Pod Insights TED Radio Hour Did social media break a generation — or just change it? About this episode Is tech rewiring childhood or exposing what’s already broken? Jonathan Haidt, Catherine Price, and a Gen Z advocate debate social media bans, attention and what “fun” looks like off-screen. Guests include social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, youth online safety activist Maximilian Milovidov and author Catherine Price.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:47 Manoush Zomorodi? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Most of us accept that social media has a dark side. But are these platforms finally facing a legal reckoning? A warning: this episode contains mentions of sexual abuse of minors and school shootings.
1:11 Speaker 07 For the very first time, the world's most powerful social media giants are standing trial. A landmark case could change how your child consumes social media content.
1:21 Manoush Zomorodi? A series of trials have begun against Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube, marking the first time these big tech companies have actually been tested in court, facing claims that they have harmed kids. ... fueling a youth mental crisis.
1:36 Speaker 07 They were intentionally designed to be addictive, and they are rewiring the way that children think, behave, and learn.
1:42 Manoush Zomorodi? And it's not just in the US. Australia recently became the first country to ban social media for users under 16 years old.
1:51 Speaker 02 Australia is launching a massive nationwide experiment.
1:55 Manoush Zomorodi? French lawmakers have passed a similar ban. It's meant to shield underage people from cyber Harassment, harmful and inappropriate content. With other countries lining up.
2:03 Speaker 03 Britain, Ireland, Malaysia and some Indian states, among those considering age limits on children.
2:09 Manoush Zomorodi? And some say the person who ignited this global movement to rise up against the harms of social media on young people is this man, Jonathan Haidt.
2:20 Speaker 02 I am a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business, and I'm the author of The Anxious Generation and the co-author with Catherine Price of The Amazing Generation.
2:34 Manoush Zomorodi? Before this, John was well-known for his work studying the evolution of morality. But then, about a decade ago, he started noticing something in his classroom.
2:45 Speaker 02 So I've been a professor since 1995. I love being a professor. I love teaching. I love students. I love universities. And all of a sudden, in 2014, and then especially 2015, everything changed. Students were much more anxious, much more fragile. There was a lot of unrest and accusation and instability on campus. And it wasn't like this in 2012. And the fact that all our mental health centers were filled at universities across the country was a big mystery. What is happening?
3:14 Manoush Zomorodi? The answer is compiled in The Anxious Generation, which is full of charts and graphs backing up his thesis that technology, particularly social media, has created a warped new kind of childhood. More recently, his book, The Amazing Generation, brings a more positive message to kids that they have better things to do with their time than scroll.
3:36 Speaker 02 By the age of 11, 12, 13, the kids are on social media in America and Britain. They're on about five hours a day just on social media. And if you add in the rest of the stuff they do on their phone, you're up to eight to 10 hours a day, not counting school, not counting screens in school. And so what does that push out? Everything. It compresses everything. That means you get less sleep, less play, less sunshine. You don't read books anymore. You don't look into people's eyes very much anymore. You don't spend time with your friends anymore. And so if you spend those crucial years, you know, age 11 or 12 through 16, if you spend those swiping five hours a day
4:16 Speaker 02 on, you know, highly stimulating videos that are not stories, they're not literature, they're just little bits of, you know, silliness. Yes, my claim is that will change brain development in ways that will make you less capable, confident, happy, and sociable as an adult.
4:35 Manoush Zomorodi? The conversation about kids and their technology has reached full volume. How much screen time is too much? Is it on parents to set stricter rules at home? Or should schools and governments step in? Should social media be off limits altogether? Today on the show, the movement to change culture and laws. Why not everyone agrees?
4:57 Speaker 03 I think we've taken this kind of authoritarian approach. We need to teach children how to navigate the world that's existing now.
5:03 Manoush Zomorodi? And an antidote that maybe we can all get behind.
5:06 Speaker 03 What I call true fun is this confluence of these three states, playfulness, connection, and flow. It's also something that phones block.
5:15 Manoush Zomorodi? So back to John Height's Anxious Generation. The book has been on the bestseller list since it debuted in 2024 and chronicles the harms of social media on young people.
5:26 Speaker 02 So in addition to the mental health harms, obviously, sleep deprivation has all kinds of effects on kids. The loss of exercise, the immobility has all kinds of health effects. But there are really serious direct harms that come mostly from the way that social media platforms put children into conversation with anonymous men. And it's always men. And so the major areas are that these men want either money or sex from the children. So kids are sextored every year, and each one is traumatized. These are not correlations. These are direct harms.
6:04 Manoush Zomorodi? And then there's the new thing, which is gaming and sports betting porn, of course. Not so new.
6:10 Speaker 02 That's right. Now, you know, gambling, I mean, slot machines are literally the inspiration for some of these platforms. They studied Las Vegas, they studied behaviorism. If you ever wondered why you pull down on your phone, you pull down to get a fresh set of emails or texts or whatever, that was literally copied from slot machine design. So, these are addictive platforms and apps, and addiction is a very serious thing to do to a child. So, we've got to stop. We've got to just stop this. And the idea that, well, we have to wait until we're sure, we have to do more research, I think, I think we need to be a little more careful here and say, unless something is proven safe for kids, we probably should keep them away from it.
6:57 Manoush Zomorodi? So, let's start with schools. Thirty-five states now have phone-free school laws or executive orders. Did this happen easily? Tell us about that process.
7:07 Speaker 02 Oh, my God. It was the easiest social change ever undertaken by humanity. So, here's what happened. So, in the anxious generation, I realized, you know what, there's four steps that solve collective action problems. If we do these, we roll back the phone-based childhood. Number one, no smartphone before high school. Number two, no social media before sixteen. Number three, phone-free schools. It's completely insane that children can basically, you know, watch television and play video games and watch porn and do everything while sitting at their desks in class. That's just, that never should have happened. And the fourth is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. We have to give kids back a childhood worth having. So, those are the four norms.
7:48 Speaker 02 And the amazing thing that happened was because pretty much every teacher in the country and in the world was pulling their hair out. Every teacher in the world had to be more interesting than TikTok, and none of us can be. My book came out, and most politicians are parents. And so, so many governors, red state and blue state, reached out to me, reached out to my team, and we helped them. We made it clear, do not just ban it during class time. And 20 states actually did it right, which is phone free for the whole school day. Because that's where you get the social benefits. If you just do it in class time, then what do you think kids are doing between classes? What do you think kids are doing at lunch? They're all on their phone all the time. When a school goes phone free and it's well enforced, you get magical results.
8:31 Speaker 02 And the universal thing we hear is that teachers say, we hear laughter in the hallways again.
8:37 Manoush Zomorodi? Thanks to your work, a lot of governments are looking at putting age limits on social media. We saw Australia's under 16 social media ban go into effect in December 2025. How did that unfold? It seemed to happen kind of fast.
8:51 Speaker 02 Yes, this is all happening very fast because once everybody sees the problem, they start acting. So what happened was the premier of South Australia, one of the Australian states. His wife was reading The Anxious Generation in bed and she turns to him and says, Peter, you've got to read this book and then you've got to do something about it. And he did. He commissioned a report from Supreme Court Justice about how it could be done. And then he did it in South Australia. And then the premier of New South Wales, who's from the other, the opposite party. So in every country, it's totally bipartisan because conservatives have kids, liberals have kids. If you have kids, you've seen this problem.
9:27 Manoush Zomorodi? How do they enforce these bans? Like, how does it work?
9:30 Speaker 02 Oh, it's easy. You put the responsibility on the companies that are making a defective consumer product. And so there are dozens and dozens of companies that do age assurance using a variety of technologies. And Julie Imingrand, the e-Safety Commissioner, put out a press release a month ago with updates. All 10 platforms complied and they closed down 5 million accounts for the 2.5 million Australian children in that age range.
9:59 Speaker 02 And yes, there was a surge of VPN usage, kids figure out how to get around it. But then the surge went down because, you know, the kids check their, they check their social media 30 times a day. And if they have to boot up a VPN every time, that's a little bit of friction.
10:13 Manoush Zomorodi? And then meanwhile, we have these lawsuits and trials that are arguing, at least here in the US, that platforms knowingly designed experiences that harmed kids. I mean, John, I've been reporting on this topic for over a decade. And I think this is the first time that we're seeing big tech truly be tested in court. And can you explain what is different this time? Why does this have legs?
10:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, so we have a dangerous consumer product. We have a lot of internal documents showing that they they know this. They they write about addiction. They write about variable ratio reinforcement schedules. And the reason why these companies have never faced liability, they have never been held responsible because Section 230, the Communications Decency Act, has been interpreted very broadly by the courts to say, no one can hold them responsible for what they see. No one can hold the platforms responsible for content that they didn't make.
11:11 Manoush Zomorodi? OK, I want to make sure we include the tech companies' perspective. A Meta spokesperson has said they disagree with the allegations. They are confident that there's evidence that they support young people, that they actually try to be as safe as possible, but also censor as little as possible. YouTube says the allegations are simply not true. So keeping that in mind, what does accountability look like to you? I mean, financial settlements are one thing, but what else are you hoping for?
11:42 Speaker 02 So if listeners go to metasinternalresearch.org, my team gathered 31 accounts of studies that Meta did, and a lot of them showed direct harm. Meta even did an RCT. They even did a reduction experiment, and they found that when when Facebook and Instagram users stop using their product for a week, they get less depressed. So these companies, most of them, again, especially Meta, TikTok, and Snap, there are design changes that they could easily make that would solve many of these problems. Now, yes, they they say, oh, we put on better parental controls. We put on a timer. We nudge you. So it's not that they've done nothing, but they haven't done anything that would bite into their bottom line and that would actually reduce addiction or engagement.
12:25 Manoush Zomorodi? Meaning like stopping like infinite scroll or autoplay or algorithmic recommendations, those sorts of things?
12:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's that's right, all those sorts of things. So what success looks like for me is that we have a sea change in our thinking about these platforms, that they don't have a magical get out of jail card where, you know, any other, every other consumer product, if they kill kids, they're held responsible. And so that's going to end. And the whole industry is going to see, you know what? If you do things that are hurting kids, you actually need to be held responsible.
12:57 Manoush Zomorodi? In a minute, why some young people aren't buying John Height's description of their generation.
13:03 Speaker 04 When you label an entire generation as anxious, it kind of takes away our agency in a way.
13:08 Manoush Zomorodi? On the show today, kids, screens, and social media. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.
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14:30 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, kids and social media, and the movement spearheaded by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt to try to save what he calls "the anxious generation." He's found plenty of disciples among concerned parents and politicians, and we'll hear more from him in a minute. But what do some members of Gen Z think about his ideas? Are you an anxious generation, Maximilian?
14:59 Speaker 04 No, I'm not an anxious generation. When you label an entire generation as anxious, it kind of defines them. Gen Z is just gonna think, well, we're cursed. You know, there's nothing we can really do about it. Just by labeling us that takes away our agency in a way.
15:13 Manoush Zomorodi? This is Maximilian Milovidov. In some ways, he is your average 19-year-old.
15:19 Speaker 04 I think I was born when the iPhone was created. So I didn't know a world without it. I had initially struggled with my own compulsive social media use, where you really can't stop. And this harms your sleep, your school, your relationships.
15:34 Manoush Zomorodi? So Maximilian saw himself and his friends struggling. But he also saw his mom, who's an advisor to tech companies and parents, trying to help make the internet safer for young people. And so rather than delete his accounts, he joined TikTok's Youth Advisory Council.
15:51 Speaker 04 I like to joke to my friends that when you see that video as you're about to go to sleep and it's telling you, "Go to sleep," on TikTok, we helped implement those features.
16:00 Manoush Zomorodi? I want to ask you, despite the fact that you recognized your own compulsive, as you called it, behavior when you were using social media, you wrote an op-ed pushing back on Jonathan Haidt's book. Tell me what your problem was with the book and why you decided to write it.
16:20 Speaker 04 Let me start off with what I agree with him on. I'm gonna give him credit because I think that he has brought awareness to a real problem with teen mental health. And I think that's the first step. 40% of US high school students report persistent sadness and hopelessness. But in my opinion, the cause is misdiagnosed. We have economic precarity. College costs have gone up 169% since the 1980s, adjusted for inflation. We have the climate crisis. We have record levels of institutional distrust. UNICEF has said that basically half of children don't trust adults and world leaders to make good decisions for them. We had the pandemic. We had a rise in school shootings. And we had a rise in wars that we haven't seen since 1946. So I think it's not as simple
17:04 Speaker 04 as just saying that social media is the problem. We recognize that there are real harms for all users of social media: eating disorder content, violence, sexual harassment, extortion. So I'm not at all dismissing those harms. But there are plenty of other alternative explanations for this.
17:19 Manoush Zomorodi? What do you think about Hite's approach in terms of the four core norms that he suggests? So, no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and then the last one is more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.
17:38 Speaker 04 The least problematic one of those, I think, is the phone-free schools. Research has proven that attention goes up, but kids will always find a way to get around it. We hide phones in pencil cases, we go to the bathroom. We even went out on an expedition. They told us to hand in our phones, and everyone brought their old iPhone 5s and handed those in and used their phones the whole time without the teachers knowing. So, we're really creative, and we will find ways around it. But when everyone's off their phone in school, there's already no FOMO, and it's also temporary and bounded. So I think that's not a terrible take. But after bans in Australia and the UK and France following, we've taken extreme measures for something that isn't proven to cause harm at the population level.
18:19 Speaker 04 Researchers recently interviewed 25,000 teenagers over three years in Manchester, I believe, and they found that there were no effects at the population level for worse mental health outcomes. So I think when we have these knee-jerk reactions, the wrong fixes could backfire and worsen the problem. Kids will be able to access it if they're creative enough. They may even access platforms that are worse. In Australia, researchers have been concerned that children will migrate to more dangerous platforms that are less regulated, and that they also won't come to their parents for help, because they'll be scared and they'll think that they're breaking the law. And we never want to put kids in a situation where they feel like they have to be secretive about what they're doing online.
19:00 Speaker 04 Giving these arbitrary numbers, the no phones until 14, and the no social media until 16, there are plenty of exceptions to that, and it really depends on the family and on the individual maturity of children, right? Parents know best what their children are going to be doing. So I think it's a case-by-case basis.
19:18 Manoush Zomorodi? I don't think parenting works the same way it did for when Hyte and I were growing up. There was a real sort of patriarchal, top-down, do-what-you're-told, authoritative way of parenting. And only now are we trying to listen and understand and talk things out. And I wonder if that is some of what you are calling out as well, that they're not asking, "Kids, what do you think?" They're not talking about each family working it out together, if they can. Obviously, it's difficult for some families.
19:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, no, I think we've taken this kind of authoritarian approach. And I think most of that stems from nostalgia, especially for Jonathan Hyte. I'm sure he can't fathom what it must be like to grow up with phones and social media. But I think a lot of his advice ignores the reality. We need to teach children how to navigate the world that's existing now and not trying to idealize a world that is no longer here.
20:14 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah, as you say in the article you wrote, "Control doesn't teach resilience. Conversation does." So how do you suggest parents go about that conversation? What do you think kids really want to hear from their parents?
20:31 Speaker 04 I think the biggest is curiosity and understanding. A lot of parents approach what we're doing on social media or with online gaming as stupid, or they dismiss it. They love to blame the phones for anything, you know? If you say you have a back problem, or if you say your leg's hurting, they're like, "It's the phone." And so I think realizing that the world is changing so fast with the rapid evolution of these technologies, just trying to understand what environment your child is growing up in and guiding them through that. If you're able to maintain that conversation with your child, then they're more likely to come to you whenever there's a problem because they trust you. Studies have shown that when you have that authoritarian parenting style, children are more likely to rebel.
21:09 Manoush Zomorodi? I have talked to people in the tech world who are like, God, this whole social media debate is kind of passe. What about AI? Social media is going to go to the wayside anyway. What do you think about that?
21:20 Speaker 04 I think it's unfortunate that we're moving on from social media so quickly. Clearly, we haven't resolved it. But it's true that already we've seen between 60 and 70% of young people use AI chatbots or companions. We can draw a parallel to social media where what you're doing on that chatbot is more important than how many hours you're spending on it.
21:39 Manoush Zomorodi? Are you using them? Do you use ChatGPT or Claude or any of those?
21:43 Speaker 04 I do, yeah. My last semester, I took part in an AI writing class. So it was an AI first class.
21:48 Manoush Zomorodi? Wait, how did it work? What did you guys do?
21:51 Speaker 04 We were required to use AI in all of our assignments.
21:53 Manoush Zomorodi? Hmm.
21:54 Speaker 04 The first day of class, the professor had asked how many of us had used ChatGPT? And everyone raised their hands in the room. And then he asked, how many of you are allowed to use it in your other classes? Or how many of you tell your professors you use it? And there were no hands up. The problem, once again, is not having that trust between adults and children. Building a space where we're allowed to be open and transparent about how we're using technologies like AI or social media and not being shamed for it will lead to much more productive conversations. Because in that class, we learned when to accept AI's feedback, how to use it in a moderate way. Some studies have shown that using AI for note taking could increase engagement better than not using it at all and using it too much. It would actually reinforce your learning.
22:38 Manoush Zomorodi? What I love about that is it's saying, yeah, use it. And then you're required to come in and talk about it and think about it and reflect on it, rather than sitting and scrolling mindlessly or chatting mindlessly, like you say, creating friction and having a sort of a critical analysis of it. That seems really smart. Maybe that's what we should have done with social media.
22:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, and I think with AI, we really have to learn from our mistakes with social media. Right? This is a new technology. We can still get on top of this. I guess my message to policymakers would be to not wait to regulate. With social media, we saw innovation as an excuse to ignore harm. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Basically exempted tech companies from taking responsibility for what others post on their platforms. And we've seen laws being passed or being debated about exempting AI from regulation and things like that. And so I think we need to get on top of this. I would also advise parents to look around and to play with it because once parents get on it and they realize that it's not as dangerous as it's made out to be,
23:40 Speaker 04 they can really approach that with a bit more clarity and be more open minded about what their children are doing online. If you're the parent and you introduce your kid to AI, and obviously in age appropriate way, kids are more likely to come to you when they encounter some weird content about AI. Forming that trust relationship with your child, I think, is really one of the most important things you can do, whether it's AI or social media.
24:03 Manoush Zomorodi? That was Maximilian Milovidov. He's a freshman at Columbia University and a member of TikTok's Youth Council.
24:12 Manoush Zomorodi? So I wanted to know what Jonathan Haidt made of Maximilian's critique of The Anxious Generation.
24:18 Speaker 02 So first of all, I've been a college professor since 1995, and I've been talking with young adults often. And what are they advocating for? They're advocating for design changes and they're advocating for protecting the kids from these dangers. So we are trying to listen to Gen Z. Now, what Maximilian is right about is when I wrote The Anxious Generation, I was trying to decide, am I going to try to reach teens and adults? And I decided, you know what? No, I, we need legislative and policy change immediately. So I wrote The Anxious Generation for adults, and that seems to be getting through to adults.
24:53 Manoush Zomorodi? I think I also, you know, get confused by, but also intrigued by some of the controversy around your original research, you know?
25:03 Speaker 02 Oh, let's go. Please, let's do it.
25:05 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah, let's do it. So there are some researchers who say, you know, sure, there are links between social media and rising rates of anxiety and depression in young people, but we can't prove that social media caused it. So where are you in terms of evidence that you're putting forward now?
25:23 Speaker 02 Okay, you know, in the social sciences, you have to operationalize a problem before you can solve. You have to structure it and say, here's what we need. And now let's look at the evidence. And somehow, the problem got operationalized around two bodies of academic work. One is the correlational studies, where we all agree there are correlations. Heavy users are doing worse. But we fight over, is the correlation big enough to matter? And the other is these experiments. They're little toy models. You get college students to quit social media for a week.
25:50 Manoush Zomorodi? I hate those.
25:51 Speaker 02 For a week, yeah. And you see, like, do they get less depressed when they quit for a week or two? And the answer is yes, but it's a small effect. And then we fight over whether it's big enough. But what Zach Roush and I have done, we have this major review paper that will be in the World Happiness Report. What we did is we said, look, let's look at all the evidence, not just these two little things. And here's the way to think about it. Who really knows what's going on? Who has the best seat in the house? Who can see what's happening? There's only two groups. One is the kids themselves. They are in it all the time. They know what they've seen. They know how it makes them feel. And when we survey them, we find that a quarter of, like, oh, it's 30% or so of the girls say, this has harmed my mental health.
26:35 Speaker 02 The kids themselves are reporting, this is harming my mental health. This is reducing my sleep. This is harming my self-confidence. Now, that's not a correlation. Those are direct reports. 10,000 a month on Snapchat alone are getting sextorted every year. At least in 2022, we know that that's what the number was. So the kids themselves, they have the best seat in the house, and they're saying that this is hurting us. There's only one other group that knows what's going on. And that is Meta and the platforms. They do a lot of research, and they think they're harming kids. They don't say it publicly, but all the documents that have come out, all the leaks. So, you know, if you want to put all your faith in experiments, I mean, Meta is the only one who actually has all the data. They have what's called user log data. They know exactly what was seen. So those are the two with the best view. And they say this is hurting kids.
27:20 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, I guess it's interesting, because I've talked to researchers like Candace Audger, she's a psychologist who studies adolescent mental health. And she actually, you know, looks at data gathered from teens' actual phones. And she agrees with so much of what you've said. But she also argues that the scary story, the anxiety, is being oversold, and that teens are actually more resilient than we are giving them credit for. What do you think about that?
27:47 Speaker 02 Well, of course, that's always true. And Candace will sometimes say, "Well, it's not affecting everyone," or "It's not causing massive changes in the brain." So, sure, if you want to treat it as though it's going to harm everyone, like, no, it's not going to harm everyone. But, again, I'm a social scientist. I see a giant change at a mass level that began in 2012. It began in multiple countries at the same time. We have not just correlational evidence, but experimental evidence, that when people get off social media, they get happier, especially if they're adolescents, and especially if they're girls. So Candace and I look at the same data, and we disagree about the interpretation. And there are methodological reasons why we differ.
28:29 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm concerned that we're ignoring some of the very important reasons why this has also happened when it comes to finding the solutions. So, for example, I think a lot of parents, they want to follow these rules that you have, but childcare is incredibly expensive, after-school programs have been cut, they live far away from their family, work is more demanding than ever. How do we support parents and kids so that they can do all the other things you want them to do when they're not on their phones?
29:04 Speaker 02 Yeah. So I think part of what you're getting at is that we've all discovered that a touchscreen device is an incredible pacifier. If you just give them the phone, everyone's happy. But here's the thing that people need to understand. If the child does not learn to be bored, boredom is a stimulus to go find something to do. But once you hand a touchscreen device, the touchscreen device gives quick dopamine. And once the kid is accustomed to quick dopamine, then you have to keep doing it. Otherwise, they'll throw a tantrum.
29:33 Manoush Zomorodi? Okay. But I have been in the supermarket with a screaming toddler and given the kid the phone and not felt great about it, and definitely got inside eye from other people. I think there is something where parents would say, but the whole structural system is broken. There is no support. What do you want me to do?
29:51 Speaker 02 Exactly. That's what I was trying to do with the anxious generation, was to say, it's not your fault. If, you know, if one person is doing something bad, that person might be a bad person. But a basic lesson in social psychology is that if everyone is doing something bad in a situation, it's a bad situation. And that's what we have. And that's because these devices have been stuffed down our throats, pushed into schools. Even if you keep your kid off at home, they're spending the whole day on a goddamn iPad or Chromebook. So the biggest structural thing we can do, and this has a huge equity effect, is phone-free schools and then device-free schools. Get rid of all of the one-to-one devices. The rich kids generally have more controls on them at home, whereas the poor
30:34 Speaker 02 kids generally don't. Poor kids, low SES, they're on about two hours a day more than the wealthier kids.
30:40 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, I've also been the parent who's gotten the alert that, once again, my child's school is in lockdown, or that kids are locked out of the building because they think there's an active shooter inside. And I'm glad my kid has a phone. I would, I mean, how do we get as much attention on all the ancillary social issues that come along with the phone issues that are making kids extremely anxious for many reasons beyond their social media?
31:05 Speaker 02 Yep. Well, so first of all, all of the parental concerns would be satisfied by a flip phone or a basic phone, and that has fewer of the problems. It's not as addictive. You could still reach your kid if they had a flip phone as opposed to a smartphone. But here's the thing about that concern. If there is a school shooter, the last thing you want is every kid pulling out their phone, calling home, crying, you know, or filming. What you want is for the kids to do what they drilled to do, to be quiet, to follow directions, to be alert if the situation changes. So the experts say smartphones make things worse, not better.
31:46 Manoush Zomorodi? So where does media literacy fit into this? Digital literacy? I mean, kids don't learn to use tech well by never touching it. So how should we teach competence, not just avoidance?
31:59 Speaker 02 Well, first, digital literacy is generally the thing put forward by the tech companies as the alternative to regulation. They say, no, no, you know, that's too hardcore to ban. No, teach kids to use it better. Well, how's that going? I can't say that none of these programs work, but we have a highly addictive substance here. It's addictive in the literal dopamine sense for many kids, but it's addictive in a unique way, which is socially for almost all the kids.
32:24 Manoush Zomorodi? In a minute, Jonathan Haidt weighs in on where things are headed when it comes to kids, screens, and AI. Plus, a conversation with Catherine Price, his co-author of a new book called The Amazing Generation, which is all about getting kids to have more fun. On the show today, kids and screens. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.
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34:07 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, kids and screens and social media. And we were just talking to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who thinks we need to keep kids off social media entirely, at least until the age of 16. For him, there is no middle ground on that rule, even in the classroom.
34:30 Speaker 02 The effort to teach kids to properly use addictive substances, I don't know how well that's going to work. And I don't see much evidence of it working. If you can show me a school where kids had a digital literacy or digital citizenship course, and then everything went pretty well, then I will change my tune. But I don't think that's possible, and I've never heard of it.
34:51 Manoush Zomorodi? Well, I have definitely heard from teachers who have said, you know, they use all sorts of funny TikTok videos or Instagram videos. Like, there's so many amazing things on these platforms, whether that's nature or science experiments. There's also a real movement to get teachers using AI as a helper and not as a companion. I think, you know, we see this school by school, teacher by teacher, classroom by classroom. But I would also love to see a sort of more codified way of, here's how we know these tech tools can actually be used as tools, rather than taskmasters.
35:28 Speaker 02 Of course, they can be used as tools. And we've been sold that promise for 20 or 30 years now. And occasionally, it's been true. I think Khan Academy is great. But most of the time, I think it has not panned out the way that they said. Because anything that's delivered on a multi-function entertainment device is going to mostly end up with short videos. The kids are used to using iPads and computers. They have them at home. They use them at home. If you put one on a kid's desk, it's going to end up at TikTok or YouTube Shorts. Now, stories are good. Long videos are good. There's a role for long videos in class. I'm not saying teachers shouldn't show videos. I'm not saying they shouldn't show YouTube videos. But I am saying they shouldn't show YouTube Shorts or TikTok or Instagram Reels. I think the short-form videos
36:13 Speaker 02 seem to be the most devastating for kids developing abilities to pay attention. That's what my students tell me. To quote one of my students, "Yeah, I take out a book. I read a sentence. I get bored. I go to TikTok."
36:27 Manoush Zomorodi? So bans, age limits, these are ways of drawing a boundary around social media as we've known it, but the ground is shifting again, John. Like, kids aren't just on feeds anymore, they're interacting with AI. There's chatbots, AI friends, algorithmically generated video, more really personalized content.
36:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
36:45 Manoush Zomorodi? What do we do about AI?
36:47 Speaker 02 Yeah. So this is probably going to be 10 times more harmful. This is, it's horrible that the social media companies hacked kids' attention and took most of it, literally most of their attention. That's horrible. That should be the crime of the century. But what's about to happen, and what's begun to happen in 2025 and 26, is now they're hacking attachment. Kids are lonely. We're mammals who are seeking connection. We're born into this world looking for that one stable thing, the caretaker. That's what the attachment system is about. And we parents, we are mesmerized, we become attached, we fall in love with our, with our baby, and we engage in what's called serve and return interactions. You
37:30 Speaker 02 know, you make a face, she smiles, it brightens your heart. You know, you make another face, she laughs. Those sort of things. That's what the baby's brain needs to do to tune up. And with thousands and thousands of those experiences, you develop internal working models of attachment where you trust your mother or your father. And then those are the basis for your later friendships and especially your later romantic relationships. All of that is now at risk. All of that may not happen for future generations.
37:57 Manoush Zomorodi? So if you're updating your four norms, how does, what's the AI norm?
38:02 Speaker 02 So we're just beginning to, we're just beginning to formulate that. I think, I mean, the simplest thing, I guess, would be the fifth norm is no AI companions for minors. They, you know, of course, ChatGPT can become a companion. I'm not saying they can ever use ChatGPT, but obviously, character AI, or any AI that acts like a friend that says, I understand you, I'm here for you. Any of that is attachment hacking. And while someday that might be proven safe, I doubt it. And I think the mistake we made with social Social media was to say, how about you guys get to do a giant test on all of the world's kids? You get to roll out a new technology, change childhood,
38:44 Speaker 02 and it'll take us 20 years for the researchers to fight it out about whether it's harmful or not. And by then, it's too late. So that's what we did with social media. We're about to do that with AI. But it's going to be much quicker and much more devastating because we're talking about severe reductions in attachment. So I'm extremely alarmed about AI. But my personal strategy here is we're so close to winning on social media. On social media, we we understand it. We have decades of data. We know exactly what's going on. We see the harms. And there's a lot of legislation around the world. So if we can win on social media this year, 2026, then I think we have a chance to actually regulate AI and to put on some limits.
39:26 Speaker 02 But we don't have five years to get the social media thing. We have to finish this in 2026.
39:31 Manoush Zomorodi? Where do you see these lawsuits, these bans in various countries, getting phones out of schools? Like, what is the end goal? What what can what do you realistically think we can achieve?
39:44 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, when I started this in 2024, I didn't know what we could achieve. But because mothers around the world stood up immediately and started acting, we actually got phones out of schools in in most states in 2025. We are now getting age limits in countries around the world. Australia started it, and theirs went into effect in December. And in January, five or six European countries committed to doing it, France being first, followed it looks like now Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden,
40:16 Speaker 02 Indonesia, their law goes into effect soon. And so I think we're going to see massive change around the world.
40:23 Speaker 02 People realizing that digital tech is deforming children. It's useful stuff for adults, but children need to do hard things. Children should not be talking with strange men on anonymous platforms. And so I think we're going to see a global change in 2026 around kids and technology.
40:40 Speaker 02 Actually, we can win. It has felt as though it's just a digital tidal wave overwhelming us. But what we're discovering is, especially when these companies have angered the mothers of the world, we actually can push back. We can get laws enacted, and there is a chance that we can get some balance back into our lives.
41:03 Manoush Zomorodi? That was social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He is the author of The Anxious Generation. He has also written a graphic novel called The Amazing Generation. The idea is to bring some of his concerns about screens and social media directly to kids, younger ones. His co-author is Catherine Price.
41:24 Speaker 03 Initially, the assumption was that it would be the anxious generation written for young readers, young readers' edition of the anxious generation. And what I tried to bring to that is, OK, well, how do we translate that into a concept and language that actually kids get excited about?
41:38 Manoush Zomorodi? Catherine's previous book was The Power of Fun. Together, they came up with a plan to make the topic of getting off screens more intriguing.
41:50 Speaker 03 So we framed it as this battle between the tech wizards who want to control people's time and attention and essentially steal their lives from them from under their noses versus these young people who are choosing a different path. These wizards, these technology wizards, created these magical stones that they convinced all of us to pick up at some point and just said that our lives were going to be better, we were going to get more friendship and more freedom and more fun if we all picked up these stones. And so we all did. And before long, everybody was just staring at these stones all day long. And then the second part of the story is that there are a number of young people, a growing number of young people, who have recognized what is happening and have decided, I actually don't want to live that way.
42:34 Speaker 03 And so they are, in our telling and also in reality, they are the brave group of young people who are actually saying, no, no, no, I want to choose a different path. And I think one of the reasons that it's working, because, you know, we were very worried about this being cheesy, but I think is that it's true. We are all engaged in this battle for our attention.
42:53 Manoush Zomorodi? I think one of the frustrations I have had is that we say to kids like, "Put down your phone. Oh, my gosh, you're on your phone so much." But we don't give them many suggestions as to what to do once they put down their phone. And that's what I loved about your bringing your fun mentality into this book. So let's talk about that.
43:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, so the personal story on my end is I'd written "How to Break Up With Your Phone." You know, it came out in 2018, very much to solve my own problem because I had noticed I was spending more time on my phone than I wanted to, especially when I was with my daughter, who was then a baby. But then I ended up uncovering this other problem, which is that I reclaimed time from my devices. I realized, oh, my goodness, I need to have something to fill this time. And I ended up signing up for a guitar class because I had a guitar. I'd always said I wanted to learn it, but I'd never gotten around to it. And that opened up this entire community of people to me. But it also led to me having this feeling, this kind of magically energetic feeling. That sounds so woo-woo. I don't mean it that way.
43:53 Manoush Zomorodi? No, I get it.
43:54 Speaker 03 Just this like joy and this release and the sense of freedom and connection and happiness all rolled into one hour and a half class where, you know, it was a bunch of other parents and me strumming basic chords on the guitar and trying to sing like the theme song to Moana. Like, we were not trying to be professionals. And it was this feeling of just buoyancy that you probably hear in my voice. Like, it stayed with me for days after this class. And I got very curious about what is that feeling that I am experiencing? And it took me this embarrassingly long time to recognize that the best word to describe that feeling was fun. So what is this feeling that we call fun?
44:32 Manoush Zomorodi? Here's Catherine Price on the TED stage.
44:35 Speaker 03 Well, when people tell me their stories about fun, it's really interesting because the details are all different and often quite mundane, but the energy running through them is the same. And there are three factors that are consistently present. And those three factors are playfulness, connection, and flow. So by playfulness, I do not mean you have to play games or, God forbid, make-believe. I just mean having a lighthearted attitude of doing things for the sake of doing them and not caring too much about the outcome, letting go of perfectionism. When we have fun, our guard is down and we're not taking ourselves too seriously. Connection refers to the feeling of having a special, shared experience. And I do think it's possible, in some circumstances, to have fun alone and for this feeling of
45:19 Speaker 03 connection to be with yourself, or the surroundings, or the activity. But in the majority of stories that people tell me about their peak fun memories, another person is involved. And that's true even for introverts. And then flow is the state where we are so engaged and focused on whatever we're doing that we can even lose track of time. You can think about an athlete in the middle of a game, or like a musician playing a piece of music. It's when we're in the zone. Now, it's possible to be in flow and not have fun, like if you're arguing, but you cannot have fun if you're not in flow.
45:52 Manoush Zomorodi? Just to bring it back to your children's book and The Amazing Generation, I feel like if you'd had this conversation with me in the 1970s or 80s, I would have been like, "What are you talking about?" But the fact that we have to talk about having fun and deciphering what is true or fake fun, tell me why you think we need to do that and how you do explain it to kids.
46:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, so we use the word "fun" all the time in all of these different contexts that don't tap into that deep joyful feeling. So fake fun is the term I came up with to refer to the feeling we get from these other activities, the stuff that's marketed to us as fun, quote unquote, but doesn't produce playful, connected flow. In the book, we talk about how the tech wizards promised people of all ages, as I alluded to earlier, that you would have more friendship, you know, connect with your friends, that's part of many of those companies' mission statements, more freedom, and more fun. But if you really think about it critically, it's not real friendship. Having, you know, a follower is not the same as having a friend. It's much more rewarding to be in person with your friends and to have real relationships.
46:57 Speaker 03 And it's not really that free to be tethered to an app. And then it's not fun. I mean, based on the research I'd done for my adult book. The scrolling through social media is not, even if you're like laughing at a meme, it's not actually fun. Like fun happens in real life with other people. So we really wanted to draw this distinction for kids so they could see what's happening more clearly. And I've been actually really impressed by how thoughtful and astute kids have been at very young ages. And just as one concrete example, I have a friend whose kid was a variant of Fortnite. I think he played, he said he played 650 hours in a year. He read the book and then he, he's fifth grade. He said to his mom, you know, I really like Fortnite,
47:37 Speaker 03 but I'm not sure it's a hobby. I want to have more hobbies. And now they're going regularly to the climbing gym as a family. His mom said she feels like now they're on the same side for the first time about screens. And it's not that he doesn't ever play Fortnite or he doesn't want to be on screens, but he actually has been able to, you know, stop using it without a conflict and actually ask for help in finding more real hobbies. That, that one just gave me chills. I just thought that was so cool.
48:05 Manoush Zomorodi? So let's, let's talk us through, how do we get more fun in our lives? Because I do think part of the appeal, obviously of screens is the convenience. It is, it's inertia, right? Sure is easier to look at my phone than schlep, get my coat on my hat, drive somewhere, deal with like finding a parking spot. Yeah, pants, exactly. That alone. But you have ideas about how to get more fun into your life.
48:36 Speaker 03 So when I think about how do you have fun, I think of it from two different angles. I think about it from a spontaneous fun side, and then I think of it from engineered fun. So the spontaneous side is basically opening yourself up to and noticing opportunities for little bits of playfulness and connection and flow. I remember a guy telling me a story about his memory of true fun. He was sitting on a park bench with his nephew and they were just trying to catch leaves as they fell off a tree. Like they did that for years, he said, an hour and it was so fun. And they were giggling. And I was like, oh my God, I love that so much because you just gave me, it's like metaphorically, exactly what I'm talking about. There's opportunities for fun floating in the air all the time.
49:19 Speaker 03 We just have to be better about reaching out and grabbing them. So that's kind of like spontaneous fun. On the other side, It's hard to have fun. It's much harder because we are so busy. So the other side is to actually say, okay, let's actually do, this is where I'm going to get dorky, an analysis of like, what I call your fun magnets. Fun magnets are a term, it's a term I came up with to help people figure out what to prioritize in your very busy life. So they are the people, the places and the activities that typically bring a feeling of fun to you. So it's like a friend, you always have fun with when you're together. Or it's a setting where you're-
49:58 Manoush Zomorodi? Oh, she's really fun.
49:59 Speaker 03 She's really fun, yeah. Or like a setting, like for me, it's like summer camps or lakes. Those are two fun magnets for me. Like a setting where you're like, oh, that, I consistently have fun when I'm in that context. And then activities, obviously, are activities that often lead to you having fun. And the reason I think that's really useful for adults is that our lives are very busy. But if you know what your fun magnets are, you actually can carve out time for them in your schedule. It doesn't guarantee that you're going to have fun. But if you're like, all right, I'm going to prioritize. In my case, for example, I'm going to prioritize playing music with friends because I know that that is a fun magnet for me. So you can use your fun magnets to carve out time and be a little bit more specific about how you are spending your limited leisure time in hopes that it will lead to true fun.
50:42 Speaker 03 But at very least, you're probably going to end up with some playfulness or connection or flow. And you're going to feel a lot better than if you had spent that time scrolling on the couch or answering your work email.
50:51 Manoush Zomorodi? So, so get off the phone.
50:52 Speaker 03 Get off the phone.
50:53 Manoush Zomorodi? Go find your fun magnet. Get out of here.
50:57 Manoush Zomorodi? That was Catherine Price. She's the co-author of The Amazing Generation, Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World. You can see her full talk at ted.com. Thanks so much for listening to our show this week. If you are a subscriber of NPR Plus, you can hear more of my conversation with Maximilian Milovidov in our bonus episode that's coming out next week. This episode was produced by Katie Monteleone, Phoebe Lett and Fiona Giran. It was edited by Sanaa Zemshkinpour, James Delahoussaye and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Matthew Cloutier, Harsha Nahada and Rachel Faulkner White. Our executive- Our creative producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Damian Herring. And David Greenberg.
51:42 Manoush Zomorodi? Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Hylash, and Daniela Bella Rezo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
51:54 Speaker 06 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
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