Are Smartphones Harming Our Kids?

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It's 10 years after the introduction of the iPhone.

A generation of kids who've grown up with smartphones is now coming of age.

Research suggests these devices are taking a troubling toll on their mental health.

Are smartphones harming a generation?

Or just making parents paranoid?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hello, Hello, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

Here in DC with me, I've got Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

Hey, Matt.

Hi, Jeff.

And over there in New York, we've got Alex Wagner, contributing editor of The Atlantic and CBS Anchor.

Hi, Alex.

Aloha and mahalo, dudes.

That's not the language of New York City.

Well,

in some parts.

That is cultural appropriation.

Thank you very much.

So I have got a question for you both.

We're here for you, Matt.

Go on.

What generation do you each identify with?

Jeff?

The old generation.

I am part of the old generation.

That is not its official label.

I'm just an old.

I don't know.

I'm before all the...

I'm well after the greatest generation, but not yet at the shittiest generation.

I'm somewhere in the mediation.

I guess I'm the mediocre.

The mediocre generation.

There is an official label for your generation.

What is that?

And what is it?

I don't know.

I'm asking you.

I don't know.

Generation X, maybe?

No.

No, I'm not going to tell you how old I am, but I'm somewhere between 50 and 52.

I mean, you're not a boomer either.

I don't think so.

I think I just came at the cusp of boomering.

You are Generation X.

That's ridiculous.

But anyway, sorry to inform you.

Go on with your inquiry.

Alex, how about you?

You're not going to like my answer because it's very similar to Jeff's.

I'm also not divulging my age.

Late 30s.

But I'm right in the middle of Gen X.

I'm certainly not a millennial, but technically that's the generation that came after Generation X.

I guess I'll say Gen X, but that puts me and Jeff in the same generation.

Which is ridiculous.

That's ridiculous.

Ridiculous.

When I think of Jeff, I think of Dusty Bones.

Wait, he was a pitcher for the Braves.

I'm going to say, right?

Dusty Bones.

Alex, it sounds like you, like me, identify as a cusper in between

the millennial and Generation X.

When you were growing up, Jeff, How did they describe your generation?

They didn't describe our generation.

We just existed without without labels.

We just, it was a simpler time in American history.

Well, I'm going to read you a passage from a 1975 essay by Midge Dector called A Letter to the Young, and this would be you and their parents.

Fundamentally, she says, the question your parents have not dared to address in so many words, either to themselves or to their friends, and yet cannot any longer keep hidden behind some false front of approving good cheer, is the question that must surely at two o'clock in the morning be growing upon some of you as well.

It is, why have you, the children, found it so hard to take your rightful place in the world?

Just that.

Why have your parents' hopes for you come to seem so impossible to meet you?

I was 10 at the time that was written.

What was I supposed to do?

1975?

Yeah, I told you how old I was.

I said I'm between 50 and 52.

Yeah,

I was born in 65.

So that's what they said about you when you were growing up.

And I guess, Alex, for you, you might have been best described by an Arlie Hochschield essay from 2001, where she said, many members of Gen X and Gen Y, as we call them, seem to be trying out a version of the insecurity paradox.

On the one hand, they feel luckier than previous generations because they enjoy a bigger cultural menu from which to choose a lifestyle and identity and authentic self.

On the other hand, this new freedom comes with a new sense of insecurity, especially with regard to the two main anchors of identity, marriage and work.

You can marry, but will you stay married?

You can work at a job, but will you be able to stay in that job?

I thought you were going to just play me some script from Reality Bites because that was apparently the movie that captured my generation.

So, do you identify with any of those?

I mean, listen, listen, did I order the Blind Melon CD from Columbia House Records?

Did I have a plaid shirt and Doc Martins and attend one of the very first Lollapaloozas?

Sure.

Wait, go back to the Blind Melon part.

That was highly amusing.

I just,

I feel like there are other aspects to that generation in particular.

You know, the children, they were the latchkey generation, the children of divorce, they were MTV junkies, they were layabouts, they were cynics, very much captured in all the characters in reality bites by chance.

I feel like I'm more optimistic and actually organized and ambitious than I think the characterizations of Gen Xers would seem to leave room for.

Yeah.

So this is my point.

There is a long, rich tradition of Kids These Days essays about anxieties, about the upcoming generations, and are they going to turn out okay?

We recently had one of our contributors, Jean Twangy, take a thorough look at the rising generation of young Americans, kids who've lived their entire lives in an era when most adults have smartphones.

And what she found actually wasn't just your typical Kids These Days anxieties.

She found measurable shifts in how kids with smartphones were behaving, and she also found some pretty striking trends that suggest these devices, these smartphones, are taking a toll on kids' mental health.

I spoke with Gene Twenge by phone.

Let's listen to that interview.

Hi, Gene.

Hello.

Thank you for joining us.

Sure.

Your story in The Atlantic seems to make a pretty convincing case that the time kids are spending with their smartphones is taking a real toll on their mental health.

Walk me through how you arrived at this conclusion.

So

I've been researching generational differences for a while, about 25 years.

And I keep an eye on these big national yearly surveys that are done of teens.

I use those in my research.

And started to see some shifts, first in how teens spent their time and then in their mental health.

So I was working on a big project on kind of overall how are teens spending their time and has that differed over the generations and noticed this big shift away from spending time with friends in person across all kinds of different activities.

And then

not surprisingly, they're also spending more time online, so more time texting on the internet, on social media, and so so on.

And then a couple years later, I started to see this pattern of basically psychological well-being

going down.

So in this data set that I look at the most often, it was symptoms of depression started to spike and, you know, fairly big, sudden changes.

don't usually see that usually you see things kind of gradually change this was sudden made me think there was something anomalous going on but they kept going you know over you know the next two three three, four years.

So I saw the same thing with loneliness.

Happiness, which had been trending up for a while.

I wrote something for The Atlantic on how teens were actually getting happier, but then right around 2012, that also changed.

Happiness started to go down.

Clinical level depression among teens and a national screening survey started to go up around 2011 and kept going up.

And then suicide rates, which had also been trending down for a while and getting better,

started to go back up, particularly among teen girls.

It seemed to get started around 2007 and then again really get going around 2011 just like a lot of this other data.

So suffice to say there were all of these signs that something was going on with teens which made me wonder what?

What could it possibly be?

It occurred to me later in looking online, well, wait a second, the Pew Center has this study showing that the end of 2012 is when the majority of Americans got a smartphone.

You put that together with that time use data I've been analyzing, and it sort of all makes sense.

Teens get smartphones, eventually it crowds out the time they spend with their friends in person, and then that is not a good recipe for mental health.

To what extent can you draw causation from the research rather than just correlations?

Right.

So good question.

There's always two things you have to think about in a correlational study like the one that I did.

where

just for context, because I haven't mentioned this yet, I found teens who spend more time on screens report less happiness and more depression than those who spend less time on screens.

And there's also a connection between those non-screen activities like spending time with friends in person or playing sports, exercising, and more happiness and less depression.

But those are correlations.

So one thing you have to worry about is, well, maybe it's outside factors like gender, race, socioeconomic status.

So I controlled for those and still found the correlation was there.

Then the next step is, well, maybe it's the teens who are unhappy or depressed spend more time on their phone or more time on social media.

Well, I can't answer that question with the data that I have, but three other studies have done a really good job trying to answer that question, and they more or less rule out that possibility.

Two studies that follow people over time found that social media use leads to lower well-being, but lower well-being did not lead to more social media use.

There's another study that randomly assigned people to either give up Facebook for a week or not

and found that those who gave up Facebook ended the week happier, less depressed, and less lonely than those who continued their usual Facebook use.

So

I think those studies suggest that at least some and maybe most of the causal arrow points from the screen time to lower happiness rather than the other way around.

I was struck by this quote from a young woman that you call Athena in your story, who's 13 years old.

She says, quote, we didn't have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones.

And it struck me that she and her peers really didn't have much of a choice in using this technology.

And how much of a choice do you think they have now?

Yeah.

Well, it's funny because, you know, when I talked to teens, I was actually kind of surprised that they

did recognize the negative effects of phones and they recognized they weren't getting together with their friends as often.

I mean, before I told them, I didn't tell them the data, I just talked to them and they would bring that up.

And they saw some of these negative effects like Athena does.

So

that does beg the question, then why do so many of them make the choice to spend six, eight, even more hours a day on their phone and less time with their friends in person?

I think there's a couple things going on.

So first, there's research suggesting that phones are addictive, that they light up the same brain regions and engender the same brain chemicals as drug addiction.

And the way people talk about their phones,

that's very evident.

teens and young adults especially that I talked to said that they slept you know within arm's reach of their phone if not having it under their pillow

that they they said you know and I don't always want to be on my phone all the time but I feel like I need to I mean that's the way people talk when they're addicted.

So I think there's also with teens too, there's a lot of pressure, you know, to be the first one to post the like, to respond to the text, to do everything instantly.

And since the piece came out, a lot of adults have told me that their iGen teens, when they are in a situation where they have to put the phone away, they're actually relieved in some ways.

That they actually like spending some time

away from screens when everybody has to put that phone away.

And I think that's the key is it has to be more of a collective exercise because the one, you know, like the email I got from some parents whose

16-year-old daughter was the only one and who didn't have a smartphone and had and had been the only one for like two or three years.

Yeah, I imagine that would be really isolating.

That was one of the things that struck me was wouldn't there be a danger if you if you're a parent that limited your teen's access to a smartphone, might that not cut her off from a social network?

Yeah, well that you know that that that I actually think is one of the good news pieces in what in the analyses that I did, I was able to look at that really specifically for unhappiness and then for another set of mental health outcomes that are linked to suicide risk.

And in both cases, the negative effects didn't show up until teens were on their phone two or more hours a day.

That's still a lot less than average.

Average seems to be somewhere around six to eight hours.

But that suggests moderate use is fine.

So I think those are the two key things for parents.

Put off getting that smartphone and then to moderate the use.

You know, I'm not suggesting we need to yank smartphones out of teens' hands.

I'm saying instead that limited, moderate use seems to be the good, happy medium for mental health.

So an hour a day, 90 minutes a day, but not a whole lot more than that.

You mentioned at one point in your story that some of the effects are exacerbated among girls,

that young women are likeliest to see some of the most harmful pieces of this.

And why do you think that is?

So, yeah, that was one of the most striking things is a lot of these mental health indicators like suicide, depression risk, and so on, the increases are a lot larger for girls than for boys.

And I happen to have, my three children happen to all be girls, so that certainly made me sit up and pay attention.

My suspicion is that it's because because girls spend more time on social media and boys,

although they're online in an equal amount, they're a little more likely to be doing other things, maybe playing games, searching for

information, those types of things, and with girls at social media.

And also,

girls are just more vulnerable to the type of bullying that happens on social media.

that relational or social or verbal bullying has always been more common among girls, and that's the kind of bullying that happens on social media.

So they're more sensitive to that.

Yeah.

This generation actually exhibits a number of positive trends.

You mentioned in your story, today's teens are physically safer than teens have ever been.

Quote, they're markedly less likely to get into a car accident and having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors are less susceptible to drinking's attendant ills.

Teen pregnancy is on a marked decline.

There are a number of positive indicators about this generation that's coming up.

And I'm curious, do you think that we should be more or less worried about this generation that's what you call iGen than some of the generations that have preceded it?

I think it's important to look at the larger picture for a lot of these trends.

I've seen a lot of people talking about the downswing in teen pregnancy and alcohol use and sex and so on, and saying, oh, these teens are more mature, they're more responsible.

But those treatments tend to leave out other trends like they're less likely to work.

They're less likely to drive.

They're less likely to go out without their parents.

I think seeing

those trends, in particular, those trends about growing up more slowly, taking on both the responsibilities and the pleasures of adulthood later,

it really misses the boat to see them as positive or negative.

I mean, absolutely, sure, objectively speaking, it's great the kids are not getting pregnant at the same rate that they used to.

I mean, I agree that that's good, but a lot of the other trends which go along in the same direction, I don't know if they're good or bad.

I don't know if anybody would really say more or less teens working.

Is it good or bad?

It's probably some of both.

Same thing with driving.

You miss a lot when you just see the world as, oh, these things are good for teens or these things are bad for teens.

I mean, if I had to pick, I suppose I would say overall that

these trends are good, but so many of them defy being put into one bucket or another.

They're trade-offs.

You know, any strategy for how fast or slow you're going to grow up has trade-offs.

You've been doing generational research for a while now.

Tell me about some of the previous research that you've seen applying to earlier generations and how those have changed over time.

My book about the millennials is called Generation Me.

And the reason we went for that title is because millennials really are characterized by individualism.

And this isn't just millennials.

This has affected everybody in the culture.

We now place more emphasis on the self and less on social rules than we did, say, in the 50s when boomers were growing up or in the 70s and 80s when Gen Xers were growing up.

That change has been going on for a while.

We just have moved more toward this individualistic view.

And that's the main shaping influence for millennials.

So it's led to trends like more emphasis on tolerance and equality.

Because when you treat people as individuals instead of members of groups, that's what you get, individual rights

and tolerance and equality.

Millennials are also more positive about themselves and more optimistic.

They have this view of themselves as well.

I sometimes say that millennials are the generation me was the first generation to be raised with the idea that everyone should have high self-esteem.

So it's this emphasis on you should always feel good about yourself.

If you believe in yourself, anything is possible.

You can be whatever you want to be.

That the key to success is self-confidence.

Did that positivity also bring about an increase in happiness and a decrease in depression?

Were they more or less depressed?

Yeah, so for millennials, there's this trade-off.

Again, a trade-off.

That's the way it usually works.

they have this optimism that seems unthinkable in a way.

They showed that the trend for teen happiness between, say, the early 90s and about 2011 was up.

Millennials were more happier and they were more satisfied with their lives.

That's when the break happened with iGen.

with the teens around 2011, 2012.

Then happiness and life satisfaction start to go down.

So millennials are like, hit this peak.

But here's the other thing.

Older millennials, those who are in their 20s and 30s, they're not quite as happy once they get to adulthood, particularly if they didn't get a college education.

So that's something I'm working on now.

We spoke to a 17-year-old kid who said without prompting that he and his friends were this constantly connected digital community.

He valued that sense of constant connection with his friends.

And I think back to my own childhood growing up as a kid, you know, I was one of those that was in the early adopters of AOL.

And my best friend and I used to pool up our time and go on AOL for like 10 hours.

And for me, as a

gay kid in a pretty conservative evangelical Christian community, the internet was an access point to other folks like me who I might not have had access to physically all around me.

How do we protect the ability for kids to reach out and stay in touch with one another, even while we limit their access to these devices and these social media experiences?

Yeah.

Well, you know, I'm the first to admit I'm not a 17-year-old kid anymore.

However, I think that could easily be done in 90 minutes a day.

I think your story is

a good illustration of the fact that there are situations for teens

who are in minority groups, whether that's

minority in terms of sexual orientation or being transgender or

suffering from a particular illness or condition,

something that they're going to have a tough time finding a lot of people around them in person in their town or at their school who's going through the same things that they are.

And in that case, that may end up being an exception where that electronic communication is better than nothing.

Well, Jean Twengi, thank you very much for spending the time.

Great talking with you.

Thanks.

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You know, you used to send your friend a letter in the mail to see how they were doing, and then it became an email.

And I'm sure there were articles about how emails were taking away from the novelty of sending, writing a handwritten letter, and now that's become a text or even a tweet.

And so I think just with the evolution of things and how technology works, those who were there in the past don't necessarily see the connections to the present.

I think it's important to note that smartphones can be used as a social crutch, but they can be used as that by anyone.

Yes, I think our generation, it's intensified.

I just don't think it's right to consider us victims.

Whether it's their sister, their uncle, their brother, the person who they're closest with in their life, it's really, I believe, important for your mental health to make sure that you're in contact with the people or person who is going to support you the most and keep you going.

I don't really think I go on social media as much as some people, but I, I don't know, it just doesn't really appeal to me as much.

I'd rather be outside doing something or, you know, it can waste your time because, like, you know, oh, maybe just five more minutes turns into another 15.

If a person reaches out to me and would like to talk about something personal or is going through something, I'm usually, I would prefer for it to be in person or over the phone because texting is really impersonal sometimes.

I'm planning hopefully to be abroad in the next year, either working or teaching, so definitely WhatsApp will be my best friend on those lonely nights.

That actually helped me in my trips that I've had already.

Being able to message my mom and call her and tell her how things are going.

Even being on Facebook and seeing people post about what's new in life and being able to keep up with people that way.

It's been great, even as I've been in college and away away from my home community.

Most of my friends you know play similar sports that I play so we'll play basketball, we'll play soccer, ping pong, anything inside.

We'll play video games, anything.

I feel like me as a person,

I don't really text my friends as much as I do meet them up in person.

If I was more of a texter type I guess you could say, I would feel pretty guilty about it because knowing that the stereotype is coming from people like me, I wouldn't like it.

The stereotype is, you know, it's accurate, but it's not for everybody.

You know, everybody's different.

I think what's most important in my generation is almost

omnipresence.

We find it reassuring that when you text someone, they're going to text you back near immediately.

It's knowing that someone is always there for you and not necessarily having to use that.

Jeff, Alex, you've heard from the kids.

How are you feeling?

Well, why don't we ask Alex first, since she has just brought a member of the next generation into the world?

That is, in fact, correct.

We owe Alex some big congratulations.

Oh, boy, what a great thing to listen to.

As I'm going to get you, by the way, we're going to get you a copy of Good Night Moon and a smartphone.

Please just get a Kindle copy

for your brand new baby.

Everyone at the Atlantic, by the the way have we said this yet everyone at the atlantic very very happy indeed very very happy thank you guys we're all tremendously excited for you so how do you feel though alex about what you're bringing this child to

i mean well i long thought we're going to end up in the ozarks baking our own bread and now that's definitely happening it's the amish life have smartphones in the ozarks you know well okay the amish life

how about just lancaster pennsylvania he's going to be on a horse and buggy by the time he's 21 Okay, by the way, I just want to note for the record, I cannot picture Alex Wagner churning butter.

Well, Jeff, that shows how little you know Matt Wagner.

I think Alex.

This Sunday morning on CBS.

I think Alex has not only many demonstrated talents, I think she's got great potential.

Yeah, a few secret butter churning sleeves.

Butter churning Wagner cheese.

Up my apron sleeve.

There are no aprons with sleeves.

Listen.

Fat check.

This story and Gene Twangi's research has made me totally terrified.

However, you know, the numbers that she talks about, and like I'll set the kids aside for one second, are so devastating if true that I can only think by the time my son Cy is of age to get a smartphone, which of course gets younger and younger, but by the time he's supposed to get one, we will be regulating these devices like we do every other thing that's bad for you.

I mean, maybe that's my hope.

Is that just a vain hope?

I don't know.

But if kids are really this much more likely to have depression or commit suicide, I mean, it feels like we're all due for a giant wake-up call as far as smartphones and how much our kids are allowed to access them.

Alex, would you mind me giving free advice?

Please, Jeff, father time.

Father time and father of a 20-year-old, an 18-year-old, and a 17-year-old.

Yes.

So I'm on the back end of the process you're just beginning.

I have to imagine that parents are going to,

at least parents who are cognizant of this kind of data and

this kind of information, are going to put their foot down at some point and figure out some alternate path because it is ridiculous.

I'm personally relieved that my children are old enough that I don't have to grapple with the ubiquity of these phones in their lives.

I mean, they came to phones fairly early, but

we managed that process.

The advice that I would give, and this is actually, I'm being earnest right now.

And I know that you don't believe that I'm capable of earnestness, but

that is Matt's job usually,

we're trying to switch roles

today.

I would say that the horrifying thought that Gene's piece evoked for me was that, or a horrifying mental picture, was all of these kids in their rooms alone, in their beds, you know, being tortured by the internet mob, you know, by tortured by their Facebook friends into conformity into whatever the mob decided was necessary to conform to.

One of the things that we've learned is, and we do this deeply imperfectly, but we tried imperfectly to get electronic use in a common room, right?

They're a little bit old now to sort of regulate in that same way, but don't let them physically isolate while they are on their devices.

So it's like the team that Snapchats together stays everybody can be together.

Everybody can be together and they could still be doing their homework online and they could still be talking to their friends, but at least you're physically close and you have some ability to monitor and they have some kind of human interaction.

The other thing, this is going to sound really earnest that I would say, but remember that old bumper sticker, do sports, not drugs, which always prompted me to think, why not do both?

Yeah, well, apparently they keep you social.

Yeah, well, no, but this is the thing.

I mean, sports,

my youngest is

on a couple of different, plays a couple of different sports in high school, and he has deep, intense, human relationships with a whole range of kids.

And these relationships are real and they're outside also.

I mean, being outside is better than being inside, in my view.

And being engaged in this kind of intensely sociable activity and an activity built around, obviously, teamwork,

has been wonderful.

And this all requires a level of vigilance that makes me worried about parents your age or children who are just coming up.

You're going to have to devise whole new ways of parenting because if you're not careful, you won't be the person raising your kids.

The phone will raise raise your kids.

By the time they get to be teens, they are already more influenced by their peers than they are by their parents.

But now that the phone has allowed them to be influenced by every one of their peers across 100 different countries, I mean, it's very hard for a parent to compete against that.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, I also think it requires parents to sort of rethink what's bad behavior, right?

I mean, obviously nobody wants their kids binge drinking and getting into trouble, but the idea that like sort of you wanted to stave off dating and sort of romantic life for as long as possible, turns out, you know, forging interpersonal connections is probably a really good thing to do in the teenage years.

I mean, there's a balance, but the things that we thought of as risky behavior actually, in some ways, ensure that kids are socialized and part of a network.

That includes playing lacrosse, which I've always thought was like a really bad, dangerous idea, but turns out sports might be good.

That's spoken as a true nerd.

Yeah, you're

lacrosse playing butter churner that you are.

Let me just just say this.

The 70s, when I was growing up in this age, 70s and early 80s, I mean, there was drinking and there was bad driving and there was drugs and there was

stupid sex and stupid sex.

I mean, before people were ready and without protection and all the rest, I mean, it was no nirvana.

It sounds like nirvana.

I know.

I mean, actually, now that I'm, I'm sort of being, I'm sort of having a wistful feeling.

Steve Miller band, Coors Light, and a parking lot.

No, sitting in a parking lot.

I mean, people endangered themselves in other ways at other periods in recent American history.

So it's not all.

I mean, I'm very pleased that the teen pregnancy rate is going down.

If it's going down because children have no interpersonal connections whatsoever and are living in isolation and anime and living under the threat of globalized bullying through their phones, that's not a good thing.

Yeah.

Alex, if history is any guide, Gene Twangu's article is not going to be the last bit of the parent anxiety industrial complex that you will encounter.

How are you navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of parenting advice?

The Scylla and Charybdis.

God, I love you, Matt Thompson.

Yeah, Alex, what have you done in your first month to limit your son's smartphone availability?

You know, I will say this.

I am cognizant of it when I'm doing stuff with him.

And I sort of look towards or gravitate towards my smartphone because I feel like part of this behavior is learned, right?

If your parents are always picking up their phones or they have it next to them at dinner or they look at it in the middle of a conversation, it sort of sanctions that behavior.

So I'm pretty vigilant, even now, of trying to keep that phone as far away as possible from him, almost like creating, leave it in its own force field.

So, you know, at-home behaviors are one thing.

My husband is very bad at that.

He kind of has his smartphone around a chain on his neck, not literally, but proverbially.

I really think I intend on being a really aggressively pushy mom.

And I think, you you know, making creating an environment where my kid is encouraged to do outdoor activities, sport.

I mean, I think sports are kind of a no-brainer here, right?

It's like a built-in community.

And as Jeff said, out of doors

that has socialization as its sort of bedrock.

But more than anything, to just kind of cultivate the two things that are really important to me as a parent are empathy and curiosity.

And those seem to be almost the things that suffer in great deal when someone's living in a vacuum and living through a screen.

So whether it's cultivating a love of animals and having lots of dinner parties and going on boating trips or learning how to swim or just being in the world and being sort of tuned in to the pitch of society, I mean, I think that that's one way to try and minimize the deleterious effects of smartphone life.

I just want to note that there's an economic or class component to this conversation.

I mean,

there's a set of parents in America who have the time and knowledge and wherewithal to intensively parent, and there's a whole group of parents who don't have the luxury of being able to intensively parent and intensively oversee their children's activities.

And these are parents who have to work at night or have to work day and night in order just to keep food on the table.

So it's

a difficult one.

One thing, though, that Jean mentioned in her piece is kids are working later in life.

But kids kids who work for money, let's say in high school during the summer or whatever, it's also a way of encouraging that they're dialed into a network that's not just virtual, right?

So maybe there is some sort of silver lining.

You know, if you do have to, if you are working at a younger age,

there's some insurance in there that you're, you know, interfacing with humanity more than you would be if you just sat on your phone in your room all day.

Hey, Alex, can I give you one more piece of advice?

Just

thinking about your husband and his bad behavior.

I mean, I'm always thinking about your husband and his various bad behaviors.

Because there's so much of it.

There is so much to write about.

Just put him in the kitchen.

Yeah, put your husband in the kitchen.

One of the things you can do, and it's harder to enforce this with parents, and we as a family have mainly failed to enforce this, but you can have a literally, you can have a cubby hole right when you walk in the house where you have the slots for your phones, and everybody's phone goes into a slot, and that's it.

Your phone stays at the door, and you're not dealing with it inside.

Again, very, very hard to actually make that happen, but you're in a good spot right now because your kid doesn't even have the ability to grip a phone.

So you can teach that behavior as he gets bigger.

He can't even grip, as far as I can tell.

Right, right.

He has not discovered his opposable thumb.

Yeah, exactly.

He's just figuring out his hand.

Yeah, yeah.

That makes it easier.

You're right, Jeff.

You can instill these virtues from, not in utero, but pretty close to you.

No, but instilling that in you is harder than instilling that in your kid.

Yeah.

And I'm an old dog, and as the saying goes, you can't teach me new tricks.

You're not that old.

Well, I'm not father time.

It's true.

You, like me, Alex, are a cusper.

And I will say

a dental term, by the way.

I wish you wouldn't.

It sounds, it reminds me of.

You're bi cuspers.

All of these terms are awful.

Every term to describe a generation is awful.

But I will say on a couple of positive notes, Alex, first of all, for us, I'm going to quote David Brooks describing our generation.

Here's what he said.

That doesn't mean that these leaders in training are money mad, although they are certainly career conscious.

It means they are goal-oriented.

An activity, whether it is studying, hitting the treadmill, drama group, community service, or one of the student groups they found and join in great numbers, is rarely an end itself.

It is a means for self-improvement, resume building, and enrichment.

College is just one step on the continual stairway of advancement, and they are always aware that they must get to the next step so they can progress up the steps after that.

That was a description of your and my generation, Alex.

The other thing I would observe is that if history is any guide, again,

these things change.

We have to pay attention to the kids.

Every kid is different and the patterns, even the patterns that Gene Twangy found in her research on millennials, shifted as the kids approached adulthood.

David Brooks in that very same piece was talking about the really sunny economic prospects for kids who were graduating college in 2001 and 2002.

Oh, David Brooks, we'll get you yet.

These predictions can be really hard to get right.

Look, the important thing is that we should teach our children.

Children are our future.

We got to let them lead the way.

Show them all the beauty they possess inside.

Give them a sense of prize.

Oh, no, Matt's starting to sing.

No, no, no, no.

This has gone awry.

I didn't know you were going to sing.

All right.

Let's take it to Kiepras with that.

What have you heard, read, listened to, experienced this in recent days that you do not want to forget, that you would like to keep?

Alex, let's start with you.

Well, guys, I've been thinking sort of big picture, having digested all this terrible, deeply depressing information about smartphones and the next generation.

And then my friend

on a social media application,

on something that I read on my smartphone, posted something that made me feel a lot better about the manageability of all of this.

And it is a quote from Zadie Smith, who is a fantastic author and a very striking individual.

She said, all day long, I can look forward to a popsicle.

The persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calmed for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth.

And though it's true that when the flavor is finished and the anxiety returns, we do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that is so readily available, especially here in America, a pineapple popsicle.

Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.

Are you sure that wasn't like a special Colorado popsicle that she's talking about?

A special hemp popsicle.

Well, for me, it is

a hemp milk ice cream sandwich.

But whatever your frozen treat preference, the point is,

life can be distilled, as complicated as it is, into moments, and moments can be filled with simple pleasures.

And it's important to remember all of that as we think about the road ahead.

That is lovely.

Jeff, what do you want to keep?

My best simple pleasure is reading good writing.

Tom Ricks, the great defense correspondent, wrote a piece for us this week about, well, it's not about the pleasure of editing.

It's about the pain of editing.

It's a fantastic piece.

You find it on theatlantic.com, in which he talks about his very tumultuous relationship with his editor for his last book.

The editor was convinced that the book that he wrote, the manuscript he wrote, was crap.

Turns out it was crap.

And it's a fascinating psychological study of a writer coming to grips with the fact that he did not write the perfect book and that his editor was right.

And I'm not saying that editors are always right.

Obviously.

But they're just mostly, they're just mostly right.

Thank you very much.

My Keeper actually came about while I was doing the prep work for our artificial intelligence episode with Alexis Madrigal.

It was a short story that I encountered by E.M.

Forster, written in 1909, called The Machine Stops.

And just to set it up for a second, this is a story about a woman named Vashti who lives in a room that can bring her almost anything she wants at the press of a button, but there's one thing it can't bring her, closer to her son.

I asked our colleague Ed Yong, he of the British accent, to read this work by a British author, and let's play it now.

For a moment, Vashti felt lonely.

Then she generated the light, and the sight of a room flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons revived her.

There were buttons and switches everywhere, buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing.

There was a hot bath button, by pressure of which a basin of imitation marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm, deodorized liquid.

There was the cold bath button, there was the button that produced literature, and there were, of course, the buttons by which she communicated with her friends.

The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

That short story, The Machine Stops, is a stunner.

It was written in 1909.

It felt like it could have been written yesterday and thrown onto Black Mirror.

I highly recommend it.

Yay.

And with that,

I guess we'll do it for another Radio Atlantic.

Jeff and Alex, thank you very much, as always.

Thanks for having me,

gents.

Yo, stop with the Hawaiian.

You can use Hawaiian anytime you'd like.

Thanks, Matt.

That'll do it for this episode of Radio Atlantic, which was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Katie Green and Kim Lau.

Thanks to Alex Feehan, Alexis McKenney, Maya King, and Zach Sippy for giving us the perspectives of kids these days.

Make sure you catch Gene Twainy's excellent story in the September 2017 issue of The Atlantic.

Thanks, as always, to the one and only John Batiste, creator of our theme song, whose immortal rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic will play in full after these credits conclude.

As always, look for us at facebook.com/slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

And if you like what you're hearing, please don't forget to rate and review us in iTunes and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Don't miss our show notes, which you'll find linked from the episode description.

And most importantly, thank you for listening.

Spare a thought for a stranger, and we will see you next week.

All

in glory

My eyes feel the glory

of the coming of the law.

Year traveling, defending with great breath and sword.

And lose the faithful lighting of the terrible Swiss war.

His troop is marching on.

Glory, glory,

hallelujah.

Glory, glory, high,

hallelujah, God,

glory,

hallelujah.

Hallelujah.