Jonathan, I see people walking all over Brooklyn holding this book. It's talking about the great rewiring. Talk to me.
What is the great rewiring? So something happened to young people born after 1995. All of a sudden, in the early 2010s, their mental health collapsed, rates of anxiety and depression skyrocketed.
Self-harm is up 150% for younger teen girls. Suicide is up 50%. Something happened in the early 2010s, and my argument in the book is a tragedy in two acts.
The first act is the loss of the play-based childhood. It's what anybody over 40 in this audience had. You were out with your friends after school.
There was nobody supervising. You had to learn how to work out conflicts, how to face adversity. So that's what kids have had for tens of-- hundreds of thousands of years.
It's part of being a mammal. You play. You develop skills.
We began to crack down on that, to lock kids up in the '90s, to not let them out. So we're restricting what they most need, which is play, from the '90s through the 2000s, but mental health doesn't collapse then. It's actually pretty stable.
Then we get act two, which is the arrival of the phone-based childhood. And what that is is, in 2010, everybody had a flip phone. The iPhone had come out, but most teens had a flip phone, no front facing camera, no social media on the phone, no high-speed data.
And by 2015, everyone's got all those other things. Now, suddenly, everyone has a smartphone, front-facing camera, high-speed internet, social media, especially Instagram, on the phone. And almost like someone turned a switch in 2013, girls in America, and many other countries, suddenly become very anxious, depressed, and self-harming.
And so that's what the book is about. Something changed between 2010 and 2015, and I'm trying to explain what it is. You're saying, in act two, they introduced Chekhov's cell phone, and-- Yeah.
And we know what ends up happening after that. You look at, sort of, the adolescent brain. Yes.
How dumb and stupid is a 13 year old's brain? [LAUGHTER] I would say not dumb and stupid at all. I would say it's in the process of remodeling, and it's still in the early phases.
So children have a brain, which is actually almost full size. By age six, the brain is almost full size. I'll fact check that.
I don't think that's right. I don't think that's right, but continue. You must be right.
Yeah, thank you. The rest of childhood is not about growth. It's about picking which neurons survive and which ones get eliminated.
It's all about wiring up, and that happens slowly in childhood. But then, around age 11, 12 for girls, puberty starts, a couple of years later for boys, and you get this massive, quick rewiring of the brain to sort of lock down into an adult configuration. It starts more in the back of the brain.
The prefrontal cortex is the last part to develop. And so around the age of 13, kids' emotional areas are rewiring. They have the beginnings of sexual urges and lust.
They're very emotional, passionate, but they don't have the self control to say, no, I'm not going to spend a fifth hour on TikTok. I'm just going to keep going because I can't stop myself. JORDAN: When does that stop, because I'm looking forward to that happening soon?
At, like, 47, 48? Like, when does that part of my brain close off, and I can put the phone down? Well, in your case, I really can't say, but for most people-- [LAUGHTER] Buy the sequel.
I get it. I get it. Smart, smart.
25 is when the frontal cortex is done rewiring. OK. I'll tell you when that happens.
Well, it's interesting how you're talking a lot about, not only these phones come in, and they change the way kids think, and the way society thinks, but you talk about raising a child, an anti-fragile child. And you make some bold claims in this book, one of which is right here. You claim that this merry-go-round playground spinner is the greatest piece of playground equipment ever invented.
Defend yourself. JONATHAN HAIDT: OK. JORDAN: First of all-- [APPLAUSE] - OK.
- How is it not-- What is better? I mean, a teeter-totter. It's just a metaphor of you're up, you're down, you know?
It's what life is all about, you know? Work with somebody else. One's up.
One's down. There's no way to stay in the middle. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[LAUGHTER] The key-- - Wow. OK. Well, I have no citations to prove my claim.
The psychological thing I'm trying to get at there is thrills. This is something I talk a lot about in chapter three, that kids need to play, but they especially need risky play. Kids literally need to face risk.
If you don't give them risk, they'll find a way to get it. They'll climb up on walls. They'll climb trees.
If they skateboard, they'll skateboard down stairs. Kids need to sort of-- need to have some actual risk. And so yes, you're right.
A teeter-totter, if it's really big, and you could come crashing down, there is risk. JORDAN: Why are you trying to hurt these kids? Well, because you have to put kids in a situation where they can get hurt because only then do they learn, every day, how to not get hurt.
And what we've done since the '90s is we've put them in places that are so safe, there's no chance to get hurt, which means they don't learn how to not get hurt. The human program of evolution is kids face risk. They're a little scared.
They have to be a little scared. They overcome it, and then they're more confident the next time around, and that's the path to adulthood, but we stopped that in the '90s. We said, no more of that.
We're going to keep you overprotected forever, and then we're going to send you to universities like mine, where you're coming in, still not ready for independent living. JORDAN: Now, you take that, and then you also-- you fast forward to this modern era where kids are obsessed with phones. They're on the internet.
They're on social media sites. Is there an argument, though, that the antifragile way in which kids need to-- it's not to pull this thing away, that they need to be exposed to the risk that the internet has? I mean, this is the world that they're going to be born into anyway.
Shouldn't they be learning how to navigate that at an early age? In theory, yes, but let's look at, say, sexuality. We want them to learn how to have sex.
Does that mean we should give them a running start at age eight? There are certain things that are not appropriate at that time. Just to be clear, I did not say that.
This was not-- [LAUGHTER] This is-- that's theoretically. That was me. JORDAN: Yeah, theoretically.
Hypothetically. JORDAN: OK. Yes, yes.
Boy. Ooh. So I've heard this before.
In theory, why are you saying we need to protect them less in the real world, but you're saying we need to protect them more in the virtual world. Isn't that contradictory? Not at all.
Not at all. Kids-- we're mammals. Kids need to be out playing, roughhousing, putting their arms around each other, touching out in nature.
This is the way a lot of us grew up. You play outside. And when you put kids in an environment where everything goes through the phone-- as soon as you give your child a phone, they're going to use that-- now the latest stats are around nine hours a day, they're on their phone, and a lot of them, it's almost all the time because they're always checking.
That blocks out time in nature, time with friends. Time with friends is down 65% since 2010. Kids need time with friends.
Texting and sending emojis doesn't compensate. It's done instead of time with friends, and that, I think, is why, as soon as they moved on to social media, and the boys on to multiplayer video games, they got so lonely. Loneliness surged along with depression and anxiety.
JORDAN: It's interesting. You talk a little bit about, in childhood, discover mode versus defensive mode. And even in a world of the arts.
I did improv comedy forever, and I think the mindset of that is a discovery mindset, right? And so you're constantly looking for something. It was interesting, reading this in terms of how to raise a child, and to put them in that open mindset, but it seems remarkably reflective of just how society feels right now, and I don't know if that is partially because of our connection to social media, and the anxiety that is there.
But do you see parallels there as well, that we are inadvertently too in defensive mode because of these devices that we have in our pockets and our hands? Well, right now, it does seem like everything is going to hell because it actually is. Oh, that's-- OK.
[LAUGHTER] Yeah. It's not just my phone telling me that. But it wasn't that way.
JORDAN: It wasn't that way. It wasn't that way in 2012. So the fact that this happened in so many countries at the same time, and a lot of people say, oh, well, the global financial crisis.
That must be what it was. There were real economic difficulties. Yeah, that was 2008.
Why do the numbers not begin going up until 2012, 2013, when the economy is getting better and better? So you can't make the claim that things were so terrible in Obama's second term compared to his first that, all of a sudden, teens, especially teen girls, suddenly fell off a cliff. That just doesn't work.
So if this had all started in 2020, we could say, well, yeah, you know, COVID, and all the craziness that's going on, but this started in 2012. There's no other explanation that anyone's proposed for why it happened in so many countries and hit girls the hardest. JORDAN: It was interesting.
You have a chapter in here that looks at, also, faith, and I'm an atheist. I know you mentioned that you are an atheist as well, but you speak to this god-shaped hole. I think it's a Blaise Pascal quote.
A god-shaped hole in everybody's heart. In every human heart. In every human heart, right?
And that this lack of religion is something that is affecting childhood in a way. And again, as an atheist, I always have my dukes up when that comes about. You said you were one.
So you earned yourself a pass. JONATHAN HAIDT: OK. But this lack of religious institutions in this modern media landscape, how do you see that as something that's affecting a childhood?
So the way to think about this as an atheist without getting defensive is-- JORDAN: Good luck. No. I've been working on this professionally for many years.
I finally got it down. - Let's see it. OK.
Just looking at it descriptively, psychologically, religious people are a little happier than non-religious people. That's been true for a long time, just as married people are happier than unmarried people. On average, your mileage may vary.
[LAUGHTER] But people need to be tied in, locked in in a community. I'm a big fan of Emile Durkheim, the sociologist. He's my favorite thinker of all time.
When we're not tied in, locked in, we're free, but that doesn't make us happy. We have nothing to push against. We have no sense of meaning.
It's like if you try to raise a plant, not in the ground, but just up in the air. It just can't be done. And so religious kids are rooted in traditions, faith, rituals, community.
They go to church every Sunday. The Jewish kids have shabbat. They literally can't use electronics for a day.
So they were always happier than the secular kids, but what happens after 2012, it's quite remarkable on all the graphs. The religious kids get a little more anxious and depressed. The secular kids get much more anxious and depressed.
So what I'm saying is, especially if you're an atheist, you're going to have to work much harder. You're going to have to be much more intentional about rooting your kid in stable social relationships. If you give them an iPad, then he graduates to a phone, and it's all this network, that network, interacting with strangers, and weirdos, and bots, and AIs.
That's not a community. That's crazy making. It might just be easier to get them to believe in angels.
Then take away the iPad? Yeah. JORDAN: I was going to say.
That iPad is there. I do want to-- [APPLAUSE] You've written a lot of very interesting books. The book you wrote before this, The Coddling of the American Mind, you co-wrote, sort of looked at safetyism.
It looked at the college landscape. And now, what we see on college campuses, these protests are breaking out. I wonder, as somebody who looked closely at that, and the ways in which students kind of moved through it, what you see now on these campuses.
Yeah. So, you know, I don't want to comment on the substance of the protest. This is a complicated issue.
I respect people on all sides. We all agree-- on campus, we all agree students have a right to protest, constitutionally protected, but two things I see going on. One is the protest, and this is what Greg Lukianoff, my co-author, first noticed in 2014, the shouting down of speakers, the activism on campus that was really illiberal, and it was intimidating, and it was stopping people from speaking.
It was based on arguments about fragility, about my mental health, or her mental health. We can't let this person on campus because it'll be dangerous. It'll be harmful.
Speech is violence. So that's a new idea that comes in with Gen Z because they haven't been given an antifragile childhood. They've been given way too much therapy.
They think everything is trauma. So we see that beginning in 2014, 20-- it wasn't there in 2012. It was very new in 2014, 2015.
And so the protesters now-- I don't know the details, but just one thing I read this morning. Someone sent me a quote from a student at Harvard where she was in the encampments, and she said, if Harvard cares so goddamn much about my mental health, why don't they just divest and do all the things that we're demanding? Yeah, Harvard, do these because our mental health is at stake.
That's something new, and it's just not going to get them very far in political life, going forward, once they leave campus. [APPLAUSE] I read this book. I want to do this right.
How do I helicopter parent my child correctly? What are some tactical things I can take away from this? Well, you just push them out of the helicopter.
No. JORDAN: That's what it is. OK.
Sorry. Learn how to fly, right? That's that antifragile.
That's right. For birds, it works. I guess not for us.
OK. So the key thing to the solution. Even though a lot of my books, a lot of my writing is very dark about things are actually going to hell in a lot of ways, but this one, we can solve it in a year or two because the reason it got so bad so quickly is that we're trapped in what's called a social trap.
It's a collective action trap. The reason why we all feel we have to give our kid a smartphone by the time they're 10 is because everyone else did, and your kid says, you know, dad, I'm the only one. I'm being left out.
So we're all doing that, and the reason my students are spending so much time on TikTok, they say, is because everyone else is, and I have to keep up. I have to know what's happening. So we're all trapped in this.
What that means is that, if we decide to escape, we can escape together. So I propose in the book-- there's a lot of suggestions, but four norms that will break these collective action traps. First, no smartphone before high school.
Just clear this out of the lives of elementary and middle school kids. Send them out. Give them a flip phone, a dumb phone, a phone watch so you can text them, but don't give them the entire internet, including strangers all over the world, who are trying to get at them sexually.
This is just craziness. So no smartphone until high school. The second is no social media until 16.
The things that are sent around on social media, the things they're exposed to-- like I just recently learned about the video cat in a blender, which was popular a while ago. JORDAN: I don't know-- It is exactly-- it is exactly what it sounds like. This is just part of childhood.
It's hardcore porn, animal cruelty, beheading videos. So let's just at least wait until they're 16 before they see that stuff. JORDAN: I was going to say, that's the appropriate age to watch a cat in a blender.
Is that 16 It's like, oh, you get to drive a car, and, hey, why don't you check this thing out. Yeah. - Yeah.
What I'm after here is not the optimum age. It's what's a minimum age that we could actually all do together, because that's the key. If most of us do this, we solve the problem.
The third norm is phone-free schools. This is the most powerful one that we can do instantly. So if you're watching this, and you have kids that go to a school that lets the kids keep the phone in the pocket, buy a copy of my book for the principal.
No. I have videos. Send them a video of my talks on phone-free schools.
Every school needs to go phone free by September. The phones, they don't just make the kids anxious and lonely. They make them less intelligent.
Test scores have been dropping around the world since 2012. Once the kids bring a phone to school, they're doing this. They're not listening to the teacher.
So get rid of phones in schools. And then the fourth norm is far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. We have to-- so this is not just about let's take away, take away.
It's let's give them a real childhood, the kind of childhood that us older people, the kind that we look back on. [APPLAUSE] So if we love our children, the best thing we can give them is a real human childhood. And if we do it together, we can get this done in the next year or two.
JORDAN: I love it. Just give your kids some space, a beer, and a bag of glass, and they should be OK. [LAUGHTER] It's a fascinating read, and an important one.
The Anxious Generation is available now. Jonathan Haidt.
