinner. Shut up. Here you go. That's the worst thing you can do because that's not story time. That's clicking, getting rewards, clicking, getting rewards, moving over. That is what damages a child's developing ability to pay attention. So I would urge no fragmenting time until at least 14.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Once you give them a phone, they're going to do fragmenting time all day long. But at least let their brain get through early puberty before you break attention into tiny little pieces.

• 37:38Jen Cohen?

  You're all, yeah, I, I think that, I mean, you said also, which is very true. I mean, mental health, anxiety and depression. But I think also with that is coming this inability to socialize period. You're not, you have no ability to socialize and make eye contact, contact. How does that affect people later on in life in terms of? Working, like employment, dating, getting married, going out with girls, boys.

• 38:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:04Jen Cohen?

  That whole world has become obsolete as well.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. So I misspoke before when I said, actually, the biggest damages to their attention. I think the mental illness, the fragmenting of attention and the loss of social skills. Each one is a gigantic catastrophe, not just for the country, but for the world, because it's happening all over the developed world. Wherever we raise kids on touchscreens, this is happening. So what we know is that the millennial generation, which is not mentally ill, they were, their dating life, it all runs through the apps. You think they're having a lot of sex, it's so easy, but they're actually having less sex than any previous generation. So there was already a sex recession for the millennials. Now, I haven't been able to get data.

• 38:41Jen Cohen?

  Why is that? Why is that?

• 38:43Speaker 03

  I, you know, the apps don't, for one thing, okay, for one thing, most sex happens in long-running couples. It's not hookups. When you're married, you have a lot more sex than single people because you have a regular partner. And with the apps, it makes it harder to fall in love, because the apps cut off courtship. You know, you hook up, you know, and that, that blocks, courtship blocks falling in love. So I'm not really sure. I haven't really studied that issue in detail. I don't know for sure why the millennials. But Gen Z is, I believe, going to be much, much worse for a lot of reasons. One is that the boys, oh, you know what? Let's pick up the boys. Because lots of parents have boys. I have a boy and a girl. We talked about girls. Let me briefly mention the boys. So the boys, it's not that spending an hour on Instagram is going to mess them up and make them mentally ill.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  For the boys, what social media does is it leads them to do all kinds of incredibly dangerous and destructive things. So a lot of the challenges, the stupid challenges on TikTok, most of the kids who've been killed are boys. Doing dangerous things, subway surfer, I mean, literally riding on top of subway cars, then they get killed. The skull breaker challenge, you tell your friend to jump up and you kick his legs out so he lands on his head. Jumping kids in the hallway or the bathroom and beating them up so that your friend can film it, you can put it up online. I mean, it's sick, sick, horrible stuff. So social media is hurting boys in a lot of ways, but it's not so much from just anxiety, depression, the way it is for girls. But the story for boys isn't really focused on social media. The story for boys is focused on their general retreat from the real world, which began in the seventies and eighties. Schools became. More and more conducive to girls, not boys.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Let's, you know, the school year is longer, less recess, get rid of shop class, get rid of, you know, auto mechanics, get rid of all that stuff, the stuff that boys would be more interested. Make them sit in their seat and learn math and, and, and, and English all day long. That's really hard on boys. So our schools have become less and less supportive and conducive to the way boys are. And at the same time, while this was happening, the virtual world said, hey, boys, come on in, come on in. When I was a kid, video games were really primitive. We loved them, but they were very primitive. Every few years, they're like an order of magnitude better. Color monitors, fast action, lifelike video, music, multiplayer games. So the video games get more and more incredible. The boys get sucked in.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  The porn gets more and more incredible, you know, high definition video of scenes chosen by algorithms because that's what turned other men on. So the porn is much more addictive, much more. I mean, I can't say it's more, I, you know, I assume it's more aggressive and violent than it was when, when I was, you know, when I was in the seventies.

• 41:09Jen Cohen?

  Right. You were like, aren't you more, it was more like Playboy. You're looking at naked people, naked girls, you know what I mean? It's much more aggressive because you have to always elevate and elevate because things get boring.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's right. And so when, so here's the key thing. Kids need to work and then get the reward of the work. And the thing I most desired when I was in high school was a girlfriend. And it was really hard to get a girlfriend and I made a lot of effort to do so. And I finally succeeded and we had a, you know, gradual courtship. And I remember when I first held her hand, it was a big deal. And like, so when you're making progress towards a goal, you get, you get dopamine, you get a reinforcing chemical, but it's slow dopamine. It's like you work and you get the reward. It feels so good. That's what you want for your kids. But what's happening with boys is these companies say, hey, boys, you want quick dopamine? You want to play war? Here, war. You could, you know, incredible vivid war.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  And you can get killed 30 times a day. You know, my son plays Fortnite. I kept him off in sixth and seventh grade, but let him on during the pandemic. You know, it's, I mean, it's really powerful, attractive, addictive stuff, exciting. And the same thing for the porn. And then, oh my god, and then all the vaping and the marijuana pens and the gambling and the sports betting and the crypto betting, all of it is gamified to hook boys. These giant industries are out there to grab your son's attention and suck it dry, leaving him nothing. And if it's gambling, leaving him broke.

• 42:36Jen Cohen?

  Right, so then because of all of this, I mean, with the porn and everything else, me actually, Prof G, I know you're friendly with him.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  Oh, I love Scott Galloway, yes.

• 42:44Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, we've talked about this many times on my podcast, his podcast, about this. Because about sex and people are not having sex anymore, why? It's kind of like the porn also, you also tweaks your brain into thinking what's, when you see a real life person, it's not attractive because

• 43:03Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 43:03Jen Cohen?

  It's not what you're seeing.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  They're far from perfect.

• 43:05Jen Cohen?

  They're far from perfect, right? Which is the part, like, listen, that's why, that's why plastic surgery is out, that's why all these filters are existing. People are, their brains are not realizing what's reality in real life versus what's like on, you know, the computer. That's why AI, now, I'm sure you know this too, like AI, like there are girlfriends, people have AI girlfriends versus having real life girlfriends.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. And so, you know, so heterosexual relationships are hard enough. Boys and girls are different on average. You know, the kind of the problems that come up in relationships and marriage, marriage therapy are, you know, often very gendered and very common across the decades. There are just some natural mismatches between the way boy, you know, men and women are in conversation, et cetera. Okay, that's the way it's always been. Now add in that the girls are much more anxious, fragile and defensive. So that's going to lead to more conflicts. Add in that the boys are more isolated, autistic, hard to make eye contact, have even worse social skills and worse social perception. How are boys and girls going to get together and do the hard work of dating and falling in love and staying together? It's looking pretty grim.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Oh, but don't worry, technology will rescue us. You're lonely? Here, create an AI girlfriend. You can, oh, you want her to have these measurements? Tell us the measurements, what color hair? Do you want her to be flirty, brainy, slutty, whatever you want? So of course, the boys are going to be going for this and, and, you know, the girls as well. Because do you want someone who actually listens to you instead of bragging and boasting all day long? Yes, please. So, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna have the sexes getting their gratification from AI. And that means, you know, not much in the way of marriage, sex and children.

• 44:47Jen Cohen?

  So would it like, is there any, are you optimistic or not about the future? Because things are not going to get better. And they're going, it's just going to keep on, it's going to keep on snowballing. So, you know, even if we put into these, even if we like do the collective, as you call it, uh, collective action, right? Another problem is, and I, and I know these are all, I'm not, I don't mean to talk about all the problems, but this is reality. A lot of parents are choosing to be, they want to be friends with their children. They don't want to be a parent to their children, right? They're like, oh, I don't want them to hate me. Just to give you an example, my kid has a flip phone, okay? And he hated me, right?

• 45:27Jen Cohen?

  But listen, I tried to do the collective thing with a bunch of parents and nobody wanted to do it.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  When was this? When did you try this?

• 45:36Jen Cohen?

  Ten months ago. My kid was going into grade five, to grade six, and I thought, you know what? Let's try and hold off. Based, honestly, based on your book.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Okay, but because you were one of the first to read it. It came out 11 months ago. Try it again in two months. What I'm saying is, okay, this is actually a good way to end. You know, I, I hear myself talking about doom and gloom. I hear, and these mega trends are horrific. So the prob, this is, you know, I think this is one of the biggest problems we face, certainly at the level of global warming, any other issue you want to put up there. This is a global change in humanity, okay? But I'm actually really optimistic, and here's why. The book came out March 26th of last year, and it spread like wildfire around the world. And legislators read it. And like, just to give you one example, in South Australia, one of the Australian states, the premier of that state, his wife was reading the Anxious Generation book in bed,

• 46:29Speaker 03

  and she said to him, Peter, you've got to read this book, and then you've got to do something about it. And so he did. He read the book, and he said, oh my God, we've got to stop this. Uh, and he commissioned a report, and they came up with really good legislation, and then the whole country of Australia adopted it, and Australia is going to raise the age to 16. And it, and in Australia, and in the US, and in the UK, it's totally bipartisan. Because politicians, governors, presidents, everybody, they have children, they've all seen it. And so this is one of the few areas in American life where we've got a hard problem, and we're united, and we all see it, and we're taking action. Now, it's not, you're, you're right, there's still going to be parents who, you know, they want to call their kid all the time, but the super tanker has turned. Things are changing.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  And 11 months ago, if you tried to say, hey, let's all not give our kids smartphones, the people are like, what? But try it again in a month or two, or try it now. People have been, everybody was kids, has been on some group where they're talking about the anxious generation. The ideas are getting out there. There's spontaneous action happening everywhere. Try it again now, you will find that you'll get a lot more support.

• 47:32Jen Cohen?

  I should have bought your book in bulk because I've sent your book and I bought your book to probably like forty people already, fifty people. I was thinking I should have been a bulk order, probably get a better deal, right?

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:42Jen Cohen?

  But, but I, I agree, like, I think that, like, maybe, so you, are you optimistic that things are gonna be, even with technology, even with all these things happening?

• 47:52Speaker 03

  You know, look, AI is, is gonna change things in some good ways, and I think a lot of bad ways, especially sociologically. So I'm very concerned about, about what AI is gonna do over the next five years.

• 48:03Jen Cohen?

  What do you think? What do you, can you give me some ideas of what you think, like what you see?

• 48:07Speaker 03

  You know, I don't want to because I want to end on a positive note. And, you know, with, with AI, just all right, briefly on kids, it means that all the current problems of social media are gonna get a lot more intense. I just saw an AI company that will take whatever you want to post to make it super viral. So everything is gonna get even more viral. Everything will get more attractive to our kids. And AI is gonna give us a kind of omnipotence. It's gonna let us do anything because we'll have agents, AI agents that can do things for us in the world. And that's, you don't want that for your kids. You don't want your kids to have lots of servants. You want your kids to work, struggle, learn to clean their rooms, make their own breakfast, do their own homework, and not have ChatGPT write it for them. So I think AI is gonna be a real problem, and that's why it is so crucial

• 48:50Speaker 03

  that we, that we enact the four reforms this year in 2025, because we've got to establish the principle this year that children are not adults. We know that in the real world, there's all kinds of restrictions in the real world. But online, we're like, ah, you know, it's kind of hard, you know, what are we gonna do? Ask for identification, and, and you can go anywhere. Just say, just say you're eighteen, you can go anywhere. That's gotta stop, and we've got to stop it this year, 2025. Australia is leading the charge, Australia is gonna do it. In the US, I don't expect that we'll do it. States are trying to do it, but they get held up in court. Meta supports lots of organizations that will just sue everybody who tries to do reform. But the thing is, we can do most of this without Congress. We can do it at the state level. Many other countries are doing it, and we can do it at the school level.

• 49:34Speaker 03

  I just spoke, when I was out in LA a month ago, I spoke to the Conference of California State Superintendents. One of the most enthusiastic, wonderful audiences I've ever spoken to. They all see the problem. The phones are wreaking havoc in their schools, on test scores. They're trying to do a job, and the phones and the computers is making them possible. So they were rallying to the cause. And so what I'm saying is, yes, this is a huge problem. It's a huge problem because we got pushed into it by collective forces. But the way we get out of it quickly is by acting together. So just keep trying. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Talk to, especially the parents of your kids' friends. You will find them much more receptive now than they were 11 months ago.

• 50:14Jen Cohen?

  How old are your kids? You said one kid is already in college.

• 50:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, my son is 18, and he's a freshman at USC. And my daughter is 15, and she's a senior in a public high school in New York City.

• 50:27Jen Cohen?

  Do you think that public or private school is better for a kid? From your research?

• 50:33Speaker 03

  That I can't say. We loved the elementary school that my kids went to. It was just wonderful. We can't imagine anything better. Some of the private schools got really deeply into ideological stuff in the 2010s. And so that was part of our decision in New York City, was like, there's no school we could send them to in New York. We don't want them exposed to all that, the political stuff. But I think the schools are loosening up now. So, and again, that's just elite schools in New York City. Although LA is probably pretty similar. So that, I can't weigh in on that question.

• 51:03Jen Cohen?

  Well, because you're a social psychologist, so you have so much deep research in all of these things. I'm sure that you're constantly seeing data and numbers and all these things. Is there one app over the other that's even more dangerous? Is TikTok more dangerous than Instagram?

• 51:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, TikTok is the most dangerous overall because that's the one that very effectively destroys attention. I can't, you know, again, it's not everybody, but a third of all kids, teens, say they're on social media almost all the time. So it's always in the hand, they're always, and TikTok is the most common of those apps. So I think TikTok has destroyed more IQ points than anybody else. With that said, Snapchat has probably led to more deaths. So when kids die, it's usually from a drug overdose because they get, you know, they buy drugs on Snapchat, disappearing messages. So it's very easy to find drugs on Snapchat. And so cyberbullying and fentanyl are two ways that kids die from social media.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  And that, I think, I'm not certain, but I believe that's more Snapchat than Instagram or TikTok. Those are the big three. There are other companies. Oh, I should just say Pinterest is wonderful. The CEO of Pinterest, Bill Reddy, he reached out to me right after the book came out and he said, I love what you're doing. I agree with you. When he took over from a couple of years ago, he spontaneously turned off social features for under 16s. That is, he said, if a 12-year-old wants to get on Pinterest and look for fabric patterns or ways to decorate her room, great, let her on. But if she wants to be talking with strangers, text, you know, no, there's no reason. So he did that, didn't have to do it. The share price went down a bit at first because people thought, oh, he's going to lose market share.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  But guess what? Safety is actually something that a lot of people want. And so since Pinterest, I never hear stories about girls whose lives were ruined by Pinterest. All the other three, yes. But Pinterest, so my point is, it's not the screens per se, and it's not social media per se, but talking with strangers who are unverified and are often not who they say, this is just completely insane that we do this. So that has to stop. And that's primarily happening on Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok.

• 53:12Jen Cohen?

  Are you trying to lobby these people, like Meta and TikTok? How do you get them on board to help with this crisis?

• 53:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:20Jen Cohen?

  Because their job is that they're like a marketing agency. They want to make money, right?

• 53:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, that's right. Now, we have, because we have, because those three companies are being sued by a lot of attorneys general, a lot of parents with dead kids. So there, a lot has come out from their own internal deliberations. And we know that those three companies, their employees have come to them and said, hey, we got problems. And then management says like, no, that solution would reduce engagement. Don't do it. We can't do it. So those three companies have shown that they're very resistant to reform to protect kids. They talk a good game. They say, oh, we're doing this. Oh, we're doing that. Oh, we hired a thousand more content. But the problem isn't so much the content and the content moderation. The problem is the design. These things are designed to attract children and keep them on and take their childhood and break their attention into little tiny bits. It doesn't matter if all the content is nice.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  It's still going to do that.

• 54:10Jen Cohen?

  Can you just mention again, because I want people to really listen to the thing that you're involved with, with the free range, Let It Grow, Let Grow?

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Let Grow, yes. So I do have to go, but thanks for giving me this, this opportunity to, to, to lay out where you can go for more information. So the central site for information is anxiousgeneration.com. That's the website for the book. We've got a huge number of resources. Also, my Substack is afterbabel.com, B-A-B-E-L, afterbabel.com. That's where we put out our research articles. We have all kinds of great writers on there. So parents, teachers, please go to afterbabel.com. It's free. You don't have to pay any money. And then we have a special relationship with, with Let Grow. Go to letgrow.org. A wonderful organization started, well, really, a couple of us said to Lenore Skenazy, hey, you need to up your game. The country needs you.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  And so we just made her more effective by giving her an organization rather than just being an author with a book. And Let Grow, we have a couple of simple programs. They're so powerful. The Let Grow Experience, schools do it. It's transformative. You, you just tell the kids, go home, pick something you think you can do by yourself without your parents, but with your parents' permission. Maybe it's make breakfast for yourself. Maybe it's make breakfast for the family. Maybe it's walk the dog. Maybe it's go to a store three blocks away. You're eight years old, you're nine years old, you think you can walk to a store three blocks in the afternoon, get a quart of milk? And it's amazing what happens when they do it because they come back brimming with confidence that you see them change. It's wonderful. And it also changes the parents because the

• 55:40Speaker 03

  parents were, wow, my nine-year-old kid actually can walk three blocks without getting lost or abducted and buy a quart of milk and come home.

• 55:50Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 55:50Speaker 03

  You know, all of us were doing that when we were seven or eight, back in the 70s and 80s. But our nine-year-olds can do all sorts of things. So anyway, the Let Grow experience, super powerful, a couple of other ideas. So anxiousgeneration.com, afterbabel.com, and letgrow.org.

• 56:05Jen Cohen?

  It's amazing. Jonathan, it was amazing to have you on. It was a pleasure. Every parent needs to read the book, Anxious Generation, and not just me, buying it for people. You can go buy it yourself on Amazon. So, thank you so much for being on the show. And, like I said, I appreciate your time.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  My pleasure, Jen. Good luck to you with your kids and convincing some other families to go along with you and adopt the Four Norms.

• 56:30Jen Cohen?

  Thank you.