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

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

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

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it! In this episode of Habits and Hustle, I'm joined by Dr. Jonathan Haidt. He's an NYU professor and the bestselling author of the book, Anxious Generation. We explore how smartphones and social media are reshaping childhood. And not for the better. We dive into the alarming rise in depression, anxiety, and suicide among young people, and how screen time disrupts critical psychological development

from resilience to conflict resolution. Dr. Height also shares why phones affect boys and girls differently, the science behind how screens rewire the brain, and his four key recommendations for healthier tech use. Whether you're a parent, teacher, or just someone who cares about mental health, this conversation is a must-listen.

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

It's small, it's affordable, it's portable, and it's really effective. Head over to Therisage.com right now and use code BeBold for 15% off. This code will work site-wide. Again, head over to Therisage.com and use code BeBold for 15% off any of their products. All right. So today on the podcast, we have Jonathan Haidt, who is the author of The Anxious Generation, probably, and in my opinion, and I think almost every parent I know's opinion, one of the best books of I think of our decade. It is so timely and I am just honored to have you on this podcast. Well, thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here. It's really a pleasure to have you. I don't even know where to begin with you because you talk so much about the rise of anxiety and depression in our youth and social media, but it's not even that. I mean, I think I want to start by asking you, what was the tipping point for you in why you even wrote the book? Matthew 2 Well, it was actually kind of a sidetrack originally. I'd written, my previous book was The Coddling of the American Mind, and it was about how overprotection is really weakening our kids. And we saw the students

who arrived on campus around 2014-2015. I teach at NYU, but all of us have seen this. The students arriving in 2014 or so, which is very different. They were much more fragile, much higher rates of anxiety, much more upset by things they saw or heard or read. And so I wrote a whole book on that with my friend, Greg Lukianoff, and we focused on overprotection. And that's a part of the story, very important part of the story, very important part of the story. But at the time we were writing this in 2017 mostly, the evidence wasn't clear

that social media was harming kids. There were people writing about it, there were few experiments, wasn't really clear. So we just had a couple of paragraphs in the book saying, well, maybe social media is part of this. But then the mental health stats kept getting worse and worse and worse. And this is all before COVID. COVID made it worse still, but all of this

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

That's when Facebook buys Instagram. That's when it becomes very popular. So once they all get smartphones, which again is around 2012, their mental health plummets immediately. So I wrote the first chapter of that book, laying out all the graphs, like look what happened. And then once I saw just how vast it was, and that it wasn't just the US, that this was happening, not in every country, we don't have data from every country, but almost all

the Western countries and certainly all of the English speaking countries, the identical pattern. So once I saw that chapter, I said, Whoa, I can't just leave this in chapter one and go write a book about democracy. I've got to follow this out. And that's what became The Anxious Generation. I split the book in two. My editors were happy with that. And I ended up writing as fast as I could, The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring

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

So the data is clearest on a link between social media and girls. There you can just look at just a simple correlation. The girls who spend a lot of time on social media are two or three times more depressed than the girls who spend little. That's a very, very crude measure, just how much time. For boys, there's a relation, but it's weaker. And so that's how I started. I thought, okay, the central thing here is social media is hurting girls. Cause I was focused on the published literature. But as I got more and more into it,

I realized there are many, many different harms that are not about the number of hours you spend. So, okay, let's do the boys, let's do the girls first. And then we'll move on to the boys. Sure. So think about it this way, you're a company whose business model is based on monetizing children's attention.

You've got to grab their eyeballs and keep them as long as you possibly can. What is the bait that you want to use in your trap? And the way a trap works is you have to have bait that appeals to the animal. You're not going to catch a dog using grapes. I mean, they don't like grapes or whatever. Some dogs do, but you know.

Most don't, right? Most don't. So you need bait Some dogs do, but you know. Most don't, right? Most don't. So you need bait. And what's the bait for girls? If you want to get teenage girls in, what are you gonna show them? Who said what about whom? Who's friends with whom?

What people said about you? Girls have a more, girls and women have a more developed mental map of social space. This is a common joke in every family. You know, the white, my wife remembers, knows all sorts of things about my friends that I've forgotten. So girls and women are much more sociable in their social cognition. Boys and men are literally a bit more autistic.

That is literally the difference. Males are sort of shifted over a bit on the spectrum, not that they're autistic, but like towards that high systemized or low empathizer, not as socially skilled. So social media offers to girls what everyone is saying about everyone. And once the girls go in, they cannot leave. They're trapped because since that's where all the girls are, they're not in the hallway talking anymore. They're not going over to each other's house and talking anymore. Everything is happening on Instagram and a few other platforms. So the girls are trapped and many girls are on there every waking moment. So that's a trap a girl. And then what are the effects of that? Well, the sheer waste of time so many young women

That's basically all they do if you're on social media five hours a day, which is the average Actually for girls is a little higher than that That's pretty much your life and all the things that you and I remember from childhood Knock all those out hanging out with friends laughing friends, reduce all that by 70, 80%. Being out in the sunshine, reduce it by reading books, having hot, everything, everything in childhood, take out 70, 80%. Oh, reduce your sleep too. Lose about a half hour sleep a night for your entire adolescence. So it just really does a number on girls. And that's not even talking about the predation. There are so many men that want to have sex with young girls and young boys. And they used to have to go to a playground where they

would be creepy men. And then we locked them up in the nineties. Well, we didn't lock them all up. They're not on the playgrounds anymore. They're on Instagram. They're on Snapchat. That's the way. It's so easy to meet children anonymously, get them to send you a photograph showing their breasts or their penis. And then you've got them. Once you've got that photograph, you can blackmail them, you can force them to do sex acts on camera. So it's horrific what is happening. Snapchat gets 10,000 reports of sextortion. Not a year, a month, every month. 10,000. And that's just what's reported to them. So social media puts kids into contact with strange men around the world. It's insane that we let this happen.

You know, it's interesting you said something that I caught. It was like, I don't know if I'm misquoting it, but it's you'll get the point that we overprotect our children in real time in real in the real world, and we under protect them online. Exactly. That's right. It's true, because they're not these creepers are not like in the park anymore. They're actually online. You know, a couple of months ago, I was walking in my neighborhood, which is a good neighborhood. And there were all these police cars around. And it was because there was some guy, by the way, a successful attorney guy who you would never

think in a million years would be the guy that was going on Instagram, trapping these young boys, and then they meet in a mall. And so that's what happened. And then they caught him. It's disgusting. Right? And then the guy ran away, but the guy got off. The guy got off.

You mean he wasn't convicted? No, he met this 13-year-old boy in the mall in front of Adidas at Century City Mall, okay? And they didn't have quote unquote proof because it didn't happen, and they couldn't prove that this was happening. And he got off. Right, that's right.

And so they're using social media as the avenue to meet these people in real time. It's not happening in real time. Exactly, that's right, that's right. So for all these reasons, it just crept up on us that, you know, cause it started in the nineties when the internet came in and we all thought this is amazing and it really was amazing.

And the millennial generation, those born 1981 to 1995, roughly, they grew up with the internet. And some bad stuff definitely happened on the internet. But back then, it wasn't monetized. There weren't companies that had perfected locking you in and addicting you. So some bad stuff happened, but it was mostly very exciting and the millennials turned out fine. And so we all kind of thought oh computers are good They're kind of good for kids and this is the future and so we didn't realize We didn't realize that everything changed between 2010 and 2015 and this is the heart of my book It's the great rewiring of childhood. So imagine that you are let's say you're a girl born in 1995 So this is the last year of the millennial generation

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

They didn't have a monetary strategy early on. It's really in the early 2010s that they perfect it. And then they buy Instagram, which all the girls go on to. There's a lot of publicity. And so as kids are trading in their flip phones, they're getting a smartphone with a front facing camera and Instagram and other platforms and Tumblr and Pinterest and other things. And they're getting high speed internet. So now you can do photographs and video. So, but if you're born 1995, made it through you get this stuff in Late teens, but that's not as bad. Your brain is most of the way done rewiring. Okay

Now what happens if you're born five years later? What happens to a girl born in the year 2000? So she's Gen Z Gen Z begins birth year 1996, but let's look at a girl born in 2000 So she turns 15 in 2015 what that means is that she probably got her first phone, it was probably an iPhone, say in 2012 when she was 12. Back then it might've been more 13, 14, but now it's 10. Kids are getting iPhones at 10 plus or minus. So her first phone is an iPhone. She just lies about her age when she's 12,

opens an Instagram account, because they welcome you, they're glad to have you. As far as I can tell, they certainly don't try to keep kids off. She has a front-facing camera. All her friends are on Instagram and so now she's going through puberty taking pictures of herself and putting them up there and trying to get followers. So you know the platforms are introducing you to people. Hey you might want to follow this person. Hey. So she grows up basically on a stage showing

off her body, showing off her face, having strangers comment on her body and her face. And the sexier she poses, the more positive reinforcement she gets. That's why all the girls look the same on Instagram. They're all doing the same sort of poses that come ultimately some of them from pornography. So again, it's just, it's unbelievable that we let this happen to childhood. We have and we've actually like eliminated the idea of play. Like play doesn't even happen anymore. It's so sad. It's really sad. Can you talk about the importance of play, why it is so important,

and because of what's happened and without it, what happens? Yes. So I have a whole chapter, really two chapters that focus on play in the book. It's really important to understand our evolutionary story. So we're mammals. And what mammals are is mammals is a way of having huge investment in a child. So the female literally makes milk from her skin. I mean, it's a miracle, but that's what evolution figured out how to do. So you've got these long childhoods where the female is literally producing food for the child. It goes on a long time.

Mammals are very smart. We have large brains and the smarter a mammal is or the larger brains it is, the more sociable it is. So the really sociable animals, so humans, dogs, chimpanzees, they have big brains, very, very social. How do they how do you wire up that brain? The genes don't tell it how to grow. The genes just start the ball rolling. The brain gets wired up in play. Mammal babies, mammal children practice the things they're going to need as adults. We have a puppy, well, she's two, but puppy-ish. They practice the, you know, I'm going to grab the bone and run away with it. You have to chase me. It's a game, but it lets her practice her grab the meat and run strategy. You know, it's great fun.

So we all play. And if you were and study research has, they've done this, you take recess monkeys and you don't let them play. You raise them without play. They come out socially deformed. They're anxious. You put them in a new environment. They're very fearful.

They're kind of like those college students who showed up on campus in 2014, 2015. Much more fearful, much more anxious, much poorer social skills. So play is an absolute essential. You know, if you think your kid needs vitamin C, of course he does. If you don't give your kid vitamin C, he's going to develop rickets and have all kinds of deformities. We need vitamin C. Play is vitamin P. If you don't give your kids play, they're going to come out anxious and socially stunted. And so the best kind of play is not with an adult, it's with other kids, ideally mixed ages, because then the older kids have to look out for the younger kids. The younger kids are trying to look mature for the older kids. They're not going to want to cry and be a baby. So when kids are playing in a group, that is the most nutritious thing that they can do. And most of us, you know, I'm older than you, I was born in 1963, but you know, those of us born in the

60s and 70s, and also in the 50s, you know, we all grew up outside playing with other kids. Yeah. And there was a crime wave. I mean, it's not as though, you know, the world was perfectly safe back then. It was actually more dangerous, a lot safer now, very little crime now compared to when I was a kid. But that kids need that play. And so my book is actually a tragedy in two acts. In Act One, we eliminate the play-based childhood in the 1990s. We freak out about child abduction. We think if I ever let my kid out, he'll be abducted. There'll be a man in a white van. If I let my kid go get milk in two aisles over in the supermarket,

someone will say, hey, little kid, do you want some candy? Come into my car. Like that never, okay. It did happen once in Florida. That's actually the thing. It happened once in Florida in 1980, but that's, it's extremely, extremely unlikely. Yeah. So we freaked out over child abduction in the nineties. We didn't stop letting our kids out. So act one of the tragedy is we lose the play-based childhood, which is a biological necessity. But their mental health doesn't drop right then. The millennials, as I said, the millennials' mental health was a little better actually than that of Gen X. There's not really a difference. So in the nineties, there's no big change in their mental health.

And then in Act 2 of the tragedy is the great rewiring, which I just told you about. We take away the flip phones. A flip phone is a tool. You can call your friends. You can text them. You're not communicating with a hundred strange men around the world on a flip phone. So take away the flip phone, give them a smartphone. So this is what I call the arrival of the phone-based childhood. And giving a kid a phone-based childhood is like raising a kid on Mars. It's an alien environment. It's not good for human development. And that's what we did. So it's a two act tragedy. And that's why I believe rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide surged in the early 2010s. And have you seen since 2010s to now,

right? In the last 15 years, what has been the surge? What percentage have you seen increase? Dr. Ben Dr. Ben So it depends on the exact survey and which subpopulation you're looking at. But as a general rule, the numbers are pretty much always between 50 and 150%. So I'll just give you a couple. If we look at the overall suicide rate for teenagers, that is up 50% between 2010 and I forget if it's 2019 or 2022, 2023, whatever it's up 50%. But whenever we zoom in on pre-teen girls, we get much higher percentage changes. Now they have a very low suicide rate, but it's up 150 percent, a 150 percent increase in younger teen girls' suicide. It used to be very rare. Now it's more common. Now, boys' rates are even higher. They go up a lot too. But the percentage

increases are always gigantic for the 10 to 14-year-old girls, often well over 100 percent. But we're talking about increases of anxiety, depression, 50 to 150% is the general rule. You know what's interesting is that when you reduce play, you know, I'm even noticing as a parent, I'm going to take a step back. The other issue that we talk about beyond just social media that you speak about as well, that you speak about in the book, is I think the way that parenting has been evolved, right? There's been a real difference in how we parent. When I was a kid, my mom worked, she left me at home, I had to feed

myself, I had to do certain things on my own. That was the Jan X way, you were called Latchki Kids. Latchki Kids. Yeah. Exactly. But it served me well in life, right? Because I became more resourceful. I have coping skills. I know how to take care of it. You learn to take care of yourself as a human being. What's happening now over, I'm noticing just within the social groups I'm looking at around here where I live, that this idea of this gentle parenting, these

trigger warnings, these safe spaces have really damaged our children. That's right. Those are all harmful things. That's right. And I guess my first question to you, how did that begin? And the funny and the interesting thing is, is like, how did this even happen if it happened when the kids are actually on a computer

or a phone more than they're in more anywhere else? So how did the parents even become such helicopter parents if there was nothing to helicopter? You know what I mean? That's right. Well, there are a lot of social changes happening at the same time. And so, you know, when I was a kid, mothers generally didn't work. Most families have three or four kids.

People are out playing. And parents weren't spending a lot of time parenting. It was this, you know, the mom's taking care of the house, kids are out playing. And what happens in the 80s as women begin entering the workforce, as everyone's getting more educated, and people with college degrees tend to have fewer children, as college admissions are getting more competitive. So we get this transformation where families now are smaller and more focused on getting the kid into college, which is very much like what they do in East Asia. Like in Korea, you know, there's no childhood in Korea. All of childhood is preparation to take an exam to try to get into one of three schools. It's really tragic what

they've done in Korea. But we're on the road to doing that ourselves here in America. So you get a bunch of social change, but you get more high impact. The fear that comes in in the 1990s of abduction now makes us think that a good mother is one who protects her child. And a lot of the burden of this really falls on mothers. The criticism, I mean, the mommy wars, you know, anything a mother does, someone's going to criticize it as being the wrong thing. Fathers, we're kind of let off the hook there. You know, if I let my son take risks, people are going

to say, oh, he's teaching him to be tough. You know, whereas mothers, it's much riskier because someone's going to judge you. And so once you get all this criticism, a lot of women, I think, are sort of pressured into overprotecting, hovering, always being there. So I think that's part of it. The key psychological idea I want to give your listeners is called anti-fragility. If you think your child is fragile, you can overprotect them, wrap them in bubble wrap, never let them get hurt, never let them take risks. But if you do that, then you keep your kid fragile. And those are the kids who showed up beginning in 2014 on campus, Gen Z. But if you understand that we're mammals who are programmed to take risks,

watch kids play naturally. Once a kid learns how to ride on a skateboard, they don't just ride back and forth. They try harder things. They try a bigger hill. They go downstairs. They go downstairs railings. Why are they doing that? Because their brain is pushing them to test the limits. That's how they learn. That's how you get strong. That's how you get resourceful. That's how you learn to manage risk on your own. You have to fall down. You can't have a child without falling down and scraping yourself and banging your head sometimes. Obviously, we want to watch out for concussions. I'm all in favor of bike helmets. But if we're protecting our kids in ways that block them from having experience, then we are harming them. We're

giving them a vitamin P deficiency, you might say. Our kids are anti-fragile. They have to take risks. They have to get hurt. They have to be excluded sometimes. You don't want them being bullied over days, but they have to experience conflict and criticism and exclusion at school. They have to experience that. And it hurts us. We don't want that to happen. So we jump in. We're always there for them. And we're blocking their development. Yeah, the problem is, it's becoming a social divide, right? It's becoming, it's becoming now if you make mention of it, you are then on the wrong side of it. Like, you're either this way, you're either like hardcore, strong, or you're or you're this, like you're either

a gentle parent or or you're, right? And there's no, there's no middle ground. That's what I find anyway. Like, how do you kind of like, what's the path forward, right? Like, how does that happen? Because, you know, the, the truth of the matter is it's, it's now becoming, it's becoming worse. It's not becoming better. The gentle parenting. Well, true, but I think it's about to turn around. You tell me. So, one of the key ideas in my book is collective action. The reason we fell into this so quickly is that once a few kids got a smartphone and

social media, that put pressure on all the other kids to get it because they don't want to be left out. And that puts pressure on the parents to give in because they don't want the kid to be left out. So this is called a collective action problem problem where we're not making up our, each parent isn't deciding, hmm, what are the pros and cons of getting a phone? We're not making our private decisions.

It's collectively made for us, there's a lot of pressure. Similarly about how to parent. I co-founded an organization called Let Grow, letgrow.org with a wonderful woman named Lenore Skanezy. And the reason she got into this area is that she let her nine-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone in the year 2008, I think it was. And he knew the subway system. He went from a store back to his house. Everything was great. He loved

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

be everybody, it can just be you and five friends first, and then it can be you and your kid's school. If we do this, we escape from the phone for your childhood. Here it is. One, no smartphone before high school or age 14. Do not give your kid a touchscreen. Laptop is not as nearly as bad, but there are issues still. An iPad, it turns out, is just as bad. It's the touchscreen technology that's super, super addictive because you get stimulus response reinforcement, stimulus response reinforcement. Television didn't do that. So no smartphone before 14. Give them a flip phone. You want to keep in touch with them? You want them to call you? Give them a flip phone. It's a phone. It's not a way for strange men to contact them.

Second rule, no social media before 16. This is really important. Social media is wildly inappropriate. Even if they could remove 90% of the porn and the grooming and the violence, even if they could move 100%, these things are engineered to addict your child, take all of their available time, damage their ability to child, take all of their available time, damage their ability to attend, take every moment. Kids, you know, now that the iPhone is waterproof, kids take it into the shower.

They are never without stuff coming in. So, just no social media till 16, at least, but that should be the norm. The third is phone-free schools. If you are able to call or text your child during the school day, I guarantee you your child feels like she has to check her phone often because lots of kids are texting each other, direct messaging each other, sending snaps,

talking about the latest video on TikTok. This is the last thing you want your child to be doing in school. You want your child to be listening to the teacher or sending notes back and forth, like literally physically talking to their friends in school, not hundreds of people around the world. So phone free schools is a must. If you can meet your child during the school day, your child's education is not nearly as good as it could be if she had a phone free school. Oh, and

California is going phone free. This is really great news. The governor knew some signed of, I think he signed the bill already, but California schools will be phone free in a year or two. That's amazing. Yeah. But what about the fact that with schools, they have now computers. Yeah.

Like they have, now everyone's doing things digitally and on these digital computers, they're now found a way that they're playing video games on there. And porn and social media, that's right. Yeah. Right. So doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose? Yes, it does. Yes, it does. So two things. First, getting rid of the phones is the easy part because all the teachers hate it.

All the principals hate it. So you got to get rid of the phones. Second, it's the phones that destroy lunchtime and time in between classes. They're not going to be on their laptop in the hallway, but they are on their phones. And so when schools go phone free, the universal thing you always hear, you always see it in the news reports, is you hear a teacher or principal saying, we hear laughter in the hallways again. We haven't heard much of that in 10 years, 15 years. So you got to get rid of the phones. That's the first step and that's easy. Now what you raise is the next battleground. I didn't say much about that at all in the book

because I didn't know when I was writing the book. But since I submitted the manuscript and you know, a year and a half ago, I've been learning a lot more. And the evidence is really damning about the one-to-one technology. We all thought in the nineties and early two thousands, oh, rich kids have computers.

We need to get computers for everyone. Get a computer on every desk we thought. And the ed tech companies and Google and Apple were thrilled and they really pushed it, especially Google after 2012 or so. So the Chromebook is ubiquitous, it's everywhere. What effect does this have? So let me just level set by saying,

I teach college students at New York University and I teach MBA students who are 27 to 30 years old. They can't handle a computer on their desk. They cannot do it. I used to always let them take notes on a computer because I like to take notes on a computer, but the TA would sit in the back of the room, even though I made them pledge,

they had literally stand up and swear that you will only use your computer for class-related purposes. They all stand up, they swear it, but the TA says half of them are online shopping, they're texting, they're checking their LinkedIn for the grad students. They can't do it. None of us can do it. You know, we're always multitasking when we're on a Zoom call. So college students' education is damaged if they have access to a computer during class. Okay, now let's look at nine-year-olds. What do we think nine-year-olds are going to do? Or 12-year-olds

who are deep into gossip and talking about each other? There's no way in hell they're gonna just do the thing they're supposed to do. So it's looking more and more like EdTech, especially, I can't say all of it. I'm sure there are some things that are good. Khan Academy is good.

I don't know, you know, the teacher having a computer to present things on a screen, that's probably good, but haven't done research on that yet. The thing we need to focus on next is get every device off of the desktop. Kids must not have a multifunction device on their desktop. If they do, they might as well just stay home. There's really no point in coming into school and having a teacher talk in front of the room if the kids are on multifunction devices. And you know, also what happens is that

the kids start to, they can wiggle around it. They can be like, oh you know what, like I'm doing my homework and they're actually not doing happens is that the kids start to, they can wiggle around it. They can be like, oh, you know what? Like I'm doing my homework and they're actually not doing their homework. They're like, they're talking to their friends and they're on the games and all these other things. There's so many things you can do. But according to some of the teachers here that people want it, like this comes from above. And so- But we're turning that around. We're turning that around. And the reason why I'm confident is that it's now clear that student test scores have been declining since 2012.

So test scores, we have national exam... There's the national thing, the NAEP, the National Assessment of Education Progress, tracking students since the 1970s, early 70s. And what you can see is that in reading and math, the two areas, scores have been rising very gradually, slowly, but they've been rising from the 70s through 2012. And then they start dropping. Now they dropped faster after COVID. And so people say, oh, my God, COVID caused this. But when you look at the graphs, what you see is that the peak was 2012 and it's downhill since 2012. And it's faster downhill from 2020 to 2022, 2023. And people say, oh, well, you know, it's just, it'll rebound because that was just COVID. We just got the 2024 numbers in about a month ago, no rebound. And guess what? What happens is the kids at the top, the kids who are the best

students, their scores are kind of level over the last 10 years. They haven't dropped much. They dropped a little bit, not a lot. All the drop comes from the students at the bottom. And so if you care about equity, if you care about the kids who are the worst performers, who are disproportionately going to be low SES, single parent families, the mom's overwhelmed, she can't hire babysitters, the kid is raised on a screen. These are the kids who are being devastated. Their education is being devastated. So even though we once thought that it was an equity move to get a computer on every kid's desk, it turns out it's the reverse because it's the rich kids who have two married college educated parents. They're the ones who have some limits and controls at home. Whereas

the kids who don't have that, they're on their screens much more. For them, it's more like 12 hours a day on their screen as opposed to eight or nine for the wealthier kids. 12 hours a day, that's your whole life. And so we've got to at least give them six or seven hours a day without addiction. And that's why we have to have phone-free schools. Absolutely. I want to take a quick break from this episode to thank our sponsor, Momentus. When your goal is healthspan, living better and longer, there are very few non-negotiables. One of them, quality. And when it comes to supplements designed for high performers, nobody does it better than Momentus.

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you're serious about leveling up, go to livemomentous.com and use code Jen for 20% off. Just act now, start today. Jen for 20% off, livemomentous.com. What about the fact that you've mentioned something earlier about how it's really become about college now, right? Like parents are becoming these helicopter parenting and this modernized parenting about getting the kid into college.

That's like a very singular thing that people are focused on, right? So if if parents and kid and students are focused on that, how are they also on their phone the whole time? Isn't that kind of like an oxymoron? No, because they're multitasking. And so what happens when you see, and this is what, look, I teach in a business school, I talk to a lot of people in the corporate world, they're really unhappy with their Gen Z employees. They can't pay attention, they sit at their desk, they have their phone in front of their computer, they're going back and forth, social They're really unhappy with their Gen Z employees. They can't pay attention. They sit at their desk. They have their phone in front of their computer.

They're going back and forth, social media, this, that, some work, they're multitasking. And this I think is actually the biggest damage that is done. In my book, I focused on mental illness as the outcome. I focused on what are they doing to their mental health? But now I believe that the biggest damage is actually not even the mental health. It's actually the complete shattering of attention. So I would urge your listeners talk to high school kids now and

ask them if they or their friends have difficulty watching a movie. A lot of kids now say they can't sit through a 90 or 100 minute movie. Now they can do it if they have their phone because they can be going back and forth. but paying attention to a story for a hundred minutes? Who can do that? I spoke with the former CEO of Netflix. He said Netflix is going shorter and shorter content, fewer movies, because younger people can't watch a movie. They can't pay attention. Same thing for books. As one of my students put it, we had a discussion about this. I teach a course called Flourishing. We talk about these issues. As one of my students put it, I take out a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok.

Because if you've raised your kids since they were two with an iPad or a multifunction device, you've conditioned their brain that at this first hint of boredom, this isn't so interesting. It's not the most interesting thing. There might be something more interesting over here or there or there or there. Let me check it out. And so, let me give you some... Okay, I'm sure some of your listeners are thinking, oh my god, you mean I have to take it all the way. How am I gonna raise my kid with no screens? What are they gonna do? So let me give you... I think this comparison might help a lot of your listeners.

I'm not saying get rid of all screens. Let me just explain. Here's good screen use. Using a television to play a long story for a kid who is watching it with another kid or adult. That's good because humans are storytelling animals. We love stories. We've always raised our kids on stories for tens of thousands of years. And so if a kid is watching a story on a TV screen and it's going to play for 30 minutes or 90 minutes and he can't manipulate it. He can't change the channel. He's just going to watch it. And if there's someone he can talk about it with or laugh with, that's actually fine. That's a pretty good thing. I wouldn't say, you know, watch a movie every single day,

but don't worry about your kid watching, you know, a couple of movies a week. That's totally fine because that's story time. Now, here's what's really, really bad. It's fragmenting time. So the really the worst use of screens is here kid, here's my iPhone or an iPad, shut up. We're in a restaurant or I'm trying to make dinner. Shut up. Here you go. That's the worst thing you can do

because that's not story time. That's clicking, getting rewards, clicking, getting rewards, moving over. That is what damages a child's developing ability to pay attention. So I would urge no fragmenting time until at least 14. Once you give them a phone, they're going to do fragmenting time all day long. But at least let their brain get through early puberty before you break attention into tiny little pieces.

Yeah, I think that... I mean, you said also, which is very true, I mean, mental health, the anxiety and depression. But I think also with that is coming this inability to socialize period, you're not you have no ability to socialize and make eye contact. How does that affect people later on in life in terms of working like employment, dating, getting married, going out with girls, boys. That whole world has become obsolete as well.

That's right. That's right. So I misspoke before when I said actually the biggest damage is to their attention. I think the mental illness, the fragmenting of attention and the loss of social skills, each one is a gigantic catastrophe, not just for the country, but for the world, because it's happening all over the developed world. Wherever we raise kids on touchscreens, this is happening. So what we know is that the millennial generation, which is not mentally ill, they were, their dating life, it all runs through the apps.

You'd think they're having a lot of sex, it's so easy, but they're actually having less sex than any previous generation. So there was already a sex recession for the millennials. Now I haven't been able to get data from- Why is that? Why is that? I, you know, the apps don't, for one thing, okay, for one thing, most sex happens in long running couples.

It's not hookups. When you're married, you have a lot more sex than single people because you have a regular partner. And with the apps, it makes it harder to fall in love because the apps cut off courtship. You know, you hook up, you know, and that blocks, courtship blocks falling in love. So I'm not really sure. I haven't really studied that issue in detail. I don't know for sure why the millennials.

But Gen Z is, I believe, going to be much, much worse for a lot of reasons. One is that the boys, oh, you know what? Let's pick up the boys because lots of parents have boys. I have a boy and a girl. We talked about girls. Let me briefly mention the boys. So the boys, it's not that spending an hour on Instagram is going to mess them up and make them mentally ill. For the boys, what social media does

is it leads them to do all kinds of incredibly dangerous and destructive things. So a lot of the challenges, the stupid challenges on TikTok, most of the kids who've been killed are boys doing dangerous things. Subway surfer, I mean, literally riding on top of subway cars and they get killed. The skull breaker challenge, you tell your friend to jump up and you kick his legs out so he lands on his head, jumping kids in the hallway or the bathroom and beating them up so that your friend can film it, you can put it up online. I mean, it's sick, sick, horrible stuff. So social media is hurting boys in a lot of ways, but it's not so much from just anxiety, depression, the way it is for girls. But the story for boys isn't

really focused on social media. The story for boys is focused on their general retreat from the real world, which began in the sevents and 80s. Schools became more and more conducive to girls, not boys. The school year was longer, less recess, get rid of shop class, get rid of auto mechanics, get rid of all that stuff, the stuff that boys would be more interested, make them sit in their seat and learn math and English all day long. That's really hard on boys. So our schools have become less and less supportive and conducive to the way boys are. And at the same time, while this was happening, the virtual world said, hey, boys, come on in, come on in. When I was a kid, video

games were really primitive. We loved them, but they were very primitive. Every few years, they're like an order of magnitude better. Color monitors, fast action, lifelike video, music, multiplayer games. So the video games get more and more incredible, the boys get sucked in, the porn gets more and more incredible, you know, high definition video of scenes chosen by algorithms because that's what turned other men on. So the porn is much more addictive, much more, I mean, I can't say it's more, I assume it's more aggressive and violent than it was when I was, you know, when I was in the seventies. Right. It was more like Playboy. You're looking at naked people, naked girls, you know what I mean? It's much more aggressive because you have to always elevate and elevate

because things get boring. Exactly. That's right. And so here's the key thing. Kids need to work and then get the reward of the work. And the thing I most desired when I was in high school was a girlfriend. And it was really hard to get a girlfriend. And I made a lot of effort to do so. And I finally succeeded. And we had a, you know, gradual courtship. And I remember when I first held her hand, it was a big deal. Like, so when you're making progress towards a goal, you get dopamine, you get a reinforcing chemical, but it's slow dopamine. It's like you work and you get the reward. It feels so good.

That's what you want for your kids. But what's happening with boys is these companies say, hey, boys, you want quick dopamine? You want to play war? Here, war. You know, incredible, vivid war. And you can get killed 30 times a day. You could, you know, incredible, vivid war. And you can get killed 30 times a day. You know, my son plays Fortnite. I kept him off in sixth and seventh grade, but let him on during the pandemic. You know, it's, I mean, it's really powerful,

attractive, addictive stuff, exciting. And the same thing for the porn. And then, oh my God. And then all the vaping and the marijuana pens and the gambling and the sports betting and the crypto betting, all of it is gamified to hook boys. These giant industries are out there to grab your son's attention and suck it dry, leaving him nothing. And if it's gambling, leaving him broke. Right. So then because of all of this, I mean, with the foreigner and everything, actually Prof G, I know you're friendly with him too. Oh, I love Scott. Yeah, yeah. We've talked about this many times on on pod my podcast is

podcast about this because about sex and people are not having sex anymore. Why it's kind of like the poor the poor and also it you also tweaks your brain into thinking what's when you see a real life person is not attractive because it's right. It's not what you're seeing. They're far from perfect, right? Which is the part like, listen, that's why that's why plastic surgery is out. That's why all these filters are existing. People are, are their brains are not realizing what's reality in real life versus what's like on, you know, the computer. That's why AI now, I'm sure you know, this too, like AI, people have AI girlfriends

versus having real life girlfriends. Yeah, that's right. And so heterosexual relationships are hard enough. Boys and girls are different on average. You know, the kind of the problems that come up in relationships, in marriage therapy, often very gendered and very common across the decades. There are just some natural mismatches between the way men and women are in conversation, etc. Okay, that's the way

it's always been. Now add in that the girls are much more anxious, fragile, and defensive. So that's going to lead to more conflicts. Add in that the boys are more isolated, autistic, hard to make eye contact, have even worse social skills and worse social perception. How are boys and girls going to get together and do the hard work of dating and falling in love and staying together? It's looking pretty grim.

Oh, but don't worry, technology will rescue us. You're lonely? Here, create an AI girlfriend. You can go, you want her to have these measurements? Tell us the measurements. What color hair? Do you want her to be flirty, brainy, slutty? Whatever you want her to have these measurements, tell us the measurements. What color hair? Do you want her to be flirty, brainy, slutty, whatever you want? So of course the boys are going to be going for this and the girls as well.

Do you want someone who actually listens to you instead of bragging and boasting all day long? Yes, please. So we're going to have the sexes getting their gratification from AI and that means not much in the way of marriage, sex and children. So what is like, is there any, are you optimistic or or not about the future, because things are not going to get better. And they're going to just going to keep on, it's going to keep on snowballing. So you know, even if we put into these, even if we like do the

collective, as you call it, collective action, right? Another problem is, and I know these are all I'm not, I don't mean to talk about all the problems, but this is reality. A lot of parents are choosing to be what they want to be friends with their children. They don't want to be a parent to their children, right? They don't like, Oh, I don't want them to hate me. Just to give you an example, my kid has a flip phone, okay? And he hated me, right? But listen, I tried to do the collective thing with a bunch of parents, and nobody wanted to do it. When was this? When did you try this? 10 months ago,

my kid was going into grade five to grade six. And I thought, you know what, let's try and hold off based honestly based on your book okay but because you were one of the first to read it it came out 11 months ago try it again in two months what I'm saying is okay this is actually a good way to end you know I hear myself talking about doom and gloom I hear these mega trends are horrific so the problem this is you know I think this is one of the biggest problems we face, certainly at the level of global warming, any other issue you want to put up there. This is a global change in humanity. Okay. But I'm actually really optimistic. And here's why. The book came out March 26th of last year, and it spread like wildfire around the world.

And legislators read it. And like, just to give you one example, in South Australia, one of the Australian states, the premier of that state, his wife was reading the anxious generation book in bed. And she said to him, Peter, you've got to read this book and then you've got to do something about it. And so he did. He read the book and he said, Oh my God, we've got to stop this. And he commissioned a report and they came up with really good legislation. And then the whole country of Australia adopted it, and Australia is going to raise the age to 16. And in Australia and in the US and in the UK, it's totally bipartisan because politicians, governors, presidents, everybody, they have children, they've all seen it.

And so this is one of the few areas in American life where we've got a hard problem and we're united and we all see it and we're taking action. Now it's not, you're right, there's still gonna be parents who they wanna call their kid all the time, but the supertanker has turned, things are changing. And 11 months ago, if you tried to say, hey, let's all not give our kids smartphones, people are like, what?

But try it again in a month or two, or try it now. People have been, everybody was kids has been on some group or they're talking about the anxious generation. The ideas are getting out there There's spontaneous action happening everywhere. Try it again now, but you will find that you'll get a lot more support I should have bought your book in bulk because I've sent your book and I bought your book to probably like 40 people already 50 people I was thinking I should get a bulk order probably get a deal Right. Yeah, but but I agree, I think that like, maybe,

so you are you optimistic that things are going to be even with technology, even with all these things happening? You know, look, AI is going to change things in some good ways. And I think a lot of bad ways, especially sociologically. So I'm very concerned about what AI is going to do over the next five years. What do you think? Can you give me some ideas of what you think, like what you see? I don't want to because I want to end on a positive note. And with AI, just briefly on kids, it means that all the current problems of social media are going to get a lot more intense. I just saw an AI company that will take whatever you want to post to make it super viral.

So everything is going to get even more viral. Everything will get more attractive to our kids. And AI is going to give us a kind of omnipotence. It's going to let us do anything because we'll have AI agents that can do things for us in the world. And you don't want that for your kids. You don't want your kids to have lots of servants. You want your kids to work, struggle, learn to clean their rooms, make their own breakfast,

do their own homework, and not have chat GPT write it for them. So I think AI is going to be a real problem. And that's why it is so crucial that we enact the full reforms this year in 2025, because we've got to establish the principle this year that children are not adults. We know that in the real world, there's all kinds of restrictions in the real world, but online we're like, ah, you know, it's kind of hard, you know, what are we going to do? Ask for identification, and ah, anyone can go anywhere. Just say, just say you're 18, you can go anywhere. That's got to stop. And we've got to stop it this year, 2025. Australia is leading the charge. Australia is going to do it. In the US, I don't expect that we'll do it. States are trying to do it, but they get held

up in, you know, in court. Metta supports lots of organizations that will just sue everybody who tries to do reform. But the thing is, we can do most of this without Congress. We can do it at the state level. Many other countries are doing it, and we can do it at the school level. I just spoke when I was out in LA a month ago. I spoke to the conference of California state superintendents,

one of the most enthusiastic, wonderful audience I've ever spoken to. They all see the problem. The phones are wreaking havoc in their schools, on test scores, on they're trying to do a job, and the phones and the computers is making them possible. So they were rallying to the cause. And so what I'm saying is, yes, this is a huge problem. It's a huge problem because we got pushed into it by collective forces. But the way we get out of it quickly is by acting together. So just keep trying, talk to your friends and neighbors,

talk to especially the parents of your kids' friends. You will find them much more receptive now than they were 11 months ago. How old are your kids? You said one kid is already in college. Yeah, my son is 18 and he's a freshman at USC, and my daughter is 15 and she's a senior in a public high school in New York City. Do you think that public or private school is better for a kid from your research?

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

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

I can't, you know, again, it's not everybody, but a third of all kids, teens, say they're on social media almost all the time. So it's always in the hand, they're always, and TikTok is the most common of those apps. So I think TikTok has destroyed more IQ points than anybody else. With that said, Snapchat has probably led to more deaths. So when kids die, it's usually from a drug overdose,

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

And so since Pinterest, I never hear stories about girls whose lives were ruined by Pinterest. All the other three, yes. But Pinterest, so my point is, it's not the screens per se, and it's not social media per se, but talking with strangers who are unverified

and are often not who they say, this is just completely insane that we do this. So that has to stop. And that's primarily happening on Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. Are you trying to lobby these people at Metta and how do you get them on board to help with this crisis? Yeah. Because they're like a marketing agency. They want to make money, right? Yeah. No, that's right. No, because those three companies are being sued by a lot of attorneys general, a lot of parents with dead kids. So a lot has come out from their own internal deliberations.

And we know that those three companies, their employees have come to them and said, hey, we got problems. And then management says like, no, that solution would reduce engagement. Don't do it. We can't do it. So those three companies have shown that they're very resistant to reform to protect kids. They talk a good game. They say, oh, we're doing this.

Oh, we're doing that. Oh, we hired a thousand more content. But the problem isn't so much the content, the content and moderation. The problem is the design. These things are designed to attract children and keep them on and take their childhood and break their attention into little tiny bits. It doesn't matter if all the content is nice. It's still gonna do that. Can you just mention it again?

I want people to really listen to the thing that you're involved with with the free range. Let it grow. Let grow. Let grow. Yes. So I do have to go but thanks for giving me this this opportunity to to lay out where you can go for more information. So the central site for information is anxiousgeneration.com. That's the website for the book. We've got a huge number of resources. Also, my substack is afterbabel.com. That's where we put out our research articles. We have all kinds of great writers on there. So parents, teachers, please go to afterbabel.com. It's free. You don't have to pay any money. And then we have a special relationship with Let Grow. Go to LetGrow.org. A wonderful organization started, well, really a couple of us said to Lenore Skanezy, hey, you need to up your

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

that you see them change. It's wonderful. And it also changes the parents because the parents realize, wow, my nine-year-old kid actually can walk three blocks without getting lost or abducted and buy a quart of milk and come home. You know, all of us were doing that when we were seven or eight back in the 70s and 80s. But our nine-year-olds can do all sorts of things. So anyway, the Let Grow experience, super powerful. A couple of other ideas. So, so, so, anxiousgeneration.com, after babble.com and let grow.org. It's amazing. Jonathan, it was amazing to have you on. It was a pleasure.

Every parent needs to read the book anxious generation and not just me buying it for people. They could go buy it yourself on Amazon. So thank you so much for being on the show. And like I said, I appreciate your time. My pleasure, Jen. Good luck to you with your kids and convincing some other families to go along with you and adopt the four norms.

Thank you.