The Anxious Generation: Impact of Smartphones on Childhood

Gen Z's mental health crisis stems from the shift to a phone-based childhood, limiting real-world social interactions and play.

### The Impact of Smartphones on Childhood Mental Health: Insights from Jonathan Haidt
* 📱 "Around 2010, we observed a **significant decline in the mental health of young people** in the U.S., marked by **rising rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide**, which social psychologist Jonathan Haidt attributes to the **rise of smartphones**."
* 📊 Haidt highlights that Generation Z, growing up with **constant access to social media**, faces a different childhood experience compared to previous generations, particularly affecting their **social skills and mental well-being**.
* 🔍 He traces the roots of this issue back to 1990 when the internet was introduced, leading to a **rapid transformation of childhood dynamics**, particularly after the launch of the **iPhone in 2007**.
* 👦 For children born in 2000, their formative years were dominated by **digital interactions** rather than traditional play-based childhood activities, resulting in a **lack of essential social experiences**.
* 📉 By 2015, data revealed a **sharp increase in mental health issues**, especially among girls, correlating with the **rise of smartphone usage** and the **decline of face-to-face interactions**.
* Haidt argues that this shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood has hindered development, as children now spend an **average of seven to nine hours daily on screens**, reducing their time for **physical play and reading**.
* 👨 He emphasizes the role of **overprotective parenting** in this crisis, as societal fears have led to **less outdoor freedom for children**, further isolating them in a **digital world**.
* 🌍 Haidt advocates for collective action among parents and educators to establish norms that prioritize **children's mental health and well-being**, such as **delaying smartphone access** and promoting **real-world interactions**.

hello and welcome. I'm Elise Hugh, the host of the TED Talks daily podcast, and I'm so glad to be with all of you today for our TED Talks daily summer book club, a special series on the TED Talks daily podcast. It's a show where we deliver ideas that inspire every day. So today, we are slowing down to ask, what are our phones doing to childhood and to us? Around 2010, we all observed the mental health of young people in the US starting to get worse. Rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, and self-harm started climbing up and haven't come down. In his new book, The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes a strong case that the cause is smartphones. He looks to Gen Z as an example. They came of age with unfettered access to the internet and social media, and he argues that these numbers are the consequence of the new childhood reality. John Haidt, welcome, and thank you for digging into this with us. Well, thank you, Elise. So much of this book really hinges on the moment around 2010.

When a few dramatic changes took place in the digital world, talk to us about what happened then and why you consider it a big deal. So, let me actually start in 1990 because we you have to understand how we all got tricked into this. So, if we go back to 1990, there was no internet. Nobody knew what the internet was. So, the internet arrives around 199 before 1995, and it's amazing. It's like God said, Hey, do you want to know anything instantly? I still remember how exciting it was. So, the internet was amazing, and the Millennials were teenagers at the time. They were going through puberty, and they charged onto it, and they made it their own, and they found all kinds of ways to do things, and they started internet companies, and they were a creative, successful generation. Also, the Berlin Wall fell just before that, and democracy is ascendant in the 90s, and we're thinking democracy, that its best friend is the internet. How could a dictator ever keep it out? Good luck, China, keeping out the

internet. So, we were all super optimistic once you got the smartphone in 2007. Now, you start getting the app store and apps. You get Uber. So, all of this is miraculous. Okay, so our kids love it. Kids always love technology, and we're all like, Well, okay, they're spending a lot of time on it, but you know, maybe it's making them smarter. It's going to teach them tech skills, so this is all good. We thought so. That's the setup. And if you were born in 1990, let's say, then you hit puberty around 2002-2003. You go through puberty with a flip phone. You use your flip phone to call your friends and to text them one-on-one, and you meet up, and you do things in the real world, so you're fine. You go through, you have a normal human development, normal human puberty, and you come out the other end as a mentally healthy person. Okay, but suppose you're born in the year 2000. You are seven when the iPhone comes out. You got a front-facing

camera in 2010. You are 11 when you probably got one. You got on Instagram when you were 12. So when you hit puberty, you're going through puberty, not meeting up with your friends. You're going through puberty, swiping, tapping, liking, and hanging on. What if I post something? How will people react? Half of our kids say they're on the internet almost all the time. 50% almost all the time. This is not a normal human childhood. There's not much, there's not as much space to face contact. There's not, you don't get to develop social skills. You don't have hobbies. You don't read books. You're just on your phone all day long. And guess what? Their mental health collapsed, especially for the girls, instantly. It's not a slow thing, instantly. Around 2012, you get these hockey stick shapes in all the graphs in my book. There was no sign of a problem in 2010, and by 2015, it's all over the world. We don't know about the developing world, but all over

the Western World. We start seeing this especially for girls. So, that's the story. And what do you think was going wrong? So, the story I tell in the book is two things. I decided not just to write a book about what social media is doing, but to write a book which is really more about childhood. What is it? Why do we have it? Why is human childhood so different from every other animal, including chimpanzees? Because we grow up fast after you're born, but then you slow down, and we don't grow very fast until we hit puberty. Why? Why do we delay? We have these amazing cultural brains. This is our great adaptation. This is why we cover the world, and chimpanzees don't. And that all depends on a slow growth process with a lot of cultural learning from your elders, from the people ahead of you in your culture. So, that's part of it. Also, part of it is play. Young mammals need a huge amount of play, free play, to wire up their brains. All animals practice skills they'll use as

adults, so you take what was called what I call the play-based childhood, yeah, which is what we've had for about 300 million years, going back to the beginning of mammals, and then 2010 to 2015, kids now have a phone-based childhood, and that, I argue, is what's blocking development. We've never seen such a sharp change in generations in terms of their mental health, so that's what we see when we look back historically. We can certainly now discuss the research trying to pin it down, but what I'm pointing to is an incredible pattern of changes that happened in many countries simultaneously, always with more increases for the girls, not affecting the middle-aged people, but only affecting the teenagers, and no one can offer another explanation other than the transformation of childhood by the technology. You call this transition from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood a great rewiring, so how do you believe the minds of these Gen Z kids are wired differently now? Let's think

about it this way. For those of you who are over 35 or 40, you surely had a play-based childhood. What I'd like you to do is think back on the most exciting things that you ever did as a child. Think back on times you just were hanging out with your friends. Think back on how much time you spent laughing with your friends, laughing, joking, playing around. Okay, now take all of that, cut it by 80%, because Gen Z didn't get that. They have almost no unsupervised time. They don't get to hang out behind the 7-Eleven or down by the river or in a playground or anywhere, um, except online. So, take 70% of that out. Think of all the times you smiled at a person or you made eye contact. Take 70% of that out. Now, again, I don't know the exact number, but for the kids who say they're online almost all the time, it's probably 70%. Um, think of all the books you read. Take 70% of those out, maybe 100%. Gen Z has no

time to read books. They have so much content to consume to keep up. There's very little book reading. Think about hobbies. Did you have a hobby? Take that out. So, you take out almost everything because, again, if the latest numbers are on average American kids, they're spending seven to nine hours a day on entertainment and screen stuff, not counting school. Seven to nine hours a day is the average, depending on how you count it. Take childhood, take out almost everything that you valued in it, and what's left? But does hanging out have to be in person and with making eye contact in real life? Because a lot of these kids would argue, We hang out all the time. We hang out in games. We hang out, you know, on social platforms. We are connecting. We're just connecting in a different way. That's right. And John Haidt, you're the fuddy-duddy, you know, for coming down on just the different tools that we're using to hang out and connect. Oh, that's a great objection. And you know, 10 years ago or

15 years ago, when I first saw Twitter and people sending out, Oh, I just had a hamburger, I thought, God, this is so trivial. But then, as a social psychologist, I thought, Well, actually, wait a second. Like, if you're sort of checking in with your friends hundreds of times a day, that could be really good. But what I've come to see is the online world gives you multiple ways to connect virtually, which often lacks certain properties. So, the most important one is being synchronous. So, right now, you and I are synchronous. We can see each other's facial expressions. But on Zoom, there's a little bit of awkwardness. You know, you don't quite get the timing. So, video games, Twitch, all these things that allow you to, well, that allow you to go two-way voice and face, those have some benefits. I'll grant that. Whereas going back and forth with in-group texts, group text is performance, not connecting one-on-one like an old phone call. Um, so synchronous is good. All the asynchronous ones, I think, miss that.

another feature um is that you now have such vast quantity. Imagine taking the number of people you talk with every day, multiply that by 50. Okay, that might sound great, but how much time do you then have for anyone, right? So, you don't get the kind of in-depth conversations. When I was a kid, it was just sort of famous that girls would talk on the phone for hours and hours at night, one-on-one, just one-on-one. You're there connecting. Boys don't do that, but we'd call each other up, say, Hey, can you come out? and we'd meet, and we'd go do something together, one-on-one or in a small group. That's all great. The large groups are not connecting; they're performing. And kids are anxious; they have to think carefully before they put something out because what if I make a mistake? Play needs to have lots of low-cost mistakes. You say something stupid, your friend says, Oh, that was mean, and you say, Oh, sorry. But when you grow up online, it's like

growing up in a minefield because you never know one mistake. It could actually ruin your life. It could literally ruin your life and make you not get into college. So, this is something that so many professors have observed. We can't get our students to disagree with each other anymore. They're so afraid. They've grown up in a minefield. They know one false move and their leg gets blown off. So, I think this, you know, you can praise all those virtual connections all you want. They don't seem to have the magic ingredient of hanging out with a friend in real life. And the way you explain it in the book, The Rise in Anxiety and Depression, isn't really happening in isolation because it also sort of coincides or interacts with a change in parenting culture. So, talk to us a little bit about that cultural shift that you're saying is happening all at the same time. A big part of this is the overprotective parenting. And, you know, so I can summarize the whole book by saying

we've overprotected our children in the real world. We've underprotection until the 1980s. American kids had a freer range childhood. Um, I grew up in the 70s. Uh, and there was a huge crime wave. There were crazy people. There were serial killers. Um, crime was at historically high levels. All kids went out, and it was amazing and exciting. And you know, we got into all kinds of, you know, arguments and fights and sports games and just, um, we had an exciting childhood. Uh, and that goes on until the 90s. Now you get the new media environment. So you get cable TV, you get 24-hour news cycles. Um, so in the '90s, for a lot of reasons, we freak out and we lock our kids up. Or rather, I should say, we no longer think it's okay for an 8-year-old to be outside unsupervised by an adult. Now it's more like 10 or 11 is when kids get that level of freedom. So here's a big reason

why it's not just the change in television and cable TV. The biggest reason I now believe is the loss of trust in everyone else. It was a great phrase from a British sociologist, Frank Furedi. He talks about the collapse of adult solidarity. So, even in the 70s, when there was a lot of crime, you know, if I wiped out on my bicycle and I got hurt, my friend could go knock on a door and say, Hey, can you call my mother? But we begin to lose trust in each other. We begin life moves away from the streets and moves indoors as we get air conditioning and television. We don't know our neighbors anymore. That's why we don't trust our kids to be let out. So, there's a whole backstory that really begins in the 80s and into the '90s in which we took away the play-based childhood. Oh, and at the exact same time, the internet arrives. And so, you know, we don't want to let our kids out, but this new internet thing, the

kids love it. They're sitting in the room on a computer. What could happen? Five hours a day is the stat now for social media, right? Seven to 10, seven to nine in there if you include video games and porn and all the other things that the kids are doing. But just social media is five hours a day average. If they're spending so much time on social media, what are they doing less of? Everything else. The most important thing they're doing less of, in order, are any kind of face-to-face contact with their friends or family, listening to their teachers, because they're doing this in school too, because most schools let them keep their phones in their pockets, flirting or gossiping or talking with their friends in school or at lunch, because even at lunch, if you have a phone in your pockets at lunch, the kids are doing what's called continuous partial attention. So they're continually paying attention to what's going on in their phones, and then they're also sometimes having conversations with a kid next to them. In other words, there's no real

quality human connection. That's the most important thing. If you take most human connection out of childhood, there's not a lot left. Number two, sleep. Kids really, really need sleep. We're now discovering sleep is so much more important than we thought. Back when I was in graduate school, kids were getting less sleep, especially those who have a device in bed. I mean, imagine if you had to suddenly give five to ten hours a day to some new thing. Yeah, like there's nothing that takes that pushes out everything else. I want to talk a little bit about the responses to the book because this was a number one New York Times bestseller, and there have been plenty of responses following the anxious generation's release. A number of social scientists have questioned the conclusions in the book, notably this article in Nature that gets public or that it's shared pretty widely where Candace Aers writes that hundreds of researchers, myself included, had searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Height. Our efforts have produced a mix of no small and mixed associations.

right most data are correlative, so she continues that when they can find a relationship between phones and anxiety or mental health poor mental health outcomes. It tends to be that teens who are already depressed tend to use social media more. So how do you respond to this, you know, correlation not necessarily causation argument? Sure. Okay, so let's start by setting the scene. We have a massive collapse of mental health that happens in a synchronized format, all in many countries, especially to girls, happens at the same time. There is no other explanation. The parents see it, the teachers and principal see it, psychiatrist psychologists see it. So the presumption should be something is going on here, and it may be related to technology. Okay, now what do we know from the data? There are two main battlefields. There are the correlational studies where there's hundreds and hundreds of them. They're easy to do. You just look who's more depressed, who spends more hours on social media. Okay, now hours spent on social media is the is the

variable that you're correlating with some self-report of mental health, and then you look at the connection, and the correlations tend to be around 0.1 for boys, point they're actually around 0.2 for girls. This is what we're fighting about. Um, now Candace Aers says that this is a small correlation. She and others won't be convinced unless we find large correlations, like say 0.3 or 0.4. But in public health, you rarely get 0.3 or 0.4 because you have very poor measurement at both ends. So, that's the correlational studies. We're sort of at a stalemate there. The more important battleground is on the experiments. We all know correlation doesn't show causation. We all know that. Um, so we move to the experiments, and what do the experiments show? I think we can show that the great majority of experiments do show a benefit from getting off social media, and very importantly, all of these studies are taking individuals and asking them to get off, and they're mostly college.

students, and if you take a college student, say, Hey, you, we'll pay you to get off social media for a month. Now, how do you feel? And it turns out they feel better, but they're also isolated. The real test is what happens if you take a whole school, a whole high school, and get them off social media. My prediction is you would have a huge increase because now they're not isolated; they're actually more together. And the most important theme of my book is that it's Collective effects that have to be addressed by Collective action. The reason every 13-year-old girl has to be on Instagram is because every other 13-year-old girl is on Instagram. My college students say the same thing; they can't get off because everyone else is on. So, she says, We don't find the large effects that would be necessary. That's because those researchers, they're not even considering the collective emergent properties of social media. Yeah, it does seem like an enormous task, though, John. Heigh to take Collective action on something because for younger

Generations so much of the way that they connect these days and find community is taking place on devices. And so, how do you address kind of this problem where, well, everyone else is on it, I don't want to be the one left out, and how do we get past this? Um, Cheng collective action. We get past it by acting together. Um, any one kid who gets off is alone. Any one parent who says you're not getting a phone till high school, now their kid is isolated. But there is a place where we all have community, and that is our local kids' schools. It's as simple as this: if you're a parent listening to this, um, and you have kids under the age of 12, let's say, um, just reach out to two other parents of your kids' friends and say, We want to do the four norms. We want to do the four norms from the anxious generation. Are you with me? And they probably will be with you. The four norms are no smartphone till high school, around 14, no social media till 16.

phone-free schools, and so parents can push the school to go phone-free. And the fourth is far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. That's the hardest one because that requires us to change, but it's the most important in that if we're going to take the screens, the 10 hours a day of screen time, take that away from kids, we have to give them back an exciting childhood. You mentioned big tech. Why place the onus of responsibility on individual families or neighborhoods or kids when it is these giant tech companies who are designing the apps and the phones for maximum engagement and profit? Can they not make changes to the way software is designed, and can governments not regulate these companies? Yes, they certainly could make changes, but they're in a collective action trap too. We know this from Frances Haugen, who brought out the Facebook files. Facebook is actively recruiting underage kids. They really need those kids, and they know that if they were to crack down those

kids would just go to Tik Tok, so the tech company certainly could solve this, um, but they're in a collective action problem too, because if one of them does the right thing, then the kids will just lie about their age and go somewhere else. Also, Congress gave them immunity, uh, the courts have interpreted section 230 very broadly, so that if your kids are harmed by anything that they saw online, well, section 230 says you can't sue the company. So, these are the biggest, most powerful, richest companies in the world. They've been given free reign to own our kids' childhood. They have limited legal responsibility so far, and we're trying to get a bill through Congress that does some fairly modest things about setting defaults and just begins to establish children are not adults. You have to treat them differently. If there was any other consumer product, let's imagine a new toy comes out on the market, the kids love it, and 90% of kids are using this toy five hours a day, and thousands are being hospitalized, uh, for depression, eating disorders, anxiety, and some kids

are killing themselves after using the toy. So, what I'm saying is we have a defective consumer product. Do you think that that toy maybe would be recalled? Do you think maybe someone may, maybe regulated, like maybe you have to change it so it doesn't wreak such damage? So, that's what the Surgeon General is saying. The Surgeon General is saying while the scientists fight about whether these, whether social media caused the increase at the population level, like, you know, the graphs I show in the book with the hockey sticks. Did social media cause that increase at the population level? That's an academic debate. I can't be 100% certain I'm right, but what the Surgeon General was saying was regardless of that debate, here are hundreds of cases of kids who were sextorted, they were bullied, they were shamed, and then they killed themselves that day. So, the Surgeon General is saying if this was any other consumer product, we'd regulate it and we'd put warning labels on it. Why not this one? You have two kids. How have you wound up

navigating phone use at your own house. Yeah, so um, we gave my son a phone, my old iPhone, as most people do, um, when he was in fourth grade when he started walking to school. Um, this was back, you know, whatever, in the early 2010s. We didn't know any better. Now, in retrospect, we should have just given him a phone watch or a basic phone, and that's what we did with my daughter, who's uh, three years younger. Okay, I gave her a big pink gizmo watch, and in third grade, she loved it. But I could send her out in third or fourth grade. I could send her out into the park, out to get bagels. So um, so uh, we at least did that for my daughter. The place where I did hold the line is on social media. I said, No way, you're not getting social media at least until high school. Both kids, you know, they accepted that, and my daughter when she then was in seventh grade, she said that she was actually glad she

wasn't on Instagram because she could see what it does to girls. It's a terrible thing to take 11 and 12-year-old girls and make them be conscious of their face, their skin, their body constantly, all day long, having people comment on. It's a horrible thing to do to girls. I want to close on a story that you have told about your son Max that I think illustrates the kind of world that you're ultimately advocating for. Tell us about his walks home and what happened eventually. Because my wife and I got to know a woman named Lenore Skenazy who wrote a book called Free Range Kids. I recommend this to everybody, Free Range Kids. I do too. I'm also a big fan of it. Oh good, good. And your kid, wait, you said you have three daughters, you said? Yes. And they all walk themselves to school and walk home every day. Fantastic, fantastic. Good luck to them. I have no idea what's happening in those two or three blocks, but that's really and

that's really important that you don't have an idea. So because we read Lenora's book and we know her, we encouraged Max to walk to school a year or two before everybody else was walking. And this is in Grwi Village right here in New York City. And you know, it's a safe neighborhood in terms of crime, but you know, there's some busy streets to cross. But Max is really good at that, as I was when I was seven, eight, nine, ten years old. So we let him walk to school, and the first time we let him walk, we were terrified. And we were watching the blue dot on the phone. We could track them. The next day, we watched again, and I think we might have watched a third day. But here's the thing about anxiety. The way you get rid of it is by exposing yourself to the stimulus, and then nothing bad happens. And by Pavlovian processes, the anxiety drops. So we trusted him, and he quickly learned the

subway system. Yeah, he's just amazing as a navigator. So then, I think the story you're referring to is that then, uh, when he was 13, um, he got really into tennis. And I took him to the US Open when he was 12, and then again, again 13, and he really wanted to go to a night game. And um, and that would mean he'd have to come home very, very late. He loved going out to out to Queens alone. We let him do that during the day, but he wanted to go out to a night game. And you know, we were a little nervous about that, but we thought, okay, you know, what would Lenor say? And we said, okay, um, so he went out, and the game, you know, tennis games sometimes they go really late. This was a really late game. And so he's coming home on the subway, um, and you know, there's a huge crowd, everyone's happy, they're all out to get the subway, gets on the subway, comes back, um, and when he's tries to transfer, uh, I

forget which line it was somewhere in Manhattan. You get from Queens to Manhattan, then you had to transfer to go south to Greenwich Village. Okay, um, that train wasn't running, and here it is, it's like one in the morning. And so, what does he do? Um, well, he goes upstairs, and he hails a Yellow Cab, which he had never done before. Now, I had shown him how to do it, but he'd never done it on his own without me. But he just went up, hailed a cab, and came home. And he was nervous. He was. But that's the thing, because he was nervous when he succeeded. It just changed him. And this is what I really want to convey. We have to get over our own anxieties and trust our kids to be competent human beings, just as we were at that age. Yeah, and it's hard at first, but by the third try, it actually gets easy. And then your kids flourish. They grow. They become more confident, and they're going to be much less subject to anxiety disorders if you give them

Independence well John height. Those are all the questions that I have for our conversation without the audience, but there are just audience questions piling up, so I'm going to jump right into them. Great. The first is, is there anything we can do to raise the smartphone issue politically? Because it would be great to know whether politicians around the world would want to address this at a national level. Yes, this is what's so exciting. This is the least polarized, most bipartisan issue that there is. It's incredible. Because wherever you go, red state or blue state, you know, Democrat or Republican in Congress, almost all of them are parents. Most politicians are parents. In so many countries, leaders are getting out in front, and they get massive support. So actually, it's not a risky position, and they're actually making changes. So I'd urge everyone to talk to your legislators, let them know you want, let them know you support KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act. It's actually the Senate passed it almost unanimously. It

was like 97 to 3, but I'm very excited about this, and I think the phone-free schools is the place where it started. A whole bunch of states have already said they're going to go phone-free statewide. Los Angeles School District announced it a month ago. New York City is going to announce it very soon. So, I'm actually really optimistic that at least school districts and states are going to go phone-free in school. Okay, on the subject of schools, we have a few questions from educators who are on with us. Bradley says, I'm a teacher. How can I implement cell phone restrictions and talk to families about this without sounding too Ivory Tower-esque or like I'm telling parents how to raise their children? So, first, let's distinguish between what are you saying about phones in school and what are you saying about phones at home. Now, you've always had the right to talk about what to do at school. Parents respect that, and I guarantee you other teachers in your school and your principal probably are reading

about this. So, if you raise the subject, if you say, Hey, can we go phone-free? you're going to find a lot more support than you expect because things are really different than they were six months ago. So, that's the first thing. You can definitely go phone-free in school. So, we're seeing schools all around the country saying, This is such a catastrophe for learning. We see it in test scores, we see it in discipline. We're dealing with it at school by going phone-free. Here's the new policy. And in addition, I hope you'll consider rolling back the technology, giving kids a more play-based childhood, not giving them a phone so early. So, I think we are seeing that happen. The key, again, is collective action. You're going to find a lot more allies now than you would have a year ago. Okay, Amber asks, I am an educator, and I'd like to know if Mr. Height recommends any specific activities or strategies for educators to help undo some of the negative effects of our students' childhoods.

oh yes, there's an amazingly powerful one which costs zero dollars, um, and is incredibly effective. It's called the Let Grow Experience. So, um, I was so taken with Lenore Skenazy's work that I and a few others co-founded an organization called Let Grow. So, if you go to letgrow.org, uh, you can sign up. You sign up there to download the kit for the Let Grow Experience. You can do this at home too, but it's especially powerful if you do it as a school. So, let's imagine a third-grade class, all the third graders, let's say, or second graders, say, We're doing the Let Grow Experience. So, you give them a MOG mograph, whatever, you know, a printout of a, uh, of the instructions. The kid takes it home. Basically, it's pick something to do by yourself that you've never done before by yourself, work it out with your parents, and then do it. Yeah, and so it's something like, Well, you know, I've never walked the dog, or I've never walked to a

store. I've never been out, so you know if there's a store that's three blocks away that your seven or eight-year-old, you know, can walk to, that would be an ideal one. But let them pick, you know, um, so they pick something, and then they do it, and then they come into class, and let's say you do one of these a month, and they, you know, they just say what they did, they put it up on a, as a leaf on a tree, and if you do it every month for, you know, eight months, you get these eight activities that you've done by yourself, and it's incredibly powerful because, first of all, the kids seem to almost grow tall, they feel much more, much more confident, but the more important effect, or as important, is what it does to the parents because the parents are so afraid, like, well, at what age can I let my kid out? I don't know, no one else is doing it until, so we don't know, but what happens, imagine a town in which all the elementary schools are doing this in

third grade. Now you've got eight-year-olds all over the place. They're walking to the store to get milk. They're doing errands. They're outside playing. They're walking the dog. Now adults see eight-year-olds outside, and at that point, people will stop calling the police when they see an eight or nine-year-old outside, which at present some people do because they think it's some horrible dangerous anomaly. I did get a bunch of texts from other parents when they saw my kids walking to school alone. They were like, Are you aware of this? Oh wow, wow, okay, right. But you know, look, but this year things will be different. This year they'll cheer you on, and they'll do it themselves. Now this, this is the year for collective action on all these fronts. All right, so some questions from parents too. Melissa asks about kind of distinguishing. Do you distinguish between phones versus iPads? Because iPads can create the same kind of issues. Parents seem to be more okay with iPads or tablets, and some schools actually require them. So would love your

perspective on that. Sure, so from the parent's point of view, um, a phone is the worst because it's the most portable. Um, a phone is with you all the time, especially when you're outside the house. My advice is that nobody give a smartphone before high school. An iPad can do all the same stuff as a phone; it's just less portable. So, I would say again, don't give your kid their own iPad that they can hold on to and customize and communicate with strangers on and watch porn. Don't do that either, um, till high school. Now, for you to have an iPad in the house, your iPad that you give them sometimes, there's all kinds of good stuff that they can do. Yeah, there's all kinds of good stuff. And also, let me be very clear, stories are good, movies are good, watching a movie with your kids is great. It's the 15-second videos that have no redeeming value and that are, I think, are really the worst. That's what I'll be studying next. So, I would say um, just be careful.

of both the addictive nature um and the distracting nature of these things. So, it's a screen, isn't going to hurt the kid necessarily, but it's the addictive possibilities. Sarah asks, What kind of advice do you have for parents with younger kids um if they have already given the kids smartphones? Do you have any advice about the removal process or the weaning? Yes, my advice is, If you try to pull it out by yourself, it's going to be very painful. But if you and four other families pull it out at the same time and you give them something in return, it's going to be joyous. Yes, they'll resist, but let's look at the in one case. You gave your kid an iPhone when she was n, and she's now 11, and everyone has an iPhone, and they're on it all day long. Now, if you take your kid off, you're condemning your kid to social death, so that's a very hard situation. But let's suppose you gave your kid a phone when she's nine.

and now she's 11, and most of her friends are on Instagram too. But you go to talk with the parents of her three best friends, and you say, You know, I think we made a mistake. What do you think? And if they agree, then what you can do is you can say, We're taking back the smartphone. Here's a flip phone or a light phone or something else. You'll get a smartphone when you're in high school. You can still do a lot of the same stuff on a computer. You still have a laptop or something, so it's not that you're not gonna be able to do these things, but we don't think you should have this with you all the time, everywhere. And you know, your three best friends, their families are also doing it. And what we really want is not to take stuff away from you. What we really want is for you to have a fantastic childhood. We want you guys to have fun. So, we're going to start off by saying every

you know, every Friday you girls are getting together for a sleepover. I mean, you plan it how you want, but we're suggesting that, you know, every Friday you guys get together, have a sleepover. We'll give you money to go places. We want you to be with your friends in the real world, and the more you give them the opportunity to hang out and do things, it's not deprivation, it's not doors closing, it's doors opening. What they're most afraid of is being alone, being cut off, so avoid that. Amy asks, How do I lead by example? I want to be a good role model for my kids, and I acknowledge that I use my own phone too much. I realize I will check my Instagram, then two seconds later check it again. Yeah, why am I checking it again? She says, But how does she lead by example? Um, so, you know, when your kids are infants and toddling, they are copying you. They're looking for examples to copy. They're definitely copying you, so do be careful when you're with toddlers. Um, you

really need to do a lot of eye contact. Don't do the continuous partial attention. Young kids, they really need to develop that sense of mutual gaze and interaction. Teenagers are not really copying you, so I would say insist on really good family norms and then honor those norms. And that means, like in my family, we have an absolute rule: no phones at the table, no matter how important it is for you to look up this fact relevant to the conversation. Don't go get your phone and look it up. That's just the rule: no phone. We do not bring phones to the table. And they have to be out of the bedroom at a certain time. Put them, you know, put them on the counter in the kitchen charging at 10 o'clock or whatever the time is you pick for your family. So definitely establish family norms that you respect and then make those stick. But don't expect that your kid is copying you. I mean, if you stop checking Instagram all the time, is your kid going to say, Oh, well, I'll stop? No, they're completely addicted. They're

socially addicted. They have to do it because everyone else is doing it, not because you're doing it. Okay, last couple of questions. Isa asks, What are the two most essential changes we can implement in our daily lives now so that there will be less damage to our own and younger generations' mental health? The number one thing that you can do is regain control of your attention. What I found when I began teaching undergrads is that most of them, not all, but most of them, have given up all of their free attention. If they're in the elevator, they're doing this because that's, you know, that's like 60 seconds, 90. They're doing this. They never have a moment to think. They can't daydream. They can't meditate. And so what I start with at the very beginning of the class is, Let's regain control of your attention. It's your most precious commodity. So shut off almost all notifications. Do not get alerts from any newspaper or magazine or anything else. You don't need alerts. Move social media off your phone onto your

computer only and then eventually maybe even off your computer. A lot of them are gaining 3 to 5 hours a day. They're regaining three to five hours a day. What do they do? They say, Now I can do my homework, and it's actually not hard anymore. I have time to read a book, or I have time to talk to a friend, or I have time to play guitar. So, regaining control of your attention is where a lot of this starts. I'd say read Cal Newport. I signed the book Deep Work. It's a fantastic book, and it'll really change the way you see what's happening to us adults. Okay, let's end on a question from Kathleen. Since your book release and tour, so following the release, are you more or less hopeful about your collective action proposals catching on? I am wildly more optimistic. Well, I'm optimistic by nature, but I've been working on democracy issues since the early 2000s, and I'm not optimistic there.

I mean, the problems are huge, and I don't know the answers. And that's what my next book is going to be on. But on this one, on Can We Roll Back the Phone-Based Childhood, I was kind of optimistic last year, and now I am just, I'm wildly optimistic because it's happening. It's happening at lightning speed. I can't believe how fast it's happening. The number of schools, the number of states, the number of countries that have acted in the last six months is mind-blowing. I've never seen anything like it. And that's especially schools and governments. Every day, I'm getting emails from parents saying, Thank you. My friends and I, we did a reading group on the book, and now we're all doing this together. And you know, all the families at the end of our street, we're all, and the kids are playing, and they're riding their bicycles. So it's not as though our children have somehow biologically forgotten how to ride a bicycle, and

they're still thrilled to be out from under your thumb. They're thrilled to have some independence. So, this is happening. We don't need everybody, but if we get most people, we solve this problem. Thank you for being so witty and wise, Jonathan Haidt, and thank you, TED members, for being here and for your involvement as a nonprofit organization. All of TED's work is made possible in part by you, so thank you so much to the TED membership community. And that is it for the book club for this time. See you next month. Thanks so much, Elise. [Music]

Are Smartphones Ruining Childhood? | Jonathan Haidt | TED

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Smartphones have been linked to the worsening mental health of young people in the US since 2010, with rising rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm.

The transition from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood, driven by technology, has disrupted normal human development and social skills.

This dramatic shift in childhood experiences, particularly for Gen Z, has led to a significant and rapid decline in mental health, especially among girls.

The Impact of Changing Childhood Experiences on Gen Z

Gen Z has significantly less unsupervised time and real-life interactions compared to previous generations, leading to a different childhood experience.

They spend seven to nine hours a day on screens for entertainment, resulting in limited book reading and hobbies.

The shift towards overprotective parenting and a new media environment has further restricted their freedom, leading to increased anxiety and a fear of making mistakes in their social interactions.

The Impact of Trust and Technology on Childhood

The loss of trust in each other has led to a decline in adult solidarity and outdoor play for children, with life moving indoors.

The rise of the internet and social media has resulted in kids spending an average of five hours a day online, reducing face-to-face interactions and quality human connections.

The correlation between social media use and mental health issues in teens is contested, but experiments suggest that getting off social media can have beneficial effects.

Social media has a collective effect on youth, with students feeling isolated when trying to disconnect.

The author suggests that collective action, such as parents coordinating to set norms for smartphone use and social media, can help address the issue.

While tech companies have the power to make changes, they are also trapped in a collective action problem, and the author advocates for regulatory measures to protect children.

Navigating Phone Use and Independence for Kids

The speaker gave their son an old iPhone in fourth grade but chose a basic phone watch for their daughter.

They held off on social media until high school, and the daughter later appreciated the decision.

The speaker's son, Max, was encouraged to walk to school early and eventually navigated the subway system confidently, even hailing a cab on his own after a late tennis game, which boosted his confidence and independence.

The smartphone issue is gaining bipartisan support from politicians, many of whom are parents themselves.

School districts and states are increasingly adopting phone-free policies, with major cities like Los Angeles and New York City leading the way.

Educators are encouraged to implement cell phone restrictions and promote the Let Grow Experience, a program that empowers students to take on new challenges independently.

The Impact of Kids' Independence and Screen Time

Kids as young as eight are becoming more independent, with parents noticing and adjusting their perceptions.

The speaker advises against giving smartphones or iPads to kids before high school due to their addictive nature.

For parents who have already given smartphones, a collective approach with other families can make the transition to less screen time easier and more beneficial for the kids.

Regaining Control of Attention for Better Mental Health

Establishing family norms around phone use, such as no phones at the table and setting a charging time, is crucial for fostering mutual gaze and interaction.

Regaining control of attention by shutting off notifications and moving social media off the phone can free up 3 to 5 hours a day for more meaningful activities.

The recent surge in collective action from schools, states, and countries to address phone-based childhoods has been rapid and promising, with parents and families coming together to create a positive change.