Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How Smartphones Are Rewiring Our Brains, Why Social Media is Eradicating Childhood & The Truth About The Mental Health Epidemic with Jonathan Haidt (Re-release) #613

Episode Date: January 18, 2026

With the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill returning to the House of Commons imminently, it’s a key time to make your feelings known. Email your MP https://www.smartphonefreechildhood.org/email. Today’s episode is about a topic that I am truly passionate about - the introduction of social media and smartphones into all aspects of our lives - and what impact this is having on us individually, collectively and, perhaps most urgently, what impact is this having on our children.  Jonathan Haidt is arguably one of the worlds’ most eminent psychologists. He is a Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the author of 4 best-selling books, including his latest ‘The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness’.   In this episode, Jonathan and I explore how the fundamental differences between online and real-world interactions are affecting young people's social, emotional and cognitive development. We discuss why girls face unique risks on social media, from damaged relationships and reputations to harassment, and how gaming and pornography are shaping boys' expectations of relationships. Jonathan also shares some eye-opening data about the link between a decline in teen mental health and the widespread adoption of smartphones and social media. He emphasises the need for collective action to create healthier norms around technology use, both at home and in schools. We dive into practical strategies for parents, including setting clear boundaries and prioritising hobbies and family time. Our conversation also touches on the challenges of navigating technology use in a world where the pace of change has been so fast. Jonathan remains optimistic that we're nearing a tipping point and outlines four key norms we can all adopt with our children—even if they’re already dependent on their phones throughout the day. We also discuss in detail what we believe schools could be doing to help their students have less screen time and the importance of collaborating with other families to support healthier habits. As a parent and a doctor, I'm deeply concerned about the mental health crisis facing our children and young people. But if, as a society, we can come together to raise awareness and take purposeful action, we can create a healthier future for the next generation. I think this is one of the most important conversations that I have ever had on my podcast. Jonathan and I both believe that the rewiring of our children’s brains to be one of the most urgent societal harms that needs addressing.   My hope is that you find this conversation eye opening, enlightening and thought provoking - and I very much hope it prompts you to take action. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://ag1.com/livemore https://thewayapp.com/livemore  Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/613   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

Children are programmed to play, and there's a biological purpose for that play. A smartphone is an experience blocker. Once a kid has it, it's so enticing. They're just not going to have many of those experiences that they need to wire up their brains properly. The more you think about it as giving your kid a play-based childhood, instead of just taking away the phone-based childhood, the easier it's going to be. Hey, guys, how you doing? I hope you're having a good week so far.

My name is Dr. Rongan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, feel better, live more. Today's episode is about a topic that I am truly passionate about, the introduction of social media and smartphones into all aspects of our lives and what impact this is having on us individually, collectively, and perhaps most urgently what impact this is having on our children. Jonathan Haidt is one of the world's leading psychologists, He is a professor of ethical leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business,

and the author of four best-selling books, including his latest The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Now, this conversation first came out in 2024 and ended up being one of the most shared podcast episodes in the UK that entire year. And the reason I've decided to re-release it right now is because for the first time in a long while, there is a real sense that something might actually be changing in the UK. Right now, MPs from across different political parties are supporting proposals to raise the minimum age for social media use to 16.

This is hugely significant and represents a real opportunity. to protect our children's health and well-being. And over the past three days, more than 150,000 people have already emailed their MPs to say that this is an issue that truly matters to them. This is one of the most important things

that we can all do that really does make a difference. If MPs get inundated with emails, it signals to them that this is an important issue and they are much more likely to take action. In our conversation, Jonathan and I discuss why exactly social media use in children is so problematic and why we need to urgently wind back

the amount of screen time kids are being exposed to, which has increased dramatically over the past few years. Jonathan is really keen to emphasise the need for collective action rather than simply putting the onus on individuals and parents. And this is why I am so excited that there seems to be a political will to change things. Literally this week, Parliament will be debating key amendments to the children's wellbeing in schools bill, and the more MPs they get emails telling them that this is an important issue to their constituents,

the more likely it is that they will act. If you would like to play your part in raising the minimum age for social media to 16, I would love you to consider doing two things. Number one, share this conversation with as many people as you can. Your friends, your school, your children's teachers, and on parents' WhatsApp groups. And number two, please take two minutes out of your day to email your MP. Smartphone-free childhood had made it really easy for you to do this.

You just need to go to www. smartphone-free childhood.org forward-slash email, and you can easily see who your local MP is, and there is also an email template that you can use to email your MP. There is a link to that page in the show-note section of your podcast app,

and it will only take you about two minutes to do in total and your email really could make a difference. I honestly think this is one of the most important conversations I have ever had on my podcast. Jonathan and I both believe that the rewiring off our children's brains to be one of the most urgent societal harms that needs addressing. And my hope is that you find this conversation eye-opening,

enlightening and thought-provoking. and that it encourages you to take action immediately. I want to start up by saying that your new book, The Actors Generation, is to me one of the most important books I've read over the past two or three years. I think it's absolutely brilliant. And I thought the best place to start would be how you end your introduction. This is a book for anyone who wants to understand how the most rapid, rewiring if human relationships and consciousness in human history has made it harder for all of us

to think, focus, forget ourselves enough to care about others, and build close relationships. What's going on? Oh, I love that sentence. I'd forgotten about it. So yeah, that's a good place to start. We'll get to the kids in a moment, but almost all of us, no matter who you talk to, you know, our technology is a mixed blessing. We all see the value in it for our work, but we're overwhelmed, just the number of emails and texts and distractions, the things we have to do.

And as I hope we'll get to, I have a whole chapter on spiritual development, even though I'm an atheist. So if we start by saying, what is this new technology doing to us, this fast-paced digital life, what's it doing to us? And then once we appreciate it how hard it is for us,

now transfer this to nine-year-olds, to children. who are just about to begin puberty. What does it do as the brain is rapidly rewiring? Puberty is this incredibly important period of brain development. What does this crazy, insane, inhuman kind of overwhelming life do to our kids? And so that's why I put that sentence there. I wanted to make it clear.

This isn't just a book about kids. But let's appreciate it as individual adults. And now let's talk about the kids. Yeah, you touch on something really important, I think, which is that most adults, we know. how addictive this technology is. We all know how difficult it is for us to manage our own relationship and we have fully developed prefrontal cortexes, right? We have fully developed brains. So what is it doing to our kids?

Yeah. So let's start by talking about childhood. What is childhood? Because human childhood is unique among all other animals. You know, childhood in other animals is this temporary period between when you're a neonate and a tiny little thing, and then you have to quickly get to the adult form to be reproductive. And all the other primates do that. They're born, they grow steadily, and then they reach puberty,

and then they reproduce. But humans have this weird S-shaped curve where we grow quickly the first couple of years, and then we grow very slowly from, you know, age four, five, six, all the way, in that period, what Freud called the latency period, up to, you know, or 11, 12, 13,

whenever the growth spurt starts. And in that period, the brain isn't really growing either, but it's rewiring itself up. And it's wiring itself up based on experience. And human children are mammal children, I should say. If you're a young mammal, you have a relatively large brain compared to other taxa of animals. And you are programmed to play. All young mammals play. Anyone who's had a puppy or a kitten knows they don't just want food.

They really want to play all day long. And it can be really tiring, but it's good preparation for having a human. child because it's going to be very tiring. And there's a biological purpose for that play, which is they try out motor patterns at first. Just can I run? Can I walk? Can I climb? And then they try social patterns. Can I tease? Can I take teasing? And this takes many, many years, 10, 15 years to do this, to wire up the brain. So what happens? What happens if we give our kids, and in the UK, I heard this horrible statistic, in the UK, Offcom reported that 24% of your five to seven-year-olds have their own smartphone. Parents give them a hand-me-down, whatever, here,

kid, watch this, you know, I'm busy, I'm cooking, I'm doing email, here's a phone. A quarter of five to seven-year-olds have a smartphone. A smartphone is an experience blocker. Once a kid has it, it's so enticing, they're just not going to have many of those experiences that they need to wire up their brains properly. Yeah. You make this case, right, at the start of your book that we have overprotected children offline in the real world and underprotected them online. It is remarkable how many children, young children now have a smartphone. I didn't know, actually, it was that much in the UK. That's quite, well, for anyone who's read your book or read your book, I think that statistic becomes even more alarming. But I think we have to

acknowledge that a lot of parents are trying to do their best, they probably don't know the impact that that is having on their case. That's right. So I think the way to understand it's because in my book, I don't blame parents at all. If parents all over the world are failing in the same way, then it can't be the parents' fault. There's something about the system, the product. So I don't blame parents. And if we go back and look at how we got into this, the early internet through 2015, we can see how we fell into it with the best of intentions. So your older listeners will remember the first day they saw a web browser. I'll never forget it. When someone showed me, you know, altavista, I think it was. And I was like, wait, you mean that I can type in something

and I'll get the answer from somewhere in the world within two seconds. Like, you know, it was like, it was like God came to earth and said, do you want omniscience? Do you want to know everything instantly? You know, it was mind blowing. And as we explored it, It was just treasure after treasure. So in the 90s, most of us were real techno-optimists. And the millennial generation, so those born between 1981 and 1995, they grew up with, well, the older, the younger ones,

grew up with the internet. And it didn't harm them. The millennials' mental health turned out fine. So we were pretty optimistic about all this stuff. We thought it was good. You know, when I, my son, as I think I say in the book or somewhere, when I gave my son, when I got my first iPhone in 2008, eight and my son was two and you know he'd play with it sometimes and as he would play and swipe

and do things at the age of two I was like wow this is going to be great for him all that stimulation of his brain this is like better than playing with blocks or something so I think we were all pretty optimistic about this and we didn't notice that it really really changed between 2010 and 2015 and this is the period that I call the great rewiring when everything changes yeah you mentioned childhoods and the unique nature of human childhoods. And you write in your book that actually it is maladaptive for us to reach puberty fast. I never heard that before. I found that absolutely fascinating.

So we are designed to have a slow growth childhoods in comparison to other mammals. That's right. That's right. And there is some interesting research that if you're, that how fast or slow. our childhood is, is in part responsive to environmental factors. So there's some interesting research, Jay Belski, I think was one of the initial authors, that when your childhood has all kinds of stress and trauma,

you don't have safe attachment figures, girls menstruate early. That is, it's as though evolution has given us some variability. And if the world is dangerous, you can't count on surviving all that long. Get to the reproductions part fast, just reproduce and have a lot of baby, But if the world is safe, we'll maybe slow it down a bit, spend more time learning.

So we are very responsive, but even we're biologically responsive to the degree of stress and uncertainty in our worlds. Yeah. When you mentioned the real worlds, there's four components to that that you're right. Embodied, synchronous, one to one or one to several, and joining communities that have a high bar for entry and exits. I think it's really, I think it would be useful to go through those because I think if we understand what an ideal, an optimal, there I say it, childhood and adolescent period is, I think it helps us understand how potentially problematic this phone-based childhood becomes. Yeah. Okay, let me try out a crazy new metaphor. I was thinking metaphor, so let's see if this one

works. So we kind of understand the way kids learn to walk. We've all seen it. All human children do the same thing. You know, first they rise up on their knees and hands, then they start crawling, then they walk holding on. You know, there's a very, there's a clear sequence of events by which our brains wire up the walking ability. Suppose we have this new technology, which keeps kids flat on their back for the first two years, but they have screens showing them how to walk. And that's how they're supposed to learn to walk. Like, that would not work. Okay. So now, let's talk about what actually happens with childhood. So when all this stuff was coming in,

we thought, well, sure, they're having social interactions on social media. It's very social. And the boys are talking to each other on video games or it's exciting. So we thought, well, maybe these virtual interactions will be just as good. I even thought, I remember when I first saw Twitter

and kids were like tweeting about a hamburger that they had or something, I was thinking, well, it's kind of weird, it's trivial, but maybe it's super social. social. Maybe, you know, maybe they're like if you have, if you have 500 contacts with other kids during the day rather than just 50 or whatever I had when I was in grade school, maybe that'll be good. But it's not. And so here's when the four features explain why. So a real, a real world interaction is one that involves our bodies. Like even right now, I'm moving my hands, you and I,

there are all kinds of rules. Like, you're listening to me, so you look at me. Yeah. I just make temporary eye contact. It'd be weird if I just stare at you. So this is a subtle thing about human social interaction that I can put into words, but I didn't know this until I like read it in a book that this is what we do. So you and I are both practiced at this because we've had millions and millions of face-to-face interactions. But in a virtual interaction, there's no body. You're just interacting, I mean, you know, you're just interacting mostly through typing, through words. And the person on the other end doesn't even have to be a person. It can be an AI. So the body is really important.

We use our heads, our head position. We use all kinds of things. So nonverbal communication is crucial. And that's just the first feature. The next feature is synchronous versus asynchronous. Yeah. So you just said, yeah, like we both know exactly when to put in that little sound. Too earlier you'd be interrupting me.

Too late and we'd trip over each other. So it's this really tight dance that we all know how to do with each other. but on social media, on virtual interactions, I post something and then I check. And you didn't comment on it. And why not? But you commented on someone else. Like, what's going on?

So asynchronous interaction is much more prone to misunderstanding, stress, a lack of feedback. And so if kids are doing that, rather than joking around with each other and wrestling and putting their arms around each other and playing, they're missing out on what they need. It's as though they were being kept flat on their back instead of learning to walk.

And it has to be in real time, right? Real time, exactly. Yeah. So, you know, a Zoom call, a Skype call, that's, you know, that's okay. That is partially embodied. We can't touch each other. We can't do a lot of things. But we do see each other's faces.

So, you know, it's not, look, obviously this stuff is incredibly useful as tools. And if you're, you know, if you have a two-year-old and you're away on business and you do a Zoom call with your two-year-old, that's great. You know, I'm not saying no technology. I'm saying as much as you can, make it embodied and synchronous. Yeah. And then the final two were one to one or one to several. What's that about?

So beginning in infancy, there's a real emphasis on the back and forth, almost like a tennis game. One person, you know, like you tickled a kid and then she laughs and then you laugh and then she laughs. So we get this diatic interaction going. And then when kids are older, they like to be with a small group, two or three other kids hanging around. So that you're truly interacting.

And when you interact, when you take turns, that bonds you. You trust more when you've done that turn taking. You're not performing for your friends. You're playing with them. But when you put kids on, so let's say texting, okay? So texting the way the millennials did it on their flip phones, you text one other person. And you might joke around. That's okay.

I'm not against joking around on text, but it's one to one. Now, what kids on Snapchat and just regular texts are doing, a lot of group texts. And when you have 30 people on a group text, you have a whole large group, now it's performative. Yeah. You're not bonding. You're performing. It will change the nature of what you say just because so many people are looking at it. Exactly.

It's performative rather than playful. Kids need a lot of play. They don't need much performance at all. So we all have to learn to perform as adults, but not in your first 10, 10, 10, 12 years. Let them play. So that's the third feature. And the fourth feature is about communities, right? That's right.

So, you know, so my book really has two major. elements, and you mentioned them at the start, we've overprotected our kids in the real world, we've underprotected them online. But by the end of the book, by the time I was writing the spirituality chapter and other things I realized, I kind of wish I'd said a third,

there's like a third piece of it, which is you need to be anchored in a real world community. You know, imagine a plant that evolved to regulate water and mineral intake, and then you say, let's just rip this plant out of the ground, and let's let it just live in the air. We'll spray it with water.

And there are some plants, epiphytes, there are some plants that can do that. But almost no plants can do that. They will wither. They will die if you just pull them out of the soil and just try to give them water in the air or something like that. And so when children are rooted in a family, a stable family where people aren't coming and going, it's like, these are my sisters, these are my parents, these are my grandparents, and that will be true for my life. Okay, that is very powerful that stable. You have a group of friends.

You go to a school, you go to a church or a synagogue or some, you know, you live. you learn how to be part of a group, a group member. And so that's part of our evolutionary programming. We're tribal, which has many good things about it and some bad things. But once you go into the virtual world, now you're flitting back and forth between platforms, between chat groups, between video games, with shifting cast to characters. And in some of them, it's your friends, and there are many good things there. But in others, it's total strangers that have some avatar.

or some fake name. Some of them might be an extortion ring in Nigeria as we're now learning about extortion. Some of them may be bought trying to spread a misinformation. You can't grow, this is like taking kids, ripping them out of the ground and saying, here, grow up with a bunch of strangers,

some of whom are not even real. So there's a formula for human social development in the real world. And once you give your kid a smartphone and unlimited access to it especially, that's kind of it. Everything's gonna go through the phone. I found that section really helpful.

I mean, kids and social media, kids and screens is something that I brought up on many occasions on this podcast over the previous years. It's something I'm very passionate about. And I have seen this in practice. I have seen at least three kids where I can directly see a link between their social media use

and their mental health. And I've also seen how quickly it can change if you help them reset their relationship. Yeah. You know, I... Right. Kids are still very plastic, very flexible. Yeah, very much so. And I think the first time I saw this was maybe 2012, 2013, 15 or 16-year-old had presented to the ER at the weekend. I didn't know.

I saw them on a Monday afternoon in my primary care practice at that time. And I was really confused because I thought, wow, I know this family. really well, I never detected anything. I was really surprised that this adolescent had ended up, you know, in the ER. With what symptom? Having tried to harm himself. It was, I never forgot that case because,

I mean, I won't go through the whole case again because I have discussed it before on the show, but in essence, as I built of a relationship with this chap, I actually said to him, maybe first or second consultation, hey, would you consider being on your phone less? Would you consider going on social media less? And he was desperate.

His mom was desperate because of what was happening. And so I helped him bit by bit, starting off with half an hour in the evening before beds, over four or five weeks, moving it to one hour in the evening before bed and one hour in the morning without going on it. A half hour without going on it. Oh my God.

Yeah, but even that was starting to shift. his relationship. And six months later, he was like a different kid. Yeah. Like really engaged with real world communities. So I am very alarmed by the widespread adoption of social media, smartphones, technology, even homework being given on screens from schools, particularly since COVID.

So we're going to get into all of that. But I really think those four features of real world interactions are really, really useful. And the second one, synchronous, it made me think of something that I read in, I think it was Sherry Turkle's book, Reclaiming Conversation. That's a great book. It's a wonderful book. And she shared how adolescence now would rather communicate, or some of them would rather communicate on text message because they can edit.

Yes. It's not real time. Right. You're growing up on camera. You're always on camera. You don't want to screw up. And I found that remarkable. It's so sad.

And then if we think about what you're talking about throughout the book and what you've already said, if we are not developing the skill of real-time interaction, we're going to struggle massively when we're adults. That's right. That's right. And this is what many employers say. You know, I work in a business school. I speak to a lot of people in the corporate world.

And I'm always interested, how are their Gen Z employees doing? And, you know, Gen Z is 1996 birth year and later. And, you know, employers are really concerned because they're young employees in their 20s. they have many more mental health problems. They're much more anxious. They expect accommodations for their difficulties. They have trouble making eye contact. They are sitting at a computer working perhaps,

but they also have their phone and they're doing things on their phone. They always have divided attention. So these habits in childhood that are messing them up not just with mental health, but with the ability to focus, with executive function, executive control, it does seem to be carrying through into adulthood.

And so it's not like they give this up when they reach 21. It's like these patterns do continue. And you can disrupt the patterns, as you were saying, you can, your kid this kid was 15. So I think all the way up into your early 20s, you know, the brain, you know, the frontal cortex kind of finishes myelinating

around 25, I hear. So there is still considerable plasticity and hope for change through the late teen years and early 20s, but we just don't know what's gonna happen to those who are now in their late 20s and soon they'll be in their 30s. We just don't know. One of the things I have enjoyed the most about the actress generation is all the research you put together.

Because a lot of people are saying, well, there's no evidence that this is bad. Okay? You know, this is what happens every generation. New technology comes and the adults think it's bad for their children. But you have quite meticulously gone through the research and put forward a case showing that actually the, widespread use of smartphones and social media together are causative of mental health problems. Could you explain that, please? Yes, that's right.

No, thank you for giving me this opportunity because there's this weird thing going on. There was a review written of the book in nature in which a psychologist Candice Odgers claimed that I was confusing correlation and causation. She suggested that I don't know the difference between them. And she said there is no evidence, that I have no evidence of causation. This is very frustrating to me because beginning in 2019, when I started studying this, there were so many studies out there.

I couldn't make sense of them. I couldn't remember. So I said, okay, let me put them all in a Google Doc. All the studies on both sides, on every side. Let me just collect them all. And it quickly emerged that there are three major categories. There's a huge number of correlational studies. So, yeah, the evidence is mostly correlational

in that there are hundreds and hundreds of correlational studies. Showing what? Oh, showing that heavy users have worse mental health, especially for girls. Heavy users of social media? Yes, we're talking about social media here. So, you know, my book is about the phone-based childhood. It's not just about social media.

There's a lot more. But social media is where you have the best data indicating harm, causal harm to girls especially. So I began tabulating all the studies. Hundreds of correlational studies. We're converging on the size of the correlations. That's going fine. But then is it a cause? Well, then there are dozens of longitudinal studies where you track the same kids over time.

Like, let's say, once a year. There are a lot of studies that measure kids once a year on various psychological traits. and you find that, well, if you increase your social media use at time one, does that lead to worse mental health at time two? Or if your mental health gets worse at time one, does that seem to cause you to do more social media at time two? So these longitudinal studies don't prove causation, but they give us more of a clue than correlational studies.

And what we find in those, and we have a few dozen of those, on both sides, I have it organized. Here are the ones that support the hypothesis. Here are the ones that oppose it. I am not cherry-picking. I'm putting all the studies there. What you find is that there are a number of studies that don't find an effect,

but they tend to be the ones that measured every day. So if you take a kid off of social media for a day or two or three, does that make them happier? If you're an addict and you're denied your drug for a couple days, you're not, you're less happy. So once we remove the ones that used a very short time period, when, and this is what we find over and over again, when you zoom in on the studies

and you concentrate on those that really test the hypothesis, the effects get bigger. So this is another signal, and what I mean is, when we look at those that used at least a month in between measurements, then the large majority do find a cause, what seems to be a causal effect of increased social media at time one is associated with increased mental illness or mental problems at time two. So that's the second category of experiments.

But the third is the most important. It's true experiments where you randomly assign half the people to go off social media for a month or not or reduce it for a month or not. And so we have about 25 experiments in this Google Doc. listeners can find all of this at Jonathan Haidt.com slash reviews. I've got dozens of Google Docs tabulating the study, all the studies we can find on video games, social media, dating apps. I mean, I'm really trying to collect all the evidence here.

I'm not cherry-picking. I'm trying to be comprehensive and transparent. And the true experiments, again, we have about 25, I think, and 16 of, if I remember, 16 of them find a significant effect. Now, some are of varying quality, and we can argue about that. But for Adjus to say that I have no evidence, when I have been working very, very carefully since 2019 to lay out what are the different kinds of evidence, what do they show, and there's a whole section in the book explaining the difference between correlation and causation. So again, it's just very frustrating to me that journalists will just cite that review in nature as though, oh, you know, he doesn't have any evidence. So it's just frustrating.

I mean, I've been working so carefully on that difference between correlation and causation since 2019. I would also add to that that I've spoken to a number of clinicians and we will tell you that we have seen this over and over again. Okay, it's not the same thing as a study, right? These are lots of n-equal ones, right? But when you see it,

and I've also, because I'm very interested in this area, I've also been very proactive at trying to help patients and families reduce the time they spend online and in particular on social media and I have seen improvements in those kids' mental health. I've seen it time and time again. So that also is powerful evidence for me when I've seen it in practice.

Yeah, that's right. Right. So that's a great point. It's almost eyewitness testimony from the people who are involved. Does that count? And a lot of the hardcore researchers say no. Only a published study counts.

Well, guess what? We have a replication crisis in psychology. We now know that you can run experiments and you think it proves one thing, but you can still be wrong. So if we're really going to be social scientists here, we're trying to get at the truth. We have to use multiple methods. And when multiple methods converge on the same conclusion,

we can have a lot more confidence. And so my critics are only focused on this set of a couple hundred experiments published in journals. Okay, yeah, that's the main battleground that we work on. Fine. But there is eyewitness testimony. And so doctors who see this happening, Are they all confusing cause and effect?

We got him off social media and three days later he was better. Well, maybe it was going to happen anyway. Maybe it was just a coincidence over and over and over again. Are all the doctors wrong? Are all the parents wrong who saw their daughter get on social media and then their happy, funny, 12-year-old turns into a sour, anxious, self-harming 12-year-old a few months later? Are they all wrong?

The parents whose kids have killed themselves because they're being extorted or bullied and then they commit suicide, are they just mistaking correlation for causation? So this is actually evidence what people say who are faced with the problem. And then you survey the kids. Talk to Jan Z. When you ask Gen Z, do you think these things are good for your generation or bad?

They generally say bad. So there are many, many lines of evidence showing this is not just a correlation. This is a causal effect. Yeah, it sounds a bit like, from recollection what the smoking companies used to say. That's right. There's no proof.

It's not settled. Settle science. We don't have settled science. Yeah, so in the meantime, people suffer, people suffer, until at some point in the future, I mean, it's quite clear to me, pre-reading your book and post-reading your book, there is something significant going on here that is detrimental, not just for children, but frankly all of us.

I mean, I think you have a thought experiment in the book at one point, about someone who sort of, was that they disappear in 2007, then they reappear and look at the world. Oh, yeah, yeah. But it's funny, that was a thought experiment. I spoke to a monk on this show.

Oh, my. Six months ago, a chat called Geelong Tubton. And this is literally what happened to him. He was, I think, in his 20s, he was an actor in New York. He suffered from severe burnout, and he went to join a monastery. Around what year was that?

I think it was around 2007, 2008. That's it. That's when the iPhone comes out, 2007. I'm pretty sure, I can't remember the exact dates, but I said he went on this prolonged retreat and he said, I went in, and when I came out, because I think it was for about a year or maybe longer, he didn't have access to the world.

Yeah, yeah. And he said he couldn't believe what he was seeing. The world looked different. Everyone's walking around staring at things. That's right. So it actually did happen to some people. Wow. Yeah.

There's an American. horror movie from the 1950s called Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Does that one that, does that phrase ring a bell? Is that, yeah. So, you know, it's about this alien species that drops spores down on earth and the spores grow and then they send tendrils out to the person's brain while they're sleeping and then they create a copy and then they kill the person and the copy takes over their life. So it's a common horror movie refrain that Americans are very familiar with. It's a little bit like that. It sometimes feels a little bit like that, that, you know, all the way up to 2007, 2008. And the first couple years of the iPhone were not harmfully. And why is that?

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That is, and Steve Jobs introduced it this way, at one of the most famous product launches in history. Steve Jobs says, today, we're releasing three new products. We have a revolutionary new music player, we have an internet browser, and we have a telephone. We have three new products and he holds it up.

It's the iPhone. Three things in one. Oh, and maps and a flashlight? I mean, it was an incredible tool. A tool is something that you pull out when you need it. And that's what the iPhone was in 2007 and 2008. We begin to get the App Store. 2009 or 10, I think it is you get push notifications.

So by 2011-2012, it's not just a tool in your pocket that you pull out when you need a flashlight or a mask. app or to send email, it now is pinging you, beeping you, saying come see what someone said about you. Social media apps are on it. Instagram is the first social media app that was created only to use on the smartphone. You couldn't use it on a browser at first. So this is why I call this period the Great Rewiring. In 2010, teenagers had flip phones.

They weren't, there were no notifications. They didn't have a front-facing camera. They had a small phone in their pocket, which was a tool that they would. use if they wanted to text someone or call someone. That was it. By 2015, everyone now has a smartphone with a front-facing camera, high-speed internet, social media loaded on it, and it's pinging them constantly.

So if you went to sleep in 2009 or 10, when the iPhone was just coming out, and you wake up in 2015, you're gonna see exactly what that monk said, and you'll see it especially among young people. Because even at schools, recess is much quieter now, because a lot of kids are sitting there at recess on their phones. Hallways are quiet between classes, fairly quiet. Because most schools say you can't use your phone in class,

you have to wait until class is over to use it in the hallway. So life really was transformed, and it kind of is like invasion of the body snatchers. Yeah. And we will talk about your solution shortly because there's a wonderful section where you propose all kinds of practical solutions because it's easy to get really negative about this and go, well, what are we going to do?

But you do propose some quite achievable solutions, actually. One of the reasons why my son is currently at the high school he is at, and not another one is because of their phone policy, actually. Oh, good. Good for you for choosing that. So this was a few years ago when he was leaving primary school, going to secondary school. And there were a few options. We're lucky that he had a few options of schools to go to. I know not everyone is in that position. But a lot of people, Jonathan, I think, feel that they have no agency here.

here with the, if the school is allowing phones, well, what the hell can parents do? Yeah, that's right. You know? That's right. So that's why in the solutions, I really focus on solving what we call collective action problems. This is the key to the whole thing. Collective action problem is one in which if one person does something, it might be very difficult,

but if several of us do it at the same time, it becomes much easier. And so if you're the only parent who says to your self, no, you're not getting a smartphone. And he says, but everyone else has one. I'm left out. They're all on various platforms. They're doing things and I don't even know what's going on. It's very painful for the kid and it's painful for you.

So if you are the first one to do what you thought was the right thing, you are imposing a cost on your child. But what if you can team up with a few of your child's friends' parents so that when your kids reach eight or nine or ten or whenever it is that you you're thinking giving them a smartphone, you all say, you know what, the five of us, the five families, we're all going to do the same thing. We're all going to give you, we're going to keep you on flip phones or brick phones, whatever you call them here, until, you know, in the U.S., I would say 14 high school here, 16, end of secondary school. We're going to keep you on those. But guess what?

We're going to give you a fun childhood. We're going to really, you know, us, you know, the family's of your best friends. We're all going to give you an enormous amount of freedom. You can have at any of our houses, you can go between them without supervision. And we're talking like eight, nine, 10 year olds, this is incredibly healthy. We're gonna, you know, we'll pay for you to take trips to an amusement park or to, you know,

something that you can do fun without supervision. That's the way we can give our kids back a healthy childhood. So the key is it's hard if you, if you're the only one, but if you can just team up with a few parents, then you can do it. And if the school is on board, then you have, you break the collective action problem instantly, Because now you have the whole community is saying, let's delay smartphones.

Let's give our kids more independence and free play without smartphones. I think schools play a huge role here because schools are seen often as the model educationally, behaviorally, you know, what the school promotes is often what the kids and the families think, okay, this is fine because schools are saying it's good. I think they hold huge amounts of influence. I want to get to school. shortly. Before we do that there, you've mentioned that it's different for girls than it is for boys. This is incredibly fascinating, Jonathan. Can you walk us through that, please? Why is social media

particularly harmful for girls? Yeah. Well, given that we have a nice long time together and given that, you know, we can cover sort of, you know, medical, biological topics, you know, I'll put out there that the big difference between boys and girls, men and women is not in their abilities. It's it's in what they enjoy. When you look at what boys and girls choose to do, when they are left alone playing however they want, the boys tend to go for, they'll form into groups and then they will compete.

They just enjoy that. The boys will work more with things. They'll build things. So boys are more oriented towards things. Girls are more oriented towards people, just on average. These are just differences on average. So when you let kids play,

the girls will tend to spend more time in pairs or small groups talking and especially talking about other people. Girls are really interested. They have a much more sophisticated mental map of social space. Boys are more clueless about social things. Boys are more mechanical.

They're more interested in physical objects. And so this is no judgment on either sex. This is just what we find in human children. So what happens when everybody gets devices all day long? the boys get their phones and their video controllers and they say, wow, rather than like going out and it's raining and we want to play basketball or football, rather than that, how about we all just,

let's play video games, it's more exciting anyway. Now, when I was young in the 70s, video games were just coming out. And to play a video game, you'd have to go over to someone's house and you would each have a controller and then you could play a game. So video games used to be social in that way.

Because you'd play a little bit, you'd eat, you'd do something else, but you're together. What's happened once we got high-speed internet, the games became more and more amazing, multiplayer distributed games. So now if a boy wants to play with his friends, he has to go home alone.

He can't go over to a friend's house because he needs his own headset, his own controller, his own screen. And then he can play with his buddies and a bunch of strangers, Fortnite or whatever war game they want to play. But he's not really with the message. Exactly. That's right.

Now, it is synchronous. So video games are better than social media because video games, at least they're synchronous. The boys, you know, my son, like during COVID, we finally relented and got him an Xbox and he'd play Fortnite with his buddies. And they'd be laughing their heads off. So there are some good things about these video games.

But when those video games displace time together, now during COVID, we did this ridiculous overreaction. We didn't let kids play. We thought that it was contagious by touch. It wasn't. So during COVID, you know, I think the video games were probably a net positive. But then COVID ends, and the boys are all on video games,

they're not spending much time with each other, so they're really losing out. So that's the boy story. Video games and porn are at the heart of what's blocking the boys' development. But social media takes that natural girl interest in the social map and exploits it and says, do you want to know what someone just said about someone else? Here it is.

What do you think about that? Do you want to what someone else just said about you? Here it is. So social media is really targeted. at girls' insecurities. And we know this from some of the documents that Francis Hogan brought out of Facebook, the Facebook whistleblower.

There's one I mentioned it in the book, where they have a little seminar within Facebook, now meta. They have a little seminar on brain development. And they show slides about how the prefrontal cortex is the last part to myelinate, is the last part to lock down, how the emotion centers are very powerful in a 12, 13, 14, 14, year old kid.

But the ability to regulate impulse control and say no, is much weaker. I mean, they knew exactly what they were targeting in their battle to keep, girls especially, to keep them on their platform and not let them go to other platforms. Yeah. It's so powerful to hear the difference between boys and girls, because as you say, boys are getting harmed by this new tech world, but just in a different way to girls. Now, there's some pretty compelling graphs in the book. Can you explain what exactly happened in 2010? You've already touched on it, but if we're really trying to understand the causative link between social media use and mental health problems, particularly in girls, maybe explain some of that data for me, please?

Yes. And actually, this will be critical because we should talk about alternative explanations. That's another criticism I get is, how do you know it's the phones? You know, it couldn't be, you know, school shootings. In the United States, we had a terrible school shooting in 2012, a guy. I killed 22, six-year-olds. It was the most horrible one we've ever had. And since then, American children have to do these lockdown drills,

you know, shooter preparedness drills. In every school? In every school, yeah. Wow. And so alien to us here because we don't have this. That's right. No, that's right. You don't have our madness about guns.

But so some people say, well, of course 2012 is the year. Everything changed. That was the year of the Newtown massacre. And then ever since, and of course the kids are anxious. But it's important to understand if the same thing happened at the same time, in the same way in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and it wasn't the school shootings. So let's go over the timing.

So what you'll find in the book, and then I have a lot more, again, if you go to jonathanite.com slash reviews. Oh, also, actually, anxiousgeneration.com is the website for the book. And so we now have a fantastic research page there. Just go to Anxious Generation.com. You'll see that, you click on the research tab. You'll see all these graphs.

And the basic pattern is this. When you trace out levels of depression and anxiety, and you always need to do it separated by sex, Never trust graphs that merge all kids together. Always look at just girls separately and look at boys separately because they're very different. And what you find is that for the girls, everything was very stable from the late 90s

or wherever the data goes back to, generally in the 90s. And all the way through the early 2000s, up to 2010, there's no real pattern. We're talking about the millennials. When the millennials were teenagers, their mental health was very stable. And just remind us what age does that mean? Or when were you born if you're a millennial?

1881 to 1995. Okay, that's the millennials, that's right. And so their mental is very stable. But then when Gen Z enters these data sets, Gen Z is about 1996 and later. When Gen Z enters, the numbers go up very, very suddenly around 2012. And it's not just because Gen Z has arrived,

it's because this is the great rewiring period, 2010 to 2015. And if you're a millennial, you were mostly done with puberty by the time this happened. So if you didn't get your first Instagram, account until you were 17 or 18 or maybe you were in university, you're probably fine. It was distracting, it wasted time, but it didn't rewire your brain because you were mostly

done with puberty. Early puberty is the most sensitive, easily disrupted open period, roughly 11 to 13 for girls, maybe 12 or 13 to 14, 15 for boys. That is the most important period for us to be careful about, about what's going into their eyes and ears. And so this is, I believe, to exist rather than just being more millennials is it's those kids around 2012 who got their first smartphone, Instagram account, front facing camera, high speed data. All of it comes in just in a few years. So kid is 11 or 12 when they get all this stuff.

Now their most sensitive period of brain rewiring is governed by millions of little things flashing past with a status report, this got this many likes, this person has this many followers, everything's quantified, everything, you're on camera. So if you were in early puberty during the Great Rewiring period, you became Gen Z,

and you have more than a double the risk of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide if you're a girl. For boys, the interesting thing is the percentage increases are often similar, but boys start from lower levels of depression anxiety. Puberty girls have always had, their levels of depression anxiety,

what we call internalizing disorders, go up. So boys and girls are both going, up, but the difference is that for the girls, it's a hockey stick. It's almost always a hockey stick graph. That is, it's flat, you get to 2012, and then boom, it goes up, up. The boys, it's not usually a hockey stick. The boys, it's more of a slow curve. And for the boys, it begins a couple years earlier.

And I think, I can't prove this part, but I think it's because the boys were getting onto the multiplayer video games around 2007, 8,9. The boys are getting onto multiplayer video games, which are great fun, but there's so much fun that they don't see each other in person much anymore. So the problem for boys starts a little earlier. It doesn't have an elbow in it that's as sharp. And that was one of the clues that the boy story is just different from the girl's story. Yeah. It's really powerful. In that section of the book, you talk about the gender differences that do show up, agency versus commune. Yes. I found that interesting. You've already spoken a little bit to that, I think, how girls are more interested in

hanging out with other girls and talking about what might be going on. What's agency there, though? Oh, yes, thank you. Because when I began, I talked about people versus things. That was only part of the story. So thank you for letting me finish it here. So psychologists, when they make lists of motivations and drives and desires, there are two sort of master categories.

One is agency-related desires. That is, we want to be effective to have an effect on the world, you know, action at a distance. When I was a kid, you know, target shooting, shooting some sort of BB gun to knock over a candle. I did that. If you're an infant in a crib and you're waving your hands around

and you hit something and a bell sounds, I did that. It's thrilling. So every kid has agency motive. They want to be effective. The other set is communion. You want to be connected. You want to belong.

You want to be close to people. Every kid has that. But on average, just again, on average, boys are more drawn. They have, they show more. more agency desires and they pick actions that will allow them to do agencies. They're more likely to build a tower

and then knock it down. When I was a kid, we would build model airplanes and then we'd pour gasoline on them or rubbing alcohol and we'd throw a match and boom, you know, watch it go. It's just like, you know, boys are just more drawn to that. Whereas girls are more drawn to communion. It's much more important, who's in, who's out,

why does she say this about me? So agency and communion motives, we all have both, but there is a sex difference. Video games target the agency motives for the boys, and they really draw them in. Social media companies target the communion needs of the girls, and they really draw them in. Yeah, you took what these four reasons that girls are particularly vulnerable, which is, you know, I find this so fascinating anyway, but as a dad with a boy and a girl, it's just so interesting to read in detail these differences,

which is why I thank you so much for writing this book. I think it's honestly such an important book. Hey, how old are your kids? 13 and 11 at the moment. Okay. So boy, the 13 year old is the boy? 13 year old boy and 11 year old girl. Early puberty.

They're both, they are both like right now this year. Well, there's some variation, but they are both, given the two year gap, they're both starting early puberty right now. Well, let me share with you what I've done. Okay, please. And you could perhaps advise or at least give your perspective. So I feel it's quite different to the. the norm. And I'm not saying that with any judgment at all. I'm just on top of this stuff. And I guess I've got the education and the ability up until now, I would say at least, to influence my children in a way

that I think is helpful for them. Right. So what does that mean? So none of my kids and my daughter is still at primary school, she's in the last term now, had a phone. of any sort. What about iPads? What about iPads? No, we don't have iPads either. Okay, good. So, yeah, and that was quite intentional from me

because I think with a lot of these things, we look at the upside and we forget about the downside. Exactly. I think humans are biased. Oh, yeah, but what about this? I think schools are doing this as well with the amount of technology coming into the classroom. I think they're looking at the upside

and they're not taking into account the downsides, which I think is a very human tendency. So when my son started what we would call high school or secondary school here, so from 11 to 18 or 11 to 16, he has to get a bus to school. Every other kid, even when he was in the final year at primary school, has a phone and they have a smartphone, right? So, and I was, I struggle because I don't want my son or any of my kids to be a social outcast. Yeah, none of us do. But even more so after reading your book,

I don't want them on this stuff, right? So we did give him a smartphone. Listen, I tried everything. I got the light phone. I got the flip phones. We went through all of that. And what have we? They didn't work for your kids?

For whatever reason, I think because all of his friends had iPhones, everyone on the bus did. And then some kids probably made fun of him. They tease the kids who don't have the right technology. Yeah. So I don't know if that happened. He hasn't shared that.

I hope. I don't know if that happened. I think we've got a pretty open relationship with him where he would say. But in essence, we did get him a phone, a smartphone, I should say. But he still to the state has no social media. He's going to be 14 shortly. He does use WhatsApp. Okay.

And he does have, you know, the internet on there. But I have to okay everything. So I have full parental access. I have to okay if he wants to download anything. Is this Apple or Android? Okay, yeah, Apple controls, I think, are pretty good. Yeah. So anything he wants to download, I have to, you know, I get alerts in the day if I'm working.

He's trying to do this. I'm like, I have to press OK or not. So I'm not saying it's perfect, but we also pretty clear on our rules at home. So he's not on it at home. Like it has to stay downstairs. That's great. That's great. Right. So I know what you're saying about smartphones until the age of 16, which I actually do agree with. And I was really thinking, have I done the wrong thing? Have my wife and I've done the wrong thing? Which is hard. I think parents are always asking ourselves. this, you know, could we have done something differently? I would say, I think he's got a pretty good relationship with technology, but we put a lot of effort in. And I want to acknowledge my privilege in saying that, right? It's a two-parent household. Married household, okay? We're doing well

in society, right? I've got the education, I've got the ability to influence this. I fully appreciate that not everyone does, right? And I think that's important points that you do bring up about the inequity of this and how single parent families are off. Yeah, much worse. Kids are spending much more time. Yeah. So this is where we're currently up to with my son. I do wish you didn't have a smartphone, if I'm honest, but he does. But my daughter now is finishing primary. She's going to the same secondary school as my son. So I literally had this conversation. I was reading your book last week and I said to my wife at the weekends, hey, babe, I'm not sure I want my daughter having a smartphone. That's right. You know,

I think if we are going to give her a phone because she's getting the school bus, I think it should be a flip phone. But then, of course, we gave my son a smartphone, right? So, so this is what I've done so well. Maybe, you know, be as honest as you want with the commentary and then provide your perspective. Sure. So your way ahead in that you were trying to do what you thought was the right thing, and it was the right thing to resist. This is a perfect illustration of the collective action problem. The problem for your son wasn't that the light phone didn't meet his needs. It's that it made him stand out as being the only kid without a smartphone. So you were imposing a cost on your child and then you had more conflict within your family or at least you felt bad about it. So if you're the first mover,

if you were the only one who's doing this, your family pays a cost. Now in the long run, I think there would be benefit from the delay. Now you did finally give him a smartphone. because of the social pressure. The hope is that at least they can use it just as a tool. And you try to make it, if the phone is a tool that you use when you want, that's okay. That's what I was saying before about the iPhone. You want to prevent it from becoming a master.

For many of the kids, the phone is their master. And it's constantly interrupting with notification. So I'd urge you to really check the notifications and make sure that almost all of them are off. Don't let any company interrupt your child's attention, unless it's like Uber. Like if you can call an Uber, yes, you want to know when the Uber is coming. But you don't want any news source, newspaper, television show.

You don't want anything to have the right to interrupt your child. But more to the point, you resisted the tide. My goal with the book is that from this day forward, no parent will have to do what you did. No parent will be the only one who isn't giving an iPhone. The revolution started in the UK, actually in February. There was a parent's revolution. There was an article in The Guardian about this. Two moms put up an Instagram post about a WhatsApp group

for parents who wanted to give their kids a smartphone-free childhood. Thousands of parents flock to it within 24 hours. So if you go to smartphonefreechildhood.com. I think it is or delay smartphones. I actually started following that Instagram account last week, I think. Oh, okay, great, great. I didn't know it was the story behind it. Yeah.

So let's return into your situation with your two kids. With your son, you were alone. and it was very hard and you ultimately gave into the pressure. But not for social media. It would take a lot for me to give into that. Now he's not asking. I think he knows pretty clearly

what my wife and I's views are on that. I do believe he may be the only person this year without Snapchat's. That's right. Whereas for your daughter, it's going to be different. For your daughter, a year ago I couldn't have said that. But now I can say, for your daughter is going to be so much easier.

I guarantee you, your daughter is not going to be the only one. If you don't give her a smartphone, now there's going to be dozens. In fact, I'm hopeful it'll be a majority. Well, actually, the school already you say banned phones during the day, it puts them in lockers. Yeah, which is, I think it's great.

You know, they understand that a lot of kids have them, but at least until the age of 16, their policy is that you go in, you give it into the teacher in morning reception and you only get it back at the end of the day. That's the right policy. So they cannot be using it. So I think that's excellent what they do there. That's right.

So for your daughter, it'll be much easier to delay giving her smartphone until I hope 16. We'll talk about the logistical difficulties of that, but in keeping her off social media because she won't be the only one. Most parents are fed up. Most parents are sick and tired of this. I can't say literally the majority of all parents, but at least among educated parents who are following this and are working on it, we're almost all fed up with it. And so there's going to be a lot more support for you going forward. Yeah, that's fantastic. you explain the data on social media and girls.

So let's just pass out these separate topics to make sure we're not conflacing them. Okay, so I think a lot of us can understand why social media in particular can be toxic. But smartphones do lots of things that are not social media. That's right. So why in your view do you think we should try our best to avoid giving our children's smartphones until the age of 16.

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For a limited time only, get a free AG1 flavor sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavors, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 Welcome Kit with your first monthly subscription or details at drinkag1.com forward slash live more. When I started writing the book, I thought the main story was going to be at social media and girls, because that's where the evidence is clearest. But pretty soon in, I realized no, it's the phone-based childhood. It's when the phone moves to the center of your child's life,

it blocks out everything else. In fact, I call phones experience blockers because they will block out, they'll reduce the degree to which your child has every other kind of experience. They won't read as many books. They're not likely to have hobbies. They're not going to sleep as much.

And that's even true if they're not on social media because the phone has so many fun things to do, so many interesting things to do. So keeping them off social media is the worst single application, especially for girls. But look at the way kids behave now. At the beginning of class, let's say. You see this in university, you see it in high schools.

At the beginning of class, it's silent. You know, students, most students are there a little bit early. It's silent because it's a little awkward to start a conversation with someone who isn't your best friend. And everyone else is on their phone. And so you pull out your phone. Even if you don't have social media,

you got something to do there. Or maybe you get into an elevator. And, you know, it's a little awkward in an elevator with some people that you sort of know. Do you make small talk? No, you just pull out your phone. That's what everyone else is doing. There's no need for small talk.

And so these tools, the technology is amazing at making our lives easier. And that's why we adults are hooked on it. And it's not necessarily bad hook. I love my iPhone. It does all kinds of amazing things for me, it's very, very helpful. But I guess the key idea I want to get for parents here

is the last thing you want to do for your child is make everything easy. The last thing you want to do is say, all the things that are difficult in life, here, here's a phone, it will take care of things for you. That's a way to guarantee that they will not grow. And so even if your daughter, let's say, gets a smartphone or your son has a smartphone

and you say no Instagram, no Snapchat, no TikTok, there's still a lot of stuff to do there and they will still use it as a crutch socially. That's why I say the best phone is a flip phone where it's hard to text, where you have to hit the seven key three times to make an S or whatever it is. I forget what it is. Because that way you can send to, if you, you know, sweetheart.

You really need to send it. You will send it. Yeah, I'm 30 minutes late, see you soon. You know, you can, you know, so I totally understand the need to text because a big part, it's, I haven't really touched on this. A big part of it is the fourth norm, far more independence, free play,

and responsibility in the real world. We need to send our kids out earlier with more independence. And if we're going to do that, I totally understand and agree. You want to be able to at least reach your kid or have them reach you. So that's okay. Yeah. I've heard you talk about the book Free Range Kids before and how that book fundamentally changed the way that you parents.

It did. Can you speak to that a little bit? Sure. So there's a wonderful woman named Lenore Skenezy who wrote a book called Free Range Kids. And it grew out of her experience. She's a journalist in New York City. and her son, when he was nine, wanted to take the subway home by himself. This boy, like my son, memorized, they were fascinated by subway maps as boys often are,

and he understood the system, and he wanted to try it. And Lenore said, okay. And she let him go home from Bloomingdale's in Midtown Manhattan, and I think he even had to do a transfer. And she gave him a quarter to use a payphone, if there was any problem. And she gave him a subway pass, and the father was waiting. for him at the other end. And so she did this. And then she, and the kid was thrilled. It was so exciting. And then she wrote about it. And the reaction, so many people said, how can you do this?

How can you condemn your child to being kidnapped? How would you feel if he was kidnapped? And so she was so shocked by the reaction of parents who were angry at her for letting her kids. She was called on some networks America's worst mom. And but she embraced it. She embraced it. And she calls herself America's worst mom. And she has been a one-woman campaign to give kids back the freedom that we all had when we were that age. Life is so much safer now than it was in the 70s and ages,

so much less crime, so much less drunk driving. So anyways. That idea, isn't it? We've overprotected children offline, but underprotected them online. That's right. That's right. We will lock them up so that nothing bad happens

in the real world. And then when they're locked up at home on a device, strangers are saying, send me a picture of you naked because here's a picture of me, which isn't me, it's a sexy young girl and all these boys are falling for it. So, yeah, it's like we're exposing our children to predators online, but we don't let them stub their toe offline.

Yeah. There was something I read in the actress generation, which really shocked me, which was how nudes are being sent around nude photos at schools. It's a sort of currency. I was like, is this really happening? at schools? So I can't say it's happening at all schools.

I'm sure it's not at all schools. It depends on the school culture. But here I was drawing in a book called American Girls. It was a portrait of American Girlhood, which is all online. And it was, I think, from 2018 or so, I think it was when it was written. And the big sex difference is that for a boy,

if he sends a picture of his penis to a girl and she were to expose him and show it to others, it's not, at least in some of these school cultures, It's not that shameful, it's almost a macho thing. Whereas for a girl, once she sends a photo to a boy that she's flirting with or a boy who says, you know, come on, don't be a prude, come on, I'm sharing with you, you share with me.

Once a boy gets a photo, now he has something of a great value. And I was shocked to learn, at least in some of the schools that were profiled in the book. Boys in middle school, for us, that's age about 11 to 13. You know, 12, 13 year old boys, if they get a photo of a, you know, of the boobs or the pubic area of a girl, they can trade that photo with high school kids who will buy them beer,

who will get them alcohol through their own connections. And so it becomes like an economy of this very valuable thing, which is naked photos of girls that you know. And so to expose girls to this, and the boy, I mean the effect it has on the boys is also so dehumanizing. And then you add in the porn, you know, the hardcore porn with the choking

and the anal sex that they're all, you know, they see, this by the time they're 11, 12, 13, most of them have seen this. The fact that they are exposed to so much hardcore porn before they've ever kissed anyone, this has to be influencing their sexual development. Yeah, it's that word rewiring, right? It's, I mean, it's pretty shocking to hear some of this. But I think what makes this so different from previous technologies that people would get scared of and, you know, you know, people would say, oh, it's just just adults complaining about the world moving on,

it feels that this is completely different. It feels that we are literally changing our experience of the world. Having immediate access to everything all the time, I think it actually is a problem. It makes us lazy. Exactly. Kids need to strive and struggle for things thousands of times, and if we make it easy for them, they don't learn.

But your point about how this feels different, this time is different. It suddenly occurs to me, because in my other academic life, I'm writing about what social media and the digital environment is doing to liberal democracy, how it's making many of the assumptions, especially of the American Constitution. The American founding fathers had certain assumptions about democracy and its intrinsic problems. You know, people are prone to passions. They, you know, rumors, you know, how do you have a democracy when democracy is almost always blow up, at least in historical experience? And so a lot of the sort of assumptions about the nature of society that the founding father is assumed are now no longer true. You know, they thought having a large republic meant that it would take weeks for a rumor to get from Georgia to Massachusetts.

Well, now it takes one second. So for a variety of reasons, liberal democracy is becoming unstable. So to bring it back to kids, you know, what occurs to me now is there have been two major transitions in human history. One was from hunter-gatherer to agriculture. That changed everything over the course of five or 10,000 years. Okay? So, you know, an agriculturist life is just really, really different from a hunter-gatherer. And then there's the Industrial Revolution.

So if you're an agriculturalist in, you know, 16th century England, living out, you know, in a shack and you're cold and then you get the Industrial Revolution, you get cheap products, you get coal, you get heat, your life is really, really different. And that played out over one or two hundred years. What we're going through now is the transformation to the digital world where everything is free, almost all information is free and instantaneous, the pace of technological changes,

orders of magnitude more than it was 50 years ago. Basically, it's like this is the third major transition in all of human history, but it happened in five years. Or, you know, we can be a little more generous. From the 90s when the internet arrived to now was 30 years. It's head spinning. It's incomprehensible.

Our world has changed beyond what we can visualize or imagine. And we've not had time to put in societal and cultural norms to deal with it, have we? Exactly. That's right. We can't even agree on what's happening. So yes, we're confused. Change is happening so fast. We're trying to understand it.

But we haven't paid enough attention to how it's affecting our children. They're the most sensitive. They're the ones whose brains are in flux. So, yeah, everything is, it is really different this time. This is not like when television arrived. That's the difference between girls and boys. I found it fascinated these four reasons that girls are particularly vulnerable. First one, girls are more affected by visual social comparison and perfectionism.

Yeah. So girls and boys each have their separate dominance hierarchies, or I should say prestige hierarchies. You see this in chimpanzees also. The males are working it out by physical violence and threat among chimpanzees, not so much among bonobos. Who can dominate whom? That's how the males work out their dominance hierarchy.

The females, even among chimpanzees, it's more social. Who is better connected? Who has more influence? And so among human children, it's the same thing. Boys are working it out, especially through sports. The kids are the really good athlete who is physically strong and big and formidable. That kid is the dominant male. Girls are not like that.

Girls, it's not about who can beat who up. Girls, it's beauty is a big factor. It's the beautiful girls are going to have a huge advantage. They're more likely to be high status than the less attractive girls. And then it's your ability to dominate the social space and destroy any girls socially who gets in your way. And so many of your listeners will have seen the movie Mean Girls,

which is from, I think, around 2003. You know, the kids, they do have cell phones, they do have flip phones, and they use them to destroy, you know, to send rumors and destroy other kids. But it's all about that jockeying. So what girls do is called relational aggression. Boys, it's all backed up by ultimately physical aggression.

Girls aren't punching each other. If you cross a girl who's dominant, who's above you, she will destroy either your relationships or your reputation or both. And that's always been true. And that's what a lot of the intrigue is in 18th century novels. You know, I mean, it's always been true. Now you give them Instagram,

And now girls have tools to organize rapidly to destroy or marginalize or alienate anyone. So I tell this story in the book, one particular story in, I think it was a middle school or maybe as a high school. And some of the girls organized a group, Everyone but Mary, that was the name of the instrument, everyone but Mary.

And so everyone other than Mary was in this group talking about how terrible Mary is. Now imagine that you're Mary. I guarantee she was thinking about suicide. Because when you are being publicly shamed, you are socially dead. And social death is incredible. incredibly painful every single moment that you're awake.

You are in pain, whereas physical death is over instantly. You're no longer in pain. So this is one of the reasons why I think social media is leading to suicides, both of boys and girls for different reasons. But when everyone is against you and everyone knows it and everyone's laughing at you and adding memes, you're thinking about suicide and there's a chance you'll act on it. Yeah.

There was also something about girls more easily share emotions and their disorders, which is contagious. Exactly. That's right. So, so boy, so sort of an interesting shorthand. You have a really great researcher here in the UK, Simon Baron Cohen, is the world's expert on the psychology of autism.

And what he showed long ago is that, is that the, so we all start off as in uteral, we all start off as in the female form, the female body type, and we have nipples and we're prepared to become a female. And then if testosterone is present, you know, if you have wide chromosomes, It triggers the testes or the adrenal glands.

I forget which comes first. You get a little bit of testosterone. It changes the body over the male pattern. It changes the brain over the male pattern. And one result of the male brain, as Baron Cohen points out, is you become higher on systemizing, that is like subway maps and, you know, how systems work, abstract systems.

And you become weaker on empathizing. That is automatically feeling what others are feeling, being sensitive to others' emotions and needs. So we have this average. Again, it's just an average. Some people, like Bill Clinton, was famous for being really high on both. He was a really good systemizer who was really empathetic.

But on average, there's this difference. And so since girls are higher on empathizing, this is a strength. Empathizing is a great strength. But if you're open to what other girls are feeling, you can read it better. When your friend is sad, you're sad, when your friend is angry,

you're more likely to get angry. This can be a great strength. But now you super connect the girls. So you're not just talking with two or three friends a day. You're now super linked into a group of dozens or hundreds or thousands of mostly girls, let's say, in some of these mental health spaces. And you're really looking at who is the most prestigious? Who should I copy? Who is the one who's most influential here?

And the algorithms are such that it's the girl who is the most extreme form of eating disorder or anxiety. she's the one who gets the most support, the most likes, the most followers. And so your brain automatically says, oh, copy her. She's more important. Unconsciously, you see that she's the role model. So girls have this,

it's a strength, but it can be turned into a weakness or a vulnerability when you super connect them on these bizarre social networks that are not honest portrayals of what people are really feeling. And the fourth point, of course,

was that girls are more subject to predation and harassment. which is, it was quite a difficult reads that bit because, you know, what does it say about the state of society when young girls are being targeted like this when they're online? Yeah, that's right, that's right. So it's just one of the key reasons you think girls should not be on social media until 16 because it's very easy to target them because, frankly, these platforms don't do much, do they?

They do. They do very, they're all just like big talk and no action. Well, that's right. Well, they take action, but it's not very effective action. And so as the tech companies say, as we saw in some Senate hearings in January, you know, but, you know, but Senator, we have taken down 13 billion pieces of, you know, this kind of material, that kind of material. We spend, you know, this much money and we have the world leading AI system to find this content. It's not about the direct content. It's about the structure of the platforms that allow strangers to interact with our children with no verification. no identity verification, no age verification, no nothing, none of us would let our kids have a window onto the street where strange men can walk up and talk to them. I mean, that's unthinkable. But once you put them on Instagram or Snapchat, that kind of is what you're doing.

Now, there are controls, there are ways to restrict it, there are ways to limit it, that's true. But once you get this online life, what I've heard is a lot, because the number of followers is so important, many girls, if they get a request from a stranger, they say yes, because they want the extra follower. Now, how dangerous is it to let your kids go to a playground or a park?

We think that there will be child sexual predators hanging out there, but it's not that it never exists. But they're all on Instagram. They all move to Instagram because it's really risky for them to approach a child at a playground or any other public space. They could get arrested. So there's much less of that than there used to be when I was growing up. They've all moved to Instagram.

because you can get access to, you know, hundreds of millions of girls are on Instagram around the world. And if you just keep approaching many of them and you develop your technique or you say that you're a 17-year-old boy or whatever it is, you can sometimes get some of them to send you a nude photo and you can flirt with them. This is insane, insane that we are letting nine-year-old girls do this.

Yeah. And going back to what we said at the start, I just feel that a lot of parents aren't aware off this. They're just following the norm of what they see around them. They're kind of thinking that, well, the government's taking care of this somewhere and making sure. Yeah, everyone else is doing it. It must be okay, which then is a feed forward cycle where everyone keeps doing it because everyone else is on it. So what can you do? Once again, collective action problems. Yeah. And so that's why I think, you know, I'm not a specialist in child development. I did study moral

development. But I think what I brought to this book, you know, there are a lot of books written on kids in social media. But I think mine is more negative about it than most, in part because I'm a social psychologist. And so what I brought to it was an appreciation of the extraordinary degree to which we influence each other. And social media made that extraordinary degree 10 times more, and it's warping all kinds of aspects of development. So yeah, once you see the collective action nature of all this, everything becomes much clearer. Yeah. For boys, you mentioned that pornography and video games are two of the big issues. You've spoken a little bit to video games already, so perhaps that's talking about pornography.

Sure. What's going on and why is it problematic? So there's not a lot of research on preteen kids in pornography. You can't do experiments. You can't show kids pornography and research. Of course. But what we can measure is the degree to which, from surveys and medical reports, the degree to which kids have what's called problematic use.

There's a debate within the academic literature. as to whether social media and video games are addictions. Should we reserve that term for chemical addictions or does it, can we use it for behaviors? And as I understand it, the consensus now is that gambling is a true addiction. Some people are truly addicted to gambling. That's one reason we don't let our kids into casinos

because we try to protect our kids from addictions and from sex and violence. Well, if gambling is an addiction, I think it's reasonable to say that compulsive use of social media or video games or pornography, if it's compulsive, if you feel driven to do it, if you try to reduce the amount of usage and you have trouble with it, that is called problematic use, but for all practical purposes, it's as though you're addicted. So what happens is most boys play video games and they love it and there's no

problem. But somewhere between 5 and 12 percent of boys qualify as having problematic use of video games, I don't have a similar, we don't know a similar number exactly for pornography, but it's going to be at least that. So anytime you're exposing your kid to a habit-forming behavior that creates compulsive use, you already have a problem. Now, if we think about neural rewiring during puberty and the importance of sexual development, because this is all new stuff when you hit puberty and you have these new desires and who am I? What is my body? What am I attracted to? Boy, girl. So all of this stuff, this is really delicate unfolding of stuff as your own identity is forming in this period of early puberty.

So for boys to have, you know, I remember when I was a kid, like, you know, it was very, you couldn't buy pornography, you couldn't get it unless you had a much older brother who could maybe buy it for you and sneak it to you or something like that. But now as soon as you get an internet browser, you have access to Pornhub, they don't even ask whether you're old enough, you're just on, there's nothing.

So there are all, you know, there's infinite pornography. and it's hardcore, very, very graphic pornography, selected by algorithm for its excellence. That is, it used to be pornography was you look at a beautiful woman, and that's it, it's a still photo beautiful woman. But now you have every possible perversion, you have, you know, violent sex, you have all sorts of things,

and the ones that most adult men liked are the ones that are thou proposed. So it's like an evolved system to get the maximally hooking pornography. This is what our 11, 12, 13-year-old boys are seeing. And for a number of them, and I've spoken to a few of them, I quote one in the book, it's so compulsive. It goes on for years and years.

They use it once a day or more every day for years and years. This is almost certain to have neurological effects. But even if you don't believe that the brain has changed, your thoughts about what sex is, Rather than discovering it slowly, where you start with a kiss, sex is this rough thing that a man does to a woman. That's what they see on the screen. And the woman, even though it looks like this should really hurt,

the woman is acting like she enjoys it. Really, that's what sex is? So in all these ways, I believe exposure to hardcore pornography is warping boys' sexual development, and it's going to make heterosexual relationships and marriage much harder to attain. Now, of course, people could access that on a laptop at home. Is there something uniquely problematic about smartphones here?

Yes. So general piece of advice for parents would be, you don't want to keep your kid away from the internet entirely. To have a desktop computer, a big computer with a big screen, out in the living room or the kitchen or someplace where it's somewhat public is probably a good idea. I mean, you know, there are many times when you want your kid to do something on the internet. The problems, from what I hear, and here I'm drawing on, there's a woman named Melanie Hempe who runs Screen Strong with an organization in the U.S.

She's educated me, especially on the effects of video games. Her son was heavily addicted to video games. She says the really bad stuff happens when they can take a device into their bedroom at night and they're not monitored. And that's when they're talking to strangers and that's when a lot of the really horrible stuff happens. So don't think you have to keep your kid away from the internet. What you have to do is you have to delay as long as you can the day at which your child has unlimited immersion in the internet on demand. And that's what a smartphone gives them,

unless in your case when they come home, they have to put aside the smartphone. That's what we do too for my daughter. She comes in, she has to put on the kitchen counter. It's supposed to stay there. It doesn't always stay there. But at least there's a framework there. Even if it doesn't always stay there,

You're setting expectations. Expectations, right? There's a framework for how to live and how to use this device. Even if it doesn't get followed 100% at the time, your daughter was still growing up knowing that I shouldn't be on this thing the whole time because mom and dad are prioritizing this. That's right. And so I appreciate it's difficult in every family.

Everyone's got unique challenges. At the same time, we're not blaming parents. You're very clear in the book to not blame parents. parents, this is a collective action problem. But whilst we are waiting for this collective action problem to get solved, I think there are some things that we can do. Absolutely. In fact, yeah, let's not put it as while we're waiting for it to get solved.

Let's put it as we all have to get going today to improve the habits and exposure of our kids. And I want to share, as long as we're moving more towards like parenting advice, in America, there's a woman named Dr. Becky, Dr. Becky Kennedy. She gives very good advice on parenting. And in our conversation, she pointed out, a lot of parents have a lot of trouble setting limits. They have a lot of trouble being the bad guy, the tough guy, the one who says, no, you can't have this. So if you haven't been doing that from the time your kid was young, if you haven't been setting clear boundaries and making clear the world has structure, there's some things you do in some places in times and other things you don't, if you haven't done that until your kid is 10 or 11, and now you're,

you're going to start doing it with a smartphone, boy, is that gonna be difficult. So even though I don't blame parents in the book, there's a lot that, I mean, just, you know, parents are sort of drifting into permissiveness, which I think is harmful for kids. And this actually brings up an interesting twist in the data, which is that kids,

at least in the United States, kids in religious families have not been washed away as much as kids in secular families. And kids who say that they're politically conservative, at the age of 18, have not been washed away as much as kids who say they're politically liberal. And what I think these have in common...

When you say washed away, you mean have come across the toxic effects of social media and smartphone use? Well, yes, I guess what I should clarify, what I mean by washed away, because I'm so, I've been creating so many graphs, is you track the different mental health outcomes, let's say, but we've long known

that religion is beneficial for mental health. Kids in religious families are a little healthier, are a little less depressed than kids in secular families. But those differences were small until 2012. And all of a sudden, the kids in secular households, for them it's a hockey stick, for the kids in religious households,

it goes up, but not as much. And same thing for left-right, at least in the United States. It's not because of grounding and like a baseline framework and some guidelines of how one lives in this world. Exactly. So conservative, so I believe what might be happening here is, We have this old, this long-standing literature in psychology about the three child-rearing styles. There's the permissive style. We don't have enough structure. Kids can do anything anytime.

There's the authoritarian style at the other end where mom is, you know, shut up because I told you to, you know, just, oh, what's the old joke? Shut up, my father explained. You know, it's very strict and can be harsh. And then in the middle is the golden mean, which is called authoritative parenting. and it used to be that if you're a progressive family or if you're in San Francisco or Brooklyn or you have a mixture of some permissive but also a lot of authoritative parenting. Whereas if you're conservative, you have some authoritarians

but you also have authoritative, which is where you have clear rules and structure, but you explain them and you're sometimes flexible if your kid can explain why this time is different. You said, okay, well done, yes. So you can talk with your kids in that way. I think what has happened, in this age we're talking about since 2010

is we're all so overwhelmed. We all have so much stuff coming in. People aren't going to church as much. They don't have time. They're not having sex as much. Married people are not having sex as much as they did in 2010. They don't have time.

They don't have time to parent. And so what I think has happened is everyone has shifted more towards permissive. What that means is that if we look at liberal households, they used to have a mix of authoritative and permissive. Again, I don't have the data to prove this, but my hypothesis is if everyone should, shifts towards permissive, now progressive families, liberal families, are having a little too much

permissive and less authoritative. Whereas conservative families, maybe they had too much authoritarian before, they're probably, you know, they're less authoritarian now, more authoritative. So that could be one reason why the outcomes, at least in the United States, are a little better for conservatives and for religious households than they are for secular and progressives, I should say. It reminds me a little bit of the data showing that kids who have stable and secure your upbringings, they get less PTSD when exposed to a traumatic event. Because the foundation of safety and security is there, right? So they're much better able to bounce back, as it were, from the trauma.

It feels that we're in a similar position here, which is, you know, there's many, as you said, you're an atheist, right? So it's not as if you're necessarily trying to. Yeah, I'm not saying, oh, be religious. But what religious families have is a framework for living. Yeah, that's right. There are more rules and more restrictions. There's no question.

We're losing that. That's right. That's right. And I find it very alarming. This is great. We have this long discussion and we can get kind of technical here. I can bring in my favorite thinker of all time, which is Emil Durkheim, the sociologist Emil Durkheim.

It's from him I learned that the way to think about religion is not as a set of beliefs, not as a way of managing fears, not as beliefs about the afterlife. religions are ways of binding individuals together into a community. That's their function. That's what they evolved to do. And so if you're in a religious community, let's take Orthodox Jews. I'm Jewish.

I'm not Orthodox, but Orthodox Jews, they have all kinds of restrictions. I mean, my God, the rules about what you can eat, what you can't eat on, which day, what you have to say beforehand. So they're used to a very regimented kind of life. And Orthodox Jewish families literally have Shabbat. They literally have a day on which you don't use any electronics. So Jewish kids are in these fans.

I'd love to get data. I haven't seen data just from Orthodox Jews or just from evangelical, you know, devout Christians. But my bet is if we could track that over time, we wouldn't see that big increase after 2012. We'd see more stability. And I think that's something that my wife and I think a lot about in relation to how we bring up our kids, which is if we. if we can give them this strong grounding and lots of family time and communal meals

where we're all sitting there, we're chatting, because we do. It's a high priority for us and we have the time to be able to do that. Yes, I appreciate that maybe my son is the only person without Snapchat in his year. But he also seems to be quite self-assured. He seems to know who he is.

He's not asking for it all the time. He's, I don't know. I sort of feel, yes, you can change the practices in schools and things are going to get to that. That's really important. But at the same time, as a family, the more stability and security you can give your kids, the more resilient they're going to be

when they go out there in the world. That's right. If I may ask, are your parents born in South Asia? What's your-mom? Mom and Dad are from born and brought up in India. They came in the 60s and the 70s to the UK. my brother and I were born in the UK. And your wife?

My wife was also born in the UK, but her family are also Indian, different part of India and partly from East Africa and Kenya, but we've both got similar Indian backgrounds, but we were both born and brought up in the UK. But you have that benefit of an ethnic community, even if you're fully assimilated or whatever you want to say,

you're going to be able to draw on that. I assume your kids have a lot of contact with aunts and uncles and perhaps grandparents. Yeah, not as much as we would ideally like, but certainly with grandparents, yeah. Like my mom and dad when he was alive are five minutes away and my wife's parents are 25 minutes away and my kids see them all the time.

Yeah, that's so there is that sort of grounding, I would say. Exactly. So that's again the way I have this metaphor of plants being just ripped up and left out to dry. which is what's happened to a lot of kids. They don't have contact with a lot of their families. Family sizes are shrinking for a lot of reasons. You know, in China, nobody has cousins.

There are no cousins because you have several generations of only children. And so that's happening in the West as well. Fertility rates are going down, down, down. So it's hard, you know, when I was growing up, there was a cousins club. You know, my grandfather was the youngest of 18, and most of them didn't make it out of Eastern Europe,

but those that did make it to America, they would get together and we had all these cousins. That doesn't happen anymore, because there aren't that many cousins to be had. So I think we have to be more intentional about grounding. And so this would be another piece of advice for anyone listening. If you have kids, do what you can to have them spend more time with relatives.

Do what you can to, you have to be more intentional about giving a sense of family and tradition and community. Because, you know, kids are hungry for it. And a variable I want to bring up some of the saddest graphs in the book are the ones that are questions like, sometimes I feel my life has no meaning. Do you agree with this? You know, on a scale of one to five, how much do you agree with it?

What we see is that all these questions about despair and uselessness, the levels were flat and relatively low until 2012 or so, and then they go way up for boys and for girls. So as soon as our kids adopted a phone-based life, they felt useless. They're not doing anything

that is a value to anyone else. And kids need to be useful. Give your kids errands, give them chores, give them responsibilities, on them, let them feel proud that they're making a contribution to the family. If they're just being raised in a very limited family environment and they have huge amounts of screen time, they're going to feel useless because they are useless. They're not being put to any use. Let's get into some more of the practical advice. Let's sort of with schools, if you don't mind. I know we touched on a few things,

but you're very clear. I think one of the best things about this book and the public conversation you have started for many years now, but particularly since it came out, is you've got some very clear guidelines for people and schools, which I think, I think without that we've really struggled because it's like, yeah, we know this is not good, we should be improving things, but we don't know how. Exactly. But you're making it really clear that these are the four things, I think,

that schools should be doing or maybe the two things. So maybe can you walk us through that? That's right. So we've been talking about mental health as the main outcome variable here, but education and learning are actually also being harmed. That is, what our kids know, in America, we have good data. It was going up and up slowly until 2012. And since 2012, academic attainment has been dropping.

And that's true around the world. Once kids had these distraction devices in school, if they're texting all the time, if they're watching porn videos, some of the boys, of course they're not listening to the teacher. They're not learning as much. So schools have a real imperative, not just for mental health. And you talk to the head of any school. What are your top issues?

Mental health, depression, self-harm. It's going to be the tops for everybody dealing with. with teens. But education is vital too. Schools are supposed to educate our kids and they care about that outcome. So the idea that kids can have the greatest distraction device ever made

in their pockets is just horrible. Of course they shouldn't. But now let's suppose we get rid of the phones. From schools? So the kids have to lock them up in the morning and they get it at the end of the day. That's the right policy. And at what age are you proposing

that continues until? Oh, all the way through secondary school. So until 18? Yes, until 18. Okay. Yeah. And at university, we can't tell the students to, but what I can't, what I've begun doing is telling my students,

even my MBA students who are 28, let's say, I say no screens whatsoever, no screens of any kind. I used to let them use screens because, you know, but I make them pledge, I will only use it for class. But what I learned from them and from the TA who would walk around the back of the room, they can't do it. They can't do it.

If they have their laptop open, they're shopping, they're texting, they're doing things. So none of us can't. John, right? They can't do it. That's right. These are people at university studying MBAs. How on earth do we expect 11, 12, 13, 14 year olds

to resist the temptation? They cannot do it, that's right. So it's vital that schools go phone free, but that's only the first step because what also happened in early 2010s, was the iPad came out in I think 2010 or 2011. iPads begin flooding children's lives at home and in school. The Apple world wants schools to adopt Apple technology,

the Google world wants them to adopt Chrome, books. So I don't know all the details about whether they've made them free or subsidized, but our schools are bursting with personal technology. Now, there is a role, of course, for the internet in school. Of course, the teacher needs access to the internet, so many lesson plans, so many videos. I mean, YouTube, Khan Academy. I'm not saying get the internet out of school. I'm saying, get it off the kid's desk. You cannot have a device on a kid's desk that can send to receive texts. If you do, the kid will be texting because if anyone is texting, they have to check their texts. Otherwise, what happens at lunch? They're the only one who doesn't

know about the rumor about somebody or the video that was sent to. So, so. So this, is this phones or is this laptops as well? Anything. This is laptops, Chromebooks, tablets and phones. Anything. Let's start, I agree fully on phones. I actually agree on laptops as well. But if I look at what's happening in the UK, certainly in the schools that I'm aware of, since COVID, Yeah. Right? Since COVID, there has been a widespread adoption now where lots of schools require their kids

to have their own laptop. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So I haven't... So you're against this as well? Well, I am, but I don't know enough to say we need to get rid of it all.

I suspect we need to get rid of it all. And so one reason for that is that, you know, as is well known, Steve Jobs and many of the founders of these companies, they did not let their kids have tablets and phones. They send their kids to the Waldorf School is one of the, is a kind of schooling in the United States where there is zero technology.

Everything is pen and paper. So the tech executives themselves chose zero technology schools, or at least zero personal technology schools. Second, what I've learned, there was a report from UNESCO about a year ago on educational technology. And at least the report says that there's no clear evidence

that these things are helpful. The distraction effects, of course, there could be benefits, and there are benefits to having the kid be able to look things up on their own. But there's benefits to many things in life. Exactly. Exactly. And the downside is always massive distraction.

Yeah. Massive distraction. So, you know, a metaphor that I used, I just wrote the forward policy exchange here in London think tank. They just put out a report yesterday on the importance of getting phones out of schools. And I wrote a little forward to it and I asked readers to imagine that you're sitting in school in 1993. just before the internet comes into our lives.

And you're kind of bored. But, you know, so you only hear 60% what the teacher says. And then the next day, the school announces a new policy. You can bring in your television set from home. You can bring in your VCR. You can bring in walkie-talkies.

You can bring in a radio, record player, everything. Everyone gets really big desks. They get a power strip. And all the kids bring in, like, all this, you know, technology, they plug it in during class. Okay. This is insane. Like, you know, imagine being the teacher.

out at this sea of kids covered by screens. Like, you can't teach, you can't learn on those circumstances. But that's what we're doing. If kids have a device that can access the internet, then some of them are shopping, some of them are watching porn, some of them are texting. So I think... And they can't resist. They can't resist. That's right. It doesn't matter what the teacher says. Doesn't matter what anyone says. Yeah. They're not going to be able to resist. That's right. That's right. So the easy thing that we can all do this year, every school can do it this year is phone lockers or lockable pouches like the yonder pouches. They can all that this year. As for getting rid of the Chromebooks and the tablets and all that, that's going

to take longer because first, I don't have the data yet to prove that they need to. I suspect that they do. And second, that's going to be really hard. It's going to take several years. And it's going to be costly. It's going to, you know, because these are labor saving devices for teachers. You know, my kids turn in everything on their, on their phones on screens, you know, as opposed to handwriting, which is harder to collate. So I think this is going to be, you know, so the battle for phone-free schools, I think can be one within the next 12 months, within the next four months. There seems to be even an appetite in the media for this. I've seen enough negative headlines about phones and schools. That's right. Also, the other thing is that every school that goes phone-free,

every school that adopts a lock-up policy, they all report miraculous results. I keep, like I've asked on Twitter, can anyone find a story about a school that went phone-free and regretted it or found that it caused more problems than it's a, no, I can't find any stories like that. that. So let's start by getting the phones out of life. And then over the next few years, I think we need to disengage from the personal technology in school. I want to talk about homework being given on screens. It's a topic I'm really passionate about because I think it's happened so quickly post-COVID. And I'm, look, I'm not an educationalist, right? So I don't know what has been thought of in those meetings, the departments, whether they've thought about the

impacts on health or whether they've just thought about the benefits of doing it in that way. I'm sure there are benefits. I'm actually dead against it. And on a personal level, I feel now that my son has to turn in homework on his screen, it's getting a lot more difficult now to maintain screen-free time in the evening. Right? That's right. And so adjust to the sound just before you came in.

For me, there's four reasons. And I'd welcome your perspective on this. Again, I'm not saying I'm right. This is just my, from looking at the data that I've seen and understanding health the way I understand it, these are the four reasons why I think school should be more judicious before giving home-acons screens. First of all, you're working against one of the main principles

of circadian biology, which is you need lots of light exposure in the day and very little at night. Good, good point. We know that light exposure in the evening alerts adults, it alerts children. Suppresses melatonin. And we'll interfere with sleep, right? And we know from the data that sleep deprivation is causative of mental health problems.

Yes, that's right. So only on that one point, I find it, how can I put it? Honestly, I find it ridiculous that we're asking our kids or that schools are asking their kids to be on screens in the evening. It just flies in the face of all the data that we have on there. So that's point one. Point two, if you are asking them to turn in homework in the evenings on screens, like, I imagine if I was 14 years old and I was in my bedroom, I'm just thinking about it as a kid and I had homework to do.

And if the internet existed and if I could go and look up the football scores and do a bit of shopping and look what was going on in rock music, I'd be doing that. You know, and you're effectively training kids to be distracted because we can't multitask. That's right. Right. So that's the second reason. The third reason, I think it puts pressure.

If the schools do it, I think it's really important what schools do. It puts pressure on parents who are trying their best to implement good digital habits. Like, this is one thing I can't do anything about. Apart from write a letter to the school, which I plan on doing. And the fourth one is something we touched on earlier, which is I think it sends a problematic message. The school is basically saying it's okay for you to be on screens in the evening. Doesn't matter what mom and dad say. The schools have said it's okay. And related to that final point, I think a lot of kids now, I don't think this is a good thing, but a lot of kids

are having their leisure time in the evening on screens. That's right. What else is there to do? So if the school are also putting homework on screens, you are putting real pressure on parents, And I think schools could stop that by just reducing dramatically how much homework they give on screens. Or I was thinking about possible solutions. One could be you have an option. So some kids don't have to do it on screens for families who are really against this

and others who, you know, are a lot more liberal on that, say, yeah, that's fine. Or schools should be given guidelines as well, saying, look, we do have this piece of homework that we'd like to do and we would like to submit it on a screen, but please try not to do it within 90 minutes of going to bed. If they at least gave that guidance,

they would show that they're aware of the issue. So that's my current thoughts. I know you are a world expert in this area, John. So do you agree or disagree with any of them? Oh, I think that's great. I think your list is great. All I can really add to it is a kind of a suggestion for how to get it implemented,

which is let's start in primary school. So in primary school, here it runs from like age five, four or five up through 11? 10, 11, yeah. Okay. Do you know if in primary school they sometimes expect you to do homework on screens? Look, it's not as much as in secondary school. If I think about my daughter, which is really the only experience I can relate to, because I'm not in education,

I would say it's not much, but it's definitely increased dramatically in the past few years. Okay. Because the age at which kids get their first smartphone keeps drifting down and down and down. And the smartphones and the technology makes it very easy for schools to do. do a lot of things. So I think a lot of the technology was introduced, not for its educational effects, but because it made administration, just made things easier.

And I acknowledge that. I acknowledge it might be easier for schools. But now that we recognize the devastating effect this is having on kids, I think we need to approach this as a several year project, maybe even a five or 10 year long project. Start with primary schools. That's established that primary schools are all about pen and paper, that the kids are not using screens in school.

Of course, the teacher can have a computer, the teacher can have a screen, there can be computers in the classroom, They do things on the computer over there, but no personal technology in primary school and no requirement for a phone or anything to do your homework. Let's get primary school really good.

And then we'll have kids who are actually used to that. And as they're transitioning to secondary school, now we're taking what we've learned because it's going to take us a few years to rip out all this technological dependence. So that's what I'm hopeful will happen. I don't want to prescribe such a radical change that people get freaked out

or they say this can't be done or, you know, because if we said, you know, in the UK government, you know, in the UK you guys seem to love to ban things. Like, it never occurred to me to say the word ban, you know, banning, you know, like you can't own a smartphone. I don't mention that in my book. I want it to be a norm. We need norms here, not necessarily laws on banning phones.

Now, for social media age 16, there we can do it with norms, but it's going to be hard. We do, it would be great to have government support, raise the age to 16, require the companies to do age verification. That would be a game changer. But again, to get back to education, I don't want us to like rush into something,

mandating something that's going to cause huge problems if we try to do it really quickly. So let's work on primary school. Let's save the generation coming up. Let's give them a more human childhood. And then we'll also try to start pulling it out of the lives of the older kids, but it's going to be harder. and it's going to be much harder

in secondary schools to say no personal, you know, everything else to be done by hand like that would take years I think to you do. I think we will have to get there but it's probably going to take a few years. Yeah, I remember talking to Andrew Huberman

about this when he came on this show a couple of years ago and Andrew said, I think we'll look back on this in I think he said 10 or 20 years and it will be like the junk food of the 80s and 90s that we didn't know what was going on

and we permitted it. And, you know, I spoke to him about it. I spoke to Anders Hansen, this amazing psychiatrist from Stockholm, the Carroll Institute. And in his book, I think the attention fix he writes about, there's data showing that actually we retain the information less on screens compared to when it's in books. Yeah. A book is more embodied.

It's this embodied interaction. Our bodies matter for our thinking. And we forget that in the digital age. Yeah. So that's for schools. What about parents who are listing who go, know, okay, I don't know what to do. And the practical area is brilliant, by the way,

so for people, get the book, because it actually, it's so clear, you've set it out for different age groups, what to do, right? It's really, really clear. But what about for someone who might feel that, I don't know, the ship has sailed, like they've got a 15-year-old who already is hooked on their smartphone?

This is very challenging, isn't it? It is. Do you have any advice for that parent? Sure. I hear this a lot, you know, the trains left the station, the ship has sailed, so we can't call it back. You know, but if a train left the station carrying 100 kids and it was headed for a bridge that was out

and we knew they were gonna fall into a ravine, we'd call it back, like we'd do something, we'd call ahead to the station, we'd block it, we'd do something. And so I think, you know, I think we can do it here, but it's very, very hard if you just call your kid back and nobody else does, that's really painful for your kid. You don't want your kid, once your kid has all these social relationships through technology, it's very hard to rip them out and say, no, those relationships are gone

because now you're condemning your kid to social death. So the first thing is team up with a few other families. If it's a few families doing it together, it's much easier, much less painful. That's the first thing. Second thing is once you're aware, once you have the concept of a phone-based childhood versus a play-based childhood, now you can think, again, with other families and perhaps the whole school, how do we give our kids more of a play-based childhood rather than a phone-based, childhood. Because don't think about this just as we've got to rip the phones out of their hands. We've got to get them off screens, period. What are they going to do all day if you take them off screens? You have to give them back a human childhood where there's a lot of time with

other kids unsupervised. So that's the next thing. And so some specific advice. In the United States, I don't know if you do it here, but in the United States, you know, middle class families and above, we often send our kids to sleepaway camp in the summer, ideally in the woods and rustic cabins and no phones, some of them have no electricity. That's pretty rare, but they still exist. That's amazing. The stories that I hear from camps, I spoke to a camp director's association, I've spoken to many parents, you know, your kid is completely phone addicted, anxious, withdrawn.

You send them to summer camp. They come back four weeks later, and you've got your wonderful happy kid back that you knew a couple of years ago. And then they get back on their phone and three weeks later, they're back to their sullen, sulking, anxious self. So a sleepaway camp is an incredibly, powerful detox, but it's not just that it's the detox, it's that they're having fun with other kids. They're having adventures. They're doing risky things with other kids. So the more you think about it

as giving your kid a play-based childhood, instead of just taking away the phone-based childhood, the easier it's going to be. Yeah. Oh, I love that. There's a wonderful section also, which perhaps we weren't had time to go into on spiritual degradation, which I thought was such a beautiful addition to the book. I wasn't expecting it. And it was this idea that the phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescence, but in all of us. Could you briefly speak to that? Sure.

I wasn't expecting to write that chapter either. Had the book all laid out, it was going to be on what's happening to kids. And when I finished the chapter on boys, that took a long time to write and to figure out. When I finished the chapter on boys, I was way behind schedule. I'd committed to a publication date. I had to get the manuscript in. But I felt like I've been so focused on the mental. health outcomes and there's so much more going on.

And I've been focused on the kids, but it's affecting all of us. And I just felt like I have to write a chapter on what it's doing to us, to adults, because we all have a phone-based life now. And my first book was called The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth and Ancient Wisdom. Great book. Thank you. For that book, I read the wisdom literature, East and West and, you know, what comes out

of India, which leads to Buddhism and Hinduism, all these insights about don't be too attached to the world and be the same in success and failure and cultivate. some, you know, these brilliant insights from South Asia. In the Western world, it's especially stoicism, I think, was really the most powerful philosophy. But I read, you know, east and west. I read everything I could. And it turns out the world's religious traditions

have this incredible knowledge of practices that lead to a flourishing life. And so when I was trying to make a list of all the things that our phone-based life blocks, it was like, you know, there's a whole chapter in the happiness hypothesis on how we're too quick to judge, you know, judge not let ye be judged.

And we're all hypocrites. You know, why do you condemn the speck in your neighbors eye when you cannot see the plank in your own? And there's similar quotes from Buddha. And it occurred to me, you know, if you grow up on social media, it's exactly the opposite. It's judge now, judge quickly, because if you don't judge quickly,

someone's going to judge you for not judging. So, you know, if you take whatever ancient wisdom traditions advise us to do, a life growing up online tells you to do the opposite. Yeah. And especially South Asian traditions are all so much meditation, stillness, controlling the jumping monkey of the mind, meditation techniques to gain control of your consciousness

and be able to focus it. And an on-life line life is the opposite. It's fragmented into tiny little shreds. You're never focused on anything for three minutes. Everything is change, change, change, change. And it's all me-focused. That's right. It's me, me, me, me, usually, isn't it?

That's right. Whereas the essence of spirituality, again, I'm talking as a Jewish atheist here, but as a psychologist who wrote about it, the essence of spiritual to me seems to be self-transcendence. We're so focused on ourselves. In fact, it's what's called the default mode network in the brain, it's like the part of the system

in the brain that's like always on because we're thinking about ourselves and what we want, what we need, what people are saying about us. When you reduce activity in that center, people have self-transcendent experiences. And so I think it's just in a lot of ways, you know, suppressing yourself, your selfishness,

opening yourself to the beauty of the world. These are all things that we've been told to do by spiritual traditions. And when you give your kid a phone, they're going to spend less time outside. And when they are outside, yeah, they'll see a sunset, but it's a sunset they can put on Instagram. They're going to take out the camera.

They're not going to be present. And my fear is that for many kids who grew up with this from the age of five, as you do in the UK, for many kids, they might never have been fully present. from a moment of their lives, because it's always about how will this look if I post it. So yeah, it's really doing a number on all of us,

not just the kids. Just so we can finish this conversation on a more optimistic note, hopefully, for that parent who's heard this and is scared and thinks there's nothing they can do and thinks, what can I do, everyone around me is doing this, I have no choice, what would you say to them?

I would say, I sympathize. You're right. That's the way it's been until today. This year, 2024, this is the tipping point in the UK and the US. And now I'm hearing it's happening all around the world. Everyone is fed up. COVID kind of confused us. But as COVID is disappearing, we're seeing the wreckage in our kids.

So what I would say is, I understand your sense of futility. I understand your sense of frustration. We all had it. But guess what? If we all come out of at the same time, we solve the problem. And that's why I'm incredibly optimistic. It's really hard to change people's minds at a mass scale. But we don't have to change people's minds.

Almost everyone has seen the problem. What we have to do is say, here's the way forward. And so actually, if you'll let me just end by relisting those four norms, because they're very easy. We can do them all this year. It's no smartphone before, well, in the United States, no smartphone before high school. In the UK, it's no smartphone before the end of secondary school.

No social media until 16. Phone-free schools, lock them up in a special phone locker, not the kid's personal locker, and far more free play independence and responsibility in the real world. That fourth one is gonna be more challenging because we're anxious, we have to get over our own anxieties. But if we can do those four norms,

and you're not on your own for this, I guarantee you, everyone's talking about this now, just talk with other families nearby, you'll have allies. allies. And once you have a group of parents, a group of families that are doing this together, it's not going to feel impossible. It's going to feel inevitable. John, I think you're doing fantastic work. Thank you so much for making time to come on the show. What a joy. Thank you, Ranga. This is so different from my other conversations. I really appreciate it. No worries. My pleasure. I really hope you enjoyed listening to that conversation. As I said in my intro, I think this is one of the most

urgent topics that society needs to address. And I honestly believe that change. is possible if we all come together and take collective action. Of course, for this to happen, we need more and more people to become aware. So please share this episode with all of your friends, share it with your fellow parents in your WhatsApp groups, and please share it with your school and teachers. I would dearly love every single teacher and head teacher to listen to this conversation. I'd also love parents to get together and start talking about this issue. issue and please do pick up a copy of Jonathan's new book, The Anxious Generation. I think it is a fantastic and crucially important book and a book that every parent and teacher should read.

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