The Current - Time to push back on smartphone-based childhoods: psychologist Jonathan Haidt

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

Jonathan Haidt says technology and social media have rewired our children’s brains, and taken a heavy toll on their mental health. In a conversation from December, the social psychologist spoke to Galloway about his blockbuster book The Anxious Generation and the dangers of a childhood spent on screens.

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Kids and their cell phones are inseparable. You could say the same thing perhaps about adults, but there has been growing concern about this and about the effects, particularly on kids' mental health for almost as long as smartphones have existed. Lately, a push has begun to move kids off of screens and into the real world. Some schools in Canada, the United States and Europe are banning cell phones in the classroom. Australia is the first country to ban social media for kids under the age of 16. And like this in many ways are happening Thanks to the work of Jonathan Haidt

He is a social psychologist at NYU New York University His latest best-selling book is called The Anxious Generation how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness It has been as I said a sensation. I spoke with Jonathan Haidt in December. Here's our conversation. This is one of those books, I mean, it's a sensation and it's a book that parents talk about. It's a book that teachers talk about. It is a book that leaders of governments talk about.

Why do you think this struck such a chord? Because it crept up on us that somehow family life around the developed world has turned into a fight over screen time. We're all struggling with this. When I was a kid, parents struggled with television. It's a hundred times harder now. And because adults are so fed up with it and because we've all seen it, if not in our own

kids, we've seen the anxiety, the pulling into a shell, the craziness. And teachers have been quitting in droves because it's no fun to teach when you can't get through to your students. So it's kind of bizarre that we let it go this long. I mean, you've seen it, I've seen it as a parent. This is something that people are really familiar with. In the book you write about,

you're on a trip to Vermont with your family and your daughter had the iPad. Tell me that story. That's right. So we were actually, we're sitting in the, it was in like the breakfast area of a lovely country in Vermont. And my daughter called out from the next room,

she said, daddy, can you take the iPad away from me? I'm trying to take my eyes off it, but I can't. Now she was about six at the time. It was just so remarkable. I mean, these things, what people have to understand is that this is very different from television. A television set was entertaining, but a television couldn't train you. It didn't reward certain responses. Whereas a touch screen is very good at giving you a stimulus. You make a response, you touch, and then you get a reward. That's how you train a dog. That's how you

train a circus elephant. And that's how you train a child. What did that tell you when your daughter said, I'm trying to take my eyes off of it, but I can't? Boy, you know, I've done a lot of writing about how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. That's what my early research was on in moral psychology. And here we have a case where we have a girl who wants to stop playing a video game. She wants to get up off the couch and she

can't. She's unable to move her eyes because our conscious will isn't that tightly connected to our motor behavior, to the things that we do. There's all kinds of intervening unconscious systems and those are the systems that the social media companies have been hacking, taking over and reprogramming for their own ends. You say that before we look at the evidence around kids living in these kind of phone-based lives, we have to step back and kind of define what childhood is. Is there a sense that we don't know anymore

what it means to be a child? I think we've forgotten the active role that we all need to play in it. We think that our job is to just keep them safe. We want to protect them from threats. But that's actually kind of wrong because they need to take risks. And so we're over protecting them in the real world.

We're not letting them have the experience that is what drives development. Experiences of going too fast on your bicycle and being scared, but then recovering. Or climbing a tree or getting into a fight with friends or an argument with friends. Kids need a lot of independent experience, and that's what makes up childhood. That's how they develop.

But at least, especially in North America, we have this ridiculous idea that, no, our job is to be the chaperone, the helicopter, the snowplow, to solve problems for the kids. It's exactly the opposite. But then at the same time, we've abandoned our kids to grow up online, which is completely inappropriate for them, that kids are looking for influence. That's what human childhood is about,

is you're developing skills in play, but you're also looking for role models. You're copying the kids who are a little older, you're copying the adults, some of the adults, and we've stopped being good role models for them. Instead we say, okay, fine, you know, you're 10, you say all your friends have a phone and Instagram, okay, go ahead. Before you know it, your kids are being raised and influenced by weirdos selected by an algorithm from their extremity. So we've

got to remember what childhood is and what we need to do so that children grow and thrive. In the book, you talk about the spinner, which we used to call the wheel of death in the playground, the thing that kind of whips you around and the kids would get on it and they'd push it faster and faster and some kids would fly off and some kids would hang on for dear life. I mean, when you get rid of the spinner or the wheel of death, I'm sure that there are orthopedic surgeons who are cheering, but there might be others who say that we're losing something.

What do we lose when that thing disappears? That's right. The key points here are first that children are anti-fragile like the immune system. That means it needs challenges and shocks in order to grow. If you try to protect your kids from dirt and germs and bacteria, you're gonna cripple the development of their immune system

because evolution built it so that it has to be exposed to things in childhood. And then it develops a biochemical response to those things. In the same way, children need to take risks and be afraid sometimes. They need to get into arguments. They need to be excluded and learn to deal with it. And if we protect kids from all those negative experiences and risks, it's as though we're crippling their immune system. We're crippling their social development. The feeling of fear, the feeling of risk, of thrill is

part of the act in reading to play. And the fact that you called it when you were a kid, you guys called it the wheel of death. Now obviously you didn't believe that would really kill you or you wouldn't play with it, but it made it more exciting. It was my favorite when I was a kid. You look in this book at one particular period, it's 2010 to 2015. When you say that everything changed in terms of the kind of play that kids would gravitate towards and the lives that they had,

what happened in that five year period? Well, so first just before that period, in American Canada, we began cracking down on independent play because we were afraid our kids will be abducted. But at the time, the internet was coming in, computers were getting more interesting, and so we said, okay, it's too dangerous

to go outside, but you can sit on a computer all day long and play. But even as late as 2010, kids are still meeting up a lot and doing things together. In 2010, very few have a smartphone. The iPhone comes out 2007. But in 2010, almost everyone has a flip phone, a basic phone, something that doesn't have the internet. Also in 2010, the first phones have front-facing cameras. Instagram is launched, which is available only on smartphones, not on the web. High-speed internet connections are getting very common. So I want listeners to compare a childhood, and especially if you're a millennial, you

probably remember this. In 2009, 2010, you had a flip phone. You texted your friends. You sometimes met up with your friends. But you couldn't spend eight, 10 hours a day on your flip phone. That would just drive everyone crazy. By 2015, if you're Gen Z, born after 1995, your childhood is very different from your older siblings who are millennials.

Now all your friends have an iPhone and you do too. If you're a girl especially, everyone's on Instagram and you're communicating that way and you're posting and liking each other's posts and commenting. You have high speed internet connection. You don't pay for texts anymore. So by 2015, it's possible for the first time in human history for children to be online, not just 12 hours a day, a lot more than that. Half of American kids say that they are online almost constantly, almost constantly, and that wasn't

possible before the smartphone. And that profoundly changes consciousness and human experience. You call this the great rewiring. Yeah. So I meant the word rewiring in two ways. One is a kind of rewiring of childhood. If you think of childhood as having inputs and outputs, and then we just radically change all of that, and now so much goes through the phone, not through people. There's a rewiring of the social order and sort of the currents of information that young people are immersed in, and those all get taken away from real-world interactions and put into the digital space, curated by three or four companies.

I also believe that we're seeing a rewiring of brains. Now this is harder to prove, but if you think about puberty, puberty is this very special, delicate rewiring process where the body and the brain convert over from the form that was adaptive for childhood to the form that's adaptive for adult sexual reproductive work life, let's say roughly 11 to 14 in that period. And in that period, the whole brain is actually sort of locking down into certain patterns. And now the brain is much more effective, it's faster, it can do things, but it's now much less plastic, much less malleable.

It's that rewiring process that really happens rapidly in puberty that we need to protect. And tragically, that is exactly when we give kids a smartphone and social media. It's around age 10 or 11 is now the norm in the US and Canada and the UK. Actually, the UK, they get it even earlier. So we've got to protect puberty. And that's why I say it's so important what Australia has done in raising the age to 16. We have to keep kids from just moving their lives onto these devices until they're most of the way done with puberty.

There's a study that you cite that found that a typical adolescent gets 237 notifications in a day, 15 notifications every hour. What does that do to a childhood? I mean, you've called this attention fracking. So yeah, fracking is where you drill down, you do things to break up the rock, and that allows you to suck out little bits of oil from every nook and cranny. And that's what the companies have done,

especially TikTok and Metta. That's what the companies have done to human consciousness. Those two companies plus Snapchat, they now largely own the attention and cognition and consciousness of young human children. These three companies in particular, we know from internal, from leaks, we know from recovered documents

that there are all these lawsuits where we're getting out all these quotes from their own reports, their own memos. They set out to do this. They set out to grab as much attention as they can. They understand variable reinforcement ratio schedules from behaviorism. They time the notifications carefully

to try to maximally get you back on their platform, not on someone else's, and what's the net result? I teach a course at NYU called Flourishing. It's 35 undergraduates, about mostly around 19 years old. What I find in our discussions, they're really haunting, is that their phones have filled up almost every available nook and cranny of consciousness. So when they open their eyes in the morning,

for the great majority, the very first thing they do is they reach for their phone and they check their notifications and messages before they get out of bed, before they go to the bathroom. So that's the way their consciousness starts. And what's the last thing they do before they go to bed? It's the same thing. The very last thing is to check their notifications,

direct messages. And what do they do in between? It's largely that. If they're waiting thing is to check their notifications, direct messages. And what do they do in between? It's largely that. If they're waiting for an elevator, the phone comes out. If they're sitting on the toilet, the phone comes out. If they're sitting at lunch with friends and there's a moment of quiet, the phone comes out. They see this happening.

They lament it, but they feel powerless to stop because everyone else is doing the same thing and they don't want to be left out. You mentioned teachers quitting. We've talked a lot on this program about the impact in schools. What have you heard that does that fracking of attention in a classroom? And you'd see this in your own classrooms as well. Jared Sussman Oh, sure. I mean, it's always been hard for teachers to get students' attention, but if they're interesting, if they make it engaging, then they can. A good teacher is able to do that.

Well, what good teachers have been discovering since the early 2010s is that nothing they do is as interesting as what's going on on the phone. The phone is carefully designed with a customized feed just for you, whereas the teacher has to teach 20 or 30 students at a time. Once students have a phone, that's going to be more interesting than almost everything else going on in their world. And it's just complete madness that we've allowed children to take phone, their smartphones, into school with them. One of the most revolutionary things that's happened is schools are going phone-free, and that means not this stupid policy of you can't use it during class, you can only think about it and wait until class ends, and then you can grab your phone and be on your phone in between classes.

No, that's a terrible policy. It means you check your phone and you come in, you put it in a yonder pouch or a phone locker or just a simple envelope at the front of a home room, and you get it back at the end of the day. That's the only policy that works, and it's miraculous. I can tell you, I was just in Arkansas where hundreds and hundreds of schools are doing this.

And over and over, not just from the teachers, but from the kids, the kids themselves say they were a little afraid of it at first, but a week or two into it, they love it. Because they say it's just a lot more fun when you're actually talking to other kids. Viking. Committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking longship with thoughtful service and cultural enrichment on board and on shore. Learn more at Viking.com. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage,

theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Canada is trying to figure this out as well, and there are districts across the country that are trying to figure out how to balance that or at the very least get the phones out

of the hands of kids in class. One of the reasons why there's a real push around this is because of what those phones and what the lack of attention and what the kids are seeing on the phone is doing to the kids themselves. How has social media affected boys differently than girls? So look at it this way. You want to trap girls. You want bait that will be appealing to girls,

and that's social information. Girls are more interested in who is friends with who, who is fighting with who. Girls, once they take the bait, they can't get out because if you leave, you're alone. Everyone else is in there on these apps. For girls, the story focuses on social media and what it has done to them. Endless social comparisons, the perfectionism,

the sexual comments and sexual harassment. For boys, they use social media less. They're not quite as interested in the social network. Boys do get into a lot of trouble. They are easily sextorted by criminals around the world pretending to be sexy young girls. So boys can be severely harmed. Fights start there, and then they become violent in the real world. But for boys, what we realized, while I was writing the book

with my research partner, Zach Rausch, is that the boys' story is not focused on social media. The boys' story is focused on checking out of the real world into an exciting world online where you get to do the two things that are of greatest interest to teenage boys, which are war and sex. Boys are just much more interested in war, in group combat, whether it be sports or whether it be movies about war or whether it be video games where you get to play war. And then the other thing of course is sex,

where you used to have to work for it or try to get to know a girl if you're straight or find some mild pornography in your older brother's drawer or whatever you could find. But now war and sex are effortless and they're amazing. I mean, the porn available to boys today is so powerful and so erotic compared to Playboy or whatever we had in the old days.

And the war is so amazing and graphic and fun and exciting, but they're not actually developing any skills doing this. In fact, it renders them less able, I would say, to actually have a relationship when maybe someday you can get married. It renders them less able to work with people, to manage their lives in the real world, to manage risk. So boys are really checking out. They're not as likely now to go to college.

They're not as likely to move out of their parents' home. We're just losing vast quantities of male talent, opportunity and potential. It's really tragic. And I used to think that it was girls were more affected by the whole thing because at the age of 14, it's clear that girls are doing worse. But Gen Z is now 28, the oldest are 28. And it's really the boys that are doing worse because so many of them have just failed to turn into

men and they're just not going to be very effective or productive. I mean, as parents, we can feel that this is happening and we can have a sense that this is going on, but feelings, as you know know aren't facts and and the critics that have come after you have said that you're cherry picking evidence that you've missed for example the pandemic in terms of of its influence on the mental health of young people. How do you respond to that? Let's look at where we are. We have a public health emergency it broke out in 2012 in multiple countries many countries around the world. There is no other explanation. There's no other theory on the table.

That's what you think this is. You think this is a public health emergency? Oh, yes. When you have the depression rate going up 50 to 100%, you have the suicide rate is up 50% in the US at least, just the educational declines since 2012, not since COVID. So we have an enormous destruction of mental health, happiness, and education. This counts to me as one of the biggest public health emergencies we've ever had. So there is no other explanation. No one's even proposed one. Secondly, there are many kinds of evidence. The people who know the most about what's happening are the companies themselves. They're the only ones who have the data. And we know from all the leaks and memos that have been obtained, they know what they're doing. They see the mental

health problems they're causing. So the perpetrators actually admit to what they're doing. That's evidence. The people who know the next most about this are the kids. And the kids see what's happening. The kids are not in denial. Gen Z is not in denial. They know that this is messing them up. As one woman said in this beautiful poem, we know it's poison, but we drink it anyway. Because we have to, because everyone else is drinking it. The people who know the third most are the parents, and the parents all see it. See if you can find me parents who say, Oh, my kid was shy and withdrawn, and then we gave her a phone and Instagram and she really came out of her shell. I have not heard that story. You hear the reverse story over and over again.

So the parents, that's evidence, surveys of parents. It's their top worry. And now finally we get to the scientific evidence, the evidence published in journals, which is largely based on a single item. How many hours a day do you spend on digital media or on screens? Sometimes it'll be focused on social media.

You get a number from one to five, and then you correlate that with mental health. And guess what? You do actually find a correlation. It's around 0.1, 0.15, that's not large in statistical terms, but when you have bad measurement on both ends, that's about the best you can do.

It's around the same ballpark as the correlation of lead exposure and adult IQ. So as far as I'm concerned, there are many forms of evidence, and this is not like a previous moral panic spread by newspapers. This is everyone seeing it with their own eyes. So what do we do about it then? I mean, you mentioned Australia. Australia's banned social media for those under 16. There are questions as to whether this is actually going to work, whether you can properly age-gate it. But is that the kind of step that you want to see?

Yes, oh, absolutely. Because the key to understanding how this got so far, so fast, and the key to understanding why so many parents and teachers feel powerless is that if you try to solve the problem on your own, it's really, really hard. If you're the only teacher who really tries hard to be a phone policeman, then the students present you for it. So everyone gives up and we get the status quo. I wrote

the book as a social psychologist looking not for law changes primarily, but for norm changes. So I lay out four norms, one of which we do need legal help on. The first norm is no smartphone before high school or age 14. You can give your kid a flip phone if you want to text with them or a phone watch, but do not give them a supercomputer that allows the entire world to reach them until at least they're partway through early puberty. The second is no social media until 16. Social media is wildly inappropriate for minors.

The sex, the violence, the sexual solicitation and harassment, the exposure to all kinds of influencers of ill repute. So we need a minimum age as we have for so many things in the real world. Lots of industries age gate. If you want to sell alcohol or if you want to do gambling, there are all kinds of industries that age gate. And there are lots of methods of demonstrating your age other than showing a government ID. There are networked validators, there are blockchain

approaches, there's the company clear in airports. So if Australia puts the onus on the companies, they'll figure it out really quick and they'll come up with multiple methods. The third norm is phone free schools. And I urge you, if your kid is allowed to have her phone on her while she's in class or between classes, I guarantee you, your child is not getting as good an education and your child is not having as much fun or is not enjoying school as much. So Canadian listeners, please, if your child can take a phone into school, get together, go to the school and say, we've got to change this.

We've got to go phone free. We got to do this. The fourth norm is if we're getting the kids off of the phones and the screens for a large part of the day, if we're rolling back the phone-based childhood, we have to restore the play-based childhood. We have to lighten up, ease up,

understand that if an eight-year-old goes out with his friends and walks a quarter mile to a store with his friends and buys candy, that's good. That's not a death-defying feat. We all did it when we were that age. So we've got to back off, give our kids the room to grow up, and I urge Canadian parents go to letgrow.org, which is an organization I co-founded to encourage, to give you all kinds of ways to do this, to back off together, give your kids the independence to grow.

Let me just ask you just a couple more questions about accountability. One is you've said that these big tech companies are in some ways in charge of our children now. Which is the company that you're most concerned about? Well, historically it's Metta in that it's been the biggest, the most important, and it's one that has clearly done a lot to resist regulation. So Metta is really the 800 pound gorilla here. But pound for pound, the worst single product out there is TikTok. TikTok has a devastating

impact on people's ability to pay attention. It's the most addictive, it sucks up time, and it's horrible. It's so effective that meta copied it with Instagram reels and YouTube copied it with YouTube shorts. So the message for parents would be, I'd say the worst single thing for your kid is TikTok. I don't think anybody should be on TikTok, even adults. What I want to focus on is the way that the United States government, we were so excited about the internet and it was sort of our invention and we had all the big companies in it and we wanted it to grow. So we did a number of things.

Congress said, first, nobody can sue these companies for whatever they show, basically granting the immunity. We can't sue the companies for anything they do to our kids is basically the way it's ended up. And then there's another law where we set the age of internet adulthood to 13. We said, how old do you have to be before a company

can take your data without letting your parents know? Congress in its infinite wisdom said 13. And Congress said, there's no need to check. As long as the child says she's 13, that's it, you're not responsible. So the United States, we set up the internet, we built in a complete absence of accountability. Almost no other industries have that,

where you can hurt as many people as you want, and nobody can do anything about it. That's where we are. And so I'm hopeful that other countries will not accept the terrible regime that we set up. Have you spoken with, for example, Mark Zuckerberg? Yes, I've spoken with him twice before COVID. He knows some of the psychological literature.

We had a friendly debate about what it shows. And he said, here's the study, the correlations are too low. There's no evidence of causation. I said, no, but here are other studies in here. And I especially, I asked him about, why is it so easy for children to open an account? I said, I just made a fake account for my daughter, pretending to be her, she's not 13 yet. And it was straightforward, it was very easy. And he said, well, he said,

well, we're working on that. And that was 2019. And I don't think they've done anything since then. And I would just urge him to become the hero in this story. But any of these companies could be the hero and lead, you know, just as with automobiles, there were no safety features before the 1960s. There were no seat belts. The glass would shatter and kill you. And someone predicted that, I can't remember who it was, they said, someday car companies are going to compete on who has the safer car.

And that happened. And so I'm hopeful that someday social media companies will compete on which one actually is better for kids. Just two final things. One is, is it possible? I mean, is the horse not already long gone? The barn is way behind us and this technology is out and there's nothing we can do about it. I hear that a lot. The train has left the station. Okay, if the train's left the station, it's harder to call it back than if it's sitting there, that's true. But if there was a train leaving the station and it had all of our kids on it, and it was headed for a bridge over a canyon

that we knew the bridge was out, what are we gonna do? Say, well, you know, the train's left the station. What are we gonna do? Even if the train has left the station, we would call it back. So the phone based childhood is only 12 years old. It started right around 2012. It is not a permanent feature of society.

We can choose. And that's what Australia has done. America has done nothing. We'll see, we have the Kids Online Safety Act is being considered. It's probably gonna die. So America has done nothing. We might never do anything.

So the rest of the world has to act because we created the monster and we can't tame it. What are you doing in your own house? We started with the story of your six-year-old. What happens in your own house with your kids? So I think I did a good job on keeping them off of social media, even though they wanted it in sixth grade

when everybody else had it. And my daughter really wants Snapchat because she says she's the only one in her high school who doesn't have it. And you don't worry about that? I did worry that I was making the right decision, but I asked my college students here at NYU whether what they thought and they generally agreed,

yeah, don't let her on Snapchat either. It's not just texting. There's a lot of bad stuff that happens there. And my daughter now actually agrees with me. She's 15. And even though it had meant some loss of social interaction, she sees the way it dominates kids' lives. She said to me in seventh grade,

she said after a year of not having Instagram when all the other kids did, she said, daddy, Instagram makes the girl stupid. I mean, she could see it happening to her, to the other girls in her class. So I did a good job on keeping away from social media until 16. Where I've fallen down is I allowed screens in the bedroom.

I really should have been much tougher on that. But, you know, well, they need their laptop, they need to do homework. And before you know it, they've got the laptop and the phone and, you know, anything you do on a phone, you can do on a laptop. So I didn't do a good enough job of controlling that. I would have had much greater restrictions on it. It's hard. It is hard, but it's a lot easier if we act together, and that's the key thing. So if

listeners will go to anxiousgeneration.com, we have all kinds of ideas, ways that you can coordinate with other parents, coordinate by school, and push your legislators to do something to protect children from this because America is not going to do anything. Jonathan Haidt, I'm really glad to have the chance to talk to you. It's an issue of our time and the book speaks to that. Thank you very much. My pleasure, Matt. Thanks so much for the conversation.

Jonathan Haidt is the author of The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. We spoke in December.