The Anxious Generation: Dr. Becky & Jonathan Haidt in Conversation with Stephanie Ruhle at 92NY

Foreign. So this is a really exciting episode. I was given permission to share with you right here on the podcast, a talk I did at the 92nd Street Y with Jonathan Haidt, moderated by Stephanie Ruhl. This was an amazing evening. There was a sold out auditorium of over 900 people all listening to Jonathan and I talking about the struggles we see with children's mental health, with phones, with apps, with how us parents are expected to navigate everything in this digital world. But don't worry, the night was full of hope and empowerment and strategies. We talked about what parents can actually do, how to get prepared for the phone and app stage, what to do if you're about to enter that stage, and yes, even some really important ideas if you're already in that stage and want to kind of course correct some things that aren't feeling great. I'm so excited to share this very special episode. I'm Dr. Becky and this is good inside. We'll be back right after this.

Thank you so so much. First, I want to give credit to you all for being here and making this a huge priority in your lives. Before I came here this evening, I was at NBC and everyone was racing around like it's the most important night because it's the VP debate. But the truth is we're going to learn more on this stage tonight that's actually going to impact people's lives and their futures than I think anyone will learn from any sort of political debate. And to credit you two, so a week ago I interviewed the vice president and right around that time they started promoting this event. So for the last five days I'm getting texts from all of these women in New York going, I'm so excited about the big interview. I can't wait to watch a big interview. And I'm going, you can't wait to watch a big interview? Like it's on YouTube, yo, just pick it up. But they met you.

Yes.

So people are excited to hear from you. Let's start with anxiety. John, let's start with you. What is the anxious generation?

So the anxious generation is everyone born after 1995. We call them Gen Z. Another way to describe them is it's the first generation to go through puberty with smartphones and social media. The millennial generation before them had flip phones and they could do social media on their parents computer. But Gen Z is the first generation that had a phone grafted into their hand, blocking out their experience. And immediately beginning 2012, the girls in particular, but everyone got more anxious, depressed and self harming.

We're going to need a lot of deep breaths. You two are a great pair because John is here giving us these big ideas and big problems. But Becky, all of us need you on speed dial because we need solutions. Given John's assessment of the anxious generation, how do you think our kids are doing and understanding that young kids are different from teens. But how would you just say, generally speaking, how are they doing?

I think they're struggling. I mean, I think one of the ways I think about anxiety is kind of the fear of discomfort. And we become fearful of discomfort and frustration in our body when we aren't put into situations over and over where we're facing those feelings, where we're tolerating those feelings. The best it gets is tolerating discomfort. And when over and over, what does that mean?

So you know when we say tolerating discomfort? Before smartphones existed, we were all used to being frustrated, right? Our kids were annoying. That was frustrating. We couldn't get a doctor on the phone. It was frustrating. We had a lot of frustration in our lives. But because of technology, we're all wanting to live a frictionless, seamless life. So is that what you mean when you talk about discomfort?

That's exactly what I mean. Like I even think about going to Blockbuster as a kid to get a movie. Would someone take me? Would they have it? Like I'd see the thing, would it be behind it? Maybe not. I'd have to get something else. Like that's not the only time I felt frustration with. But if I think about my kids experience of wanting to watch a movie and then the time and effort it takes to watch the movie, the gap is non existent and we become more anxious. When we have ways to avoid discomfort and we expect ease, we actually become more fearful of the uncomfortable things that are actually part of the real world.

Yeah, I can add to that a little bit that technology makes our lives easier. And as adults, it's great to have a thing to smooth things out, speed things up, let you focus on your work. But that's the last thing we want for our kids, is to make all of childhood from 0 to 18. If you make it easy, they don't learn how to deal with setbacks, with loneliness, with anxiety. Please don't send them to me at NYU if that's the way your kid was raised.

But when we're connected, don't we then lose human connection? Because it's that time when you're sitting in a doctor's office when you have to talk to one another or Do a highlights magazine or you're sitting in a car. Those are the times when we should have a human connection and we don't.

That's right. And it's those direct human connections that Gen Z is very, very uncomfortable with. They're very resistant to making telephone calls because they're synchronous and they're awkward, whereas texting is easy. My team, we had a team meeting today and we had this amazing 15 year old kid who joined the team and is helping with statistics and we were talking and he said, you have.

A 15 year old?

I remarkable.

All of these mothers have total anxiety that their 15 year old sucks. Way to go.

But anyway, but he told us the story how his school just went phone free as a lot of schools are going this September. And I said, how's that going? And he said, oh, it's great. The kids are talking and they're laughing at lunch. And he said, the only problem is the kids who like some kids who don't have friends, they used to be able to just do this during lunch and then they didn't feel so embarrassed and now they can't do that anymore. But then will they learn to actually then talk to other kids? And so that's the hope. The technology means you never have to be bored, you never have to look silly. You can just always be doing this and that blocks development.

This might be a hard question when you are meeting with a family and trying to assess whether things aren't good, whether they need help, whether it's an anxious household. What does that household look like? What are they telling you?

I think the thing I'm looking for, and I think this is something that underlies the struggle we're seeing with our kids is something like I refer to as sturdy leadership. I think that is actually what we're really struggling with as parents. That I think our job as parents is to set boundaries and stay connected to our kids while they're inevitably upset about our boundaries. I actually think one of the things that's happened is we're really struggling as parents to set boundaries. Going back to when we set boundaries, our kids are always upset, always. That's actually their job. Because a boundary is a way of saying I'm going to say no or I'm not going to give you the thing you want right now. And our kids have a meltdown or they whine. And I think we've struggled to tolerate the frustration of those moments. So we give in. And so while a parent is never saying this is the core issue that's always at the center of kind of the anxiety that tends to be in the family system.

But isn't it harder to set boundaries now because we don't live in a vacuum?

Right.

When we all grew up, your parents set the rules in your household and you could or could not answer a friend who knocked on your door and, and said you wanna go outside and play. We are now living in a community, in a society where everyone is connected. And if you're making the decision for your child to be disconnected, then you have all these voices in your head that you've now just made a conscious decision to make your child an outcast.

Well, that's right. And that's how we got into this mess. So we used to have what you might call a play based childhood. And between 2010 and 2015 that, that ended. We were cutting down on place since the 90s and freedom. But between 2010 and 2015 we get what I call in the book a phone based childhood. It happened very, very fast. And what we all have to realize is that this is only 12 years old. This new childhood is only 12 years old. The mental health epidemic, the mental illness epidemic is only 12 years old. This is not like baked in like, we have to live with this. We can reverse this. We can turn this around. The reason why it's gripped us so quickly is because it put every parent in the same prisoner's dilemma or the same commons dilemma, which is, mom, I need a smartphone. You know, no, honey, but everyone else has one. They're making fun of me for my flip phone. And that's what we all hate to hear, that I'm the only one. And so most of us give in. And the more people give in, the more pressure there is on the few remaining holdouts.

But it's not just their friends, it's school, right? It's the sports teams they're on, right? Where all the kids are communicating on a group chat or they're only on GroupMe or they're on WhatsApp. And if your child is not on that, then it's not about missing out kids. The infrastructure has now been created for everyone to be connected.

That's right. So that's right. So the world has changed very quickly, even before COVID but especially during COVID very quickly. To assume that every child has a smartphone. And it's going to be painful. We're going to have to change that. And I think we need to start with elementary and middle school. Let's just get this, all this stuff out of the lives of elementary and middle school kids. Let's get them through early puberty. That's the most important years, especially for girls. Okay, okay. So you applaud, but how many of you are going to do it?

Ok, that's. But hold on. It's a hard question and I want to give it to Becky because how do people not just do it, how do they undo it? Okay, right. I have an 11 year old daughter who has always thought she's gonna get a phone when she's 12. Then I read John's book and I'm like, oh, she can't have a phone when she's 12. We have to wait till high school. How am I gonna undo that?

You're gonna have John call your house.

You don't know who John is. I'm gonna tell you how she's gonna feel about Mr. Haight.

Yeah.

It'S Haight, but some kids call me Hate.

I think there's a couple things and I love that you're bringing to the real pragmatic element. Right. And this is built into the infrastructure. First of all, I think we have to check in with ourselves as parents and think about truly the underlying skill we would need to build and practice before we could change a rule or set a boundary or involve the other people in our neighborhood of doing the same thing. And to me, that check in requires asking ourselves, what is it like for me to set a boundary with my kid that I know they're going to push back around? Because I think if we're signing pledges, that's our intention. But at the end of the day, when your kid's 11 or whatever age, you have to say, do I have the muscle to flex in this high stakes situation? And I think an idea how I crystallize it in my head is if it's hard for me to say no to a cupcake, I'm not gonna be able to say no to a phone. And I think that then actually leads to something very hopeful, which is okay. It is. Maybe it's hard for me to say no to a cupcake. That's true. Okay, well, I'm not gonna start by saying no to a phone. I'm actually gonna say, even if my kid's 11, what is like level one on my level one to 10 hierarchy to build up my boundary setting muscle? Maybe level one is, you know, I really do want my kid to go to bed at whatever time it is. And I always stretch. I'm gonna actually start to hold that boundary. I'm gonna Start to see that I could hold a boundary. My kid can whine. I can tolerate it. We can stay connected through that experience. Maybe I move to a level four, which is, ooh, you really shouldn't have a sleepover before your lacrosse game. I always say that, but then I let you. I'm gonna stick to that a couple times. When it gets to a phone, I now am gonna have much more conviction, and I'm gonna feel like my relationship with my kid can actually handle it, because I've seen evidence of that pattern.

But how do you do it in a way that your child doesn't feel like they're being punished?

I love that question. I think the same exact boundary we can either set from a place of punishment or protection. And punishment's easiest because I can do it, too. It just flies out of our mouth. You can't get a phone and all your friends and your brain and your mental health, and we just kind of vomit all of the things. I've done it, too. That is one way, and it's just not effective. Another way is actually saying to your kid, look, my number one job is to keep you safe. And I actually love you so much that I'm willing to keep you safe even in areas that I'm going to get a lot of pushback around. And so I want to let you know about a different decision I've made today than what I've said in the past. And then you can say, look, I said you could get a phone. I've changed my mind, and here's why. And hopefully. And I can kick it to you. I love when John talks about collective action, because if I can then say, and here are the other parents, even if it's like two. Right. Who I'm doing this with, it's a nine out of ten hard instead of a ten out of ten. And sometimes that's the best it gets.

Yeah, right. So what I brought to this was that I'm a social psychologist. I'm not a clinical psychologist, but I'm very, very aware of the way that we influence each other and the way that norms arise, the way that norms change, and the way that we all sort of create an imaginary world, our society, and then we live in that world. And that world can change very quickly, but it involves other people. And so what I'm trying to do is say, look at the way these norms change. Driven in part by technology companies really designing things to be addictive and then making it seem like this was normal or fun or healthy. And if we can change the norms. Then it becomes so much easier for every single parent. And so like Stephanie, you said you're 11 year old, your daughter does not have a phone and there's a lot of pressure on her. What's the situation? She's in sixth grade.

She's in the sixth grade and most of the people she goes to school with have a phone and they have social media and she doesn't. So she's counting down the days and looking at a calendar for when she can get any sort. It could be a flip phone, any sort of phone. She just wants that phone. And she's now using that narrative of so parents know where we are so you can keep track, which is just so crazy in that like throughout history we all knew where our kids were. I'm not sure why we need a cell phone to do that, but there's lots of parents who buy into it.

Yeah.

And then we're just my family's home, like churning butter and everyone else is like doing TikTok dancing.

Well, that's a marketable skill, or at least it will be in a few years.

There you go.

So two things. The first is if it's just, you know, what the kids are most afraid of is not not having a phone, it's being left out, being the only one being the one that kids are going to make fun of because you're different. And so what we're trying to, what my team is trying to do is change the norms very quickly so that the best your kid can do next year will be come to you and say, mom, two thirds of the kids have a smartphone. Well, then you'll be. And I've spoken with the parents of your two best friends and we all agree we're going to wait till high school to give you a smartphone. The second thing I would point out though is that a lot of people seem to think either there's a smartphone or there's nothing. And the problem isn't the flip phones. The problem isn't the ability to communicate with your child. Now we tend to overdo it. We tend to feel people then want to text their kid even when they're in class. But what I want to really point out is what really destroyed childhood for Gen Z was not the cell phone, it was the smartphone. It was having the entire Internet with you all the time so that every company in the world can get to your child, every man in the world who wants to have sexual pictures with them or sexual status that can get to them. This is just Completely bonkers that we've done this. When we were growing up it was knowledge. You don't let a kid have a television set in their bedroom, that would be crazy. And now we let them have like everything and everyone can be in their bedroom. It's just completely insane. So by all means hold the line. But you don't have to keep until high school without any phone, phone watches or a flip phone. The key is that they that it's not easy to communicate and that it's not going to hold their attention for hours each day.

Jonathan brings up a really good point about the sexualization of the Internet and what especially our girls have access to. For me I know the number one reason I don't want my daughter to have it is because I have an 18 year old son and I see the images of teenage girls and what they send my son and what he sees and it's so devastating to think those are our girls and those are our boys conditioned to think. I mean I remember being in high school and being at a party and for the first time walking by a TV and seeing a porn movie and I almost threw up. I was so overwhelmed and scared by it. And now our kids have hardcore porn in their rooms at school and it's like why are we not realizing that's what our girls are going to get when they're 13? Access to. Yeah.

And look, I think your passion for this topic is so important because that is what happens, that's what no one starts wanting and that's where things so quickly evolve. I think there's a couple things under that that I think we can really think about how to like action on with our kids. If I think about what is driving girls to send naked pictures of, of themselves to other people to some degree what we're conditioning kids to do and definitely girls to do is derive their entire self worth in an outside in way. Let me literally show you who I am and you can tell me if I'm good enough. That's really what would drive someone to do that.

But isn't that bananas that like we're talking such a big game? No, but we're talking such a big empowerment game and everybody here, you know, has a laundry basket full of you go girl T shirts. But what we're actually doing is turning our daughters into pinup girls vying for boys approval.

And I think there are really like tweaks we can do in our home around like how we can build something very different in our say daughters which is not just saying don't send those pictures. As long as someone derives self worth from an external, motivated activity, they will do that. Because we all have to have a way of feeling good about ourselves. The issue, actual issue is how do we help our kids feel good enough on their own? By gazing in, not by looking out. And a lot of that really has to do with a bunch of small interactions in our home with our kids. When we ask them, even they show up in some outfit. Right. I actually ask them, hey, like, what do you like about that? What is in that for you? These are questions that a lot of kids will give you a blank stare. They've never considered that. What do I like? Well, people like me in this. Ugh. Spending a lot of time in your mind, in other people's estimation of yourselves. Let's come back to you. Let's figure that out. Let's actually connect those moments in our home. Really do, over time, become a little bit of an antidote.

But then don't we need to examine what the word connect means? Oh, yes, because these teens are sending these images to one another and communicating in the most hardcore way possible. Yet to your earlier point, they're not actually picking up the phone or calling one another. They don't make eye contact. And those Friday and Saturday nights when they're all dolled up, they're not even going out.

That's why they're just taking photographs.

I mean, I was physically climbing out of windows in high school and I've got teenagers that don't even leave the house.

That's right. Right. So let's see, what was I going to say?

The connection? They're super connected and they don't speak to one another.

Yeah. So, you know, this was sold to us as, you know, oh, it's connection. You know, you're going to have all these friends. And you know, what I point out again as a social psychologist is there's human connection is synchronous and, and telephone is actually okay. You know, we remember having long conversations with their friends on the telephone. But two things, it's synchronous and it's one to one. It's not performance. You're connecting with a friend if you have a phone call. And so if they want to talk one on one by a FaceTime call, that's great. But once it becomes a group chat with a lot of kids on it now it's much more performative and you're more anxious. You're not bonding your parents.

What's funny, you don't even have One another's phone numbers. Right.

If you ask, oh, and then snap.

Or call a friend, what's their phone number they have? No way. They only can communicate with them via snap, which keeps adults so far out of it.

That's right. So, you know, a lot of experts give you advice about, you know, talk to your child, help them use, you know, get the good, not the bad. And I don't know anyone who's having success with that. Once you give your kid a smartphone, and especially once they have social media for the rest of their time at home, it's gonna be a fight over screen time and they're going to be sucked into this, this whirlwind where they're going to be struggling to get prestige. So I think the solution to this is not to talk to your child and teach them digital wellness and digital citizenship and all that. The solution is for us to say, this is completely bonkers. This is completely insane that we've done this. We've got to just stop. And so what I'm proposing in the book is four norms. With four norms, we can roll this back, roll back the phone based childhood. And they are no smartphone before high school. So at least let's get them through early puberty before giving them a smartphone. No social media till 16. Ideally it should be 18, but what I'm aiming for is a norm that we could actually meet because that's the power. If most of us do it, then we win. The third number is phone free schools. Let's at least give them six hours a day away from their phones. And test scores have been dropping around the world since 2012. Our entire species is getting less intelligent because our kids in school are watching porn and video games. I mean, again, it's just completely insane that we've done this. That's the third norm, phone free schools. And that's happening rapidly around the world. Very exciting. And then the fourth is more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. Because we don't want the focus here to be just on the phones, the phones, the phones. We want to be on childhood. What kind of childhood do we want for our kids and older people here? We remember childhoods in which there was excitement, there was adventure. You'd sneak out of your bedroom and climb down a tree or whatever it is you had to do. But there was adventure. And kids need thrills, they need to be together, they need to plan things together. So that's the goal. The goal isn't just take away the phone. The goal is restore a normal Human play based, excitement filled childhood where the kids take risks, children must take risks. And if you prevent your children from taking risks when they leave the house, they're gonna have no idea how to handle risk.

That's what I want to talk about. Because what I'm hearing you say is almost how we need to rebrand how we're raising and how we're living our lives. Because what's been marketed to us in the last decade is technology based, helicopter parenting. Right. I'm not gonna ask people to raise their hands, but I guarantee a lot of people in this room have life360. Now, I certainly don't want to be on an app where I'm telling everyone in my family where I am 24 hours a day. And I don't think any adult should have to do that. But there's this idea that you need to know the physical. I mean, if you want to track your kid on an iPhone, you can figure it out within half a block. But there's now this idea that you need to know precisely what room they're sitting in, what the temperature is and what they ate without them telling you. How do we start to. And if you don't subscribe to that, then people are like, oh, you're not on life. You don't use that. I guess they're swingers. No, but like, how do you rebrand that?

Well, I think we have to rebrand a couple things. Number one, when we think about our kids becoming less anxious, right. I really think about competence. Competence is the antidote to anxiety. And competence actually comes from watching yourself struggle, take on a risk, and not even be great at something. Just survive it. So the first time your kid goes to a grocery store here in New York City, walks a couple blocks on their own, this is really important. They're going to be anxious. And then so often as a parent, we clamp down on control. But control and trust are opposites.

I need you to say this one one more time. I need you to say the competence and anxiety part and the control part again, because I think you just hit the jackpot.

So I think that we're depriving our kids of opportunities to find their own competence. And so the bubble in which they feel safe is getting smaller and smaller and more and more protected. That's why they feel anxious, because they're no longer over and over in situations that we're right, are uncomfortable, and then they don't get good right away. They just survive it. And if you think about control and trust as opposites which I think is powerful in any relationship, then the more we exert control, the more we reflect to our kids, we don't trust you. And when we reflect to our kids, we don't trust you. We're their mirrors. They learn I can't really trust myself. And that's this massive ball of anxiety that seems to carry with them from situation to situation.

I think that's exactly right. And that's beautifully and powerfully put. There's a very easy thing that parents can do to respond to that. So here in the front row is a woman named Lenore Skenazy that some of you may know. She wrote a book called Free Range Kids and Lenore. Actually, the last time I was on the stage, it was with Lenore and Malcolm Gladwell. And Lenore and I co founded an organization called Let Grow. If you go to letgrow.org, it basically was just my attempt to give Lenore a bigger platform rather than just being an author with a book. Because I think she really has the answer to a lot of this problem. Exactly what Dr. Beck was talking about. And our most powerful program, the most powerful thing we have to offer is called the Let Grow Experience, or Let Grow Project. And it's meant to be done in a classroom, an entire class, but you can do it yourself at home, as a family. All it is is the teacher gives the kid a piece of paper. It says, here's the assignment. Go home, talk to your parents. Figure out, pick something that you think you can do by yourself, with your parents permission, but without your parents. We give examples like maybe you can walk the dog, and you've never walked the dog. Maybe you could walk a few blocks to a corner store and get a quart of milk. And these are the sort of things that everybody did at the age of 7 or 8. For decades and decades and decades, all the way through the crime wave, we all went out. By 7 or 8, you were out doing errands. And that makes you feel useful and competent. You realize, I can walk six blocks and buy a quart of milk and come home and survive. And you know, so every seven or eight year old used to have that. And then in the 90s, we just stopped kids from getting that. So let's give it back to them. And it is transformative. What happens if you go to letgro.org, we have videos. I mean, because we're talking like seventh graders who have never walked to a store unsupervised. We're talking, there are kids who've never cut their own meat because their parents think a knife is sharp and we can't trust them with a knife. But what we find, and we have actually beginning some research here, what we find is that it is an anti anxiety medication that has zero bad side effects, huge numbers of good side effects. It actually literally reduces anxiety. And for Prozac it takes about five weeks to work. This works in about an hour. So the amazing thing is if you do it in a school because a lot of parents like, I don't want to let my kid out, I'll be reported, I'll never see him again. But if it's a school assignment, then you say, whoa, okay, it's homework. They're asking me to do it and everyone else is doing it. And so if a school does it, imagine all the third graders in a school or school district are doing the let grow experience once a month. Well, by the end of the semester, by the end of the year, everyone has seen 8 year olds walking to the store again. And that's how we change social norms and that's how we tell all the parents, you know what, 8 is actually an age when kids can do things. So we have to do that. We can solve this problem, but it's a lot easier if we do it together and reset norms.

Can I say two things around this that I just want to empower everyone to have something to like go out and do. Number one, like truly a mantra I use in my life often is discomfort is a sign I'm doing something new, not something wrong. We all tend to misinterpret discomfort. If you're letting your kid walk for the first time to a friend's, you will feel uncomfortable and your kid will feel uncomfortable. And that feeling is right. It's right. Discomfort could mean we're doing something wrong, but it always means it's new. And so if it's new for you to give your kid independence, the way your body will feel is uncomfortable. And waiting till you feel comfortable, it will never happen. So I think that's really powerful. Number two, let's say you are encouraging your kid to go to the store or walk to a friend or something. Someone recently backstage just told me my kid is really scared to shower alone. They're 10, whatever it is, okay? A script. I've said a lot to my kids, starting with like why I wouldn't finish a puzzle for them, but it also works with teens doing errands is I want to tell you why I'm not going to do this for you. You are such a competent person and I never want to reflect to you that I see you as anything other than a competent person. And so I'm going to start by watching you in the shower and then I'm gonna go out of your room. I know you can walk to a friend's house and you're right, it's gonna feel uncomfortable. But I need you to know that I know you can do it. Because if we can't name to our kid that we don't see them as competent as getting through their discomfort, then we reflect to our kid that we don't think they're competent. Then our kid learns, wow, I'm scared of this. My parent doesn't think I can do this either. And that's the collusion. So just naming to your kid, I'm not going to do this. I'm not gonna cut your steak for you. Not because I think you can do it. Well, in fact, I know you can't, but I'm not going to because I think you're capable of struggling through it and struggling through it again and again until one day it's just gonna be a tiny bit easier and you're gonna feel that. And that's going to be the best feeling in the world. And I'm not going to take that feeling away from you. I'm not going to do it anymore. It's such a communication of sturdiness and competence. And again, that really is an antidote to this anxiety.

Okay? Watching our kids struggle through it and talking through it and parenting them through it. I can see all of that because you're talking about physical activities like taking a shower or going to bed or walking to the store. But when our kids whole universe exists inside of a phone, how do we parent then, right? So we say to ourselves, I don't want to be overprotective. I don't want to when they go to bed, figure out their password and read all their messages. But we're inclined to do that because when we were teenagers, our mother stood one room away and just listened a little to make sure no, but to make sure the conversations we were having were healthy and normal, right? And now we find ourselves in a situation where we're laying in bed with our husband trying to figure out what the fucking password is. Because we know our kid looks so devastated and depressed and they're not speaking and we know that the answer is in that phone. It's like you're laughing, but it's all your lives. Don't Tell me it's not.

So half of all American teens say that they spend almost all the time online. So even if they're talking to you, they're actually thinking about what's going on online. And so this is. Half of our kids are essentially lost to us. So when you ask the question, how do we parent if their life isn't the fun? I said, we can't. You really can't get, are we supposed.

To go through that? Like, what do we do with that? Because that is their privacy.

So we stop their life from being on the phone. We should not allow any kid to be online all the time. So how do you do that? I mean, if your kids are young, it's easy, you have a lot more control. But a lot of the questions are, well, my kid's already 14, 15, her whole life is on the phone. What am I going to do? Take it away? And what I'm finding in talking with parents is that there are ways you can structure the day or encourage them to be structured so that they're not online all the time. And so first, if your kid goes to a school where they can keep the phone in the pocket, either withdraw that kid from the school if you can, or march into the principal's office and say, what the hell are you doing? I want my kid to actually connect with students and teachers. So make the school go phone free. And that gives you six hours. Now, you still got the Chromebooks and the iPads, but at least if you get phone free for six hours a day, that's a big part of the day. Then ideally, hopefully your kid is doing some sort of activity, like ideally team sports or something physical in the afternoon, that's a few more hours that they're not on the phone, then they come home. And you must have an absolute rule about mealtime, especially dinner. No phones at the table, not even in your pocket. So now you're all the way at like 6, 7, 7:30, whatever time it is. And now maybe in the evening, they need their laptop, they need to do homework. So what I'm saying is if the phone will take over every available moment, it will expand like a gas to fill everything that you don't. I don't mean that you fill, but everything that isn't structured otherwise. And then of course, summers, if you can send your kid to a sleep wake camp that has no phones. So I think there are ways that we can structure a kid's lives so they're not on 16 hours a day and then you have room to Parent and the teachers have room to teach.

And I think, look, I think we're also seeing the minutiae of the day to day. Like, do we learn our kids passcode? How do we set it up? I think how you give your kid a phone is so critical.

Explain this.

Okay, so there's the how you give it and then there's all of us who's like, oh, I didn't do that. You know, so that's not all is lost. We can go back so we could talk about both. I think about my kid's bedroom. I would never let my kid have a lock on their bedroom. That doesn't mean I go snooping around my kid's room. Like, we think there's only two extremes. The answer is always in between the extremes. When my kid gets a phone and they're learning how to use it, you better bet, number one, that phone is set up with my kid put as a minor and with parental controls. Kids are smart. They get their phone, they set it up as an adult. That cannot happen. And when you talk to your kid, I think we actually have a whole process of, your kid needs to write the contract first. You cannot from the start be more invested in your kid being safe online than they are. This is a joint project. If you're thinking my kid isn't responsible or old enough to write out a good contract as a first draft, that's your best sign. They're definitely not ready to have a phone. Right. So that's a safeguard. Number two, you can say to your kid your phone will have a passcode that I know. Let me explain the nuance. I don't wanna spend a lot of time looking over your texts. Really. I have other things to do. And I would never let you lock your room because my number one job is to keep you safe. And should I ever have to look in your room, not to punish you, but to protect you, I would. I love you that much. Same thing with the phone. Now you're not snooping. It's out in the open. A lot of kids won't send nasty things because they know their parents. That's how they learn a boundary. And then I think there's a really important nuance with your kid. And we have to be able to hold these two things as true. We need to set up guidelines so you can be as safe as possible. For example, no phones at the dinner table, no phone in your room sleeping. 0. There's very few things I'm rigid about that.

A lot of the worst have happened.

Rigid. And if that's the first change people make and we could talk about how to change it. That's a good one. So those are the rules. I also am a realist, Sweetie. There's gonna be a moment when I learn something where you've broken that rule. And I just wanna let you know up front, my job is to help set guidelines, and it's also to be there for you and figure things out when those guidelines are inevitably broken. That's not my way of saying that it's okay, but it's my way of saying I'm always gonna be on your team to figure it out. If we are not willing to be a safe adult for our kid when they inevitably transgress, that child should never have a phone, because these things are set up to encourage that behavior.

Okay. I love that you're bringing this up because we're so worried about what our kids will do, what they'll say online, we have them panicked that if you post this, you're not gonna get into college. If you say that you're not gonna get a job sometime. And the truth is, if you mean to tell me that nobody in this room was ever in a wet T shirt contest in college, you're all liars. But now, like, kids are supposed to do keg stands, not kids. Older teenagers should do keg stands. They should make a mistake. There should be a beer slide, and maybe they're gonna dance on a bar. But we have them so panicked that if you do any of these things, your future is over. Where is the middle ground?

Let's see. Where's the middle ground? So we need to change our thinking about risk. We need to realize that kids need risk and thrills. And there are some things, like a summer camp counselor said, our goal, we want to see bruises, not scars. If you send your kid to a camp where no one ever goes to the nurse because no one ever gets bruised, well, then something's wrong. I think the most surprising graph in my book, the one I get a lot of questions about, is the one showing rates of broken arms and broken bones. And for as long as data was kept, who do you think gets the most broken bones? Boys or girls? What age? Teenage boys. They always got the most broken bones. And that was true until 2012, and then that their rate began dropping and dropping and dropping, so that now the CDC collects data on who's going to the hospital for what reason. Now teenage boys are getting fewer broken bones than their fathers or grandfathers are currently. In other words, they're slightly less than men in their 50s or 70s or any other age because they're not doing anything. How big of a problem could lead to a broken bone?

How big do you think gaming is? Because now to be a gamer, it's marketed like it's a sport.

Yeah, that's right. So this is complicated. The social media story for girls was actually pretty easy because the evidence of harm, the correlational experimental studies, you know, social media is messing up girls, especially when they get on in middle school. That's very clear. And that was clear when I started writing the book. The boys story was harder to figure out because the research on video games, I mean, there were some little benefits here and there. It wasn't quite so clear what was going on. But. But what I finally realized, and this is work I did, actually. Zach Rauch is here in the audience somewhere. My research partner in all of this. What we put together with Zach's leadership was realizing it's not just video games per se, it's boys are kind of checking out of the real world and the online world has just been luring them in and video games is the central part of it. So boys are really checking out. They're not doing well in school. Girls are crushing them at every level from kindergarten through PhD. And what they're doing with their teenage years is largely video games and pornography. And so they're not developing skills that would be useful. I mean, it's hard to imagine them, as you said, you know, look what their views about girls and women. It's hard to imagine them ever being able to flirt effectively, to court, to have sex normally. That's right, that's right. So to be clear, the view that we came to on video games is for most kids who play video games, you know, somewhat it's okay. And it's not even the first person shooter game. It's not even that that's the problem. It's when they're doing it every day, even if it's just an hour or two a day, if it's seven days a week, their brain is adapting to it. They get quick dopamine, quick dopamine. And then when they're not playing the game, the world feels boring. The world is low dopamine. And so boys are getting sucked into this high stimulation life, video games and porn primarily. And then the world feels boring. So they don't want to be involved. They always want to be on a screen. And they're basically checking out of Life. Plus about 5 to 10% depending on you count it 5 to 10% of the boys develop what's called problematic use, which sure looks like addiction. And so there's no other activity where we'd let our boys do something if we knew there was a 10% chance it's going to severely damage their life. But video games, is that so? I'm not saying take all your boys off video games, but if your sons are playing video games two hours a day or more, it's hard to put an exact number. But two hours a day or more, I would say they're at risk of changing their brains to need more dopamine. You do not want that.

Are there little signs like it's tough to get your child to sit down or watch a full length movie?

Yes.

Yet they watch endless hours of short form videos.

I think that's one. I think it's really hard for us to sit at dinner and talk, that it's very quick where someone's like, I want to Google that. I want to look something up. And it always makes sense in the moment. You're like, I do want to know that sports score. But really there's this attachment to more information, more excitement. Just being here in the moment and connecting seems to be really difficult.

Then how important, please?

Yeah, if I could just add on to this, I think this is a very important point about the nature of videos. So movies are good. Stories are good. Humans evolved with stories. We tell stories, we love stories. Every society socializes the kid with stories. So if you want to watch a movie with your kid every day, that's great. For most movies, if they watch it alone, that's great. If they can pay attention to a story and get immersed in it for 60 to 120 minutes, that's great. TikTok is not stories. TikTok is little tiny bits of content selected by algorithms and other people's ratings to be maximally addictive. And so don't worry so much about movies. But I'm really coming to see that TikTok is just terrible for everyone at every age, including, you know, including us. But you know, I just want to make one final point, which is our discussion so far is really focused on mental health and mental illness. That's what all the research is on, that's what the debate is on. But what I'm coming to see, since we wrote the book, is that there's actually a diminishment of the entire generation on many, many fronts. So certainly their anxiety levels are up, depression's up, self harm's up, suicide's up. Happiness is down, but it's not just mental health. Look at education, which we already mentioned. They're learning less. They literally know less around the world. This is the PISA data shows us around the world after 2012. They know less. And the third thing where I think we really need to focus on is the ability to attend, the ability to pay attention for 20 minutes uninterrupted. A lot of them have never gone 20 minutes uninterrupted because their phone is pinging them every few minutes. So we really need to see our kids ability to pay attention for 20 uninterrupted minutes, or ideally even 30, is an incredibly precious resource. And if your kid can't pay attention for 30 minutes, they're gonna have a lot of trouble in college, they're gonna have a lot of trouble in life. They'll never be able to really get absorbed in something. So we really have to guard our kids attention. And I think TikTok and then the other companies that copy it. TikTok is probably the worst thing for your kids developing attention. It's gonna damage it if they become heavy users.

We have some questions from the audience. You know, we hear so much about how parents need to behave and how we have to model good technology behavior and all of this requires work. So what does that look like? Because on some level we shouldn't have to behave the way children do. Right. When I grew up, on Saturday nights my parents would drink vodka and play gin rummy with their friends. I didn't get to do that. So why do we have to have, why do we have to behave in a way that we want our children to?

Well, I think one of the big differences between what we're seeing now and alcohol consumption is our kids are oriented toward attachment. That's still true. Their relationship with us, being able to be present with us, getting attention from us, not all the time, but when we're there actually getting it is a hugely important part of their development. And the more we're on our phones, like I think about this with my kid. How often did I look at my mom wanting her attention and instead I saw the back of her phone like zero. How often does my kid want time with me? Because they say something on the surface that seems minor, but it's actually just the beginning of unraveling story that leads to them being left out that they actually really want to figure out with me. And instead I'm on my phone if I'm honest, like a decent percentage of the time. And so if we're not so available for those deeper synchronous connections because we're on our phone. It's not just about modeling behavior. Our kid, then they're not getting what they need, and then they learn to turn to what seems to be soothing us. The other thing I think that we're not talking about enough with regards to phones. Our frustration tolerance for the inherent inconveniences of parenting has gone way down since we've been on our phones a ton more. It's just the same for us. Instant gratification, endless information, low effort, high enjoyment. Being a parent is like the opposite of that. It's effort, basically. Unless you figured something out, please find me. It is. It's meltdowns and it's whines and it's complaints and it's pushbacks. And in those situations, for us to get through it and for our kids to get what they need from childhood, we actually have to just tolerate those moments. So the more we're on our phones, we are actually making our tolerance for good, sturdy parenting so much lower, which leads to us giving our kids more devices so we just kind of don't have to deal with it. So I think that actually for me is one of the main reasons to make it manageable. My second grade teacher always said, if something feels too hard to do, it only means the first step isn't small enough. Ms. Edson, may she rest in peace. Like, may us all. Like, what is the first step I could do? Is it a 20 minute dinner where the phones are all in the bathroom? Is it saying, hey, you've had your phone in your room at night? You know what? I have too. It's probably not good for either of us. Let's both try that for five nights together. It could be something so manageable to get the family going in a different direction.

Question from the audience. How do I convince my child's school not to give students laptops or Chromebooks in the second grade?

Yeah. So this is the next front in the battle. Because these technologies flooded Into School around 2011, the companies are competing with each other to get the kids hooked on their brand. And there's essentially no evidence that this is benefiting them. UNESCO put out a report a year and a half ago suggesting that actually these things have such massive distraction effects, whatever educational benefits they might have are probably wiped out by the distraction effects. And that's especially going to be true in elementary school. So let's start by going phone free. That's easy. The teachers hate the phones, the principals hate the phones. Let's get the victory on phone free education now, this year, then the next thing. Maybe you're ready for it now, but certainly next year I think we're going to really be pushing a lot more on education technology. I have a substack, afterbabble.com, it's free. We have a lot of content about all these things. We'll have an article on EdTech in a day or two with specific advice on what to do. But this is harder because while the teachers hate the phones, they've come to rely on all the educational technology. It makes teaching easier and less effective. And so it's going to be hard, hard to get those out. And so this is going to take a while. But I think we need to start with elementary school where it's not as essential and let's get that. And then we'll move on to middle school and then high school is harder. There might be a role for it in high school, but I think there's no role for this stuff now. The teacher can have a computer, the teacher can have a screen. That's not bad. It's the one on one devices that were marketed to us as an equity thing. Oh, the rich kids have computers, so we need to give all the poor kids computers. This is a social justice thing. It's the opposite. It's the opposite because the one on one technology has the biggest damaging effect on kids from low ses, kids with single parent families, they're the ones who are most phone addicted. And when schools go phone free, a number of studies that we found, when schools go phone free, the biggest gains are for the kids, more on the bottom of the both social class and the educational performance. So it was all pushed on us with a lot of nonsense. It's not true and we probably should get rid of all of it.

I want to ask you a quick big tech question. How do you feel about the new parental control measures that Instagram just rolled out? I mean, is this the devil winking at you or are they actually trying to do something positive?

Well, okay, wait, are they trying to do something positive? Not necessarily. Have they done something positive? Yes.

What I mean is positive for them or positive?

No for our kids? What I mean is, until now, meta in particular has been really the worst of the worst in that they've had internal whistleblowers who say, look, we're hurting kids in this way. Here's a simple technical fix. And they won't do it. They haven't done anything that would protect kids if it Might lose the mark. So so far, they've really done nothing substantial. This is actually substantial. What they're doing is a real thing. So that's good. And it's important to praise them, to show them, you know, keep doing this. Like we actually notice if you're doing something good. Just to be clear, the timing of it, it was announced literally the day before Congress marked up cosa, the Kids Online Safety Act. It was conceived when Mark Zuckerberg, I believe, was called in front of Congress. So it is a transparent ploy to defer and delay regulation to say we don't need Congress. See, look, we're doing it ourselves. So while it definitely is a real thing, it is good. It has a number of good things about it. Especially. They have marked 16 as an age that matters. Until now, it was, are you old enough to lie about your age and say you're 13? If you're old enough to lie, you're in everywhere. And now they're saying you have to be old enough to say you're 16 to be in everywhere. It'll make it easier to enforce. And it's just, we need to just get a general consciousness that 13 was way too young. That is nothing. That is not a proper age. 16 and 18 are important ages. At 18, you're an adult and there's going to be less regulation. But 16, what they say is below 16, you can't change these settings without a parent getting involved. If you're 16 or over, then you can change these settings. And so that is, I think, an important point, that 16 matters.

How do those companies feel about you and your work?

Well, so to make a general point, the tech industry is thousands of companies that make our lives better. This is not the tech industry. This is three companies. This is Meta, TikTok and Snap. They own our children's childhood all over the world. They suck up almost all of their attention and they seem not to give a damn about their mental health. So it's three companies are the ones that are really causing the problems. What was your question? How do they feel about me?

I'm in.

Oh, I see. Yeah.

It was funny because it was months ago when you were sort of on tour and I was looking online at the party parties you were going to, and I'm thinking, there's a lot of big tech people that might be at these parties. How do they feel about you? What do they say to you?

Well, they don't say anything to me now. I. I did.

They've never called you in. They've Never said we want to look at research. Like they're not even.

No, actually, Mark Zuckerberg reached out to me in 2019. I had a conversation with him. I've had a couple of conversations with him. I. I know a few people at Meta. These companies are full of most of, of good people who don't want to hurt kids. It's the leadership at these three companies seems to. Obviously, they're putting shareholders first and our kids last. Interestingly, a lot of them don't let their own kids have the technology. They know how bad it is. They want us to use. They want our kids to use it without our knowledge or permission, but they don't let their kids use it. So I don't think I'm. Put it this way, these companies are full of parents, and parents read the book and they generally say, oh, my God, yes, this is happening. So I think there's going to be mixed feelings in the tech companies, although I imagine the leadership generally doesn't like me.

All right, I know we're out of time, but we must end on a high note, right? It was great that 92y set this up at 5 so everyone could go out for a drink. We want them drinking like a margarita, not brown liquor. So let's just get them in a good place. Kids are super resilient. What should we feel good about?

I think you can feel good about the fact that the ultimate strategy, and really the only strategy any parent has, is connection. Right? And especially as your kid gets older, that's the only thing. And every ounce that you pour in there, talking to your kids, connecting to your kid, trying to understand something first before judging it, trying to support your kid. Tell me more about that before you offer them a quick fix. That is the capital you have to make hard decisions to change boundaries. And so if over dinner, you're just brainstorming, hey, what is one more way we can connect with our kid today? What can I go back and say, I didn't listen? Or tell me more about that. That's gonna have huge payout.

What we should feel good about is that we're faced with one of the biggest health disasters ever to affect children. Yet we can actually change it. And we are changing it. We can change it if we do it together. And it's not just us foisting change on kids. The older members of Gen Z agree with us. They see the problem. My students at nyu, I teach a course called Flourishing. Most of them have phone addiction problems. They recognize their phone is damaging their life and their livelihood, but they say they can't quit because everyone else is on. They have to keep up with the content. So Gen Z actually sees the problem. They're not in denial. They're not going to fight us on this. So it's just extraordinary to me that we have this gigantic problem. We can solve it. And given the speed at which things are changing in schools and the speed with which parents are beginning to let their kids out and let them do errands and reporting back to us that, yeah, you know, at work, my kid's riding his bicycle and he loves it. This is really changing fast. So I'm incredibly hopeful. Like, we're actually changing this, but we have to do it together.

Well, that is a great way to end this conversation. Thank you both.

So.

So.