The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right

migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.

Botox, onobotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start.

It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month.

It prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo.

Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor.

Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms.

Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition.

Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk.

Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck, and injection side pain, fatigue, and headache.

Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness.

Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection.

Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

Why wait?

Ask your doctor, visit BotoxchronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

This podcast is supported by Progressive, a leader in RV Insurance.

RVs are for sharing adventures with family, friends, and even your pets.

So if you bring your cats and dogs along for the ride, you'll want Progressive RV Insurance.

They protect your cats and dogs like family by offering up to $1,000 in optional coverage for vet bills in case of an RV accident, making it a great companion for the responsible pet owner who loves to travel.

See Progressive's other benefits and more when you quote RVinsurance at progressive.com today.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, pet injuries, and additional coverage and subject to policy terms.

What's up?

What are you up to?

I mean, not much.

Like, I just got home.

I'm going to do my laundry soon and then pack.

Uh-huh.

All right.

You're leaving Sunday.

Yeah.

What's

what are you typing?

I'm just chatting with friends.

Like,

wait, you're chatting with friends while we're doing this video.

I do this all the time.

Don't worry about it.

So you're going to chat with friends throughout this interview.

Have we started the interview yet?

No, we haven't.

Okay.

Oh my God.

Tell me when you're ready.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

And that is my 20-year-old child, Jacob.

I'm ready.

Wait, how long will this take?

Sorry.

This is basically how it goes with me and Jacob.

I always think it's just me and them talking, and I'm always surprised to learn that there's someone else in the room.

The feeling is like when you're at a party and you're talking to someone and their eyes are scanning for someone more interesting.

Okay,

so what would you say that most of our fights are about?

I mean, I don't know how to get more specific than phone usage, but I think it might also be phone usage while also not paying attention to something important.

Right.

Phone usage.

And then...

Is this a leading question?

No, no, no, no.

I am genuinely trying to figure out how close my perception is to your perception.

Okay.

What would you say is

my position or maybe your parents' position?

And what is your position in this fight?

I mean, I think most of the time when I'm on my phone, my friends are in the phone and

the idea is that there is a real world out there that I should be paying attention to because it is more immediate and

I can't really come back to it in the same way, I guess.

I see.

Okay, so you recognize that, like, there's a world in your phone, there's a world outside.

That is probably more important to me.

What's more important to you?

The world on the phone.

And I'm irritated because I think the world outside should be more important to you.

Is that like a fair summary?

Maybe, yes.

There's this expression that this MIT professor who writes about stuff has, we are forever elsewhere.

Do you think that's true?

Does that bother you?

Does it bother me?

No, I mean, that's just how I am.

Like, I just do that.

I think about other stuff.

Like, does it feel distracting or like your mind isn't?

Are you online again?

I just, that was only a brief exchange.

I'll close Discord.

Hold on.

I'm not sure Jacob is typical.

Although, given what the latest research is showing about how phones intrude into kids' lives, they might not be that atypical.

Jacob is autistic and did not glide easily into middle and high school social dynamics.

It was always just much easier for them to have fun with friends online.

But I've been pretty typical as a parent trying to figure out what to enforce around phones.

Jacob and their siblings were part of a guinea pig generation, the first kids to get smartphones during puberty.

And we, the parents, knew nothing.

We had no wisdom to go by.

We just watched as they dove in deeper and deeper and had no idea if this was excellent and fresh and creative or totally ruinous.

When did you first get your cell phone?

I remember waking up to look at my phone and see the results of the 2016 election.

So it was at least before then.

Yeah.

Okay.

How would you say it changed your

over time?

It absolutely made me feel more connected with social media and particularly Discord.

Can you say more about that?

I mean, I did not really feel like I had any real friends before that point, even though I allegedly did.

Did you ever feel like you started to compare yourself to other people or anything like that?

I've been doing that since I was born, baby.

What does that mean?

What do you mean?

I mean,

I don't know if the internet ever brought that habit.

I think it's just a habit.

Like,

maybe it started to be negative when metrics got involved, I think.

What do you mean?

Well, I mean, like, if I get, if I do something funny that I think is funny on twitter.com and only get one like for it or it's whatever.

You know what I mean?

Right, right.

It would be like you, like in school, it's vague, like who likes you, who sits next to you or whatever.

But then on social media, it's like really specific.

In school, I'm not even paying attention to that stuff.

But on social media, you are.

Yeah.

In 2017, about a year after Jacob got their first phone, The Atlantic published the story, have smartphones destroyed a generation?

Destroyed.

That is a big word.

I don't know many parents who look at their kid and think, you're destroyed.

But now in 2024, the question of have smartphones destroyed a generation is less of a question and more of a, yeah, actually, they probably did.

All right.

Is Hannah on already?

Hey, it's me.

It's hi.

It's Hannah.

I've just been listening.

Yes, it's Hannah.

I'm sorry.

It's Hannah Rosen.

It could be Hannah Rausen, but it's not.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, and I'm John Height.

It's often John Haidt, but John Haidt.

So I talked to social psychologist Jonathan Height.

Oh, John Haidt.

I've been calling John Haidt, so John Heights.

Half the world does, yeah.

Okay.

Height has a new book called The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

Like a lot of parents, I keep up with this research.

And for the sake of household peace, I would like to dismiss all this stuff about teens and smartphones as alarmist.

But Heidi's book compiles some pretty compelling data.

The way I understand your research over the last 10, 15 years is that you have been trying to

prevent,

you have been trying to counter the argument of alarmism with extremely specific data.

I mean, that's how I understand the point of this book.

Exactly.

Sometimes it is correct to be alarmed.

And as a professor and social scientist, I want to make damn sure that if I'm going to tell people they should be alarmed, I better be right and I better be able to back it up.

One of the big things that Height looked at was data from a national survey called Monitoring the Future.

It's a wide-ranging survey that dates back to the 70s and it asks 8th, 10th, and 12th graders a bunch of questions.

Everything from what they think of the government to their attitudes towards drugs and alcohol use.

But what Height was most interested in were questions tracking mental health.

In the survey, students are given statements and then agree or disagree with them on a scale of one to five.

On Modern of the Future, there's some really sad items about meaninglessness, hopelessness.

It's like, I often feel that my life is meaningless, or I feel that my life has no purpose.

Or I'm feeling lonely and socially isolated at school.

I mean, they're quite, they're in a language, I think, that is relatable.

I mean, that's why I wanted to talk about them.

It's sentences that a teenager could relate to.

That's right.

So if you plot with the year on the x-axis going back to the 90s or sometimes the 70s, and then you plot a bunch of lines, and then what you see is the numbers, you know, they sort of, the lines bounce around.

A number of them, they really do go down a bit.

They're sloping down.

Down is good.

Like down is like, you know, I don't agree with that.

I don't feel depressed.

Fewer people say that, or fewer people agree with those depressing statements.

That's right.

And this is also a period when suicide rates are dropping.

Gen X had the highest suicide rates in history.

For whatever reason, the millennials are actually doing better than Gen X.

And that's very clear when when you look at the 90s and the 2000s.

So you get flat lines or you get lines sloping down.

And if you cut off your data collection after 2010, no hint of a problem.

Now in 2010, teens are just beginning to get iPhones.

But what's remarkable to me is that the mental health data doesn't get worse slowly.

The mental health data is fine in the 2000s.

And then all of a sudden, like right around 2012, 2013, everything falls off a cliff.

I just want to track the timeline because I think these are such short periods that people are thinking in their head, okay, what happened then?

What happened then?

So 2012 is the wide acceptance of cell phones.

Is that because it's not when smartphones

came around?

So the iPhone comes out in 2007.

Yeah.

But it's just amazing in that it's a digital Swiss army knife and there were no apps other than the ones that came with it.

And then the next year we get the App Store and now and then we get notifications.

So it's not until 2010, 2011 that you have this thing in your pocket, which is not a digital Swiss Army knife that you pull out when you need something.

It is now a portal that millions, millions of companies now can use to get to you as a child without your parents' permission or knowledge.

They can get to you.

They can send you notifications.

They can try to get you to stop your homework and come look what someone just said about you.

So it's in the 2010s that the phone becomes a master rather than a servant.

2010 is also when Instagram is available for public use.

2010 is also when the front-facing camera is put on.

Also, high-speed internet.

By 2012, 2013, most people do have high-speed internet.

So the point is, between 2010, when phones weren't toxic, people weren't on Instagram, most people didn't have high-speed data, 2010, things were fine.

By 2015, everything's different.

For example, what happens if you're a kid and you make a mistake?

Heid admits that childhood wasn't perfect before the invention of the smartphone.

Obviously, the smartphone didn't invent bullying.

But now, the act of growing up and everything that comes with it is on display for thousands and possibly millions to see, including your mistakes.

There's a huge difference between practicing all these things on a small stage, not a stage, let's say in a small group, where mistakes are not very costly.

So you say something stupid and then your friend is is mad at you and then maybe she gives you the cold shoulder.

Maybe she even starts a rumor about you.

So that's the way it always was.

That's very painful, but it's still relatively low stakes.

What happens when now it's on a stage where if you say anything wrong or you anger anyone, she can find an ugly photo of you.

Maybe she can find a nude photo that you swapped with some boy.

And now she can put it out there for the world to see.

and thousands of people comment on it.

It might even get into the newspapers or something like that.

This is a level of shame and humiliation that no teenager can stand.

And this, I think, is one of the reasons why the suicide rate is up because when you are being publicly shamed on a big stage,

life is a living hell and death is an escape.

But we don't actually know how many suicides are related to social media shaming, just to be no, no, that's right.

Because thankfully suicide is still very, very rare.

But what we can say is that it's up for all groups of teenagers.

It's way, way up for preteen girls.

They have very low rates to begin with, but their rates have tripled since before 2010.

So it's way up.

And even if it's anecdotal, that is, even if, because so few kids killed themselves, but you know, we saw all those parents at the Senate here.

Parents who were against maddening.

Because their kids are dead.

They think

they saw it happen.

They can see what happened.

The kid

was bullied, shamed, sextorted.

She was on web pages promoting self-harm and suicide.

Are they all wrong?

I don't think so.

After the break, Heid offers some solutions for what we should do.

We the schools, we the government, and we the parents about the smartphone problem.

After which, I asked Jacob if they wish they'd never had a cell phone.

CRM was supposed to improve customer relationships.

Instead, it's shorthand for can't resolve much.

Which means you may have sunk a fortune into software that just bounces customer issues around, but never actually solves them.

On the ServiceNow AI platform, CRM stands for something better.

With AI built into one platform, customers aren't mired in endless loops of automated indifference.

They get what they need when they need it.

Bad CRM was then.

This is ServiceNow.

Say hello to the next generation of Zendesk AI agents, built to deliver resolutions for everyone.

Zendesk AI agents easily deploy in minutes, not months, to resolve 30% of customer and employee interactions on day one, quickly turning monotonous tasks into autonomous solutions.

Loved by over 10,000 companies, Zendesk AI makes service teams more efficient, businesses run better, and your customers happier.

That's the Zendesk AI effect.

Find out more at Zendesk.com.

It's the early 2010s.

And according to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, this is around the time the teen mental health starts tanking.

Heid believes that the uptick in depression, anxiety, and self-harm in young people, it all got really bad when the first teenage girl moved her life online.

She downloaded Instagram, posted on Tumblr, and started checking obsessively for comments and likes.

And some of her friends did too, so that now their consciousness, their focus was hours a day on their phones and what's happening in the virtual world.

That's when the problems start.

That's the great rewiring of childhood.

You get much less eye contact, social contact.

It all goes through the screen.

Okay, so the key factor here that shifted is

real-time socialization, eye contact, social cues, laughter.

Laughter, navigating the real-time reactions of people.

That's what you're saying is the key difference.

It's being real-time in person with your peers.

Yes, there are about 15 different causal pathways.

There are many ways that the phone-based life is harming boys and girls.

But if I had to pick one, that would be the one.

You know, here I am.

I'm a 60-year-old man talking about kids these days.

You'd think that I'm wrong, right?

You know, you'd think that what do I know?

You'd think that with all the talk about, you know, let's raise the age to 16, let's not let kids have smartphones till 14, these are the things I say.

You'd think that somewhere on planet Earth, there would be a young person who would write an essay saying this is wrong.

I can't find that person.

I found one essay from a woman in Canada that kind of defended it.

Wait, wait, wait a minute.

Just wait, just one question.

I mean, there are plenty of teenagers who would say the phone opened up whole new worlds to me that were not available to me before.

Sure, for individuals, they might say that about themselves, but find me any kind of movement or even any individual who is arguing.

No, grown-ups, you don't understand.

Don't take away our social media.

Don't stop 11-year-olds from being on it.

You know, middle school kids should have access.

I can't find that.

Now, maybe there's a TikTok video somewhere where they do that.

But each generation,

if you try to raise the drinking age, at some point, I bet somebody wrote something saying, no, don't raise the drinking age.

So my point is,

don't just listen to the correlational data.

Don't just listen to the experimental data, which we haven't even talked about.

Don't just listen to the parents.

Don't just listen to the teachers, all of whom are speaking with almost one voice.

This is messing up our kids.

Talk to the kids.

And what you find is while many will say that they enjoy the social connections on Instagram or TikTok, they'll say they enjoy it, but they don't say, and it's good for us overall.

But some of it is, I mean, to me, it's a little complicated.

Like I have a child who would say they were addicted, but also would say that

you know, online is where they found their friends and where they found people who shared their interests.

And that's something they couldn't do in real life.

And I find it hard to very simply say it's all terrible because I also see the ways in which it's rewired childhood in a way that I can't personally access because I don't have a lot of friends that I just know online, but in a way that's also real.

That's right.

So it greatly increases the quantity of social interactions.

That's true.

And it greatly decreases their quality.

But here's the thing.

If you were right that it's opening up all these possible social relationships, it's doing all this good.

If you were right, then loneliness should have gone down in the 2010s.

And it didn't.

It goes up like a hundred.

Right.

And I suppose you could have some kids for whom that's true, but the vast majority of kids are not true.

Yeah.

So the last section I want to talk about is solutions.

I think part of the reason that people resist your argument or want to think of it as alarmist is because the solution seems completely out of reach.

Like if I'm a teenager,

easy.

I mean, if I'm a teenager, I'm listening to this.

I'm thinking, this is culture.

This is the world we live in.

These companies are bigger than I am.

The social culture is bigger than I am.

The emotional culture is bigger than I am.

There aren't any particular government regulations on any of this.

All my friends are here.

So, for you to tell me, you know, okay, go back and play in the woods, it's like with whom and when.

Like, that just seems like a non-starter.

Okay, so, Hannah, I have been involved since college in many efforts to bring about social change.

I ran a gun control group in Connecticut in the 80s.

That was hard.

To change people's minds is really, really hard.

You know what's easy?

Walking into a situation where most people want to change, they don't like what's happening, they just need a coordination device.

They just need an escape path out of a collective action problem.

And then I can come along and I can say, here's your path.

Let's just do it.

Let's do it at the same time.

And then it's easy.

Okay, and I'm exaggerating a little bit, but compared to other kinds of social change, this one we can solve in the next year or two.

So here's how we do it.

The reason why so many of us give our kids a smartphone in sixth grade is because she comes to us and says, Dad, everyone else has a smartphone.

I'm being left at.

So that's a collective action problem.

So what I'm proposing in the book is four norms, and this, it won't solve it entirely, but it'll roll it back most of the way.

Four norms.

The first norm, no smartphone till high school.

Let's clear this all out of middle school.

Middle school kids desperately need a more old-fashioned childhood where they have a few close friends and they talk and they gossip and they do other things face-to-face.

So this is a parental culture.

You can't legislate that no one can have a cell phone.

That's right.

We're saying change a parental culture.

Yep.

That's right.

So that's the first norm.

The second norm, no social media till 16.

These platforms are just completely inappropriate.

Kids should not be growing up on a stage.

Have you tried that experiment?

Yeah.

Well, yes.

I told my kids no social media in middle school.

And my son finally opened his own Instagram account without telling me in 10th grade.

But he'd proven himself so responsible and he was on the track team, which is great.

And so they needed to communicate.

And he was already at that time, whatever, 14, 15.

So I said, okay, that's okay.

But for my daughter, I've said absolutely not no to Instagram or to Snapchat.

Until what age?

Well, for now, I've said 16.

And I'm hopeful that this norm, so I have to kind of like publicize the book really quickly.

She's now 14, so I better get this norm changed next year so that she'll be able to put up with it.

But anyway.

And do you know that she's not?

No, there's no, I mean, the anyway is the difficult part.

I feel like once you get into the weeds,

this is what happens.

Like you will forbid a kid.

They can start an Instagram account under any name that you would have no idea about.

Yes.

And so, you know, she watches TikTok on a web browser.

She doesn't have it on her phone.

But we don't need perfect here.

What we need is to break the norm.

We need to break the pattern where in every free moment, the phone comes out and TikTok and Instagram go up.

That's what we we have to stop.

Third norm is phone-free schools.

There is nothing good that comes from kids having the greatest distraction device ever built in their pockets during class.

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

If you're going to take away the phone-based childhood, if you're going to greatly cut back on screen usage, we can't just let them look at the wall.

We can't just say, well, go read a book, go, you know, learn to make canoes or something.

We have to give them back back each other.

That's what they really want.

That's where they thrive is when they can play and hang out with other kids without adults telling them what to do.

So those are the four norms.

Yeah.

No smartphone till high school, no social media till 16, phone-free schools, more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.

There's so the reason I'm asking all these questions is because there is this, this book is coming out called The Anxious Generation.

And it basically, its argument is that, this is what he writes, is as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.

And the argument is that rapes of depression, mental health issues, all kinds of things just like

skyrocketed, you know?

Like kids became less able to get a lot of people.

Have you paid attention to the world lately?

What do you mean?

Like

everything sucks.

I don't think that social media is the cause of that, but social media definitely made people more aware of that.

And it was going to start happening no matter what we did about it.

I don't know about the phones.

And do you,

do you think that,

like, I look back and think, should we have put more restrictions?

Like, we tried one time and it was, you know, warfare, but should we have tried harder?

What kind of, well, what kind of restrictions do you mean by that?

Like, forced you to not have your phone at night, you know, put your, like, just realistically, yeah, that probably would have helped at some point, but like,

it's too late now.

Oh, God, I feel so bad.

And so, so, I mean, how do you think your life would have been different if you didn't have a phone?

I think I would have been a lot unhappier, generally.

A lot unhappier.

Yeah.

The story that it sounds like you tell about your life and social media is, so I got my phone,

you know, it gave me a pathway to socializing and social connection.

Yeah.

That pathway is addictive,

but, you know, it's less lonely.

Because at least I had a pathway to socializing.

Pretty much.

Can I propose an alternative story and you just tell me what you think?

What if there's a story that you never got a cell phone?

Like you had, you were lonely and at some point you just would have been like had to socialize?

I don't think that's true.

I do not think I would have been pushed into it by necessity.

Because that's what always, like as a parent, honestly, that's what haunts me a little bit.

Like I remember when you came back from camp.

Remember that camp that you hated?

Yeah.

I remember picking you up from that camp.

Where was it?

Like in North Carolina or something?

Yeah.

Anyway, so we picked you up from that camp and that camp did not allow phones.

So like you didn't have your phone for a month or something.

Yes, I did not.

And you definitely wrote letters of misery from camp, like summer camp, I hate this place kind of letters.

But you were so chatty when we picked you up because you had not had your phone for a month.

And I know you hated that place, but I think about that all the time.

Like, what if we had just done some experiment of like Jacob can't have a phone for a long time?

Would you have been forced to socialize more?

I mean, I don't know how much I would actually follow through, but I might.

I don't know.

You don't know?

I like, there's no way to find out now.

I mean, my purpose in talking to you is like, there is this book.

It's written by grown-ups.

It's written by grown-ups who grew up after the internet age about teenagers.

And I like, I'm torn because part of me thinks,

like, I ruined Jacob's life by not taking their phone away more.

And part of me thinks these grownups don't understand kids and there's something we're all missing about.

I would not at all say you ruined my life by doing that.

Uh-huh.

I actually feel like I only got to live my life because of my phone.

Oh.

Oh.

And yeah, that probably sounds a little depressing.

And yeah.

But like, I don't know.

I think there might be an assumption among people who say stuff like this that everyone who's on the phone will is using it to replace real human interaction.

And I, I totally disagree with that.

Everything on the phone is real human interaction.

Well, most things.

There are things that are not.

And how typical do you think your experience is?

Very not typical.

Oh, very not typical.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

But I, you don't, you don't think I ruined your life then?

No.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you for saying that.

What are you going to do just now?

Get back online?

I mean, honestly, yeah, I probably will.

Okay.

Okay.

I'll stop the recording.

Actually, I maybe,

maybe I'll just go watch videos.

I don't know.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Janae West.

It was edited by Andrea Valdez, fact-checked by Sam Fentress, and engineered by Rob Smirciak.

Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Parents who are listening, please share with us creative strategies you've come up with to limit cell phone use without causing domestic warfare.

I'll give you mine.

When Jacob was younger, instead of saying, say, half an hour hour of screen time, Jacob, I would ask them when they thought they would be done with their video game or conversation.

So it might be like 36 minutes or 27 minutes, and that way they could finish out the game or the conversation, and the endpoint would feel more natural to them.

If you have one, send it to radioatlantic at theatlantic.com, and we will share our favorites.

Kids who are listening, If you have creative ideas, please share them too.

Thank you, Jacob, for playing along.

I'm Hannah Rosen, and thank the rest of you for listening.

Just to make sure you're all ready or if you need anything.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right, great.

All right.

Love you.

I'll talk to you later.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Take the next 30 seconds to invest in yourself with Vanguard.

Breathe in.

Center your mind.

Recognize the power you have to direct your financial future.

Feel the freedom that comes with reaching your goals and building a life you love.

Vanguard brings you this meditation because we invest where it matters most, in you.

Visit vanguard.com/slash investinginyou to learn more.

All investing is subject to risk.