Unashamed with the Robertson Family - Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

Jase, Al, and Zach are captivated and appalled by the shocking stats about the effect of social media, big tech, and today’s kids provided by Dr. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, author, and professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. Dr. Haidt exposes the strategies used by big tech corporations to hook kids on their apps, and Jase shares his own experiences as a father encountering these dangerous practices. But, Dr. Haidt proposes a four-step plan to win back the childhoods of kids all over the world.  —  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I am unashamed. What about you? Welcome to unashamed. This is a very... It's a first. It's a first. It's a unique situation we have today as we start our podcast. Never done us. Because we've already had our podcast, but we're now starting the podcast. Well, Zach, you know, yesterday, because he was in charge of this, he was like, I got a guess coming on. I'll give you all the details. I'll send you some questions. Last night at about 11th. 11 o'clock. I was like,

Missy's like, what are you looking for? I was like, I'm looking for the details that Zach was going to send me. It was literally the last thing he told us yesterday. To be fair,

to be fair, my wife's van literally kaput is gone, blew off engines. So I've been, I had to deal with some issues. Maddie, can you send him a cheap violin

and he can use it as a prop what we can just say. Let's just play that violin. So Zach found a doctor who, you know, I was, I was saying, oh, you know, is he a believer? And Zach started him hauling around. I'm not sure about that. You know, he's like, but we have a common interest. And it was really about this epidemic, what I call the zombie apocalypse, with the cell phones. This is something we've been talking about on this podcast since we started. For years.

Cell phones with the kids, the damage to the society, the distractions and the horrors of social media and putting immature people in mature environments and then shocked while they're disconnected, bullying, no social skills, suicide going out the wazoo among teenagers. I mean, it's just, it's an epidemic. And you've got to look at it. I mean, I think people are like, this is, this may, this may be the most important discussion that we need to be having with our families and children right now. It's so big. But what I feel that's powerful about the conversation we just had is here you have people just from the world agreeing with Christianity of what is happening to our kids? Where are the parents? You know? And so it's what I found fascinating was

really wasn't about cell phones, even though we talked about that a lot in the epidemic. It's about kids. It's about childhood. It's the way he put it. And family, ultimately families. And just so you know, as we're going into, we're setting you up to hear this podcast. This is Dr. Jonathan Haidt. He is a Jewish professor from New York, and he teaches at NYU School of Business. He could not be any more different than this podcast than us. And yet, we found a synergy with him and his book and his research that was fascinating. I was like, I agree with everything this man is safe.

But, you know, what's incredible is he has all the data and research that is just anybody should be able to look and say, okay, humanity, we have a problem that has emerged through this. And so I found it very powerful that even when the world is crying out, saying, this won't work for society. We're breaking down society. And so what's real funny, I think and interesting, as it went along, Zach, in his theological brain, brought up some real deep truths of the Bible, but he found them absolutely fascinating. He was taking notes, Zach. He was taking notes. So, Zach, good job on that. That was impressive.

That was a tip of the cap. I thought the same thing, Zach. You were definitely teasing this man to look into the, because he's a Jewish man, and you were teasing him to look into the, New Testament, some of the things we teach. I don't want to give it away, but he threw a clue out. He threw something out there. I was like, that's interesting. So I went and looked up what he said.

I was like, whoa, there's another piece of this that you might be interested in. So it was, but you definitely got to listen to the whole thing because I think it's towards the end of the podcast. But I think it's the discussion here, like there's not a family that I know of that is immune from this discussion, not one, not mine and not Jason's, not al. And there's some raw conversations in this episode and what in this conversation that's about to be had. I mean, I want to encourage you to not just listen to it, listen to the entire thing and also share it because this is a movement that we want to enter it. We want to enter into as people of God.

We need to be. And I notice, you know, both of you guys being a little bit younger than me, you know, Jace, the tail end of yours, generate your kids. And Zach, kind of the middle back of his have raised your kids through this. generation he's talking about because he kind of zeroes into 2012, this rise of social media and sort of addiction to smartphones. But my constant fear, and I know this speaks, I know this speaks powerfully to our audience because I'm worried so much about my grandkids. We're now in 2025, so we're sort of 12 years removed from where he was doing this research. But I mean, I just, I pray for him every day. And I'm like, what can I do to?

walk alongside my kids to help them. So when I was reading this book, Jason, what you didn't get that I got was a copy of the book. Yeah. So I don't know if Zach thought you couldn't read or what. It actually worked, though, because. Yeah, because, you know, he said that. I was asking the questions. It was my orientation to this.

Which will be all of our listeners that hadn't read his book. Yeah, I had no idea who he was. But I immediately started highlighting and taking pictures of this book. I was in and out of airports when I started reading this book and sending it to my kids. And I was, because I was like, we must implement this now

because my grandkids are the age that he's talking about. Well, because I went, I just went through this with all my kids. Right. And one story I've never shared, but, you know,

one of my sons, he was spending a lot of time on his phone. It was quiet, you know, which is what are you doing. And so I would frequently get my kids' phones since I'm paying for it. which they didn't get one until they were pretty far in their teenage years.

And so I found this interesting text in that, it wasn't a text thread, just hours of, he's talking to this girl. But something didn't feel right. There were no, you know, no profanity. There was not one thing in there that was like inappropriate other than the fact of I was like, this is a, it's like a fantasy. Who is this person? Because it wasn't like somebody he knew,

which it started on social media and went, you know, hey, I'll give you my number. And so what's interesting is when I ran across this thread, which took me hours to go through, I realized they were fixing to meet. She had lined up the meeting. So I was like, I'm fixing to check out who this person is. well it turned out much older woman

filled with mischief problems and then it hit me as like this woman's a predator she's lured my son who's whatever he was 16 years old and spent so much time just lured it because it's kind of like

one of those those threads you know the more I read everything was too perfect everything she was saying And it was like she was manipulating the commerce. It kind of scared me. I was like, there's no flaws here. The lack of anything inappropriate, it was just luring to a meeting. Yeah.

Turned out, much older woman, obviously. What are you doing? Having hours and hours of texting with a 16-year-old guy, where's this headed? And then, you know, when I found out who she was and legal problems and all this, I thought, yeah. So we squelched that. But it scared me because I thought this is the new normal now where you have depraved people praying on kids in very clever ways. And meanwhile, this guy's in La La Land.

You know, I'm like having to give a month tutorial on you're in La La La Land. This is not real. It seems real, but it's not. There's a hook in this. And if you think your children are, or not my kids, kids, they're immune to that. Well, you better think again, I mean, it scares me too. And we've, you know, we've had encounters as well with nieces and nephews and our own children and just, I mean, it is a, I think you had to just remember like what's out there and, and even the more

benign stuff, too. We're going to talk about that in the coming interview, you know, just a little, the things that you think are benign. But there are real world consequences for the development of your children and even ourselves, I would argue. So this is like a must listen to. I think it's one of my favorite podcasts that we've done, which is why we've done the first time ever. We've never recorded the introduction after the fact. So we're actually going to that was a new thing.

Well, it was a bold move because I was thought, it was a bold move because I thought, well, you know, we get our manual, you know, how all these people say, hey, there's no parenting manual out there or there's no manual for humanity and I'm like well the Bible's a pretty good manual for the way humanity should live and uh in a parenting you know to give you parenting skills but in this case I just think it does draw attention that you're trying to find commonality when especially when it comes to morality and our kids and how all that's going you want people to band together and uh it's fascinating to me that even people who's don't line up with our faith or whatever. They are upset about this and have every right to be so.

And I'm like, let's come together for the future of our kids and generations and see what we can do about this. It's an epidemic. And that's what I love about what you're about to hear is because it was a scholarly work done by a college professor and a lot of research and data. And yet it's so practical and helpful. And that's what I took out of for me that I share with my kids. So we're going to take a break on the other side of that break. This is a super, super good and important podcast. We're excited for you to get to hear it. So we'll see you on the other side of the break. Welcome back to Unashamed. We have our guest with us. We are super excited about. And we put Zach in charge of finding us fantastic guest. And he has done it yet again.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt. Dr. Haidt, welcome to the Unashamed podcast. Thank you so much. And please call me. John. Okay, John. He is a professor at NYU School of Business. He's written some books. One is called The Righteous Mind, the coddling of the American mind. And the one I'm holding in my hand, for those of you watching today, instead of listening, says the anxious generation, how the great rewiring of the childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. And I have to tell you, John, when I got the book, started on an airplane. I could not put it down. And it's really amazing because all of us, like I'm 60, Jace is 55.

You're in the range. Yeah. And Zach is nearing 50, I think. And so, you know, they have children of this generation kind of on the back end. Mine are more grandchildren in terms of what I see you talking about in this book. But it's so apropos for everything we talk about in terms of social media. and everything like that. So it's very well done.

I just wanted to, first of all, just tell you, thank you for writing it. It's amazing. Well, thank you, Al. You know, everyone who has kids has seen this. Something's going on with the kids and the screens, and that's what the book's about. Well, Al, you mentioned that Zach was in charge of this,

so I didn't get the email that Dr. Haight would be on. So I'm like, this is my orientation to your work. And so before I, you know, ask how this got started, I'm just fascinated by this picture because... On the cover. Yeah. There's this little girl and there's all these little balls and... But she's on her cell phone. It's little emojis, I think, is what it's meant to it.

But this reminds me of the experience I had with each of my kids who are now all grown and I will have to admit, have turned out quite well and respected humans. But the number one issue in their teenage years was that cell phone. And so I was just wondering how this got started. Sure. And actually it works pretty well if you haven't read the book because this gives me a chance to just sort of lay it out the big picture for all the listeners who haven't read the book. So what the book is about is that something changed around 2012. I'm a college professor and we saw this with the students coming in to campus.

around 2014, 2015, they were just much more depressed and anxious. And a lot of surveys found the same thing. It wasn't just college students. It was all kids who were born 1996 and later. We now know them as Gen Z. They're not millennials. It's a different generation. They have much higher rates of anxiety and depression and self-harm and even suicide.

So what happened? And why was there no sign of trouble before 2012? All the way up from the 90s through 2010, there's no sign of a mental health problem. And so what my book is about is about how this period, 2010 to 2015, was the great rewiring of childhood. If you were, if you were born in 1995, you're the last of the millennials, you went through puberty with a flip phone. You didn't have a smartphone when you were in middle school. You had a flip phone. And a flip phone is good for talking to your friends and texting them. You're not talking to strangers. You're not looking at your,

you're not on your phone 10 hours a day. But if you were born in the year 2000, you're Gen Z and you turn 15 in 2015, and you got a smartphone. If you're a girl, you probably had Instagram. You're spending all this time posting pictures of yourself. People are commenting on it and makes you anxious. And a whole bunch of ways, kids who went through puberty on a smartphone were kind of blocked.

They didn't get to do the things that kids normally do. And that is the story that I'm telling in the book about why we see this very sudden increase in depression and anxiety and self-harm and suicide right around 2012. Well, and I thought, so you started and end the book with an analogy that I love. We love analogies on this podcast, John. Good. So you talked about what it would look like to send your kids to Mars. That's right. That's how you open the book.

And then you talk about at the end, how do we bring them back? to Earth. So talk about that in terms of how foreign the idea is that we would turn over our children to an entity beyond our ability to impact and influence. That's right. So I love metaphors. And in my teaching and my writing, I always try to give people a kind of a feeling for the phenomena with a good metaphor. So the metaphor that I chose for this after working on this for years was what if your nine-year-old daughter comes to you and says, mommy, daddy, I've signed up for a trip to Mars. I'm going to actually move there and I'm going to finish growing up there. And I'm going to be part of the first colony of humans to live on Mars.

It's very exciting. What would you say? I mean, of course, you, like, what the hell is going on here? But, you know, even if, like, you know, I always wanted to be an astronaut when I was when I was a kid. So even imagine that, you know, I was willing to say, well, okay, let me hear you out. It turns out that the people running this space colony, they don't give a damn about kids. They didn't, they have no idea if the kids are going to be okay. They didn't even ask the question. They didn't do any testing. They just want to get as many kids as they can, bring them to Mars,

let them grow up there, and then maybe they'll send them back when they're adults. Maybe not. So this is a horrible situation. We'd never let that happen. But that's kind of what happened when we gave our kids smartphones and Instagram and all these other apps. And then those companies now own our children's lives. Not for everybody, but half of all teenagers say they're online almost constantly. About half of them are basically on social media most of the time. So half of our kids, in a sense, have gone off to this different way of growing up. Now, you might have said back then, well, maybe it's okay. Maybe, you know, the technology would be good for them. Maybe they'll be super social. And I thought that back in 2010, like maybe this is going to like stimulate

brain development. But now it looks like it had a devastating effect, not just in the U.S. The reason I'm so passionate about this is that it's not just us. It's the exact same thing happened in Canada, the UK, Australia, Scandinavia. We have good data from a lot of countries. Something happened to kids around 2012 in so many different countries. So that's why it, that's trying to convey the sense of kids being taken away by a foreign, you know, company trying to to make money off our kids. And they're coming, many of them are harmed,

are damaged or blocked. Well, one thing is I love about your work. It's a scholarly work because it's full of data and charts and graphs that showed just what John just talked about. Our dad used to be on our podcast, John, and he, you know,

he never, he's like, you know, he's almost 80 years old. And so he never understood cell phones. He never understood. computers. He's famously, you know, says, I've never owned one. And so for years, anecdotally, he has said what you say with data and evidence that it just seemed to him, like it was a bad

idea to send your kids to Mars in this situation as you lay it out. I wanted to ask you, you'd make a distinction of difference between how it affects boys and girls. Obviously, our audience is a lot of young people, a lot of young men, especially, but a lot of young people, a lot of people just starting families. So what did you notice about the difference between the breakdown and how this works between boys and girls in terms of of that? Yeah. So let me address this both to the young men and the young women who are listening. That is those who are in their 20s. Gen Z is turning 30 this year. So if you're in your 20s, you're Gen Z. And I also especially want to address everybody who has a son or a daughter.

And so the girl's story and the boy's story are different. I didn't know this when I started writing the book. I thought the story was going to be social media is really bad for kids' mental health. And it turns out that the connections between social media and depression and anxiety for girls is really strong. girls who spend a lot of time on social media are two or three times more likely to be depressed or anxious. For boys, they're a little more likely, but not that much. So it looked like social media is really particularly bad for girls. Why is it so bad for girls?

If you want to trap a girl, if you're a company, you want to extract all the attention from a girl and sell her advertisements. How do you trap girls? You offer them bait, as you guys would know, how, you know, how, you know, how, you know, How do you attract an animal? Well, a trap, you have to put bait that the animal finds attractive. But then the trick is when the animal takes the bait, now something changes and they can't get out. That's what a trap is. Girls, what you put in the trap is social information.

Who said what about whom? Who's dating whom? Who's mad at whom? And girls care more about social relationships. They're more sensitive to it. So the girls will go rushing onto Instagram. They're all talking about each other. They're all talking to each other.

Now they're trapped. Because any girl who says, wait, this is crazy. This is terrible. I want to be out playing. That girl's now alone because everybody's on Instagram. So the girls get trapped by social media, especially Instagram, but there's a few others. And then now they're not spending time with their friends as much. What girls need is a couple of close friends. If they have a few close friends to talk with, to gossip with, to comfort each other, they're probably going to turn out fine. But what social media does is says, how about you spend five hours. a day on this platform, interacting with hundreds of people, so you don't have any time for your

real friends, and you're not going to see them much. You're not going to laugh with them much. You're just going to share emojis. So that's what it's doing to girls. Oh, plus the incredible amount of sexual harassment of girls, and plus the social comparison and the constant comments on their face, their hair, their breasts, everything. It's a terrible thing to do to an 11, 12, 13-year-old girl to put her on social media. So that's the girl's story. And at first, I thought, that's what most of the book would be about. And I thought, well, the boys aren't doing this badly. And they're not as depressed and anxious. So if you look at the kids when they're 14, the girls look like they're doing worse, and they are at 14. The boys are playing a lot of

video games, which are great fun, and they're watching a lot of porn. But what is the effect on the boys if they spend their childhood playing video games and watching porn? They're not doing anything else. So here's the most shocking stat in the book, I think. When you look at the rates of hospital admissions for broken bones. How many kids in America break a bone and go to the hospital? Who do you think used to break bones the most? Young people, old people, boys, girls? Like, you know, who are the people who are ending up in hospitals and broken bones?

Teenage boys, right? Yeah. That's what it used to be. Teenage boys used to have by far the highest rates of broken bones until about 2010, 2012. Then what happens? Once the teenage boys are all spending their time now on video games, and also on their smartphones, and they are on social media too.

But once everything is on the screen, teenage boys' rates drop so low that they are now less likely to break a bone than their fathers or grandfathers. Because teenage boys aren't doing anything that's risky. And if boys aren't doing anything risky, if they're playing it safe, they're not going to turn into men. Or at least it's going to be harder, I should say. Boys need to take more risks. They need to learn how to manage risk. They need to have conflicts in the real world and learn to manage them. They need to do sports.

And the video games are great fun, but they don't really help the boys develop. They don't turn, they don't develop skills. So what we're finding is that if you'll check in on kids when they're in their late 20s, the girls, they finish their education, they're more likely to have gone to college. They're more likely to have a job. Who's more likely to be living with their parents at the age of 30? It's the boys. So the boy's story is not about social media so much.

It's about missing out on all the things that are going to turn boys into men and instead spending thousands and thousands of hours on video games, porn and YouTube videos, short videos on TikTok. Yeah, that's interesting. You also talk in the book, there's kind of another side of that you talk about with the overprotection of kids. Talk about a little bit how that, because that plays into it as well. I actually believe there's a great crisis of masculinity in the country right now and the world for a lot of the reasons you mentioned. But there's also coupled with that is that over coddling of the American mind, particularly with boys. Talk about a little about the safetyism. Yeah.

Oh, thank you, Zach. Yeah, because, you know, the conversations tend to focus on the phones. That's what everyone's interested in. What the hell's happening to our kids with all these screens? But thank you for pointed that out. The book isn't really about screens. It's actually about childhood, and there's two pieces to it. I can summarize the whole book with this sentence.

We have overprotected our children. in the real world, and we have underprotected them online. So when, you know, when us older folk, I'm 61. So, you got to repeat that because I think that is a key line. Okay. Okay. We have overprotected our children in the real world where it's actually much safer than it used to be and where they need to take risks. And we have underprotected them online, which is actually a kind of a dangerous place where a lot of men are trying to get to your kids and all kinds of bad things happen.

So we have to work on both of those. And so, you know, when me and Al and Jace were growing up in the 70s, there was a huge crime wave. I don't know what it was like for you guys in Louisiana, but I grew up in the suburbs of New York and the whole area. You know, there was a lot of crazy stuff and a lot of drunk drivers. Some of those drunk drivers were us. I mean, we just took a lot of risks and life was kind of dangerous. But all kids went out to play, right? Am I right?

At age 7, 8, 9? We were all out playing. You'd leave in the morning and basically, not come back until dark in the summertime. Every day. Exactly. That's right. And if you tried to come back, your mom might say, get out of here.

Don't watch television. Get out of here. Don't come back until dark. Don't come back until dinner time. I actually don't remember my parents even being around because we were all outside. It's like, yeah, they were around somewhere. We were out playing. But that's kind of like what Hunter Gatherer childhood is like.

If you look at ancient societies, the adults aren't like watching the kids. It's like the kids are socializing among themselves, and they're teaching each other, and they're inventing games. And one of the most valuable things groups of kids can do is get into an argument about, well, what should we do? Or, okay, we're playing this game, but you broke the rules. No, I didn't. Like, all that stuff is pure gold for social development. This is how kids learn to be citizens in a democracy where we're going to disagree, and the majority is probably going to win, but you don't want to crush the minority. because you want the game to keep going, you want to keep the group together.

So these are such crucial skills to learn, but we only learn those skills when we're not supervised by grown-ups. Because if you watch kids today on the playground, there's always, it's so sad. I don't know what it's like there, but in New York City, you go to a playground here, we've got great playgrounds. What are you going to see? You're going to see one or two parents standing near the equipment talking to their child who's on the equipment. You don't see the kids playing with each other. It's all each individual child is being watched carefully so that they don't fall or something like that. We're so overprotective and we're blocking those, just the unsupervised play.

So what I'm arguing is that, in fact, what I show with a lot of evidence in the book, is that kids used to play outside. They used to have be unsupervised a lot until the 1990s. That's the decade when we freak out in America and we say, if I ever let my kid out, he's going to be abducted. A lot of parents now start saying, I can't even let my kid go two aisles over in a grocery store because I heard that a kid was abducted from a gross, which never happened. Okay, there was actually one case. There was one case in 1980, which sort of was like that, one case. But people freak out in the 90s.

And we don't trust our neighbors anymore. We've lost a lot of trust in our neighbors. And what that means is that we have to supervise our kids all the time. And that falls on the mothers mostly. mothers start spending a lot more time parenting being with their kids. It's not good for the kids. It's not good for the mothers. The kids need to be out with each other.

So that's the first piece of it. That starts in the 90s. And then by the time we get to 2010, outdoor play is really reduced. Kids aren't doing a lot outdoor. They're spending a lot of time on the Internet, on the computers. And then when they get social media and smartphones, 2010 to 2015, that's when their mental health collapses. So that's the story that I tell in the book. There's two pieces to it.

Which can be tracked. I mean, I read a book back in 2017, Igen. Yes. And she had put the doctor, had put the stat, it was like a line graph of the adoption of the iPhone and then the increase in depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety disorders. And it was almost a mirror image as the iPhone was adopted by children and young people that it was a mirror image of the increase in mental illness, which is just. fascinating to think about how well that correlates on a graph. That's right. That's exactly right. So Gene Twangy is a professor in California at the University of San Diego. I'm sorry, San Diego State University. And she's a friend of mine. And when I was writing the coddling of the American

mind, I was talking about overprotection, but I noticed, Greg Lukianov, my co-author, we noticed that social media might have something to do with this. We didn't know. We didn't know. It was 2017. And then Gene's book comes out, Igen. And she's like, got graph after graph showing just what Zach just said, that all the mental health problems, they all sort of track the degree to which kids are, kids are spending time on smartphones and social media. Now, what Gene showed is what's called correlation. That is this happened and this happened at the same time. And in the sciences and in medicine, that's the starting point for an investigation. Like, okay, these two things happened together. Did one cause the other?

We don't know. We can't be sure. Lots of other things happened in the early 2010s. Maybe it's something else. And so what Gene and I have both been doing since then is collecting the evidence that it was the phone-based childhood. Growing up on a phone is what caused the mental health and other problems. And we think we've got a lot of different kinds of evidence. I'll tell you, one of the most shocking kinds of evidence is the words of the companies themselves. There's a lot that's come out because so many parents have lost their kids to suicide.

cyberbullying, drug overdoses from fentanyl-l-laced drugs that they got on social media. So all these parents are suing meta and Snapchat and TikTok, and a lot of documents have come out from those lawsuits. And so my group and our substack, our blog at afterbabel.com, we've collected just TikTok in its own words. And it is absolutely shocking what they said in their internal emails and their internal reports. they know that their product is addictive. It was designed to be addictive. They know that it's shattering kids' attention. It was designed to grab every little bit of consciousness it could.

So from all three of those companies, we have all kinds of quotes. They know they're doing this. Here's another piece of evidence. What do you think the founders of these companies do with their own kids? Do you suppose they give them smartphones and TikTok? Hell no. They keep their kids off. It's well known.

In Silicon Valley, a lot of the executives at these tech companies, they send their kids to a school called the Waldorf School because it has no technology. These people know that this stuff is bad for kids. So they don't give it to their kids, but they want to give it to your kids because that's how they make their money. So there's also a lot of scientific evidence and their experiments, but everything's lining up to say it wasn't just a coincidence. growing up on a on a smartphone social media blocks child development blocks social development you get kids who are more anxious fragile and and full of problems that's an interesting name to your block site too because we talk a lot on this podcast about um the kingdom of god coming and and that it's a Acts chapter two there's a a story what we call the we think it's

the rect that like it's uh it's the redemption of babel you know where babble is the division of yeah yeah i don't know this an act Acts? Yeah, Acts 2. Acts 2, the day of Pentecost. And so in the Christians world, this is like when the Holy Spirit shows up or the Tower of Babylon, Genesis 7 was that there was the creation of nations. And then God, Genesis 12, pulled out his portion, Israel. But what happened is their language was confused. So you have this orientation, a scattering of community. they were spread out to the ends of the earth, so to speak, and then in Acts chapter 2 in Christ and his eschatological kingdom, is he's bringing all of that back together. And so where in Babel, the language was confused in Acts 2, each nation could hear each other in their own native tongue,

and they could understand it. Oh, wow. So it's this beautiful picture of community, what we would call embodied communities. Oh, you call it embodied. That's great. Okay. I'm writing that down. Yeah, it's a, yeah, I think it's like what, because what is the hope, you know, I think about the, what, what you've talked about a lot is in the book. And it certainly, I think we were all feeling it before even the data had come in. We were all feeling this disembodiment. We were all feeling of the loss and trust in community. There was a time when I, when I had to buy milk, not me personally, my grandparents, when they bought milk, they bought it from this guy called the milk man.

Yeah, I remember that. I was a kid. That was like a thing, right? So communities were much more connected. And we've lost that in the virtual world. I actually think that the hope for renewal of Western civilization is going to be coming back to local communities. And we love local parish model churches and like doing life together again. I think it seems like one author, Martin Guri, he said, we're drowning in data, but we're thirsting for me.

Absolutely. Oh, my goodness. I love Martin Gurry. And let's go into this. This is fascinating because I didn't know about acts too, but I, but I was very moved by the Genesis story in the, I mean, sorry, the Babel story in Genesis. And so, you know, because my own work before, I was, I set out to write a book on what social media is doing to democracy. Because our country has been weird since sometime in the 2010s. It's not like it used to be. Something weird is going on with our politics. They're rising polarization. Everybody believes something different. And so I was looking around for metaphor. I love metaphors.

And I was starting to, I was starting this book. The title of the book is, well, okay, so I was starting the book and I was looking for metaphor. And I reread the Babel story. And when I got to that line, God says, let us go down and confound their language so that they may not understand one another. Boom. That's it. That's it. Because I was thought, you know, so I'm, you know, I'm Jewish.

I grew up not very religious. I had a slight acquaintance with the Babel story. I always thought God knocked over the tower. But, no, in the store, in the book, he just confuses their language so that they can't understand. And that's the way you shatter a community. And so that's why I picked the title for the blog after Babel. And the title of the book I was going to write is life after Babel,

adapting to a world we may never again share. And this is what Martin Gorey was talking to you about, because I drew on him. he talks about how, you know, the mass media age, 50 years ago, the newspapers and television, we might all see the same TV show. We might all have the same understanding. We'll have our disagreements, but we have a body of shared facts. Not anymore.

Now that we're all on social media, everything is fragmented. So, and so, right, the problem is the loss of any sense of community. So I'm so excited to hear about, I'll go check out Acts 2, because I think you're right. The way we fix this, or at least the way we bring some little bubbles of sanity to our lives is going to be much more local. And local parish churches is a great idea. Well, and I love the way you give the simple sort of two-step process for because I want to spend our last few minutes together talking about some solutions for people who are really struggling out there with what do I do with all this? Because you talk about one, you know, we can say we just don't use the devices, don't use the social. media, but if you don't have some outlet then, as you then talk about this idea of this

safetyism, if they can't go out and experience and have these things and have local community and fix, then they don't have a place to go and flourish. And so I like the idea of both sides. Well, I was going to bring that up too from solution-wise, because most of the things is just now raising three teenagers and sending them out there. Because I was like, what can I do about that. I knew there was a problem because I learned that just being a parent, I think the biggest problem is it's so easy to give your kid a scratch. So you don't have to do anything, but I noticed something, even when my kids were real small, when it's real quiet, there's trouble. You know, when you don't hear them laughing at it, when it's just silence. And so when they got to

be teenagers, I noticed that revolved around three teenagers going into their own separate rooms. and getting into the cell phone and all these fantasy worlds. And it's so weird that all three of them had different things, different problems that came out of that. But I've shared this story before, but I just wanted to share it with you

and get your take as far as solutions. You know, what I wound up doing is I took one of my kids' phones. Of course, I asked them, is there anything in here that, you know, Jesus wouldn't approve of? I thought that was a good question. And she was like, oh, no, it's all great. And, but once I did some digging, I found it.

And it was a social media site kind of hidden. Which one was it? Do you remember the name? Snapchat. Oh, yes. And so, I bring so much degrading stuff to kids. Yeah.

And once I got involved, I just followed all the trails. And she had like seven other friends that were a group, but I saw places of bullying. And then I went into each individual friend of hers. And then a couple of theirs, they were, you know, having these encounters with men much older. Yes. And like, you know, show me yours, show me my – I'm looking at all this stuff. And so for two days, I became my child on there. I just played the game.

Of course, it took them two days to figure out that this is not who they thought it was. And that's when I broke the news that I'm the dad. And I've been – I know y'all quite well now. And so I just called a meeting with their parents. I was like, my daughter will be going in a different direction. And if you want to be a part of that direction, I need to have a face-to-face conversation with you and your mom, dad, or guardian. What I was surprised. Wait, how did it go?

Did they respond? Did you actually meet with the parents? Six of the seven showed up with their mom. Oh, that's fantastic. It was. And look, and this happened years ago. But, I mean, some of these people are still my friends. a couple of them actually came to the Lord.

And so, but there were three or four that didn't go well. And it wasn't because of the kid. It was, because it was the, oh, how dare you, you know, invade my kids' privacy. You know, but we had all these conversations, which I think was good for my daughter to see. And so then I just implemented a rule. We're going to make our house a place for your friends. And so they had to turn in their cell phones when they walked through the door, which is still a practice that they do today,

even though I've lifted that practice, because now they're all in their 20s. But it's so weird how some of their friends will come in and they'll go turn their cell phone in at the little beverage center. But we ate good food. We told good stories. We played a game. We did things together.

Community. That was a community. And that's just what our house became to fight this. So, Jay, that is a beautiful story because you basically figured out intuitively, the conclusions I came to in the book after all this research. The problem is that each of us as parents acting alone,

if we say, no, you can't have Snapchat. And I said that to my daughter. She's 15. She says, Dad, but everybody in my school has it. Everybody else has it except for me. So if you're acting alone, your kid's isolated. Yeah. But the solution is that we act together.

Yeah. And so here are the four norms. This is the last third of the book. Even though this problem is gigantic, we can actually solve it if we do these four things together, most of us. We don't need everybody, but if most people do this, we solve the problem. The first, no smartphone before high school or age 14. You can give your kid a flip phone if you want to communicate with them, but nothing with a browser or social media platforms.

No smartphone before 14. Let them get through early puberty first. The second is no social media until 16. Social media is designed to introduce your children to strange. They will be talking to strangers. That's what it's there for. It's insane. Children shouldn't be talking to strangers.

Okay? So it's just, you know, I really should be 18, but I'm just trying to argue, can we just agree on a floor of 16? Just nobody should be on it until 16. And then nobody feels the pressure to be on it. The third is phone-free schools. If you can text your kids during the school day, I guarantee you they're checking their text.

They're sending texts. Everybody's texting everybody. They're not listening to the teacher. They're not even talking to each other. Hallways and schools are very quiet these days because all the kids are on their phone all the time. But if you have a phone-free school, you turn in the phone in the morning, they get it back in the afternoon. Amazing things happen. What the schools always say is they hear laughter in the hallways again.

The kids are paying attention to the teachers. They're flirting, talking, joking with each other. So you've got to have phone-free schools. And the fourth norm, and this is the hardest, this is the one that you've got. The fourth norm is far more independent. free play and responsibility in the real world. Because if we're going to take them off of screens, if they're not, I mean, not all screens,

they can watch some television. But if we're going to, if they're not going to be growing up on screens, we have to give them back a fun childhood. My book isn't about screens. It's about childhood. You've got to give back a fun childhood. And even though the phone will suck them away

because it seems so interesting, when you actually put kids together without phones, they have a lot of fun. And they laugh and they invent games. But if you do all four, and if you have a community, it's hard to do it by yourself. But if you get a community and a church parish or a school, those are the two best units. You really have people.

You have adults who care about kids. You have kids who want to play with each other. And so if you do that in a community, boom, you roll it back. And within a few weeks, within a certain month or two, the kids are going to be happier, having fun. They'll adjust to not being on their phones. And everyone's better off. I think we should put that into law. That's that way.

Well, in Europe, I think I just read recently, didn't they? In England, they passed a law or the minimum age mandate for... In Australia, yes. Australia is the first country in the world to do it. The tech companies say that they can't do it, but of course they can do it. They know everything about us. They know how old we are. So they can figure it out. And Australia is the first country with the guts to say, you know what? You've been trashing our children for so long. We're going to raise the age to 16 and you guys have to enforce it. You figure it out. Does not have to. to be perfect, but you've got to make an effort. Right now, they're making no effort. Yeah. It'd be interesting to see if this ends up being, like, you know, smoking. And like, we'll look back in 50 years and think, like, this would be the equivalent of smoking in our grandparents' generation. That's going to be in five or 10 years. I guarantee, well, I believe that within five or 10 years, we're going to look back on this and think, what the hell were we doing? Thank God, we're not doing that anymore. I just read 40% of two-year-olds in the United States have their own iPad. 40%.

That means they're growing up. 40%. Because we've all discovered. We all discovered what you said, Chase. You just give them a device and they're quiet. It's great. It seems to work great. They're happy.

You're happy. But you know, you're kind of blocking their brain development. And it's a little bit of a double whammy here because Jason mentioned this and he's mentioned it before many times on the podcast is a lot of times parents themselves become so engrossed in social media that they're distracted by that. and then you don't realize what your kid is doing. You noticed it in airports.

I mean, it became a problem like Little League Baseball where you realize at some point after a couple of years of this, the problem is not the kids. Yeah. Okay. Because even the parents, I'm like, look, I've revealed this information, and they're like, well, that, you know, that's just, I'll run my house like I want to.

Well, what I love about what you're doing, Don, is you're saying as parents, we can start something, that then goes into pressure onto schools to do the right thing, and let's get phones out. I'm hearing more and more politicians say this now out loud. Our schools need to be phone-free, which is good to hear. But that's because that's coming pressure from us. It's supposed to be we the people. Well, and the teachers. The teachers have hated the phones. The teachers have desperately wanted to get rid of the phones. But there are always some parents who said, no, I need to call my child whenever anything. Oh, which goes into your overprotection point.

Yep, exactly. But I want to say that I personally learned the value of democracy as a child in child play. I had a particular cousin that was a brutal dictator. His name is Jace Robertson. So I realize that whatever this political setup is in our child play, I don't want that. I want to have a voice. That was a nice way for Zach saying that I trained him to be the man he is today. And we're all strong men.

Exactly. We're welcome, Zat. We left our thin skins at the door. All right. We're out of time. Dr. Jonathan Haidt. Thank you so much for coming on. The book is called The Anxious Generation,

how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. We see this. We know it. I love what Zach said. We feel it as a people. And we know something's not right. And you've laid out some very practical things, but also a very scholarly approach to see.

that this is all backed up, your worldwide view of it, and it's very, very powerful. And so immediately I read it, I started sending quotes to my kids. My kids are in their late 30s, and now they are having teenagers. And I'm like, let's start implementing this today. Start telling your friends. So I think it's a movement that Unashamed Nation can be a part of. I know you guys are struggling with this because we get your emails all the time. So this is something we can get behind. Thank you for writing the book and for coming on to tell us about it. Well, thank you, gentlemen. I hope your listeners will go to Anxious Generation.com.

We have a lot of resources for parents, for teachers, for legislators. This is a movement. And when you get millions and millions of parents, and especially the moms, I mean, the mothers around the world are just up in arms about this. When you get a movement of parents, I don't think we can be stopped. I agree. Here, here. Thank you, John. Appreciate you coming on.

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