The 12 Books of Christmas | The Anxious Generation: Jonathan Haidt on How Smartphones Rewired Childhood
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Leila Ismail. Our third pick of the year is an event we staged in April with best-selling author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He is the author of numerous books including The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind. He was live on stage earlier this year to talk about his latest book,

The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness, which is an urgent investigation into the crisis of youth mental health today. Joining him to discuss it all is BBC journalist and broadcaster, Sarah Montagu. Thank you so much. And what a treat to be here.

Now, almost everywhere you turn at the moment, you will see, hear, read discussions about whether we should be getting our children off social media and off phones. Much of it, of course, driven by this man. His book, The Anxious Generation, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for the past four weeks.

He argues that a whole generation has been damaged by growing up with unrestricted access to social media and to an adult online world, but also by being so overprotected and over-parented that it's a generation of young adults unable to cope with the rigours of normal life.

His book, "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,"

Maybe doing so well because he is tapping into something in society. A concern, a very widely held belief among parents that there is something going wrong. He is very much the man of the moment. He is, of course, Jonathan Haidt. And now, listen, I should explain to both our online audience and to those of you here in the room. I'm hogging things for almost the next hour.

After that, though, you will get your chance. And I know if you're online, you will be able to send some questions in, which I'll get through here to here, and we'll be able to get a discussion going in the room as well. But as I say, I'm kicking things off. Now, Jonathan, I mean, the response in the room when you walk on stage, it's just an illustration, in a way, of what you're tapping into. But I was astonished to read that actually you didn't intend to read this book. I mean, of course you had, you know...

Hannah mentioned the righteous mind, you had the happiness hypothesis, you had the coddling of the American mind. It didn't come out of anywhere, but you set out to write a different book, didn't you? That's right. Yes, I did. But I first just want to say just what a pleasure it is for an American to come to Britain and to be able to speak, to be hosted in a room like this, because we have rooms like this in America, but they were all built about 100 years ago as copies of this. And...

And in so many ways, coming to Britain is kind of like seeing the platonic forms of the things we have copies of in America in a lot of ways. Not just our architecture, but our political institutions as well. And so to get such a warm welcome in such a beautiful space, so thank you. Now to answer your question, yes, I actually set out to write two other books that haven't been written because I wrote this one.

So in 2015, I got a contract to write a book called Three Stories About Capitalism: The Moral Psychology of Economic Life. I had recently moved to a business school, to the NYU Stern, and I thought I'd continue The Righteous Mind, which was about social left-right, and let's do economic left-right. Got a contract for that, went to Asia for a semester, did a lot of research, came back,

published the "Coddling the American Mind" article, thought I'd go back to work on the capitalism book, and then our universities blew up in 2015. And that was such a change of my home institution. I've been focused on that. What the hell happened? Why are we now all afraid? We're afraid of our students, we're afraid to speak, we're afraid of social punishments for expressing ideas. So that led me to work with Greg Litjanov to spend the whole time writing this other book, "The Coddling the American Mind."

And then I had a sabbatical in 2020, I said, "Okay, now I'll get back to the capitalism book." But my country was blowing up and dividing, and things were just getting weirder and worse. And I kept having ideas for why, why. It has something to do with social media. Something's changed about the way we're all connected. And so then I had the idea to write eight essays for The Atlantic on like eight different reasons why everything is going to hell. And the editor of The Atlantic said, "Don't write eight, write one."

And so I wrote one which was titled, ultimately, "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid." So that was my first-- and it's gotten much worse since then. So that was my first pass at what then became a book contract of-- this really should be a book. And that book is going to be called "Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share." And I got the contract to write that book. So I have two-- you know, they give me a lot of money here to write two books that I still haven't written.

And I started writing that book, and chapter one was going to be what happened to teenagers when they moved their lives online? Because I'd done all this research on teen mental health, but that was a side project. I study moral and political psychology, but I have this side project on what's happening to Gen Z.

And at all this data, and the story was really becoming clear, so okay, chapter one, we're going to show how when teenagers moved on to social media around 2012, almost instantly they became depressed and anxious. And then the rest of the book is about what happens to democracy when your public life moves on to social media.

But by the time I finished that first chapter, and you'll see the graphs in it, they're absolutely unbelievable. It was like someone flipped a switch in 2012, and all the rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, they go shooting up, especially for girls. And I realized, I can't just drop this and say, all right, now let's move on. Once I wrote that chapter, I had to write another chapter on explaining how did this happen, and what is childhood, and why don't...

And then I had to have a chapter on girls, because that's a special story. And then I have to have a chapter on boys. And so by the time I had four chapters, I realized I'm never going to finish this book. It's going to be gigantic. I need to cut the book in half. So I got a contract for another book. So finally, so I have three book contracts. And now I actually have written one of them. So that's where we are. OK. Well, let's try and unpick that very first chapter, which is the scale of the problem, which you write this chapter and you realize.

I mean, there are some terrifying graphs in there. How would... I mean, the best way to illustrate the scale of the problem, how would you set it out? And I'm talking about the harms first. Yes. OK, let's talk about the harms. So, when we track... In the UK and the US, we have very good long-running studies, better than most parts of the world.

So you can track how rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm, those are the clearest ones. The central problem is anxiety, and it's related to depression, that's related to self-harm. So let's focus on those three. From the 90s through the 2000s, we're talking the millennial generation, which many of you in this room are. If you're born between 1981 and 1995, you're a millennial. Your mental health was actually fine, a little better than Gen X before you.

So, all the numbers are going along, they go up, down, up, you know, sort of moving along. And then all of a sudden, those numbers all start rising right around 2012, 2013. And the level of the rise, especially when, for boys it's a little slower, it's not such a sharp elbow, that's a different story. But for girls, it's a very sharp elbow. And when we look at the younger teen girls, ages 10 to 14, that's where we see the hugest rises. So, the

those younger girls, they didn't used to be hospitalized for self-harm. It was very, very rare. But after 2012, the numbers go way up. For the older teen girls, I think it's like 70 or 80% increase. For the younger teen girls, it's more like 150. That's in America. In Britain,

that you have data that 10 to 12 year old girls are up 380% increase. It's more than a quadruple. - It's a self-harming. - For self-harm, that's right. So something happened that especially, well, when girls got super connected and began sharing,

the idea of self-harming and the idea of anxiety became just much more widespread. OK, now, there is definitely something going on which is to do with people being more open and more likely to report. And there will be plenty of people, old people, who will say, "Look, I self-harmed when I was in my teens." Oh, I see. Can you strip out...

that factor, the fact that people are more likely to come forward? Yes. So there are a couple of critiques that I get. One of them, the important null hypothesis is nothing's going on, the kids are all right. This is just changes in their willingness to report and changes in diagnostic criteria, concept creep, we consider smaller things to be problematic now. Perfectly reasonable hypothesis.

But the fact that the behavior curves match the self-report curves, so the curves for self-harm match the self-report. Now you're saying even self-harm could be

Sure, there could be generational differences, but why would it be between 2012 and 2013? Why would it suddenly change that year in America, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Northern Europe? You can't explain why it changes everywhere at the same time. And hospitalisations went up. These were hospitalisations, like psychiatric emergency department visits. There's something else going on with suicide, isn't there? Because in girls, I don't think suicide's gone up, but in boys it has.

Now hold on. In the US, it's up a lot for both boys and girls. And the increase percentage-wise is actually fairly similar. Boys have a higher rate because when boys make attempts, they don't make as many attempts, but they tend to use irreversible means. They tend to use a gun in my country or a tall building.

So boys have much higher rates, about three times the rate. They both are way up. It starts a little bit earlier than 2012. The suicide rate begins going up a couple years earlier. But both sexes are up a lot in America. Now then I'm in a debate with people who say, oh, but suicide is declining around the world, which is true. Suicide rates have been going down since the early 2000s. That's great.

But if you break it out by age and sex, you see all these different groups going slightly down, down, down for 20 years, and then right around 2014, you see one line going way up. And this is a graph you can find in The Economist.

It's the teen girls, even though the world's going down, teen girls suddenly start going way up, and a little later, teen boys go up somewhat. So what you should look at is, whatever the rate is, if you zoom in on your younger teen girls, you'll see they are much worse off than everyone else. OK, so you are now talking 2012, 2013, 2014, something happened. Now, I know you are convinced about what it is. What would you posit is the cause behind this?

So the cause behind it is that we changed childhood more radically than it has ever been changed in just a few years. I mean, the change from agriculture to the Industrial Revolution, that was a pretty radical change, but that was over 100 years, whatever you want to say. So what I want you to do is, those of you who had children or those of you who were children in 2010,

What was your technology life like? You had a flip phone, you had to press the 7 key three times to make the letter S. Some of you remember that? Okay. So did you spend all day typing about your feelings with your friends? No. You say, "See you at 3." You know, you meet up. So technology for millennials was a tool that they could use to improve their social lives. They might have had Facebook.

which they used on their parents' computer. You couldn't use it on a phone. So there was Facebook, there were cell phones, but you were not spending five hours a day on social media or on your phone. Also, your phone didn't have a front-facing camera. Also, you had to pay for text. Also, you didn't have high-speed internet. So all the way up to 2010, children had what we might recognize as a human childhood.

But between 2010 and 2015, the technology changes such that by 2015, almost everybody - you can see these very sharp adoption curves - by 2015, almost all teens now, they've traded in their flip phones for a smartphone with a front-facing camera, unlimited data, and Instagram or Tumblr or other social media platforms.

Now the boys and the girls all rush on. The boys go for video games and YouTube especially. The girls go much more for visually oriented social media, so Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest. So what is a boy's life? A boy's life is more video games, which are not particularly harmful, but we'll get back to that, I hope, because it ends up taking them out of life.

The girls, on the other hand, their life now revolves around photographs, ratings of photographs, what people are saying about the photographs, why someone likes... So, the girls, you take all the worst parts of being a teenage girl, and then you multiply them by 10 because now all of that is magnified, the bullying, the social comparison. So, that's why I'm calling 2010 to 2015 the great rewiring of childhood.

What childhood now is in our countries and in most of the developed world, if you're a boy, you're sitting at a video game console because you can't go to your friend's house. If you go over to your friend's house, you can't play video games. You have to go home alone. You can put on your headset, your video game controller. So boys are sitting alone playing video games. Girls are sitting alone. They might be next to another girl, but they're sitting alone. They're on social media. So this is not a human childhood.

This is, if you remember the opening scene or that key scene in The Matrix where you see suddenly The Matrix is revealed and you see all the people lying in pods with something sucking out their brain juice. That's kind of what happened. So Jonathan, the graphs are amazing and in a way they look like, gosh, they match. Look what's happening at that point. Look what's happening to... Across countries.

So you have a correlation, but the charge that you will know that is often levelled against you is it doesn't necessarily mean that you have causation. That's right. And in a way, I don't know, perhaps you would argue, perhaps you can't. I don't know how one would ever prove because you can't sort of take the group of people that aren't on social media who've never self-harmed. But that is a particular challenge for what you're positing, isn't it? Yes.

Yes, but it's one that I've been addressing since 2019. So, as everyone knows in the social sciences, correlation doesn't prove causation. There are consistent correlations in which heavy users of social media are two or three times more likely to be depressed. And you might say, "Oh, well, maybe depressed people just like to use more social media." And that could be true. And so that's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.

So we have to move on and look at longitudinal studies where you track people over time and does an increase at time one cause an increase in time two? That gets you closer to causality, but it's not proof of causality. And then the real gold standard is experiments. So what I've been doing since 2019 is collecting all the studies I can find on all sides.

I don't want to be accused of cherry-picking. I want to say, "Let's take everything." Because it's so confusing. There's so many studies. People point to this study, that study. Let's put them all together in Google Docs, invite the world to comment on them. So I've been incredibly transparent doing this since 2019 with Gene Twenge. So in one of our Google Docs, we have 150 studies, mostly correlational, that's true. But we have, I think, 25 experiments and eight quasi-experiments, which are a different category of experiment. And they don't all show an effect.

But the great majority of them do, and that's the way the game is played. If you have the experiments, then that is evidence of causation. Now we can argue about the quality of the experiments, and that's where we are. So those who say I have no evidence and I'm mistaking correlation for causation simply haven't read my work. Because from the very beginning, I've been very clear, I have many writings on this, about how do we tease out causality. So we're in a debate, but I believe I've shown causality.

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And to be very clear, throughout the book you keep flagging up that there is going to be an online version that you will update as more information comes out. But you do appear to, I mean, I think you're pretty open about it, you set out to prove something. And reading it, I was thinking...

there are positive experiences. I mean, the boy that you mentioned sitting on who goes home alone on playing video games, he's chatting to his friends on the headphones. There might be a girl who is struggling to make friends at school, but she'll find somebody online who she can connect to and realise she's not alone. And there is no representation of the positive side of social media in your book. Actually, I do have a short section called On the Benefits of Social Media.

But as you maybe you've actually read it or maybe you just know what's coming and I talk about that the pluses and minuses school Which is you know people say well, you know, there's these pluses there's these minuses, you know And the pluses are really the only real evidence they point to is, you know Kids say that it makes them feel closer to their friends. That's true. But does that mean it's actually good? I

Imagine this situation: you take kids who are playing with each other every day, they're getting together, they have clubs, they do this, they do that, and you say, "Hey kids, come each to your individual cell. We've got amazing stuff for you in your individual cell. You're all alone in your individual cell. Now, here's a tin can with a string. You can use it to talk to your friends." And then you do that for a few years, and then someone comes along and says, "How do you feel about your tin can?"

I love it. It makes me feel closer to my friends. So the mere fact that they say it makes them feel closer does not mean that it's been good for them because as soon as the girls moved on to social media, they began saying they were much lonelier, their lives felt pointless, and they were more depressed.

When the boys moved on to multiplayer video games, which is more like around 2007, 8, 9, as Internet speeds are picking up, that's where the boys' curve, I believe, starts earlier. It's not as sharp at 2012. The boys, when they move their social life much more onto multiplayer video games, they become more lonely, more depressed, and they too say their lives are pointless, there's no purpose, I feel useless.

So, sure, you can say they like it, but I think the evidence is pretty clear. If these things were good for them, we'd have seen an increase in well-being in the early 2000s, not a collapse. OK. I mean, I'm going to keep pushing on this. Please. The harder you push, the better I get. Most children, most parents I know, do, don't, or at least let's put it this way, most children don't have unrestricted use.

They might not be allowed to have their phone in their bedroom. They might be limited by their parents. You paint a picture of this sort of unrestricted, uncontrolled hours on. And there are cases like that. But they are at just one end of the spectrum. And so this challenge to you is on whether you're being fair, whether you're being fair to the actual use.

So there are big demographic differences. I don't have the data for the UK, but I can tell you in the US, if you just look at hours of time on their phones,

If you have two college-educated parents who are married, it's something like seven hours a day. And if you're white or, I think, Asian. But if you're black or Hispanic or have a single parent or are low social class, it's a couple hours higher.

The phone, the iPad, it's an incredibly effective pacifier. It turns out now it's really more like giving your kid morphine to shut him up. But it's true that many kids have tight restrictions.

But talk to parents. Okay, look, parents in the room, raise your hand if you were a parent of a kid between 8 and 22. Raise your hand. Okay. Just you in the audience, just you who raised your hands, how many of you felt like it was pretty easy to control? We actually, we were able to keep a lid on it, we were able to raise our kids the way we wanted. Raise your hand high. It was easy to control. One, two, three.

- Four and five. - Okay, five percent. - Six. - All right, but less than 10%, less than 5%. - We haven't even gone up there. - For those of you watching on the video, it was about, I'd say, five to seven percent of the people that raised their hand said that. We're all really trying, and we're failing,

And unless you're willing to put on spy software and watch over your kids' shoulders and monitor them, oh, and by the way, if they go to a friend's house, they can just use a browser there. So at present, there is almost no way for parents to raise their kids the way they want because the tech companies have put us in a trap where if we do what we think is right, we're isolating our kid.

Apple gives us good screen time controls. There are tools out there. But we're trying and most of us are failing. We're going to come on to solutions with regard to tech companies a bit. I just want to just nail something, of course. You talked there about going on a browser. Your complaint isn't with the internet. No, I love the internet. And it's not with children being on the internet.

Unless they're on adult areas. It's mainly social media. It's the target. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Can I just demonstrate that with this audience? I can show you. This is a very important distinction because I often hear this. Oh, you know, without social media, kids would have been so isolated during COVID. Oh, thank God they had social media. All right. Let me thought experiment for you. So imagine it's the early 90s and a genie comes to you with three glowing floating boxes.

magical boxes, and the genie says to you, "You can open 0, 1, 2 or 3 of these boxes. If you open it, it's going to take 15 hours a week of your life. Here's the first box." And he opens it. It's the Internet. You will have omniscience. You will be able to know everything instantly. Now, it's going to take 15 hours a week. Do you want it? Raise your hand if you're glad we opened the box, you're glad we have the Internet. Raise your hand high. Okay. The great majority, it's not all of you, but it's the great majority.

Okay, so great. We've got the internet and remember the early 90s was amazing and You know, we thought it was gonna save democracy and mental health was fine Okay. Now let's move up. It's it's it's Now let's move up it and the second box he opens it and it's the iPhone and

It's this incredible digital Swiss Army knife which can do all these functions. You used to have to buy a radio and a flashlight and a map, and no, everything is in this one thing. But remember, you have the Internet and the iPhone, so now you're up to 30 hours a week you're going to be spending on these two. Raise your hand if you're glad that we opened that box, you're glad we have smartphones. Raise your hand high. Okay, now it's maybe around half, maybe a little less than half, but it's still a lot of people.

Okay, and now the third box, he opens it, it's social media. You already have the whole internet and you have your smartphone. Do you also want to have social media where you get to post stuff and comment on people's stuff and get sucked into spending many hours a day doing that? I'm sorry, I shouldn't bias the survey. But honestly, if you already have the internet and an iPhone,

How many of you are glad we opened the social media box? The world's a better place because we have Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. Raise your hand high if you think it was good that we opened it. One, two, three, four, so probably about a dozen. So this is my point.

Technology is amazing. Technology is the way we've advanced for many thousands of years. The internet is incredible. You can't imagine life without the internet. The internet has so many benefits. Social media is an entirely different animal engineered to hack into young people's insecurities about their position in society and keep pressing on and pressing on it to keep them paying attention. I don't think that's a good deal.

The headlines have largely been about the sort of banning of social media or restricting... Yeah, you British, you just love to ban things. I'm not talking about banning. Every conversation is about banning phones. What do you want, then? I want norms. I want to change norms.

- You want to ban... We'll come back to this. - We'll come back to that. But just on those specific things, banning phones from schools during the school day. - That I do want, yes. - And restricting social media to over-16s. - OK. - But there is a second... The second half of your book is actually about a whole other aspect, which is that while children this generation are on their phones, they are not doing things in real life.

And you have suggested that both that combination of phones and not doing other things in real life is deprived them of their childhood. Just talk about the importance of what you think they're missing. Sure. So humans have these gigantic brains. So within any group of animals, if there's some that have gigantic brains, it's going to be because they're super social.

And so among the primates, we're the huge brain champions because we're super-duper social, much more than chimpanzees. We're ultra-social. And in humans, part of our sociality is culture. We developed culture. And culture requires a much longer childhood.

This seems to be the explanation for why we have this unique growth pattern, which is human children grow quickly and then we slow down after two or three years and then we grow very slowly, from like five to ten, growing very slowly. All other primates, they just grow and grow and grow until they can reproduce and then they reproduce. Why do we have this long slow period? It's because our brains need to wire up, they need a lot of cultural training

from either older kids or older people. We're guided all around the world, we're guided, especially at puberty, we're guided through how do you make the transition from a girl to a woman or a boy to a man. So humans have this incredible developmental process that we've evolved to have.

Like all mammals, play is the main way we do it, especially early on. We play at roles, we play at roles that we'll have as adults within our gender. So play is an intrinsic part, a crucial part of life. If you deprive animals, including children of play, they come out anxious and socially unskilled, which is what most people say about Gen Z on average.

So, when you deprive young mammals of what they most need, you're blocking human development. And my argument is that between 2010 and 2015, we blocked human development at a level never before seen in human history. Imagine, for those of you who are older, those of you who are born before 1995, especially before 1981, let's talk Gen X and older, think back on your childhood. Think back on all the things you did, all the adventures.

Now imagine removing 70% of the time hanging out with friends. At least 70%. Just imagine that was never, you didn't have that, that was gone. Imagine you had no, well, any hobbies that you had, if you did something physical, imagine that's gone. Imagine thrills, adventures, adventures where you might have gotten hurt. 80% of that's gone.

And in its place, you have vast amounts of content you're consuming, short videos, 20-second videos, TikTok videos, after a few hours of which you might stop and then you say, "What did I just do for the last three hours?" is what people say to me. So what I'm saying is, let's imagine almost all the good stuff from childhood, take out 70% of it, and now imagine growing up with just the remaining 30%. And that's what we've done to Gen Z. - Okay, now you're... - So childhood is... Yeah. One of the things that you say, that you set out in the book,

is that there's a particularly risky form of play that is important, which I think the word you use is anti-fragile. The example is a tree needs wind as it's growing in order to become stronger. And this is what you suggest, which I suppose is the coddling of childhood from earlier. But...

which you think has been what, replaced by people sitting by actually not even necessarily being on their phones, by their parents saying, "You can't walk home from school. You can't climb that tree. You can't go to that." And that is what, doing as much damage as phones or doing a considerable... Yeah. So there's two parts to the story. And let me just mention that the thrill part is something which is really important and really interesting. So there's a number of play researchers have pointed out

that kids, when they're naturally playing, they will, if they master something, they'll make it more dangerous. If they learn to skateboard down a hill, they'll then go for a really steep hill, then they'll go for a jump, then they'll go downstairs. And they're going to fall, they're going to hurt themselves. Why do they do this? Why would you choose to hurt yourself? If you learn to swing, you're going to jump off the swings, and you're going to go higher and higher, and you might hurt yourself. You're not going to kill yourself, but you might hurt yourself. Why do kids try to hurt themselves? Well, they're not trying to hurt themselves directly.

They're seeking out just the right level of thrill, and thrill requires fear, the fear of actually getting hurt. And it turns out kids need this. This is how we overcome childhood fears.

And I have a great little story in the book about my dog. While I was writing this, I got a puppy named Wilma. And I have a video, and you can find it at anxiousgeneration.com. I just put it up. Wilma was this little tiny thing. She was seven pounds when we got her. And I took her to Washington Square Park, near where I live. And there was a German shepherd, an area where dogs run. There was a big German shepherd. And I let Wilma off the leash, which was probably foolish at that age, because she might have run away. But I

But anyway, so Wilma goes like going up to the dog. And then as soon as the dog makes a motion, she goes running away. You might think she's terrified. She's going to run home. No, no. She was afraid, but she was also intrigued and she was thrilled. She goes running away, comes to me, runs around me and runs right back to the dog.

And then the dog moves again. So she's playing this game. She's trying to adjust the level of fear and master it, and then she runs away and she comes back for more. She's dosing herself with fear. And that's how you become fearless. And that's what kids do. When you're climbing a tree and you're a little scared, you go a little higher and then you did it. And now you're not as afraid of climbing trees. So anyway, my point is, as we began to focus on physical safety and then emotional safety...

We said, "Let's not let our kids do anything that could be dangerous. Nothing that could be dangerous. We have to watch them or they'll do something dangerous." And in doing so, it's as though we said, "How about if we don't let them have anything with vitamin C? No vitamin C." And then, of course, they get scurvy. So, we have to recognize that fear, that kids are seeking out the right level of fear. And I just want to point out about video games, yeah, they look like great fun,

I watch my son play Fortnite. You know, he's jumping out of planes, he's having knife fights, they're killing people, they're competing, it's very exciting. Is he ever afraid? Is there a moment of fear? No, there's no fear. Boys are not getting anything from video games that will help turn them into men.

What you're talking about, that concern about safety, predates 2012, doesn't it? I mean, it goes back decades, this idea of overprotective parents. So it doesn't contribute to the concern. Right. So this is the puzzle. This is the puzzle. That we began taking away the play-based childhood gradually from about 19... In my country, about 1980 to 2010. You started a little later, but you started in the 90s. But yet mental health doesn't get worse. Right.

So it's not as though the loss of play didn't make kids anxious and depressed directly, but it weakened them, I believe, so that then when they move on to smartphones, then they are very vulnerable, and then they get knocked over. And this, I think, can explain why it's especially Northern Europe and the Anglo countries where we see the biggest effects. It's places that had a lot of freedom,

Southern Europe and Eastern Europe, especially Eastern Europe, the increases are not as bad. In fact, in Eastern Europe, the numbers have gone down a little bit. My point is just that it's not a one-factor thing about phones make you ill. It's if you're rooted in communities and you have a normal childhood with some risk and thrill, and then you get an iPhone, you're probably not going to be that much more depressed. It's probably not going to really affect you.

But if you have not had a normal toughening human childhood and you're not rooted in communities, then you're going to be swept away. And that's what happened, I believe. Okay. I asked you about the sort of contributing. I don't know if it's possible to give some sense of, look, social media is this bad and actually overprotecting our children. You just can't. Can't take them apart.

But you think that sort of the removal of risk from childhood in the real world is a serious contributing factor to a damaged generation. Yes, I do. And here, what I like to do is say, you know, we're talking mostly about the mental illness as the dependent variable, as the outcome. That's where you have good data. That's what everything's focused on. But Gen Z isn't just marked by having higher rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm. They're marked by...

were social skills. I mean, at least this is what people say as they supervise Gen Z, is that they're more anxious and shy in the office, they're afraid to try new things, they have more expectation of accommodation,

They are multitasking. Their attention is fragmented. They can't stay on target. So we have so many different outcomes. There's cognitive fragmentation. There's the inability to focus, which is very similar. So there's...

Some people are saying there's a lack of creativity because Gen Z, my students in my class at NYU, they don't have any extra attention to do anything. It's all taken up by the phone. - What do your students think of you? I mean, you're dumping on their whole generation.

I don't know. Okay, I'll show you. I've given talks to many, many high school and college audiences that are full of Gen Z. And I say these things I've said that are painting a very bad picture of the generation. And I always do this. Raise your hand in this room if you were born after 1995. Raise your hand high if you were born after 1995. Okay, so we have a lot of Gen Z here. Okay, just you, just you.

Raise your hand if you're quite the question is do you think I got this gen generally right or wrong? Do you think I have I misunderstood your generation? Am I slandering you? So raise your hand if you think I largely got this right Gen Z Okay, and raise your hand if you think I largely got this wrong. Okay, actually Wow one two three four five

Okay, this is the most I've ever seen. Now... But this is great. So when we get to questions... Hold on a second. When we get to questions, I'm going to give you a chance if you want to contribute, but I'm going to put the case, because I'm listening to you thinking...

Just hold on a second. I certainly know some Gen Zers who would be screaming frustration and listening and thinking, you know, because they might have heard some of this. And their argument would be that it's a sort of nostalgia trip from somebody on a different generation who just thinks, you know, it's the things were better in my day.

And this is a phenomenal generation whose lives are lived online now, who find partners online, who find jobs online, who run their whole lives. That is their real world. And guess what? They can spend 20 minutes on TikTok and then go and do some work because they know what it is and they manage it.

So I'm going to put that defense on the behalf of... I'm sure you guys have got better defense because you're Gen Zers. Okay. Perfectly reasonable hypothesis. This time is no different than every previous moral panic. Perfectly reasonable hypothesis. Let's look at that. Is this just like every other generation?

First of all, in previous moral panics, when adults were freaking out about kids with comic books or young women reading novels in the 18th century, there are many of these moral panics.

We didn't find young people advocating to have the stuff taken away. There were moral panics among adults who would point to stories in the news about a terrible thing that happened because some kid read a comic book and then became violent. What's happening now isn't like that. What's happening now is we all see it, everyone sees it within their friend group. So the problems, the costs are incredibly visible and that wasn't true in the age of television or anything else. So this is very different from previous ones.

On the question of nostalgia, though, there's a wonderful British woman, Freya India. Freya, are you here? Is Freya in the audience? Oh, where is she? Someone's pointing her. Oh, Freya, there she is. Freya is a really beautiful Gen Z writer who has an incredible essay on my sub-stack at After Babel on, what, anemoya, was that the word? Yeah, anemoya, which is a Greek word for nostalgia for a thing you never had or never knew.

So many of us are nostalgic for our childhoods. How many of you are nostalgic for your parents' childhood? You have this intense nostalgia feeling for your parents' childhood. Raise your hand if that's you. Okay, what Freya shows is that many Gen Z long for that. They're looking at videos from the '90s and '80s, and they're looking like, "Wow, the kids are hugging, they're talking, there are no phones, they're interacting." So the report from Gen Z

It generally contradicts what you're saying. Gen Z doesn't think its childhood is great. Gen Z in general thinks that they missed out on a lot. Do you think they should be nostalgic for those days? Yes, absolutely they should. There's a lot of those days that they really shouldn't be. Oh sure, no, that's right. Look, we have huge social progress in every decade.

So each decade we have huge social progress on equality, on women's rights, gay rights, animal rights. So we have huge social progress all the way up to about 2013. So each generation could enjoy the progress, the benefits of technology and growing rights until this one. This one I think is not getting that benefit.

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OK, I was worried this was going to be too long and I can see the end encroaching and I haven't even got... We've got to do solutions next. Let's talk solutions. We've already touched on some, which in a way are the easy ones that everybody's talking about. You would say all schools... Let's try and hop through them. All schools need to ban mobile phones during the school day from beginning to end. Absolutely.

Absolutely. So these devices are engineered to grab attention and hold it. There's no reason why kids should be able to text during class.

We got tricked because kids had flip phones and they brought them into class and they were sometimes texting during class on their flip phones. But once it switched over to smartphones, which a flip phone wasn't engineered to hold your attention forever, but a smartphone is. And so kids are now, they're watching videos, the boys are watching porn, they're communicating with their parents. During class?

Why are we doing this? - Okay, but sometimes a teacher or a school would say, "Look, I know that we need phones because..." I mean, some classes will have iPads and things like that, but they need it for Google or for going online or for answering questions, and they're confident that their class will be doing that. You'd say... - Wait, what? They're confident their class will be doing that and not texting?

Really? Have you spoken to teachers? If you give kids a device that can text, they will be texting. If you give kids a device with a browser, they will be browsing. This is true from elementary, from younger school, all the way through my MBA students. I used to make them sign a pledge or stand up and pledge, you can use your computer if it's only for class. That's what I did. I trusted my students. And then the TA told me a couple years ago, everyone in the back row is shopping, texting, eBay, you know.

We're all addicted. It's not just the young... We're all addicted. So if they have a way to text, they will be texting. So we've got to just end that. OK, so that's it. Removed from the school day. Locker. Social media to 16. Now, that is something that I think you make the point has got to be collective action. Yeah.

I'm just, now you have had a phenomenal response to this book. Do you think that's going to happen? Because some people would say, look, it's, you know, horses bolted. So collective action means, you know, if you're the only parent who says to your kid, no, you don't get social media. As I said to my kids, you know, no social media when they were 11, 12, 13, when everybody was getting on Instagram, no. And so they were somewhat cut off. Now they weren't the only ones, but

the great majority had it. It's hard when you're the first one. But guess what? If you coordinate with just a few other families, just the families of your friends' kids, and you don't just take away something, you say, "And here are five families, we're all doing this. You're just gonna get a flip phone when you're independent. You're not gonna get Instagram or TikTok or any of those things.

But guess what? You guys get together, you know, every week you get together, you have sleepovers, you play, you go out, you know, here's money, you can go to the amusement park together. You're going to have an exciting childhood together. Now you can solve it, just a few families. And so what I'm doing in the book, as an American, I'm assuming that my Congress is so dysfunctional that they will never do anything to help us.

And I wrote the book saying, here are four norms that we can do just with a few families cooperating and then ideally with the school, if you can get the school. So do I think this is going to happen? Hell yeah, it's already happening. There's been an explosion in Britain, began February 15th or so. Daisy Greenwell and Claire Reynolds, are they here? Daisy and Claire? They started...

smartphone-free childhood and Hannah Ortele started delay smartphones. So you're actually, in Britain, you're already doing it. It's a spontaneous grassroots movement because parents are fed up. They're sick of this and they want to change. So yeah, it's going to happen. It is happening. Okay. There's something else you want, which in a way is harder. Is this kind of like you want, and you mentioned it earlier, I sort of moved you on. I said we'd come back to it. This idea that at certain stages in your life, growing up,

there would be certain things like walking to the shop on your own or, I don't know, you want a sort of a way to ensure a riskier childhood. Explain how that can work. So how about if we just say I want to ensure a more independent childhood which will include more risk than we currently let them have?

I'd rather put it that way. Risk is good. I'm not saying we-- well, OK, maybe I am kind of saying we need to risk your childhood. Because if we have zero risk childhood, yeah, I'm saying we need to risk your childhood. But the key thing is the independence and then also the risk.

In America, we refer to our country, we refer to the American experiment. And what that means is an experiment in self-governance. The question in 1776 and all the way through 1787 and all the way through the 19th century was can people govern themselves without a king? And you all said, no, you can't do it. Have you seen Hamilton? The song, you'll be back like before.

Everyone thought you can't govern yourself without a king. People can't do that. But we did. We did it. And we got better. We had all kinds of moral flaws early, and we have a long history of correcting those. So the whole point is to become self-governing. And the way you become self-governing as a people is by becoming self-governing during your childhood.

And that's what childhood is always used to be about. The job of a parent is to work him or herself out of a job so that by the time your kids are 17 or so, they can function independently, they can go off to university, they can get a job. So yeah, we need to start that before they leave our home.

And part of this, I think, involves the state stepping back. Because I know I've had plenty of conversations over the years where you're thinking, can I pop to the shop and leave the child? And if something happened, how much trouble would I be in? I mean, obviously, your first concern is for your child, I'd say. Right.

- Not necessarily. - But there is a little bit. And there's a friend of mine who always used to say, "Imagine you've got CCTV on you the whole time." But you want the sort of... the kind of slight removal of, you know, the bad parenting thought.

Yeah, so in the United States, we're much more insane about this than you are. We have much greater fears of abduction. In Britain, the reason why parents say they won't let their 10-year-old kids out to go to a shop is they're afraid they'll get hit by a car. They're afraid of traffic.

And in some parts that's a reasonable concern. We have a built environment around a car culture. But that even happens in areas where it isn't really a concern. We're basically just afraid. We're afraid of each other, we've lost trust in each other. There's a wonderful British sociologist named Frank Ferretti who wrote this brilliant book called "Paranoid Parenting" and he traces the collapse, what he calls the collapse of adult solidarity all over the world until recently in our countries.

Kids went out and like when I was growing up if I fell on my bicycle and you know and got somewhat hurt like an adult you know I could even knock on a door like somebody would call my mother and she'd come pick me up like somebody would help. But now we think if a kid goes out there and then there's another adult stranger danger this person will take you and sexually abuse you. When you don't trust the people around you you have to protect them yourself.

And that's no way to raise children. So what we're facing here is a really difficult sociological challenge. I'm advocating... So look, the first three reforms are about the phones. Those I think we can do. The hardest one is the fourth one. Far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. Because we need to trust each other more, and that's going to be really hard. What I propose in the books is some ways we can give our kids more independence, even if we don't trust each other.

The simplest way is the school playground. And so I co-founded an organization called Let Grow. Go to letgrow.org with Lenore Skenazy who wrote the book Free Range Kids. And one of our simple programs is called Play Club.

Parents who wouldn't let their kid walk three blocks to a store, they will let the kid play on the playground after school. So with Play Club, let's say 10 or 15 students, they sign up for Monday. Every Monday, they're on the playground. Let's take seven, eight, nine-year-old kids who really want to play with each other. Every Monday, these 15 kids are on the playground. There is no supervision. There's an adult nearby if someone gets hurt, but there's no supervision.

They work out games themselves. They enforce the rules themselves. They get into fights, they work it out. That's what they need to do.

So parents are willing to let that happen. That's a baby step towards giving your kids some independence. So I recognize we can't just say, "Kids should have the same childhood I had in 1975." You know, the world has changed. We have to be much more intentional. But man, we've got to be intentional. We have to give our kids independence, otherwise they're going to come out not fully developed. And that's, I think, what's happening. Well, let's turn to the tech companies.

When you were talking earlier about what social media apps are designed to do, the very fact that one's saying they're designed to do that, do you think the tech companies want this? Yeah, they said so.

There's a talk, what's his name? I have it in the book. Facebook. Yeah, Facebook, the first president of Facebook. Was it Sean Parker? I think it might have been Sean Parker. He describes the thinking pattern. A lot of these people took a specific course at Stanford in persuasive technology. How do you capture people's attention? How do you influence them?

One of the developers of Instagram took that course. This was the culture in Silicon Valley in the 90s and the 2000s. They're all competing for attention because what's the revenue model? The revenue model is advertising for a lot of them. So the advertising-based businesses are in a fight to the death, to the corporate death, to grab the eyeballs more firmly and younger

And they admit this. I mean, they said that's what they were doing. Okay, so there are states now that are trying to find ways to ban social media up to 16. Is there something that you are confident that could be done to rein in the tech companies on this or to change the model? Yeah, there are a couple of...

So first of all, we should be clear. There are thousands and thousands of tech companies. They make our lives better. They're not hurting children. There are five or ten that I believe are hurting children. And most of them, a few of them, I'm confident they actually do care and they're trying, a few of them. And a few of them, I think, don't really care and have been impervious to suggestions from their own employees.

So what's going to make them change? Only new legislation or if these lawsuits succeed. I don't know what's happening here, but in the US, we have 45, the attorneys general of 45 states are suing Meta and Snapchat just for the medical costs for all sorts of problems they're causing for the states.

School districts are suing because our test scores are going down, chaos is happening in schools. Hundreds and thousands of parents whose kids are dead and they believe it wasn't just correlation, my child was sextorted and then the next day he killed himself, is that just correlation? I think that's causation. So even though the tech companies have immunity from Congress, they can't be sued for what they show your child.

The argument that the lawyers are making is, "We're not suing on content. We're suing on the designs you made, the architecture of your platforms that you consciously created or you knew eventually were doing this."

So, product liability. We have an unsafe product that's harming millions and millions of children. I am hopeful that some of these suits will... They're being consolidated in a district court in California. If those succeed, then we have something so much bigger than the tobacco settlement. We have something in the... I don't even know how much it would be. That, I think, would finally get their attention. Do you think it's like tobacco?

Do I think it's what? Like tobacco. Well, tobacco, it's like it in some ways, but here's the big difference. In 1997, which was the peak year of teen smoking in the United States, I just found this number, 37% of American high school students smoked cigarettes, which means two-thirds didn't smoke. Because smoking is biologically addictive, but it doesn't force everyone to smoke. Right. Right.

Whereas once once a bunch of kids are on Instagram at a much younger age now there's pressure on everyone So now it becomes 90 95 percent So in a sense social media is much more addictive than tobacco or heroin You could never get a hundred percent of kids on tobacco or heroin, but there you get 100% on social media I'm gonna come up for questions in just a minute. Just one thing our Gen Zers mm-hmm permanent damage

OK, so I'll start with the pessimistic side, but there's a lot of optimism here too. The pessimistic side is if you miss out... I mean, the whole point of childhood is to prepare your brain to take the ideal configuration for your culture. So to some extent, there is going to be some lasting effect. That seems very likely. I can't say 100% that that's the case, but it seems very likely. So I think what we're going to see, we're already seeing Gen Z is 28, the oldest are 28. We are already seeing...

you know, less marriage, less dating, less sex. They're already behind where previous generations were. The levels of anxiety and depression are much higher, so it's not like they get over it once they reach 21. So I think we will see, on average, I think we will see Gen Z less happy, less flourishing than previous generations throughout their life, on average.

but there's huge individual variability. Many in Gen Z are flourishing. Many are doing fine. I'm a social scientist. When I say, you know, a generation, I don't mean 100%. I mean, on average, it's different. Here's the optimistic side. When members of Gen Z change their habits, they change their consciousness and they get back control over their lives. This is what happens in my class at NYU. My students, I have a teacher

I teach a course called Flourishing. And they're mostly 19 years old. I want the sophomores, the second years, I want them to get this pretty early.

And once we go through this, about how you're giving away all of your attention, all of it, you don't have anything to do anything of any significance because it's all given to these platforms. Once they realize this, they start turning off notifications. They start doing social media only on their computer, not their phone. They start having moment, they start having five or ten minutes at a time with no interruptions. And then they can lengthen to 20.

So we're getting remarkable results just by changing their habits at the age of 19. So yeah, I think there is hope, but it's going to be, Gen Z, you'll have to be much more intentional about flourishing because you were denied the normal childhood that would have made you stronger and more open, more in discover mode. You have been an amazing audience, and I think that's because Jonathan Haidt's been so interesting. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Leila Ismail. Make sure to stay tuned for the next episode as we look back to 2024 and select the 12 best conversations from the year.

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