Put The Phones Away with Jonathan Haidt

My daughter was described by her third grade teacher as a giant ball of sunshine.

And she still is.

I love that.

And I never let her on social media.

She's 15.

She wants Snapchat.

All her friends are on it.

I have not let her have it.

But I hear so many stories from parents whose daughters were also giant balls of sunshine.

And then they got Instagram in fifth, sixth, seventh grade.

And then they stopped being giant balls of sunshine.

And they're anxious.

And they're comparing themselves.

And they're focused on their skin and their hair and their bodies.

So, well, so I think a lot of parents can recognize this.

Even if it's not in every single family, it's in something like every third family.

So everybody knows a family that has a daughter especially who got on social media and became depressed, anxious, self-conscious.

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Hi, Craig Robinson.

How are you?

I'm terrific.

How are you?

Good.

You're looking pretty even.

That's because I'm wearing makeup.

Let's see.

I think it's good now.

You know, lights, camera, action, you know, you need to have, be blended just like the rest of us.

I am very self-conscious.

I mean, I've worn makeup before, you know.

Have you tell me more about makeup

on what occasion?

That's right.

That's right.

But that, you're not on the screen very much.

So it's very light.

And I did it myself.

So I just like

powdered it up.

Yeah.

They let you do your own makeup.

They do.

You'd be surprised how many sports analysts do their own makeup on.

You should have told me.

I could have helped you out.

Well, Kelly took me to the Mac store and we matched up.

I wish I had been there for that trip.

Wow.

Yeah.

My big brother at the Mac store.

Oh, it was, it was, it was tough, tough.

Anyway, but you're looking good.

I feel good.

I feel good.

Yeah, yeah.

We're back in LA.

Yes, yeah.

It's always good to be in LA in this beautiful Airbnb.

Yeah.

Are you staying at an Airbnb again?

I am.

I am staying at the same one.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

So

we got some stuff to talk about today.

We do.

We do.

So, you know,

our show today is going to be about technology and kids and technology.

And this is a really interesting one because

when we were setting up the show, our producers were asking us about our relationship with technology.

And for us, it was like the television.

Growing up.

Growing up, right?

That was don't watch too much TV.

It'll rot your mind out.

Right.

When there were only like seven channels.

I know.

I know.

And

I think back to the rule that mom had for us was we could each watch one hour of TV a night.

You remember that?

Yeah, I sort of do, but I think I was usually doing homework.

I mean, you were the one that would get through your homework and get your hour in.

I never really focused on that hour because I was really trying to get my homework done.

You were trying to get your homework done, but I remember colluding in making sure that our hours didn't overlap so that we could really get two hours in.

That sounds like some strategy you'd be putting out there.

Maybe you don't remember that because

it was a real thing.

But what

I wanted to point out was we were so busy, like you with homework, me with homework and sports or whatever, that there were many nights we couldn't use that hour.

That's right.

That's right.

Even our parents who were not college educated, working class folks, they understood that we didn't need to be in front of a screen

for the limited time that we could have.

You didn't have 24-hour

television on at all.

You didn't have all-day kid TV.

Right.

Television, Kid TV happened on Saturday morning.

Yes.

You woke up early to get the first cartoon, which was at 6 a.m.

And you could maybe watch cartoons until 11.30, 11.

And then we were outside.

But in between that, I have to throw in there, you had to get the chores done, the Saturday chores done.

For sure.

You had to either get your chores done before the cartoons came on or before you went outside after they were off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, now they call it how we were raised is now titled free-range parenting, you know, like it's some, you know,

animalistic

out in the sonara.

I mean, and so free-range parenting was essentially how everybody, our generation was raised.

You know, your parents really didn't know that much about what you were doing and didn't feel like it was their obligation or duty to know everything that you were doing.

You So the independence started with parents just our parents loved us and were involved, engaged.

My mother was on the PTA, but the notion that our parents thought that they were responsible for us getting our homework done or even us getting up in the morning or getting us to school or getting us to our activities, that was not something that our parents' generation believed in.

So I guess as a result, most of our generation, we were free-range, you know, and during those times, we were just out and about playing on our own.

Figuring it out.

Figuring it out.

Learning about the world, how to deal with friends and people who weren't friends.

And as a matter of fact, do you remember when I used to go to the park and stay all day?

Mom would say, you have to come back and check in.

That was our version of the cell phone.

Right, right.

She just wanted to know you were alive.

She just wanted to know everything was okay.

And I remember I'm playing in a basketball game at the park and the game's over.

I race back home and I scream up to mom on the back porch, I'm back.

She's like, okay.

And then I run back to get in the next game.

But that was how we were all raised.

And I think that that set us up for owning our own lives in a way that I think

some kids today

don't, perhaps because parents, we've overparented.

And I think some parents are denying their kids kids that opportunity to experience the success and confidence of doing some things on their own because we're just

protecting them to everyone.

We're protecting them from everything.

And I see it in coaching now.

Yeah, we may have overdone it.

We may be a little too coddling.

And so therefore, when it comes to social media, we don't know how to say no.

But these are some of the things we'll

talk about.

I certainly understand, you know, how challenging it can be.

I mean, when I was raising the girls in the White House, I mean, we had to think really long and hard about their access to social media.

They were coming up right at the sort of beginning of Snapchat and Instagram.

So it wasn't, they didn't really feel the kind of pressure that probably you as the father of younger kids are experiencing.

today.

And it was still unknown territory.

So I think a lot of parents are struggling with this.

We're struggling with how do we not over-parent?

How much do we parent?

How much free-ranging do we do?

And then how does that affect how we manage our kids' social media?

And we've got a great expert on board.

Well, yes.

So fortunately, we have

somebody who knows this more than

we do.

So

our guest today is John Heid.

And I I have been excited about this ever since we booked him.

So I would like to read part of his bio because he begged me not to read the entire thing because it is fascinating, and I wanted to read every bit of it.

But

John Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business.

He received his Ph.D.

from the University of Pennsylvania, and I'm not going to hold that against them because I'm a Princeton guy in 1992 and taught for 16 years in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia.

In his most recent release, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, he brings to light the great rewiring of childhood in which play-based childhood has been replaced by phone-based childhood.

With that, please welcome John Heid.

John, welcome.

John.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thanks.

It's a good pleasure.

Yeah.

Welcome.

Welcome to the table.

We've got an expert that actually knows something.

And not just in this area, but you're a parent too,

grappling with this issue.

That's right.

My daughter is 15.

My son is 18.

You're in the thick of it.

That's right.

That's right.

But it sounds like you guys basically already covered it.

So for parenting and the technology.

Like, you got it.

Okay, we can go deeper, but those are the two main ingredients.

Well, tell us, let's just start by telling us why you wrote your latest book.

So my main line of research is on democracy, what social media is doing to liberal democracy.

Democracy is a conversation, but what happens when that conversation moves on to Twitter?

There's growing evidence that

something about social media and all the time the kids are spending on phones, there's a lot more evidence now linking that to mental illness, especially anxiety and depression.

So I ended up, even though I was going to write a book on democracy, I ended up just focusing on this because nothing could be more important than this.

If we don't get this solved, there's no point in working on democracy.

We've got to have a strong next generation to handle this American experiment.

You say something very clearly that I didn't realize and wondered about when I was parenting, when this, you know, this

technology came to be, is, is this harming our children?

Because I can say honestly that

we weren't sure because there was the push between, okay, this is something that's out there.

It's giving our kids access to limited amounts of information.

They're linking up.

This all should be good.

You know, it's being marketed to us as a very good thing.

But I can say now that that was the question among my group of parents is like, is this okay?

How much is too much?

And now we have, can we say a definitive answer?

I mean, can we say that now?

Because because that's that's the question that people have i'll say definitive and i'll defend it i think it's really important to trace out how this all started because as you said you know parents they were giving their kids the device or maybe you weren't giving it but your kid like you know so many of my family videos when my son was one or two end with iphone iphone like they desperately wanted it and you give it to them and they're happy and they're quiet and you can do your work a lot of people say oh this is just like the moral panic over television oh we'll get used like no this is actually really different from television right and the other piece is that you guys were talking about just how much fun you had outside and how important that was.

Well, outside has gotten a lot less fun for our kids because there aren't any other kids out there.

And we just don't have that expectation anymore.

Yeah.

Well, it's also, you know, it changes the expectation for parenting.

And there is a level of sort of chaos and uncertainty and, you know, not pleasantness when it comes to managing your kids and having a household.

And a lot of parents want none of it now.

That's right.

It's almost like, okay, I want, now I want my child to be absolutely silent.

And it was, it's perhaps easier to hand a kid a phone so that they are absolutely quiet and there is absolutely no fighting, right?

That's right.

That's right.

And in the long run, that's going to block their development.

As you were just saying, it's going to be, there's going to be conflicts, but that's actually, that's actually nutritious.

That's right.

John, John, can you elaborate on the four pillars that you lay out in your book for our listeners?

And we're going to get to our question, but there's so many questions we have of you and really appreciate your time.

But can you elaborate a little bit on those four pillars?

So let me just first say, I can summarize the book with a single sentence, which is that we have overprotected our children in the real world.

and we have underprotected them online.

Phones are experience blockers.

So we interfered with their development, their social development, intellectual intellectual development, sexual development, all of those things.

So we've got to stop.

And the reason why it's so hard for us is that any parent who says, no, you're not doing this.

I'm not giving you a phone.

We all get the same thing.

But mom, I'm the only one.

Everyone's making fun of me.

I don't know.

So, and it breaks our heart.

And then we, you know, usually we give in or say, okay, okay, but there'll be all kinds of restrictions, but then it's impossible to enforce.

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So, the key here is collective action.

That is, we have to do things together.

We have to make it a norm, and then we're not each alone to enforce it.

So, here are the four norms.

No smartphone before high school.

Just give them a flip phone or a basic phone.

No social media before 16.

Social media is just wildly inappropriate for minors, for children.

Phone-free schools.

We couldn't bring our television set into school.

That would be madness, but yet we let kids bring in this multi-entertainment computer.

And the fourth is far far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.

It's not just about taking away the screens, it's about restoring a fun, exciting childhood.

Typically, the kids raise each other in the sense of

there's a kid community, there's a kid group of mixed ages, as you guys had.

And you learn so much from your older sibling.

And you learned, you didn't learn so much from her directly when she was little, but you learned how to take care of her.

Well, you learned how to take care of her.

You learned how to look out for her.

You learned accountability.

When you were three, what did you learn when you were three?

i was so smart she's she we were joking before we got on she took over when she was four

took over the whole family but john i i mean you set it out so clearly so simply so and in such a it's it is so utterly doable yeah that's why i love your book and i love the way you um just sort of make it plain to parents because to many people this feels like an impossible task and the the four things you lay out are completely within our control one other thing that i want you to point out before we get to the caller question is the impact of social media on our kids mental health i mean because again it's not it's something that I don't think a lot of parents are making that link.

And I want to be real clear here that there is a real correlation between um our children's depression higher rates of depression and anxiety you talk about that john can you say a little more about that that's right well i'll start with just the intuitive and i'll give you the data the intuitive is things like this so my my daughter was described by her third grade teacher as a giant ball of sunshine

and um and she still is i love that um and i never let her on social media.

She's 15.

She wants Snapchat.

All her friends are on it.

I have not let her have it.

But I hear so many stories from parents whose daughters were also giant balls of sunshine.

And then they got Instagram in fifth, sixth, seventh grade, and then they stopped being giant balls of sunshine.

And they're anxious and they're comparing themselves and they're focused on their skin and their hair and their bodies.

So, well, so I think a lot of parents can recognize this.

Even if it's not in every single family, it's in something like every third family.

So everybody knows a family that has a daughter, especially, who got on social social media and became depressed, anxious, self-conscious.

When you look at how much social media time kids spend, for boys, their correlation is there, but it's very small.

For girls, it's much bigger.

So the girls who are using social media three, four, five hours a day are two to three times as depressed as the girls who are using it one hour or less.

So we have correlational evidence.

There's experiments about getting kids off.

They get benefits if they stay off for at least a week or two.

So I think the evidence is increasingly strong.

Again, there is a debate.

There are psychologists who disagree with me.

But I think because we all see it, the parents see it, the teachers see it, the psychotherapists see it, the coaches see it, everyone sees something has gone terribly wrong.

Yeah.

Well, we're going to keep talking about this, but we want to get to our listener question, which is from Josie in Santa Cruz.

And

Natalie, we are ready for our question.

Let's do it.

Hi, Michelle and Craig.

My name is Josie, and I live in Santa Cruz, California.

I am a parent to two wonderful girls, ages five and 11.

With the younger one, I'm having a hard time setting boundaries around screen time.

My husband and I both work full-time, and we tend to hand her an iPad whenever we need a moment to ourselves.

She's now clearly hooked on it and moody when we take it away.

Also, because we don't live in a bubble, it feels difficult to keep her away from screens in general when the other kids she knows are just as into the screen as she is.

Of course, I have a similar problem with my 11-year-old and social media.

Some of her friends have their own accounts already.

I haven't given in to her demands to have her own yet, but it's becoming harder and harder to put it off, and it's really starting to consume our relationship.

My question is simple, and I think it's one a lot of parents can relate to.

What do we do about our kids' addictions to screens and social media?

I want nothing more than for my daughters to be resilient and self-assured people all on their own.

But in the modern world where screens are ubiquitous and social interactions happen mostly online, it really feels like a monumental task to make that happen.

What can I do to set up my daughters to have healthy relationships outside of screens and social media with their friends and most importantly, with themselves?

Thanks for your help, Josie.

Okay, so that is the perfect question

because in the anxious generation, I especially focused on teenagers because that's where the data is best.

I didn't talk as much about

younger kids, but I keep getting this question because parents with younger kids are exactly like your listener.

And so here's a few things I can share.

Just from what I heard in her question, I think there's three principles I want to put on the table.

dopamine,

friends, and stories.

Let's keep those three things in mind.

So dopamine is this really important neurotransmitter.

It's a chemical in the brain that's related to reward and motivation.

When something feels good, the dopamine comes out and that feels great, but it's not like that feels great, you're done.

It's that feels great, let's do it again.

That feels good, let's do it again.

And we've all seen this with kids again, again, again.

And so, you want your kids to have slow dopamine.

You want your kids to struggle at something, work at something.

They train to do a layup, and then they do it, and then they get the dopamine.

That is great.

What the tech companies did is they figured out a way to hack the system.

They figured out, hey, let's give the kids some dopamine without having them do anything.

Just swipe or touch or whatever.

No skills learned.

So, quick dopamine is really bad for your kids.

You want to keep them away from quick dopamine.

Now, like with junk food, if you let them play video games for an hour a week, that's totally fine.

But when your kids are playing video games or other screen, other dopamine, quick things like that, two or three hours a day, now you're changing their brains.

The dopamine circuits are responding, getting less sensitive to dopamine.

So they need more.

And I know this is relevant to your listener because she said that the daughter gets moody when you take it away.

Sounds like an addict.

Exactly.

Exactly.

It is, because dopamine is the exact neurotransmitter that is involved in all addictions.

And when you take the drug away, you feel terrible.

And then you just need the drug back to feel normal.

So that's the bad news.

That's the bad news to your listener is that in a sense, your kid is an addict.

But here's the good news.

Just as the brain adapts after a week or two, it adapts and gets addicted.

You go cold turkey.

It just takes a week or two for the brain to get back to normal.

So that's the first, let's keep that in mind.

Now, that's still hard advice because we all face this.

Like, the kid freaks out.

But you know what?

A lot of parenting is like this, where you have to go through the hard period.

So I'll just share the story of how my wife and I, when we had our first, our first child, our son,

at about four or five months, we decided to ferberize him.

I know this is a, you know, people debate about things.

Okay.

And how long did it take before your daughter's got it?

Well, I didn't want to do it.

Right.

Barack did it.

And I don't know that I could have done it because I wasn't sure about it.

The notion that you just let the little person that you've loved the most cry and cry and cry.

I couldn't even, and maybe it was something about

estrogen and my response to the crying.

So we set it up where Barack took the night shift.

I went to bed, which was helpful because it got me some sleep.

I would have to cover my ears so that I couldn't literally hear the crying.

And it took no longer than a week.

Exactly.

And it was really after the first two nights

that it, you know, because we started early.

How old was

it

when we weaned her off of breastfeeding, which was four months, five months?

So it was very early.

So she learned quickly.

The sooner, this is the point to Josie, the sooner that you start

sort of removing

the symptom, the quicker you start to implement the action, the more responsive the child is sooner.

Your family story is exactly my family story.

We read this book by Ferber about how it's about sleep training.

I forget the title.

But the key idea is so simple.

The key idea is all mammals sleep, all mammals dream, all mammals wake up briefly and go back to sleep, wake up briefly.

So we all do this.

And the infant has to learn, like, oh, I wake up, I can go back to sleep.

I don't need the breast.

I don't need to be rocked and held.

Like, you wake up, you go to to sleep.

Back to Josie's question.

So, yes, she's moody when you take it away.

And if you were to go cold turkey, it's going to be hard for a little while.

Now, you want to give her lots of other fun things to do.

And that brings us to the second thing I said.

So I said, dopamine, and then friends, and then stories.

So

the devices are more engaging than anything in the real world.

They're more engaging even than your friends in the short run.

But in the long run, you have a lot more fun out with an afternoon with your friends than you do an afternoon on TikTok.

And so

we have to not just be taking away the screens from our kids.

We have to be giving them back a fun and exciting childhood.

So I'd say to Josie, find someone, find some other, some girl who your daughter knows and talk to their parents.

This year, now that everyone's talking about the book, everyone's talking about this, you will find some other parents who agree with you and form a pact

where you're going to say, you know what, we're going to try to get our daughters together

fairly unsupervised.

Like you drop them off, you know, I'll be there, but we'll let them play.

You know, at seven, they don't need constant supervision.

So, the more you can give them, give them

fun, real-world analog friendship, the easier it is to wean them off the screens.

That's the second principle.

And then the third is stories, because I'm not saying some people interpret me to be saying, oh, you know, screens are the devil, never let them watch screens.

And in the book, I didn't say a lot to counter that view, but now I'd like to, which is what I'm coming to see in thinking about this and dealing with my own kids

is this insight, which is that humans are storytelling animals.

That's who we are.

Every culture, we tell stories, we raise our kids on stories, we have myths, we have religion, so stories are good.

And a TV screen is a pretty good way to present stories.

And so if you, so the, so here's the best thing you could do: watch a 90-minute movie with your kid or the siblings together.

So watching a long story in a social setting on a TV set, that's great.

I'm not saying five hours a day, but you know, even an hour or two a day is probably fine.

Not for two, three-year-olds, but you know, by seven, eight, fine.

Here's what's really bad.

Not a TV screen, but a touchscreen device, which is not just entertainment, it's training your child because they touch, they get a reward.

They get the dope.

They touch, they get a reward.

And before you know it, they're addicted.

So touchscreen device is much worse than a TV.

Watching it alone is much worse than watching it with a friend.

And watching short stuff and moving around a lot is fragmenting your attention, whereas watching a movie is teaching you to pay attention to a story for 90 minutes.

So what I would say is, don't think about screen time.

Think about story time and fragmenting time.

How much story time should your kids have?

I don't know the answer, but you know, I mean, an hour a day should be fine.

Watching movies.

So story time is generally a good thing.

Just don't go too far.

how much fragmenting time should how much time on tick tock should they have i think zero i think zero is a pretty good number for fragmenting time

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You know, you talk about dopamine for kids.

You know,

as I hear Josie's question, I hear the question, the parenting question,

the new parenting trap,

which is parents suffer from this dopamine thing too, when it comes to parenting, because we want instant reward response from our children.

We don't want to wait.

We don't want to do the longer haul thing.

You know, a lot of times we have to ask ourselves, are we doing this for our kids or are we doing this for us?

Because

we have the screen too.

And

we're being trained on that instant gratification that

maybe the 90-minute story is a problem for us because we can't sit still.

The bottom line is that we've got to get tougher.

We've got to get more resilient for our kids.

Because I know time and time again that a lot of parents do what's easy for them,

you know, and not necessarily what's best for the kid.

The intent is there, the love is there, but I think we've gotten really confused that

we're kind of hooked on instant gratification.

That's right.

You know, we want silence, we want, we, we want everybody,

harmony, instant harmony.

Craig, what were you saying?

No, I was, I was just thinking about how our parents parented and what my mom would say about saying no

is that it's not just saying no.

It's holding your no accountable.

It is

explaining why you're saying no, and it's outlasting your kids.

And that is what I see that parents aren't doing today.

And I wanted to get your take on that.

And maybe there's a way we can help Josie because

you have to be able to outlast a whatever year old as an adult.

That's how I look at it.

I am not going to let a two-year-old or a six-month-old or a 15-year-old outlast me on something that I know is right.

That's right.

There's so much in what you both just said.

So I'll start with this idea of outlasting.

So the key idea I want to put on the table here is called anti-fragility.

We treat our kids as if they're fragile and we don't want any harm to come to them.

We don't realize or we forget, which our parents knew, is that our kids are anti-fragile, which means they actually need to fall down sometimes.

So they learn how to not fall down.

They need to be in fights.

They learn how to get, you know, how to deal with it.

They need to be excluded sometimes.

They learn how to deal with exclusion.

We can't be jumping in all the time.

You want to frustrate your kids every day because learning to deal with frustration is how you create.

an adult that other people are going to want to hire or marry.

Well, this is, we talk about this all the time.

So the one thing I would say to Josie, you know, understand that your children are not your friends.

You love them deeply.

And if you do it right, if you set some boundaries now, give them a lot of no's with a lot of love and a lot of encouragement.

But if you set really clear boundaries that you believe in and you stick to all the time,

all the time, kids are just, they are waiting for you.

That's right.

They need structure.

They respond to it.

And they're waiting for you to go back on your word.

They're waiting to see how long it will take.

How many times can I outlast you?

Because as I say, they got time on their hands.

Kids don't have jobs.

They have no responsibility.

They're not paying bills.

All they have time for is to outlast you.

To wear you down.

To wear you down.

That's right.

That's well put.

That's really well put.

The way you described it makes me think of Dr.

Becky Kennedy talks about a lot about this, about your job as a parent, your job is to set the boundaries and choose what's safe and what's proper for their development.

Their job is to experience negative emotions and learn how to deal with it.

They can't have everything they want.

And she uses the analogy of, in some ways, you're the pilot of an airplane.

The pilot is not our friend.

The pilot is not there to make us feel good.

If I'm flying to LA and there's terrible weather in LA and the pilot says, I'm sorry, we're going to have to reroute to Salt Lake.

He's like, no, no, I need to get to L.A.

And the pilot is like, oh, yeah, I don't want to let you down.

Okay, we'll go to L.A.

Like, no, no, no.

And so if you get, if the pilot gets new information that's relevant to the safety of the passengers, it is obligatory for the pilot to take that into account and do what's in the interest of the passengers in terms of their safety.

So similarly,

we all gave our kids, most of us gave our kids screens way too early, the touch screens.

We didn't know.

And now we have new information.

And it's like, you know, you know, a storm system over LA.

We can't land there.

And so I would say to Josie, I know it's really painful.

It's difficult to take the iPad away, but you can do it.

You can say, I've got new information and I love you too much to let you have this thing change your brain.

I can also say,

I'm now working with a lot of Gen Z.

So there's so many wonderful things about Gen Z.

They see the problem.

They understand what's happening to them.

A lot of them want to fix it.

They want to address it.

A lot of them are writing about it.

You will often find members of Gen Z who say in their 20s, talk to the ones in their 20s, and they will often say,

I'm so glad my parents didn't give me a a phone or social media until later.

What you'll never hear is a 23-year-old Gen Z saying, I wish my parents had given me a smartphone and social media in middle school.

So it's hard now, but stick it out and find a couple of other families.

It'll be so much easier because your kids are terrified of being the only ones.

Craig, you as a coach, you know, you've also seen this.

And some parents will be able to see themselves.

I would echo everything you said and then layer on top your theory of anti-fragility.

And sports was always the place where you sort of had some,

where you learned how to deal with adversity.

Toughening.

And I am just amazed at the number of parents who are trying to shield their children from that adversity.

And those are the biggest lessons that I think you learn in sports.

And this new wave of children, they don't understand really what team is

because they're all independent contractors puppeted by their parents.

Right.

Oh, no.

And

so that's what I'm seeing as a coach.

And it just,

it worries me.

And it makes me think,

how can we encourage parents to set these boundaries and that these knows and sometimes over-know it,

but understand we're doing this the right way and

and not turn them into these swooping in yeah helicopter parents.

I've got four kids, two older, two who are still

15 and 13 and 32 and 28.

And

I've tried to parent them the same ways, right?

Right.

There's there's hard parenting and then there's an explanation for why we're doing it the way we're doing it.

And, but to get back to this, to this screen time stuff,

the 32 and 28-year-olds, they didn't, to your point, they didn't have the smartphones yet.

Right.

They didn't go through puberty with them.

They didn't go through puberty with them.

So it was really easy to say, okay, no phones until you got to high school.

No social media stuff until you got to 16.

It was really easy because there were more people like that.

But it would have been easy for the way we were raised, it would have been easy to say it anyway.

Because with our younger kids, I have seen exactly what you said.

And I've seen it through my own eyes because when people send me a TikTok and I look at that and I'm cracking up, I flip to the next one and I know better.

I know.

And I'm cracking up again and I flip to the next one.

And then I realize my 15 and 13 year old, they don't have the willpower.

They have a little, they have less willpower than I do.

So we have gotten to the point where it's one hour of social media

or one hour of Instagram.

That's all they have is Instagram.

Every day.

So that's seven days a week?

One hour a day.

Seven days a week.

Seven, seven.

No, on the weekend, on the weekend, we're so busy,

we can say, you can spend as much time as you want, knowing they don't have any time to spend on it.

So it's, it's a little triceration there where we're like making them feel like, oh, man, we can't wait till the weekend comes.

But when they're, when

I'm, I'm thinking about what you were saying about the dopamine, the friends, and the stories.

The friends part for us is

we've got a good group of close friends.

who are operating the same way.

Great.

Do the kids hang out with each other in person?

They hang out in person.

Fantastic.

And they play games together online.

Oh, online.

Can you?

But they still get together in person.

I mean, you know,

we're a sports family, so we've got the sports running around physical outside.

And in the wintertime, it's a little hard.

So

I wanted to hear more about what we can tell Josie on how to get back to

where she should be.

Because I am well aware of what you're talking about and it's hard.

Yeah.

So, okay, so I'll share a few ideas.

You know, and I'll share my own experience and my own mistakes.

So, when I started this whole project, I was focused on social media as the bad thing.

And I was in a debate with other researchers who were saying, well, total screen time doesn't correlate as much.

And so, I thought, okay, maybe it's not the phone, maybe it's just social media.

So, I did a really good job keeping my kids off social media until they were 16.

But

I didn't pay enough attention to the computer and the fact, and of course, also during COVID, they both were on their computer all day long.

What were they doing?

They were watching The Office and other shows on Netflix over and over and over again.

They spent, I mean, you know, thousands of hours they spent just watching stuff when we thought they were in school.

And so what I wish I had done, and here's a policy I would recommend to everybody with younger kids, and even to Josie, even though you've already given them an iPad.

I think the policy should be no screens in the bedroom ever.

You start off with that policy when they're young.

You make a clean out.

Now, you can still have a screen in your bedroom because don't worry, your kids will point it out, but they're not really copying you.

They want to do what other kids are doing.

So if you have a policy, no screens in the bedroom ever, which is what a lot of us had when we were kids, you couldn't have a television in your bedroom.

That'd be crazy.

That's right.

Now, at a certain point, maybe middle school, you're going to have to relent and say, okay, you can take your laptop into your bedroom, or you can take the family laptop.

into your bedroom to do home.

So you might relent, but establish the principle early that screens don't belong in bedrooms.

Bedrooms are are a place to sleep.

They're a place to do hobbies or whatever else you do.

My daughter has a sewing machine in her bedroom.

So I wish I had done that.

And Josie can still do that.

So you can certainly put restrictions on.

And that's where, and what some people who study this, you know, the really terrible things, the talking with sextortionists, with people who are blackmailing you, with people who are after sex or money, that especially happens overnight.

When kids are in bed with a phone under the blanket and for hours and hours and they're missing out on sleep.

So no screens in the bedroom ever.

You can start with, have that policy.

And the other thing is beware of the seven day a week thing because

an hour a day, seven days a week, that is enough to get the brain kind of adapted to it and the habit.

And so, you know, I can't prove this yet, but I think a wiser policy is to have some like just on weekends.

Like, you know, I didn't let my son play any video games when he was in sixth grade, any online video games.

And he does kind of resent me for that because that's where all the boys were.

Yeah, now 10-15% of those boys got addicted, their brains are changed, they might be diminished for life.

So, you know, I'm not, I don't think I necessarily made the wrong decision.

But what I could have done is to say to my son, you can play Fortnite for one hour a day on Saturday and one hour a day on Sunday.

Then at least he could talk with other boys about the game.

He could have.

So,

I would just say, beware of anything that's every day.

If you have clear boundaries, there's a lot less fighting.

Whereas if it's in in every day,

there's more risk of addiction.

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Well, the real, you know, the unavoidable aspect to all of this, unfortunately, for Josie, is that there will be parental pain.

Yeah.

You know, and I, and I just think that, you know, why I spend so much time talking about that is that I think that in addition to social media,

the tech industry, the way people's minds work,

that we have to become a little more resilient as parents.

Yeah, we have to become tougher.

We have to become tougher for the sake of our kids.

And I just don't think that there's any way around making this easy for parents.

And I think that that's what we parenting is never easy.

It's not supposed to be.

And it's not fun.

All of it is going to be really, really hard and not physically hard.

Not, it's going to be emotionally

one of the toughest things you do because the

little child that you brought into this world that you will love beyond anything you can imagine.

That's right.

You will be disappointing them and

scaring them and making them hurt and arguing with them, doing all the things that you don't want to do with your best friends.

But in the end, as parents, you know, we are responsible for securing the safety and the health of the children we bring into this world.

And that means once we know that something isn't good for them, you know, and now what you're saying, we know, even though there are arguments, we are getting the data, and we are seeing it with our own eyes in our own homes that this generation of children, they are more depressed, they are struggling with anxiety.

the higher rates of suicide.

I mean,

if these weren't real statistics, we wouldn't be talking about this.

That's right.

But there is a connection.

We do know that now.

We didn't know that, you know, one generation ago, but we have the data now.

And so that means that we've got to do the hard thing.

We've got to take the substance from the addict.

Yeah, that's right.

And it's not going to be fun.

That's right.

But what I can promise parents is that it's going to be easier going forward than it was a year or two ago.

Yeah.

Because this, the danger began to be coming into view around 2019.

And Gene Twanky, who really first diagnosed this in her book, iGen, 2017, she and I were saying by 2019, what kids really need is a lot less time on screens, a lot more time outdoors playing.

And then COVID comes in and what do they get?

In New York City, they locked the playgrounds.

It was horrible.

All kids could do was sit and rot on their screens all day.

So we were confused for a number of years.

And during that time, a lot of resignation set in in parents.

People saying, What are you going to do?

The gene is out of the bottle.

The toothpaste is out of the tooth.

The train's left the station.

The technology is here to stay.

People felt powerless.

And Josie, and Josie conveyed that too.

We all feel powerless when we try to do it alone.

What I can promise you, Josie, what I can promise all the parents out there is if you step up now,

if you say, if you talk to other parents, you're going to find allies.

If you talk to your students,

your kids' teachers, you're going to find allies.

Talk to the principal, you're going to find allies.

If you initiate something,

you're going to find people are ready to stand up.

And it doesn't matter if they're on the left or the right.

We're all united by being parents.

We're all united by being human beings.

And as you're saying, like, we see what it's doing to us.

We have problems with it.

And so, of course, it's wreaking havoc on our kids' development.

John, before we sort of sum up for Josie's sort of next steps for her,

in

the

realm of making the changes changes that you talked about, sort of the

not seven days a week, have you seen or is there any data or have you seen anecdotally where

you've seen results in teenagers where they've been able to turn it around?

Oh, yes.

So there's hope.

Oh, yes.

Oh, my goodness.

I'm so glad you asked this question

because sometimes I go on about the mental illness and it all seems so depressing and so terrible.

And parents with younger kids love my book.

Okay, we're on this, we're doing this and that.

Parents with teenagers who already have a phone, they're like, oh my God, what have we done?

So let me give everybody some hope here.

I teach, I'm a professor at New York University.

I teach a course in a business school called Flourishing for the undergraduates and a version called Work, Wisdom, and Happiness for the MBA students who are older.

And what I find over and over again with the undergraduates is: first, as I said, they're not in denial.

They know there are problems.

They want to grow.

They want mentorship.

They want to be successful.

And so if you, once you get them on board on the project and you lay out, you know, the course is designed around three goals.

We're going to try to make you stronger, smarter, and more sociable.

And stronger means emotionally stronger.

And they, they, they, yes, they want to do that.

And then we go through some of the foundations.

Like, okay, let's, let's look at the foundations of flourishing.

Are you getting enough sleep?

And a third of them are not.

And so, okay, you guys, you need to work on your sleep first.

If you're getting six hours or less and you're feeling tired during the day, you got to start there.

And there's a national epidemic of sleeplessness, which causes loss of learning,

mental health problems.

So we say, okay, you start working on your sleep.

How many of you are spending more than two hours a day on social media?

And that'll be like a quarter or a third of them.

But my students who are hooked on social media,

in every class, there's always one kid who's spending six hours a day on TikTok, six hours a day just on TikTok.

And when they, and they're 19 years old, when they, for their project, they say, okay, I'm going to quit, or I'm going to reduce it to, you know, even just one hour, they get the most spectacular results.

And what always happens is they report all these other benefits that they didn't even expect.

You know, like, I can do my homework.

Like, I used to think I had no time for homework, but now I get my homework done and I have three hours left in the evening.

So I go out with a friend.

Oh, good, you're going out with a friend.

That's great.

Um,

and and they just become more confident because you can't do anything in this life if you don't have your attention.

Yeah, and these are business students, they want to be successful, so it starts with regain control of your attention.

And if you do that, you can then go on and do great things.

So, I want to reassure everybody out there that while it's going to be tough for Gen Z overall because we deprive them of a lot of these growth experiences we're talking about, but any single one of them who commits to regaining their attention, cultivating healthy habits, they're going to get amazing results.

The brain isn't really done sort of like locking down into its adult form until around age 25 is when the frontal prefrontal cortex finishes.

So, if you have a late teenager or kid in early 20s, they can really turn their lives around.

I mean, look, we can all turn it.

Humans are amazing.

You can turn your life around at 30 or 42, but it's going to be a lot easier if you do it while you're still below 25.

Yeah.

Well, that's great.

That's good.

Good.

Well, thanks for that because we needed that.

But

we've covered a whole lot of really neat stuff here for Josie.

And I want to make sure that I don't leave anything out.

I think

the

most important thing for Josie that I heard was you can't be afraid to say no.

And you can't be afraid to start over and say, okay, this is how we're going to operate.

That's right.

That's one thing.

And the no screens in the bedroom.

That's easy.

That's definitely an easy one, right?

But it's a revelation to a lot of people because that's a lot of us have given in on.

Well, but also, John, a point that you made is that some adults don't do it because they have TVs in their bedrooms, right?

And this is another thing.

Yeah.

No, life isn't fair.

That's right.

It's okay.

Look, if I drive a car, you don't.

Right.

Or even if even if mom's on the phone, right?

Because mom hasn't broken her addiction, you can say, yes, I'm doing it, but you have a different set of rules.

And the whole fairness

isn't fair.

And that's another another lesson for kids to learn.

That's right.

That's right.

Unfairness and how to deal with that.

And mom got to do something that I couldn't do or older sister got to do it.

I think it's okay for kids to have a different set of rules than their parents, especially if their parents can't break their own addiction.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Agreed.

Agreed.

And then just one more thing to add for Josie, just to really emphasize at the end here, is it isn't just about taking away the technology.

It's about restoring a play-based, exciting, amazing, fun, adventure-filled, risk-filled childhood.

So when you look at it that way, the deal is, yeah, I'm taking this away from you and it's going to hurt for a couple of weeks.

But you're going to have a lot more fun in your childhood.

And I've already talked with three of your friends' parents, and we're going to give you a better childhood.

So

yeah,

if you keep your eye on childhood, not just on the screens, then I think it's easier to see what you need to do.

And what childhood should look like, which is a lot of one-on-one play in real life.

What you guys talk about, I listened to, to prepare for this, I listened to a podcast discussion you guys did like five years ago.

So I was like, you guys just had a lot of fun together.

Well, it was you were each other's playmates.

Right.

It was the way you grew up.

I mean, I, I, you, you were raised that way.

Um, you know, we played a lot and we played unsupervised and we had to make stuff up and we had to, you know, we had to play with broken toys and learn how to fix them.

Fix them or how to make games with kids in the neighborhood.

You know, the playgroup model

is a good one.

That's how I survived the majority of my parenting.

You know, we developed.

great groups of

friends with kids in the same age.

And a lot of times all we had to do was put them in the basement.

That's right.

That's fine.

They'll find a way to entertain themselves.

So just two sources of information for all of your listeners.

One is please go to letgrow.org.

It's an organization I co-founded with Lenore Skinese, the woman who invented the term free-range kids that you were talking about.

So letgrow.org has all kinds of advice for families and schools on how to give your kid this fun, exciting childhood.

The other is the website for my book, but really it's become the website for the movement.

If you go to anxiousgeneration.com,

anxiousgeneration.com, in the upper right corner, there's a box that says take action.

And then there's a line for parents, a line for educators a line for legislators we have all kinds of tools to help you act collectively because that's what this is all about it's hard to act josie it's hard to act if you're totally alone i get that we all are facing that but if you but if we can do collective action then we can escape from this together yeah that's great great thank you john really appreciate you being here and uh there's probably more we could talk about so well we'll we'll maybe we'll get you back

in a healthy way Happy to come back.

Yeah, let's do an update on parenting and coaching and

see how it all works out.

See some progress.

Well, thanks again.

Great advice.

Michelle, thank you, Craig.

Thank you.

Hey there, it's Michelle and Craig.

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