Next Question with Katie CouricJonathan Haidt on the Great Rewiring of Childhood
Social Psychologist and NYU Professor Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness lays it out emphatically: kids are being very negatively affected by ubiquitous phone use. The research on what phones and their attendant apps are doing to our kids is devastating, and these spikes in depression, anxiety, and even self-harm correlate pretty exactly with the rise of internet-connected smartphone use.
The good news is that the answer to possibly reversing this trend is simple, if not easy. In this urgent conversation, Haidt lays out exactly what parents need to know to help protect and prepare their kids as they navigate this complex technological era.
Hi everyone, I'm Katie Couric, and this is next question.
I got a smartphone when I was twelve years old.
I was in fifth grade.
It was my mom's old phone, so I think I was like nine or.
Ten, I was fourteen.
As far as like comparing myself to other people, I think I started doing that a lot more when d a smartphone and like seeing people are posting.
Unfortunately, it's kind of like a constant competition. You make posts to show people what you're doing, and whether or not you want to admit it, it's to show that you're doing something better than the other person. I think a lot of it is toxic and it has contributed to like a lot of negativity.
I cannot wait to hopefully one day get better control over my life, because right now, Instagram and TikTok and snapchatre'srolling my life like puppeteers.
Do you guys remember that song from Bye Bye Bertie, the one Paul Lynn sang back in nineteen sixty three.
Why Kevin May like we were perfect in every way? What's the matter with kids today?
But go sixty one years later people are wondering the same thing, what's the matter with kids today? I am so excited to have one of my favorite people, Jonathan Height, here to help us think through what exactly has gone wrong with young people iPhones and social media and what we can all do about it together. As you'll hear, the solution might be simple, but it is not easy. Jonathan has a new book out and it is doing gangbusters. Clearly he's struck a nerve. It's a deep dive into how and why and when smartphones changed everything about childhood and why we might just be at a tipping point where parents and kids say no Moss. Jonathan Height. Your new book is called The Anxious Generation, How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. I'm so happy to see you and talk to you. We have been actually communicating during your whole writing process, and yeah, you sneak a few graphs to me kind of showing what you were discovering. But before we talk about the essence of this book, you had great hopes for technology when it first surfaced in our lives and in society writ large. What did you think it would allow us to do well?
I was very influenced by a book I read. It was written in nineteen ninety nine by Robert Wright called non Zero, and it was how he starts with the history of bacteria and like early life, and whenever life has found a way to cooperate more, you get an explosion of productivity and you never lose it. And so life has been stepping up ability to cooperate at larger and larger levels forever. And with humans, you know, we were originally hunter gatherers and tribes battling each other. But when you get forms of political organization that you have communities or towns, you get roads that link. So it's always connection has always been good in the long run. Sometimes there's chaos at first, but it's always good in the long run. And remember this book comes out, it's nineteen ninety nine, so you and I remember the nineties. It was like, yay, history is over all that crazy stuff with dictators and wars, like that's all God and like it's going to be yeah and that. So then the Internet comes in around I saw my first web browser nineteen ninety four, and it really was like, wow, you know, these guys in California, they're giving us godlike powers. They are literally giving us omnissions. I can at this moment, I can know anything in the whole. It was a amazing you know, and I was I was a relatively young man at the time, and I loved computers and technology. I'd worked in computers, so there was enormous techno optimism. I certainly was a techno optimist. And this persists all the way through about twenty eleven twenty twelve, for sure, because now we're getting the iPhone, which is magical and amazing. We're getting you know, uber like I just press a button and a taxi appears for me.
Why didn't I think of that?
So, you know, it was just amazement after amazement, and there was a lot of gratitude, and we treated these guys like gods.
I know that you had your son at the time, I believe was two years old, and you started showing him this technology and you marveled at the fact that he was able to do the touch screen and swipe almost instinctively right, and you thought, Wow, this is so cool.
That's exactly.
Was there not a part of you, John that was saying, no, maybe it's not cool.
No, because you know, it's not that I showed it to him. It's that, like every young human being. He saw the lights and flashing colors and said, you know, I phone, I phone. You know, he wanted he desperately wanted it, and you give it to him, and he very quickly, you know, learned you touch, you know, you touch what you want. You know, it's it's very intuitive technology.
And what year was this when so little I.
Got my first iPhone in two thousand and eight, was an iPhone two the year after it came out, and my son was two at the time, and he, you know, he could bear. He wasn't even really talking like he had words, he didn't have sentences yet, but he could figure out how to move around the iPhone and so that's amazing. There's no problem there. And you got to remember the original iPhone was just a digital Swiss army knife. It just you know, if you wanted maps, you had maps. If you want music, you got music. If you want a flashlight, you got a flashlight. There were no notifications, there was no app store, there was no social media. So it was a tool that I pulled out of my pocket when I wanted to do something, and so it was great. The story in my book is how everything changes between twenty ten and twenty fifteen. I call that the great rewiring of childhood because in twenty ten almost all American kids have a flip phone. They have everyone has a cell phone, but it was a dumb what we now call it dumb was then mostly a flip phone which they used to connect to other kids. And so that's great. Still, technology is wonderful, it's amazing. You know, the kids are going to be so smart. Oh by they're all techno whizzes. That's twenty ten. By twenty fifteen, eighty percent have a smartphone. They've got high speed data, which they high speed Internet. They didn't have it in twenty ten. Mostly they've got a front facing camera, which wasn't there in twenty ten. It was introduced in twenty ten. They have Instagram, which was introduced in twenty ten. And so the daily life of a young person in twenty ten was still recognizably a human childhood, where technology was a tool they used to connect. By twenty fifteen, it was not recognizably a human childhood. It was spent most of the waking hours that were not in school. Oh actually, and even hours in school were spent looking at their small screen and doing stuff that disconnected them from the peace people next to them. So that's why I say childhood change between twenty ten and twenty fifteen, and I believe that's the major reason that mental health plunged all over the developed world in that period.
Let's talk about the number of kids who when you say they, what ages are you talking about between twenty ten and twenty fifteen when these devices became ubiquitous.
So the thing to focus on is puberty. Puberty begins around eleven to thirteen for girls is early puberty, and then boys it's a year or two later. And puberty is so important because that's when the human brain really speeds up its development. The brain isn't growing very much in total volume, that it reaches almost its full volume by age six. Everything else is about sorting through which which neurons are going to stay, which are going to get cleaned out, which synapses, which connections between neurons are going to stay and multiply, and which ones are going to disappear. So it's a tuning up process which is guided by the experiences that the child is having. So if a child is running around a lot and playing social games and gossiping and doing all the normal stuff of childhood, then those parts of the brain are going to wire up sort of in the way that evolution expected. But if a kid is spending six hours a day on video games, that's a very different set of stimulation. It's going to lead to different neural development. Boys mostly went for video games, or they disproportionally went for video games and pornography. Girls disproportionately went for social media and social media. It just like it's like, you take all the complicated social development. I mean, you know, you know, as a boy, I remember seventh grade was the worst year of my life. According to what I read, that is the peak year of bullying, especially for girls. So I was very aware even then. You know, girls had it even rougher, Like it's hard to be a middle school girl. And social media homes hones in on exactly the insecurities, the fears, the relational aggression, and it gives girls tools to say, oh, you know, you want to hurt her relationships or her reputation, here you go. You can do it anonymously, you can do it over the week. And oh she's insecure about her looks, let's show her lots of photos of other girls who have happier lives and more beautiful faces than she does. So for all these reasons, social media really hit girls hard. Oh but your original question was like what ag just sorry this is att answer. That's OK, because I'm so focused on puberty in middle school because that's where the maximum damage is done and that's what it's going to be easiest for us to rip it all out.
I'm curious about this whole synapse wiring and your brain kind of making these connections during puberty. How much of those connections are really impacting your emotional wellbeing versus, say, your cognitive function.
That's a great question because that difference is one that we know Meta was very aware of. That is some documents leaked brought up by Francis Haugen the Whistleblower show a some sort of a workshop or something that Facebook that had internal workshop where someone was explaining to Facebook staff worldwide what happens during puberty, and they explicitly say that the brain rewires itself from back to front and during puberty first the emotions. The emotions get rewired and the emotional life is very strong, and the prefrontal cortex, which is the seat of executive function, the seat of self control, the seat of I'm going to make a plan. Here's how I get to the plan. I'm going to stick to the plan. That stuff which is even it's hard for us adults in the age of social.
Media to say, and I understand that that continues to develop up until like age twenty four.
Twenty that's right, Yeah, that's right. So this rewiring of the brain, and part of what happens is you get the neurons get coated in a sheath of myelin, which is kind of a fatty substance. So that's that's when we say things get locked down. It's sort of like, you know, when you're the young brain could change in a lot of ways, but once it's figured out like, okay, this is what is needed in this culture, let's put the milin sheath over it, so that now things go really fast, but they can't be changed anymore. So puberty is the period when the brain is assuming this form, and the last part to wire up like that is the prefunctional cortex. And so we don't know, you know, we don't know whether these effects will be permanent. But if kids are growing up without spending ten minutes at a time on tasks. If it's if it's constant switching, constant switching of tasks that's going to interfere with the ability to develop executive control and to make plans and execute them.
We'll talk a little bit more if you could, John about how this constant focus on your phone impact your ability to form, you know, to be able to make judgments to get versus say, being out in the world playing tag, as you said, or running around with your friends or having face to face interactions. Can you talk a little more about that.
Sure, So let's start. You know, I'm going to assume that most of your listeners are are not gen Z, that they're older, that many many of them have had to say that I'm kidding just because gen Z is no, I shouldn't say anything I should saying about whether they're likely what they're likely listen to it. But you know, most of us remember childhood, back when we were allowed out. And that's the other piece of this, which I'm sure we'll come back to.
It's the lost the playbase, this culture of fear. Yeah, that's right, that it's kind of coincided with this interesting thing enough and helicopter parenting.
It's all part of it. But so yeah, to lead up to it, we can say, remember your best moments of outdoor play, and probably your heart was beating fast. It was a running, a game involved running. It was incredibly exciting. Maybe it was hiding, maybe it was swinging, maybe there was motion, but there was probably something that was thrilling about it.
For me, it was riding my bike all over my neighborhood.
Oh and you remember steep hills. You go over the top of.
My down and broke my front too, so that wasn't a positive experience. But other than that, I really enjoyed taking off on my bike in the early morning or mid morning and being gone until five thirty.
That's right, That's the way childhood was. And when you know, I really remember like going on my bus, like up over a hill and there's a part where you're on the downhill and it's a steep hill and you're a little scared, but it's incredibly exciting and you're incredibly focused on what you're doing. And then when you do it, when you do it and you don't wipe out, you're like, yes, it's so exciting. While you were going down that hill. How many other things were you thinking about. Probably none, Right, You're totally focused on what you are, totally present, and kids have an incredible ability to be present to look at something you didn't even notice. Now, let's contrast that with sitting in school and you're trying to pay attention to the teacher. And let's suppose let's suppose imagine you're back in school and on your desk, you brought your television set in and your television is there. You you out the remote control. You can watch whatever you wants right on your desk, and your telephone is there and you can talk to whoever you want during class, and comic books are there, and pornography is there. Everything is spread out on your desk, and the teacher's droning on about map Like, you're probably not paying attention to the teacher, and you're probably scattered among all the other things. And that's basically what we've done to kids, because it's not just the phones, it's all the educatational technology.
So what is that doing to your brain?
Then?
If you are being assaulted by all these different things that are vying for your attention, is that just scrambling your brain? What is it doing exactly?
Well, everything that involves learning is changing your brain. None of these are like big things like it. It's not like you could look at a brain and say, oh, this kid watch social media. But the neural growth is going to change in response to whatever it is that you do. So if you spend a lot of time doing archery, whatever parts of the brain are related to that, those are going to really refine that you become a really good archer. Or if it's athletics, whatever it is, those parts of the brain are going to tune up really really well. So if it's playing video games, then you're going to get really good at the hand eye coordination, not at risk taking, not at any physical skill, just whatever skills the video game gives you. What we can say about all the distraction for sure is this it is making kids dumber. And by dumber, I just mean when you give kids tests, as we do a lot, what we see is that from nineteen seventy through twenty twelve those scores were going up. We have in America, we have the National Assessment of Educational Progress Report. From the seventies to twenty twelve, those numbers were going up slowly. It's very hard to make a whole population smarter. But we actually did it. And then last year we found out scores have plummeted, and everyone said, oh, COVID, My god, COVID really, you know it did it in you know, the COVID the cancelations, And that was true. You know, keeping kids out of school was bad. You know, it's also bad. Putting them on screens all day long, that was really bad. But guess what a lot of the job was actually twenty twelve to twenty nineteen. It was before COVID, so American kids we lost almost all the project. Almost all the problems we've made since nineteen seventy one is now gone gone since twenty twelve. And it's not just us. There's an international data set called PISA, and it shows that around the world, almost all over the world. There's thirty seven countries, I think in pea thirty four something like that. It's not just us. All over kids are there, they know less, they're doing work on academic achievement, which has not happened before, I certainly on a global level, and they're lonelier in school. There's some questions like I feel lonely at school, you know, strongly agree disagree, and so Gene Twangy and I looked at those six items and we graft them out and all over the world beginning after twenty twelve, kids are lonely at school. Of course they are because if everyone else has a smartphone. Now, even if you don't have one, there's no one to talk to in the hall. Everyone's on their phone.
Yeah, you know, there's so much to unravel here. First, let's talk about sort of academic performance. I know increasingly schools are thinking about banning or forcing students to put away phones. They say ostensibly they have a no phone use, but they don't really necessarily enforce it. And it's interesting. I remember taking my daughter on a college tour and going to a class and seeing so many kids. Now this was when they were taking notes on computers. We're shopping at Ja Crew and other things, and Professor, I know, Larry Sabato, I think you cuts out.
Connection.
That's really so Larry, I think figured out he wasn't going to have Wi Fi in his classroom. So they could use their computer to take notes, but they couldn't shop, or they couldn't go on social media platforms.
How about it work out?
I think better, I think better for him. But it infuriated me. Actually, I thought, these parents are paying all this money and these kids are shopping at ja cru during a really important history class. So let's talk about this school thing. I mean, more and more schools are trying to enact these requirements or restrictions on phones. Right, how is that going over? And do you think it's going to turn around test scores?
Yes, I think it's going to go really well. It's going to happen this year and so far. So let me just be clear about what has been happening. So the teachers all hate the phones. The teachers, the last thing they need is to be phone police. The teachers can see what it's doing. I've not yet made a teacher who thinks it's a good thing that the kids have phones in their pockets. The principles, the heads of school, they all hate the phones, the drama, the bullying, the thing that they can and even see what's going on. They just know that something terrible is happening with the students. They can't even help. So everyone hates the phones. Why don't they bam them? Why don't they require them to be locked away? Because in every school there are some parents who freak out and yell and scream and say, no, I have to be able to reach my child. What if there's an emergency or a schoolshroom. That's right, that's right. And so this small number of parents who insist that it's their right to communicate with their child even in class are very loud. They have a loud voice. So what they do. What the common policy in America is the school says you're not allowed to use your phone during class, that your phone use is banned during class.
And that's a joke.
It's a joke because what it means is open phone use is banned as long as you hide it in a book, hide it in your lap, or go to the bathroom. And teachers have told me kids are going to the bathroom a lot more nowadays. If they have a you know, if they can use their phone in the bathroom, they will. You know, if you were running a heroin treatment clinic and you had a rule, you come in, you know, we'll work on your heroin addiction. You can bring your heroin in, you can bring your needles in, but just leap in your pocket. Just don't shoot up while you're here. In the clinic like they can't do that. And so, to return to your example of Larry Sabato, or of teachers until three years ago, I always had the policy because I like to take notes on a computer. So I always had a policy. And I'm teaching NBA students at at NYU. These are like twenty eight year old professionals, and you know, you know, we're all mature here. So I would make a big show of saying, look, we can't multitask. Here's the research. You can't multitask. If you want to use your computer to take notes, you have to stand up, raise your right hand and pledge, and it's written out. I will only use my computer for class related activities. I will not go on the end, you know.
So I think there's an honor system at NYA. They don't have that only UVA, that's.
Right, which I tried to reform, but that's another story. When I was there, since I taught at UVA until twenty eleven, loved it, and so but what I found my TA would sit in the back and she would say, you know a third of the class, especially everyone in the back row, is their shopping. They're on social media, they're texting, and I finally realized this is happening all over the country. That means it's not the kid's fault. It's like this technology was designed to grip, to grab their attention, keep their interest, keep them thinking about it, send them alerts. Oh there's a special twenty percent off. Click here to find out what someone just said about you.
When we come back. What our kids lose when they lose an analog childhood. If you want to get smarter every morning with a breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on health and wellness and pop culture, sign up for our daily newsletter Wake Up Call by going to Katiecuric dot com. We're back with Jonathan Hepe. I interviewed Christan Harris documentary I did six years ago on tech addiction, and you're right. I'm glad you brought that up, because in some ways it's not their fault because these devices are designed for maximum time spent on them, and so everything they can do, from making the colors enticing and interesting to making sure that they have constant stimulation, it's just it's very hard. It's hard. I feel like I'm addicted to my phone.
Well, that's right. So I think one reason why my book is resonating so much, why people are buying it and sending and giving it to others, is that we've all seen this in ourselves. Like, you know, we know that this is true, that this stuff, it fragments our attention, it keeps us on, it wastes our time. Now, obviously there are very powerful tools. I mean for adults, there are reasons to use Instagram and even TikTok. You know, they're very helpful for companies.
And markets and things like that.
Oh yeah, well, no one's addicted to maps. Kind of weird.
If you're doing you're kind of addicted to maps. I am addicted to GPS. I don't think I could get any place with that.
That's so you're dependent on it, which is very different. So look, adults can make a choice, you know what, I'm willing to give up my ability to navigate in return for perfect directions. And it's true, we are like I find like you know, I've been living in New York since twenty eleven. We have a grid system here. But yet, like I'm dependent on that. You know, you don't bother to learn certain things.
I don't know my husband's phone number.
Right, But okay, but again, that's not an addiction. That's you've been a change in your life, and it's a kind of a deal with the devil where you don't have to learn a lot of stuff because your computer knows it.
But I feel like my mind is lazy as a result. But that's another topic. But getting back to addiction, I mean, so this is part of the problem, and I want to just bring in this notion of protecting children. This coincided with sort of stranger danger helicopter parenting. We don't want our kids to be too. So it's almost been a double whammy, hasn't it talk about that?
So one thing that I do in the book. I thought that it was going to be a book about social media and girls, originally because that's where the data is clearest, that there's a cause, there's a causal relationship. But once I got all the numbers together, I started making graphs. My research partner, Zach Rousch, and I we had all these graphs. I asked him to look at what's happening all these countries and we saw it's not just us, it's so many countries. It's the boys too. Although the boys don't curve up quite as quickly. It's not like everything changed for them in twenty twelve the way it did for the girls. But the larger point is what we realized is it's a change in childhood. Where there's the first part is the loss of the play based childhood. And so I realized I can't just write a book about social media and girls. I have to actually start writing about what is childhood? What is human childhood? Why is it so different from every other species? Why is it so long? And why do humans actually slow down in our growth. Other primates they just grow and grow and grow, and then they reach puberty and then they reproduce. That's I mean, why wouldn't you But humans, we grow and grow and then we slow down around age three or four, were slow and we grow very slowly until around age you know, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, and then we have a growth spurt. And that period seems to be an evolutionary adaptation for cultural learning. Humans have culture. Chimpanzees don't. They have a tiny bit, but not really much, And so there's so much learning to do in that period, and the way we learn is through play and through trial and error and when kids are out. You know, So did you play with fire when you were a kid? Is that a girl thing? Like boys? We all played with fire, I.
Mean a little bit, not too much. But I wasn't too much of a pyro.
Okay, we all were blue.
Okay, Okay, I didn't sniff it. I just put it on my hands.
Oh yeah, I hold it off, yes, the way I remember that feeling. Yes. Yeah, so we you know, we would build a you know, we stole lumber and built a little shack for ourselves in the you know, some trees behind my house. Yeah, but you know, there's attraction to fire. I mean, fire is a big part of evolutionary history. It's a real part of the human and stories fire And so you let kids play with fire, and they learn it, they master it, they feel comfortable with it. So that was a normal human childhood. And everyone got burned, Like at some point, you burn yourself, maybe burn yourself on the stove, maybe you burn yourself on a match, and then you learn from trial and error, Oh, be careful of the hot parts. That's the way humans have always learned, right.
Or you're running around and you trip on something and you skin your knee, or you hurt yourself in other ways, and you kind of learn coordination and you know areas to stay away from all those kind of little lessons.
That's exactly. So all of that comes about through trial and error. We have to have these experiences, we have to fall down, we have to have the setback, so we learn a lot from those. But what happened beginning in the eighties and especially in the nineties was Americans began to freak out about dangers to their children, the main danger being stranger danger kidnapping. Now, there's very little kidnapping in this country, thankfully. When it happens, it's mostly the non custodial parent. A true kidnapping by a stranger. FBI stats it's in the ballpark of one hundred a year, which in a gigantic country, that means you're much more likely be struck by lightning than that. But of course it looms large in your minds, and with cable TV, we all would then follow the few cases, so we had the feeling, and this is called the availability loss.
For example, remember.
That I don't remember that particular one.
Yes, and then that led to three strikes anyway, Oh.
Yeah, okay, that's right, Megan's law. There are all kinds of laws, and anyway, I don't mean to minimize that particular issue, except to say it looms so large in the public mind that we began to think, if we let our kids out, someone's going to take them. And the previous assumption had been if we let our kids out in trouble, someone's going to help them, you know, like if I fell down on my bicycle and was you know, was actually injured, you know, like you could knock on the doorbell of the person, like, you know, can you call my mother, and they would call your mother. But in the eighties, for a lot of variety of sociological reasons, we lost trust in each other. We began to lose trust in each other. There were scandals, some of them were totally fake, like the daycare sex abuse scandals that never happened, but people were afraid, oh my god, even in daycare, my kids will be sexually molested. So once we became paranoid about other adults, that meant we had to do all the work ourselves, and that means especially mothers. So mothers were really judged by how well they were protecting their kids from dangers, and this intensifies in the nineties, which is the same decade that the Internet comes in, and now everyone's got a personal computer, and then you get an internet connection, and so you can either have your kids running around outside where you're afraid they'll be abducted, or they can sit inside on a computer, which will make them smarter. Right, So I'd much rather have them be sitting inside on a computer and where they're learning things. It's great, we had no idea what we were doing.
Add to that this whole notion of helicopter parenting, right, it was almost taking it a notch further as parents started not only over protecting their children but kind of now it's called snowplow parenting, but doing things, you know, micromanaging their whole lives and giving them very little freedom to hopefully ensure their success whatever that might mean.
That's right, which is paradoxical, because if you want your kid to be successful in life, the last thing you should do is make them successful at everything they try. You need to let them struggle. Kids. As I said before, we learned from trial and error. We learn a lot more from our failures and mistakes than from our successes. So they have to have those failures. We are anti fragile. That means if you treat your kid as that they're fragile, and you say, oh my god, if someone teases my child, they'll be hurt. If someone excludes my child, she'll be hurt. Like, no, your kid needs to be excluded, sometimes not too much, but kids need all the negatives. Then they realize I can survive this.
Right, here's what develop coping mechan That's right exactly. I want to talk to you about the mental health repercussions of this period of time between twenty ten and twenty fifteen, because that I think is sort of the siren call of this book and something that is really very disturbing and upsetting. Can you talk about the things that have increased as a result you believe of this constant well, this addiction to your iPhone?
Yeah sure so. So first, the way to understand it is not any one thing. It's not like just social media or just video games. It's the transition from what I've called a play based childhood, where plays you know, you're out hanging out with your friends, that's the normal thing you do, to a phone based childhood where most stuff is coming through the screen, So it's that transition. So what does it do. The things that go up a lot are especially it's not all mental disorders, it's especially those related to anxiety and depression. Those are the core mental illnesses that have increased dramatically. So you know between fifteen, one hundred and fifty percent, depending on what measure and what age group you're talking about, the most dramatic. So some of my critics say, oh, you know, that's just self report, Like girls are saying they're depressed because you know, the stigma is reduced, and that's a good thing that they're just reporting and more. But the kids are all right, there's no change, there's nothing going on here. It's just another moral pen This is the main pushback I get to my book, to which I say, it's a plausible hypothesis. You know, there are definitely changes in diagnostic criteria over time that could be it. So let's look at some things that don't involve self report, that don't involve asking kids questions about how do you feel today. Let's look at hospitalizations or emergency room visits for self harm. Intentional self harm, which is a thing that girls have always done much more than boys. When they hit puberty, girls become more depressed and anxious than boys. They rise up on that. That's always been the case and one way of dealing with anxiety. It's hard for people to understand. Cutting yourself is not a suicide attempt. It's a thing that many teenage girls do. It's somehow it manages their anxiety, but it's terrifying. I mean to see your child bloody from her own hand. And these numbers go up like fifty to eighty percent for the older teen girls, one hundred and eighty percent for the younger teen girls. The CDC breaks up the data the ten to fourteen year olds. Whenever you look at the ten to fourteen year old girls, you see gigantic increases, more than doubling, sometimes almost tripling. So that's one of the most alarming things. And that the same thing happened in Canada, in Britain, in Australia and New Zealand and a lot of other countries. That all happened, that all began to go up in the early twenty ten. So something is really happening, especially to girls in that period.
Not only self harm, but let's talk about suicides. Because that is also really really scary. I know that Vivig Murphy, who's a surgeon general, who was also the surgeon General during the Obama administration, issued and advisory talk about suicide rates and suicidal ideation.
Yeah. Sure, So suicide is actually going down around the world since the year two thousand ers. So there's been a global decline in suicide. The number of reasons for that, nobody really knows why, but it's been going down overall. And some people say, oh, see, this disproves your thesis is because you know, as smartphones were coming in, the suicide rate is going down, so it can't be the smartphones are bad. But when you break out the suicide stats by age and sex, what you see is is going down for everybody except for teenage girls and teenage boys. Teenage boys are up, are up more recently, but teenage girls all around the world, or at least in the western world, I should in the developed world, they begin going up in the mid early to mid twenty tens.
The statistics you report in the book about anxiety, depressions, suicide, self harm, et cetera. Are really staggering and very upsetting. They have been publicized by the Surgeon General's Office. Rates of depression and anxiety in the US rose by more than fifty percent from twenty ten to twenty nineteen. The suicide rate rose forty eight percent for adolescence between the ages of ten and nineteen, and for girls ages ten to fourteen, the suicide rate rows one hundred and thirty one percent.
That's right. Whenever you look at the younger teen girls, you see astonishing increases, and it's very sharp. It wasn't like they they just gradually went up. There's actually, I think a fifty percent increase between twenty twelve and twenty thirteen. In that single year, there's a fifty percent increase, and then the rage just keeps going up from there. So that I think is also very clear evidence that something changed in the early twenty tens. Now, I should also make clear we've been focusing on the girls. Boys have much higher rates of suicide than girls do. Boys are much more risk of suicide. Girls make more attempts. Girls say they think about suicide more often. In fact, now I think it's thirty percent of American girls say they've made a suicide planner, They've thought seriously about suicide. In the last year it used to be I think it was nineteen percent in twenty ten something like that, so it's way up. But girls, when they make attempts, they tend to use reversible means, either cutting their wrists or taking their psychiatric medications and overdose of them something like that. Boys make fewer attempts, but when boys make attempts, they tend to use a gun or a tall building, and so boys attempts tend to be not reversible, and so that's why they end up with two or three times the rate of actual suicide. So we have to really attend to boys as well. But it's not linked to social media as clearly as it is for the girls.
Well, let's talk about what specifically you know, because there's a lot of things on your iPhone. There's social media, they're also group chats, they're all kinds of things. There are things that are being sent to you. If you google something about eating disorders, you might get all sorts of content. Is there anything specific that you were able to parse out that seems to be behind these numbers?
Well, so for suicide, it's very hard to say because suicide is still so rare, thankfully, so we don't really have studies saying, you know, before she killed herself, she did this and that's right, So we don't tend to have that data. What I suspect is happening is it's incredibly painful to be publicly shamed. It's incredibly painful to be exclus alluded, to be a pariah. That's social death, and the being on social media makes it possible to be shamed at a magnitude far beyond what we could ever have imagined when we were young. So you might say something, you make a bad joke.
Is it like virtual bullying?
Yes, it's because the mob dynamics of social media are such that it used to be if you said something stupid or to your friend, your acquaintance group, and someone was offended, they might spread rumors about you, and that would painful to learn, but it wouldn't be the entire school, and they wouldn't all be adding on and laughing at you in a way that you can see. Things were little back then. But with social media there's no limit to how big it can get, and so it could even go national with this stupid thing you said, or it could go national. It's with you for the rest of your life and when it's happening. In those first days when something is going viral, we have these innate social psychological mechanism that are always monitoring our reputation. How am I doing? How am I doing? What do people think of me? And especially if you're in an early teen, you're so insecure about it, and.
So you're just developing your sense of self.
That's right. You know, you were in fifth grade a couple of years ago, and it was fun. You were playing with toys.
And also your hormones or rating your body.
Your body's changing, that's right. That's right, which is another reason it's hardest for girls because their bodies change more visibly in ways that the public, that other people respond to.
And also the fact that so many girls post pictures of themselves and bikinis, and then that results in a lot of you know, eating disorders and feeling insecure about unattainable beauty standards.
Exactly. That's right. So you know, when you and I were growing up, there's a lot of talk about, oh, you know, all these models and the magazines. It's really bad for our girls. They shouldn't be seeing these super thin models. And everyone's saying this is beauty, And yeah, that was right. That was hard for girls. Well just think how much harder it is when it's not some strange adult in a magazine. It's literally all the people you know posting photos in which they look more beautiful than they do in real life. And you might even know they're using filters, but unconsciously your brain is saying, she's more beautiful than me, her life is more perfect than me. Why don't I have a car like Why doesn't my family have a car like that? So so, for all these reasons, spending a lot of time on Instagram in particular, it just really fosters a lot of social comparison, which is hard for all kids, but especially for the younger teen girls. So why I'm just so adamant we really have to get this all out of middle school. Just don't try to make it nicer, don't try to filter things and remove the eating disorder content. Just keep them the hell off. Yeah.
I'm going to talk to you about solutions in a moment, but I want to tell you this terrible story I heard this morning when I was taking a walk with the friend. She had read this story, and I'm going to find it to verify it that a young man in Michigan his phone got hacked. He was sent this very seductive picture. Do you know this story?
No, but this is a six story story.
I go ahead, and this woman, I guess, said, you know I really like you or I mean just I don't know, and send me a nude photo of yourself. The young man did, and then they were told that we were going to blackmail you. Send five hundred dollars. Now send another five hundred. This is, you know, like eleventh grader. Finally, he said, we know everything about you. We know your family, we know your siblings, we know all of this information. We are going to destroy your life.
That suicide.
He killed himself. This was like the captain of the football team, a kid everyone loved, from a nice family. And it was so sick and so upsetting. And I guess the FBI traced it to some Nigerian scam, but that is so terrible.
These are the most and I've got some stories that are even more horrible than that. But we don't know how many this is happening to. But this is not just like this thing happened to one kid. This has happened. I don't know how many. But this is happening to a bunch of kids. So this boy was not depressed. This is not like, oh he was depressed and killed himself. No, No, he was driven by fear and shame and horror into killing himself and.
Then they started harassing his girlfriend.
So what I want parents to think about here is, of course, we don't want our kids hanging out with creeps that might sexually molest them. We don't want them to go out into the world where where such things can happen to them. But guess what, the creeps and predators are not at your child's playground. They're on Instagram. That's literally where they're hanging out because that's how they can get to young girls, especially, and they can ask for photos and they can pretend to be somebody they're not. So, you know, I can summarize my whole book by saying, we have overprotected our children in the real world, we have underprotected them online. And the fact that some number of kids, you know, is it hundreds, Is it that since I don't know, get sex storted. I mean, this is a thing now and now it's so profitable. There are sextortion rings all around the world that are praying on children. Why would you let your child do something where strangers with bad intent can get to them?
After the break some good news? Why Jonathan thinks we're at a tipping point where everyone is starting to not only talk about this but take action. Now more of my conversation with the one and only Jonathan Height. I know that you've been to Capitol Hill and this conversation has been going on a long time, but nothing seems to get done. Do you feel like we're at a tipping points, both by American parents and adults and also by our leaders in Congress? And if so, what do you say see them doing? Because it's frustrating that more hasn't been done already.
That's right. I am certain we are at a tipping point. And here's how I know. Before COVID, when I was really began working on this, there was some ambiguity as to what was the cause. We didn't know what to.
Do itation versus correlation, That's right.
And then you know in gene Tweengie and I were sort of trying to demonstrate, look, there's actually a lot of evidence of causation, and then COVID comes in confuses everybody changes everything. Of course, our kids are spending all day on screens now, and then when COVID fades away and our kids are going back to school, there's still really the depression and anxiety rates are still extremely high. They're not really going down. So now it's clear, and now everyone has seen it. Everyone is seen more about what happens when their kids are online all day. So there's an emerging sense among parents that this is just really bad for our kids. And it's totally bipartisan. So here's why I'm confident that things are going to change in our incredibly divided country where our Congress can't really do anything because if one side likes it, the other sides against it. Right, everyone just about sees the problem. Most legislators are parents, Most of our congress people are parents. And what I went down I was giving some talks in Washington. I met with some members of Congress and the group I met with a volunteer to come. It was half Democrats, half Republicans. There are a couple of bills that I think have a really good chance of passages. The main one is COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, which requires the companies to assume a duty of care. That is, they have to realize children are not adults. You can't do the dirty tricks you do on adults. You can't do those to kids. You have to give them more private you can't make them discover by strangers. So cosa I'm really hopeful that really could pass this year. The big thing that we need to protect kids is to raise the age from thirteen to sixteen. Congress set a law in nineteen ninety eight that said you have to be thirteen years old in order to sign a contract with a company like AOL or whatever.
You get around that. Though, well, hold, wait.
Hold on. The law says, at what age can a company just take your day without your parents even knowing about it? Or And what Congress said was, as long as you're thirteen, will treat you like an adult, and you can make deals with companies without even your parents knowing or giving permission. But oh, by the way, the lobbyists god is to gut the enforcement procedures. So as long as the company doesn't know for sure that you're under thirteen, they're okay. So as long as you say you're thirteen, you can't sue the company for what they do, right, So that's a terrible law in nineteen ninety eight, and that was the last law Congress ever passed to protect children or regulate the en It was complete failure, and there's been zero since then. I think they realize it now. And here's why I think it's going to change, because politicians are very good at sensing when there is a groundswell of public support. They want to be ahead of that, not behind it. And so this is why I think we're seeing a lot of action in the states, a lot of state governors.
In Florida, Fia state you can't sign up for social media until.
Till you're sixteen. Until you're sixteen, but with parents. So that was original bills until you're sixteen, which is what I'm advocating. But in Florida they in the lobbying and they put in provision if you're fourteen or fifteen, you can do it if you have your parents' permission. And I'm okay with that because that will force the companies to develop a way of getting parental permission, which they don't want to do. But come on, we have to One objection I get is, oh, the government shouldn't be involved in this. It should be up to the parents how they raise their kids. Yeah, but we can't control it unless we lock our kids up and never let them get near a web browser. Putting a requirement for parental permission in the law will motivate the companies to figure out how to do it, and then finally we parents will have more tools to actually raise our kids the way we want to.
And it's all about sort of working with other parents, which I think is absolutely the key. And you have recommendations for how we solve or maybe rewire our kids' brains. Again back to I don't know, is it a lost cause at some point?
Yeah, Well, it's two different things. One is how do we prevent jen alpha, which is let's say born after twenty eleven ch Yeah, that you know, because they know gen Z. You go back to alpha.
At the beginning, Whaney said, it was like, wasn't it like polars?
Yeah, you know, we'll see what name sticks, right, We don't know yet. Yeah, but let's suppose it's going to be jin alpha. So the most important thing is to just stop them from getting sucked into this vortex that it consumed gen Z. The next thing is, well, when we do to help the kids were born between nineteen ninety six and twenty eleven. And so what I'm proposing is four norms, which are hard to do if you're acting on your own, but if a group of parents, or especially if a community around a school does it, they're actually easy to do. So here they are. One, no smartphone before high school. Give kids a flip phone, a phone, watch, or nothing, but delay smartphones until high school. Two is no social media until sixteen. There's really no way these things are unsafe at any speed for kids going through puberty. Let them get through early puberty. The third is phone free schools. Just put this. Put the phones in a locker or a yonder pouch first thing in the morning. I mean a special phone locker, not your own personal locker. They have to be taken away so that at lunch and between classes kids are talking to each other they're not all looking at their phones.
My husband said, why can't there be a phone that could be put on school mode. You know, we talked about school shooting, so could there be something that says it's only available to text to you know, your parents. Yes, that would be John said, he's not an engineer, but he thinks that's a good idea.
I know some people have advocated that Apple created school Mode. It's better than nothing. But still, the idea is you can be text with your parents all day long.
No, no, but if there's a school shooting or there's something bad happens, I know that that's unlikely. But as you and I have discussed before, that's one reason parents really worry about not having their kids with a phone.
Yeah, no, I understand that. But but the experts on school safety say is that you're much better off in a school where the adults have a phone and the kids are listening and following directions and they're quiet and they're doing what they're supposed to do, rather than a school and which as soon as there's a problem, everyone's on their phone crying to their parents. That's just not an effective way to deal with the school shooting.
And finally, it's more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.
That's right, So this is really important. Discussion tends to focus on the phones because that's what we're all upset about. But if we're going to roll back the phone based childhood so that our kids are not spending the latest numbers are nine or ten hours a day on average of leisure time on screens and phones. If we're going to roll that back and cut that way down, we have to give them back a positive childhood, the kind of childhood that we had and their grandparents and great grandparents, which has a lot of play, a lot of hanging out, a lot of independence. So we have to do both. We have to roll back the phone based childhood. We have to restore the play based childhood.
You have a lot of hope, but are we at the point of no return? Are people and society in general so addicted to their digital devices the genie is out of the bottle. I mean, I hope that's not true, But I just wonder how realistic you're being.
So let's use a different meta or another one. I hear is you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, to which I say, if your children's life depended on you getting toothpaste back in a tube, you'd figure out a way. You know that train has left the station. If the train left the station, it was loaded with our kids and was headed for a bridge that was out, and we knew they were all going to plunge to their death. We'd probably call it back. So, yeah, it's going to be hard getting rid of all the chromebooks and iPads and all the things in school that they use to text. That's going to be really hard. But all of that is doable. But let's start with the phone to.
Do that though, I mean, if it's not attached to social.
Media, but a lot of it is, a lot of it is, well.
Just don't attach it to social medium. Makes it technology that's built for learning.
Yes, So I do think if because I had this discussion in Washington with a policy expert who was saying con Academy is so great that the teacher can assign and the con Academy has you know, AI intelligent, that's all great. So I said, you know what if you could have like an iPad or a special device that only did con academy that is all, and you could have that on your desk, that I think would probably be positive. But as long as it's a multifunction device that has twenty three things the kid can do, the distraction effects are going to swamp whatever educational benefits. If we talk again next year, we'll talk about the ed tech because I'm just learning about that let's start with the phones, because that is the child's personal portal to the entire internet. That is the way that strangers can get to your child, companies can get to your child. So let's just delay that till high school minimum.
Which would be great if their parents could stop using the phone. And I want to ask you about parental modeling because John Downs, who was at a book event for you last night, we walked out together and he said, I really wanted to ask Jonathan this question. He's the headmaster at the Millbrook School, and he said, what about parents. Kids see their parents constantly on their phones. I worry that there's less and less interaction with children and their parents. You see go the playground, you see all the parents or the babysitters on phones. You see people pushing strong instead of pointing out things for their kids to look at, they're on their phone. So JO parents have some responsibility before they start.
They do they do, especially for infants and toddlers who are They're trying their brains are trying to figure out how do I do this interaction thing and turn taking and timing and making jokes. And so I would urge parents of young children to avoid what's called continuous partial attention. It's where you're kind of aware what your kid is doing, but you're also trying to do your email and text and you're doing a bad job of both.
That's such a bad signal to kids about what's important. And you know, sometimes I have friends who children have been desperate in saying, Mom, get off the phone, get off the phone. And you know it's really hard.
Yeah it is. But the one thing I want to point out here is because I get this question a lot, like aren't the kids just copying us? And I think the answer is no. If you think about an eleven or twelve year old kid and her her parents are on their phone all the time, and her friends aren't on phones. They're out playing, which is going to be more influential. Kids are much more focused on what their friends are doing.
Now.
Conversely, you have a kid all her friends are on their phones all the time, they're all on Instagram, and you have parents who are perfect models of digital maturity and they use their phone really in healthy ways. What's the kid going to do uninfluenced by the parents, They're going to do whatever the other kids are doing. So our parental behavior is extremely important.
For instance, karents do still Ellen Golinsky, who I'm sure you know, just wrote a book and she still talks about how hugely important influential parents are in their children's behavior.
Well, yes, I mean, of course parents are influential. But the simple idea that our kids are copying us is there's some truth to it when they're very young, but we don't have that kind of direct influence. They're much more concerned about their peers are doing. And what I just said is far more true after twenty ten. When you hook kids up by social media, there's just not much room in their input stream for their parents.
So if you want to get your kids off their phone or delay giving them a phone, you really have to reach out to your parental community. Yes, and almost sign a pledge, right and kind of say, this is how we're going to operate. Is everyone with us, and you present the information and the evidence that not doing that could have really dangerous consequences.
That's right. The key is cooperation. We're all stuck in a collective action problem. If we do it together, it becomes easy. And so, for example, there's a really great organization called Wait until Eighth, which eighth grade. That's right, in which parents sign a pledge when the kids are in first or second grade, and then once fifty people I think it is in that school or that grade agree, the pledge becomes live and now you have a support group.
Now.
The only problem is eighth grade is too early. Eighth grade is actually still in middle school, and I'm adamant we have to get this all out in middle school. So the people wait until eight They've actually changed it. It's wait until the end of eighth So you know, we're all.
Maybe they should say wait until tenth. But by the way, I think high school is held to So I mean, puberty is awful, but high school can be helped.
Oh, no, it absolutely is. Look, if we were just doing this for health, I would say wait till eighteen. Like kids should not be on you know, they should certainly not be on social media. And in Europe, where they don't have this, we have this break in America mostly between eighth and ninth grade. And because I'm a social psychologist, I'm not focused on the child's age. I'm focused on the community. And a middle school can do things a high school. They're also dependent on the phones. They assume every kid has a phone. It's going to be very hard to get the phones out of the lives of high school kids, but middle school we can do. So that's why I'm so focused on that.
Why do Europeans seem to be take this much more seriously than Americans? Because hasn't there been legislation and all kinds of actions.
So in Europe they have a very different idea about regulation. In the EU, they love regulation. They think it's appropriate for the government to determine all sorts of things. In America, we have a much more libertarian streak. We think, especially the federal government. You know, the Tenth Amendment says here's what the federal government can do. Everything else is up to the states. And in Britain it's in between. I just in fact, I was just talking with some British people today. In Britain, they are trying to pass a law that says that you can't buy a smartphone until you are sixteen. Now, that doesn't make any sense. In America, We're not going to have the government saying what you can and can't buy in terms of a product.
Well, we do for cigarettes and alcohol.
But right because those those are more directly linked to illnesses. What I'm saying is in Europe they have different ideas about government than we do. And often I think that's been good. I think we have a more vibrant economy because of that. But there are times, as with gun control and assault rifles and now sports gambling, there's all sorts of hazards for kids. I think our government does need to be more active.
And a selfish question to end this conversation with, As you might know, Jonathan, or maybe you don't, I recently became a grandmother. My daughter Ellie has a little boy who is about a month old. So what would you advise Ellie and her husband Mark in terms of using the phone. You know, when they hold little Jay, they're reading their phones, they're looking at articles, they're taking pictures of him, and I think, oh my god, he's going to get as used to the phone being around his face as he is. Ellie and Mark, Yeah.
That's right. The urge to take pictures of your kids all the time is so strong. I'm not saying don't take pictures, but just recognize. What I would advise for them is aim for more analog childhood. Find some other families as he gets older, find some other families that agree with you. We're at a tipping point. It might have been hard to find those families five years ago. In two or three years, most families are going to be this way. So find other families. Try to find ways for the kids to get together, to just be around each other, and some toys. Toys can be a couple of cardboard boxes. The kids will find something to do with it and it'll be fun. So they're in great shape. Things are going to get a lot lot better over the coming years because almost everyone is fed up. Almost everyone is ready for change, and so if we do this together, it's going to change.
Jonathan Height, I always love talking to you. The book is The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Let's hope you're right that we're at a real tipping point, because you know so many lives depend on that.
Well.
Thanks Katie, thanks for having me on.
Special. Thanks to Kate McLoughlin for interviewing those young people for today's episode. Thanks for listening everyone. If you have a question for me, a subject you want us to cover, or you want to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world reach out. You can leave a short message at six h nine five point two five to five oh five, or you can send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. Next Question is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Couric Media. The executive producers are Me, Katiekuric, and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz, and our producers are Adriana Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my newsletter wake Up Call, go to the description in the podcast app, or visit us at Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
