And now, a Brian Kilmeade show special presentation, reclaiming America's childhood. Here's Brian Kilmeade.
So welcome back everybody. This special edition is the guy with the deep voice says of the Brian Kilmeade show as we look at July 4th and focus on the family, focus on the family that's all affected by social media, focus on the family all affected by the phones. I think very NYU professor Jonathan Haidt really did a great job with his book learning people to the problem that's in the palm of your hand or in your pocket and how to solve it because it just wasn't sprung on us in one day.
It gradually came and suddenly it's overwhelming and changing our behavior as a country for the most part, not for the better as we originally thought. So here this hour, we're going to take a look at Jonathan Haidt and also how it affects your family. I think you'll find it insightful, interesting.
He did the research to make your life better. Let's take a listen. It's my privilege to bring in best selling author, brand new book out, Jonathan Haidt. Brand new book is called The Anxious Generation. Everybody's talking about it and you all can relate to it. How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
And we're not looking back 100 years, Jonathan. I feel like we're in the middle of this and we're trying to stop this tornado in the middle of the tornado. What alerted you to the link between the cell phone, the iPhone and anxiousness? So I'm a college professor.
I teach at New York University Stern School of Business. And many of us who teach on college campuses, we notice something going very wrong around 2014, 2015. And that led me to write an article and then a book with my friend Greg Lukianoff called The Coddling of the American Mind.
He's been on. Oh, good, good. And, you know, at the time we thought colleges were somehow making kids sick by teaching them bad ideas. But a few years later we discovered, no, actually it's everyone born after 1995. Not literally everyone, but the generation born after 1995. Their rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide are much, much higher.
50 to 100 percent higher than for the millennials. So seeing that led me to start asking, what happened? Why is this happening so sharply around 2012, 2013 it begins?
And why is it happening in multiple countries? That's what the book is about. Right. So when you came to the conclusion that it was the advent of? Well, it was not the advent of the smartphone itself. The smartphone itself, I remember when I got my first one in 2008, it was an amazing digital Swiss Army knife. It had all these great tools. It was a tool that I could pull out of my pocket if I wanted something. But then in 2008 you get the App Store, 2008 or 2009 you get push notifications.
And pretty soon by 2010 or so, 2011, you've got 100 or 1000 companies on your phone trying to interrupt you, trying to pull you over to them. So now it's not a tool. It becomes more of a master. And look, every adult here knows what I'm talking about. It's hard for us to stay focused. Imagine you're 11 or 12 years old. You don't have a developed prefrontal cortex. It's hard for you to stay on task. And you have this thing in your pocket constantly saying, hey, you want to know what someone just said about you?
Click here. So it was really that transformation between 2010 and 2015, a huge transformation in children's lives. And that, I think, is what set them up for anxiety, depression and mental illness.
And you also don't solely blame the iPhone. No, that's right. There's two parts to it. There's more to it. That's why I think it's so intriguing. Well, thank you. Yes, people tend to focus on the phones because that's what we're all, I mean, we're all in the midst of it. But there's a longer back story.
And thanks for giving me the invitation to tell that. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg and I talked about how kids used to have free play. You and I think we're about the same age.
I was born in 1963. We grew up during a big crime wave. There was some danger out there. But all kids went out to play.
It would have been totally unnatural for parents to say, no, you stay inside, you know, eight-year-old, you're not allowed outside. We all went out to play. And that's how you learn basic social skills. That's how you get tougher.
That's how you learn to manage risk. And Americans kind of stopped that in the 1990s. We freaked out about child abduction, a few other risks, and we basically took away normal human childhood. Now, at first, the kids didn't get mentally ill. We took them inside.
They started playing on computers. They're not as tough anymore, but they're not yet depressed and anxious. It's only then when we get to around 2010 to 2015, it's in that period, that the kids go from having flip phones, because all the millennials had flip phones, which they could text each other or they could call.
That's okay. They go to having a smartphone with high-speed internet and unlimited data plan and Instagram and a front-facing camera. So, especially for girls, by the time you get to 2015, you're a 12-year-old.
Your life is all about taking photos of yourself and comparing yourself to others, like, thousands of times a day. And this is just an inhumane way to raise children. So, this week, also, Ron DeSantis took a move, made a move in Florida, and he is banning all cell phone use for kids. Not cell phone use, social media use. Social media use is a big difference.
Cut one. The way this bill is structured, it is not engaging in any regulation of speech. It is basically identifying functionality that is causing harm, the addictive features. And so, that's laid out in the bill. We worked hard with the legislature, because at the end of the day, we're not just here spinning our wheels. We're not just trying to get a photo. We want something that actually sticks and actually has a positive impact. And he's looking to keep it below 16. That's right. And that's exactly the right way to go. I'm thrilled with the Florida bill.
It's excellent. In my book, I recommend four norms. Four norms that if we do them, we can really roll this back. One of them is no smartphone until high school, but the second one is no social media until 16. The reason is because puberty is a really, really special time.
People don't fully understand. I don't think people really appreciate just how fast a child's brain is rewiring itself from around age 11 or 12, when puberty starts, to around 15, 16. Puberty goes on longer than that, but the early years of puberty are the most vulnerable years. And there's research showing that girls are most damaged by social media between the ages of 11 to 13. Boys might be a little bit later, 14 to 15. And so the idea that American children, children all over the world, during the most sensitive years in which their brain, their frontal cortex is trying to wire up to, how do we live in this culture?
Who am I? All those questions that they're working out in early adolescence. To have those guided by random weirdos on the internet that are chosen by algorithms because of how extreme they are, this is insanity. And so for DeSantis to say, look, let's just hold it back till 16, I think is perfect. Oh, sorry. That is so insightful to listen to.
I'm sure you got a lot from it, but more to come. You know, Governor DeSantis ahead of the curve. He was after social media over a year ago. And now we have Governor Newsom saying, banning phones in the classroom. We have Governor Hochul coming out and saying, hey, I want to ban social media unless you're 14 and over.
And now nobody's really standing in the way. Maybe the tech companies, but they don't want to stand up to the wrath of parents. And if everyone does it, I think we're all in. In fact, I believe even the kids want it too.
Back in a moment with more. This is a special edition of The Brian Kilmeade Show. You're listening to Reclaiming America's Childhood with Brian Kilmeade. Imagine that your children are having a life out in the real world. They're having adventures. They're doing things.
They're building forts in the forest and doing all sorts of things. And then one day a casino opens up nearby and it welcomes all the kids. And that's where they spend all their time is in a casino. And they're in the care of a company that is trying to extract as much money as it can from them.
And that's what they do eight or 10 hours a day. It's an abomination to think that a casino could own our children's childhood. What if it wasn't a casino? What if it was a brothel for the boys would be more of interest, let's say.
Like, again, inconceivable that we would let that happen. What we've done is we've said, well, what if it's Snapchat? What if it's Instagram? What if it's Facebook? Well, not so much Facebook.
What if it's TikTok? These companies, these are some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. They essentially own our children's childhood.
This is where childhood is taking place on a few giant for-profit platforms that use an advertising-based business model. So they are motivated, like the casino, to keep them in. Don't have a clock. Don't let them see what time it is. Keep them in. Don't let them click over to a link to another site.
Keep them in. We somehow have ceded our children's childhood to giant companies that have shown that they don't really care about our kids' welfare. They care much more about profitability, and they care about their customers, who are the advertisers. And these companies have been granted a special writ from the king.
Congress said in Section 230, the Communications Decency Act in 1996, I think it was, Congress said, oh, and nobody can sue you. Nobody can sue you for what you show to their kids. We somehow slipped into this, and once you see it that way, that it's as though our kids are being raised in Harrah's casino. You know, like, no, we've got to stop this.
So that is Jonathan Haidt talking to Andrew Huberman on his podcast, talking about the danger of kids. I love the analogy, talking about a casino, talking about brothels, places you'd never send your kids. But that's the objective of those media companies. And we've got to look at them as media companies, social media companies, looking for maximum profit without values and ethics, despite what they testify about. And we have to start understanding that, too. That's why I think Europe is ahead of us in terms of the bans, the limitations, and I actually think that once kids understand how they're being manipulated when they get a little bit older, like 11th and 12th grade, they get offended, offended that they'd be allowed to gradually have the water get hotter and to be suddenly intolerable and people have to indeed step in. Here's more of my interview with Jonathan Haidt as he continues to expand on the dangers of social media.
We thought it all would be a plus, and in the end it's doing quite a bit of damage. Let's listen. I have a childhood. I'm in my house. When I walk out of that house, my life is unscripted.
Whether I'm going to the food store, running errands, or whatever it is, I'm hopping on that bike, I could run into people that could negatively influence me. Is that the same thing you're saying that happens on social media, only to the millionth power? No, it's very, very different. Humans are mammals. We're very similar to other primates, where we have a lot of similarity to dogs and cats. Mammals need to play.
They need to play physically. It's especially clear for boys. Boys need a lot of rough-and-tumble play, wrestling, running around. All kids do. That's what our brains are kind of expecting, and we need to develop our social skills one-on-one or in small groups. You say something, your friend makes fun of you, you're a little embarrassed, and then it's over. You move on.
That's a healthy childhood. You have to make a lot of mistakes, and they have to be low-cost mistakes. We all made thousands of low-cost mistakes, and we learned from them. Now what happens when kids move their social lives onto, let's say, Instagram or Facebook or any of those other platforms? Now, you say one false word, you make one mistake. It could blow up to an infinite scale. It could be that everyone at your school is making fun of you.
It could even go national. So, the mistakes are no longer low-cost. Also, when we were hanging out with our friends, joking around, teasing each other, we were playing. We were having fun. We weren't managing our brand, but when you're online and you're always thinking, Should I post this? Should I like this?
What should I say? It's not what you really feel. It's what will people think if I do this versus that. And so, we're turning our 11-year-olds into brand managers, and again, that's just a twisted way to develop.
It's interfering with normal human development. And you know what I think, too, is people are like, I'll compete. Do you want me to compete?
I'll compete. But I'd rather not even go into the social media world. But if I have to, I'll do it. But I'm only not going to do it if I know I'm not missing out.
So, that's part of it. And not missing out would be finding out that if that kid is on social media at 11, 12, they're going against the rules. Like, if you want to stay out past a curfew, if you want to not do your homework, there's always going to be those people. But you want to put that into society where, my goodness, I saw a 10-year-old on social media that's so offensive.
How could those parents do that? And you're optimistic that we can do that now. Yes, I am. Yes, I am. Because I've been involved in a lot of attempts to change people's minds and message, and I ran a gun control group when I was in college, and we got nowhere.
This is entirely different. I don't have to persuade anyone. Every parent I talk to, everyone who has kids, everyone who's a teacher, they all see the problem. I don't have to persuade them that this is a problem. What I have to do is fight their resignation.
Wherever I go, parents are like, yeah, you know, this is terrible. What's happening? But, you know, what are you going to do? The train's left the station. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. This is the way of the future. But, you know, if the train has left the station full of kids, and we know that the train is headed for a bridge that's collapsed and the kids are going to fall to their death, I think we should try to call back the train.
And you know what the good news is? I don't think anyone listening to us right now are thinking, it's fine. Right. No problem. There's nobody I know who says no problem.
That's right. Even the kids. You ask Gen Z, they know it's messing them up, and that's why I'm optimistic. Because it's not like, you know, when you and I were kids and our parents probably said, oh, they're watching too much television. It's right in their brains. Let's get them off television. Well, we love television. And if they told us no more television, we would have been very upset. But with social media, over and over again, what we find is if you say to a kid, I'm taking away your social media, they freak out because now they're cut off. They're basically socially dead. But if you offer them the possibility, like, what if we took it away from everyone?
Would you like that? And over and over again, in studies, in anecdotes, in talks with my students, they say yes. In fact, there are several studies in which it's been asked, would you rather live in a world where Instagram and TikTok were never invented? And the majority of college students in this one study I recently read said yes.
Some of the things that you've already went over. No smartphones before high school. Got it? No social media before 16. Phone-free schools. Yes. That's tough in a public school situation.
You could go find a school like that, but, I mean, you could get together with PTA and try to have your voice heard that way and maybe show examples. And then lastly, more free play and responsibility in the real world. Yes. Those are the four norms. So it's kind of a, I would like you to do something with no rules. So tell these kids to go out. Now, in that time, there are going to be kids that are in the cool crowd. There are going to be kids that are in the non-cool crowd. And the natural instinct for parents is, I don't want my kid to feel left out.
But it's important for them to go through those experiences in life because nothing's permanent. That's right. That's right. The kids need to be out having adventures with each other.
You know, if I just ask you, do you feel, when you were young, when you were 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, do you feel you sometimes had adventures with your friends? Oh, yeah. Right. Of course we did.
That's what we were looking for every day. How old are your kids, if I may ask? My kid, 27, 23, and now 21.
Okay. So they're technically all Gen Z, although they're older Gen Z. Do you feel as though your kids had as many adventures when they were young as you did?
Probably not. They were big athletes, so they were involved in two or three sports at a time. So that's one thing, by the way, makes me more want to do sports than ever. Yes, absolutely. Because that is old school.
That's right. You know, you got the parents, too much helicopter parents, we got that, it's an issue, and money is an issue. But I'll take those problems because you get to negotiate. How do I handle pressure? How do I handle a coach that yells?
How do I handle being cut? All those things get you ready for life. You used to, okay, if you don't choose sports, you have other things.
But now your other thing is in your hand. That's right. That's right. So what we find, and this is research I've done with my research partner, Zachary Roush. What we find, we've looked at the data all different ways. We plot it out. You see that the trends were fine in the early 2000s.
There's nothing going up, no sign of a problem. All of a sudden, the lines go way up around 2012, 2013 for depression, anxiety, self-harm, all sorts of things. But when we graph it out by religion, that is, kids who said that, on a survey, religion is important to me or my family, their lines go up much less. And those who say religion is not important to me or my family, they go up much more.
That's so interesting. There's also research showing that kids who are active in their church or religious organization, and kids who are active in sports, especially team sports, also had a lot of protection. So the way to think about this is kids must be rooted in a community of real people with a moral order, a moral structure, a sense of what's good and bad, right and wrong.
They need that the way plants need to be rooted in soil. I know Abigail Shrier was here and she said, have intentional, non-directed conversations, small talk. Because it's important to have small talk. Because if you have small talk with someone and feel comfortable in non-consequential conversations, when you have to have a real conversation, it doesn't come out of the blue. I feel comfortable talking to you. Now let me tell you what just happened in school.
I just got rejected and you fill in the bank. The one thing I think it has done, it's wiped out small talk. So you get in the car. Everyone's got their phones out. Now you can tell them to put it away, but they're pretty much waiting. They get texts and they get distracted. Instead of focusing on the people there, well, I have nothing to say. I was with you all day. Well, you start driving around, you look around, oh, it just reminds me. You don't have those unscripted conversations.
Wow, so that's fascinating. Now, in the next half hour, how all this, staying in, not taking chances, being afraid, all worried, has hurt our kids. And believe it or not, the fact that fewer kids are going to the ER, and he'll explain, Jonathan Heywell, is actually not a good sign.
I know, it's counterintuitive, but it's true. Special edition of The Brian Kilmeade Show, July 4th weekend. Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Keep it here. Is social media producing a generation of risk-averse children? Reclaiming America's Childhood with Brian Kilmeade. I'm not saying kids got to get hurt, but I'm saying is when kids take risks, sometimes they get hurt, and not seriously. But, you know, you twist an ankle, you break a finger.
You know, not the end of the world is painful, but it shows you're out there having a good time, roughing it up a little bit. You learn a lot about life that way. And believe it or not, no previous generation had to deal with this. Sometimes you're at war and sometimes you don't get to fool around and kids had to grow up quick.
That used to, those are good old days compared to now. Some kids aren't growing up at all, and they grow up afraid of their own shadow. That's the focus of this segment, this next segment with Jonathan Haidt, NYU professor, best-selling author. You also talked about something interesting, and it's bad. Did you say, you point to a graph in your book and said, as time has gone on, less visits, less injuries of kids going to be hospitalized or, you know, broken arms, broken fingers.
Because they're not doing a lot of... Not doing anything that could break a bone. Yeah. That's right. And that's bad, believe it or not, you're saying. That's right, that's what I'm saying. It means no risk.
That's right. You don't want kids to be having zero broken bones, because that means that they're not doing anything. They're not taking any risk. They're not riding bicycles. They're not swinging from ropes.
They're not climbing anything. So that's one of my favorite graphs in the book. We have all this data showing that kids are getting more risk averse. Gen Z is more afraid of risk, and that's going to have huge ramifications for the country.
They're less likely to start businesses, to take entrepreneurial risks. So we've got all this self-report data that kids are more afraid of risk. And then I found this data set in the CDC where they track hospitalizations all across the country for various reasons. And one thing they track is hospitalizations for fractures, that is, broken bones. And what you see is that before 2010, the people who got the most broken bones by far were teenage boys, followed by men in their 20s. Those are the two groups where you've got daredevils, they're doing things. They're the ones who break bones. Middle-aged men don't. Women generally don't. Much lower rates.
Until 2010. Once we get into this period, the great rewiring, the rates for boys especially, the rates for everyone goes down, because all of us are on our phones all the time. But the rate for boys plunges to the point where now a teenage boy is slightly less likely to have a broken bone than his father or grandfather. Because they're not doing anything that could break a bone.
They can't even play with each other after school, because if they want to be on video games, they each have to go home alone so they can put on their headset, their controller, their screen, and that's how they can play with each other. You know what's so interesting, too, is you mentioned you're in a business school. So you need that entrepreneur. I'm going to take a risk. I'm going to risk it all.
I'm going to go up and knock on those doors. Steven Spielberg opens up an office on campus, I think, of Warner Brothers and pretends like he's a producer. He ends up being the most successful ever. But those people that take risk, let alone the Navy Seals, we obviously need those type of people in this country. Entrepreneurs, if we don't have people out taking risks, that's the thing that separates us from everybody else. Exactly. That was our brand.
That was our secret sauce. It was the people who took risks who were willing to take risks. They're the ones who got in the boats and came here. Now obviously different groups came here under different circumstances, but it's always been the people who were seeking a better life and were willing to gamble it all were the ones who immigrated here. Risk takers from all over the world. In the early days of Silicon Valley and all the way through the 90s and 2000s, it was these people from South Asia and all over the world.
They were coming here because we had this open, free environment where you could gamble and you had a good shot of winning if you could work hard. That is at risk of changing. So what's so interesting is life became easier. Obviously we get to the 20th century and 21st century. We end up from walking, from biking. We get cars. We get roads. We get planes. Everything changes. And we just keep on improving. Now, AI is here.
That's another book for you. But you're asking us in a way to turn down the option of technology in order to go back to the way it was, which put us on a path of advancement. Yes, for our children especially. Have we ever done something like this before?
Oh, let's see. Have we ever done something like that? I can't think of any other time where we're asking, you know, we did get a TV and we did hope to have one in every room. Then we got cable and then we have different ways to communicate and advertise and we go everywhere. Now we go to a gym and we see, we go to a dentist and we see the TV.
Now I walk into my house. TV's not even on. Yeah.
I mean, it's- Right, because people, handheld devices are more- Right. Yeah. I'm like, you don't want to watch anything?
You don't even know when it's on? And we ask to program ourselves. But Brian, that's a really good question. Have we ever gone back? So what you're talking about are sometimes called problems of prosperity or problems of progress and our technology has made our lives easier. From the invention of fire and plumbing, thank God for those, all the way through the invention of the telephone, the automobile, all these things make our lives easier. Let me just put on the table here a really key psychological term called anti-fragility. It's a term, it refers to the property of systems that are not fragile. They actually, you know, something is fragile, you've got to protect it, like glass is fragile, you don't want it to bang around, it'll break.
But there's some things that need to bang around. They need to be stressed and challenged in order to develop properly. So bones and muscle are that way. If you take it easy on your muscles, you get weak.
If you push them to the point of pain, you get strong. The immune system is that way. If you try to protect your kid from dirt and germs, they're going to have autoimmune diseases, their immune system won't work. If you expose them to dirt and germs, let them play in the dirt, they'll be healthier.
So there's a very important concept. And now, to go back to your point, as we've made lives easier and easier for us as adults, we've made it easier and easier for our kids. Kids can now get what they want without even getting up from the sofa, they have everything they want on their phone, the boys have pornography, they don't need to pursue girls.
Everything is so easy that our kids who are anti-fragile, who need challenges and failures, they need to experience stress and then overcome it and have a sense of victory. Everything is so easy for them that they're not having the experiences that would turn them into men and women. Right. They're not dating like they used to.
They're not going up to someone in a bar and having the risk of rejection. Oh, heaven forbid. Yeah. And being prosecuted.
And I never thought I'd be living in a time where we have to urge people to have sex. And drink. I shouldn't say this on the air, but my kids kind of know that I want them to have adventures.
Right. And so how many kids do you have? I have two kids, both in high school. And so have you done this with them? Have you told them, give me your cell phone? Well, they're in high school, so they passed the limit.
Did you try to hold it back? We didn't because I didn't know back then. So we gave my son a cell phone when he started walking to school. So I learned early on from Lenore Skenazy, who's my partner in this, she wrote the book Free Range Kids, I learned that we need to send our kids out. So I had sent my kids out on errands. And when my son started walking to school in fourth grade, we gave him my old iPhone. If I had it to do again, I'd just give him a flip phone or an Apple Watch.
Those seemed to work well. So I understand the need to track your kid. But what I did hold the line on is social media.
I made it clear. No social media until high school at the earliest. And so I did keep my kids off. And my daughter, when she was in sixth grade, she couldn't have Instagram. And when she was in seventh grade, she said to me, Daddy, I'm glad you did that because the Instagram girls are stupid. She could see what it did to them.
She could see they were like shallow and stupid and slutty. So I did hold the line there and I'm still holding it on on Snapchat. As everybody in the control room would know, I am not the most forward thinking person. The thing I like about social media for me is it tells people who's coming up. I could say that you're coming up on the show. So my followers. So it helps me. Hey, I'm going to be in this appearance. But I'm very almost embarrassed to say this. But on Instagram, I could do those TED talks. So I'm on those.
There'll be four or five different ones pop it up. And I'm like, well, this is I'm going down to work, but I'm happy to. I'm happy to. Oh, that's an interesting. I never thought of this.
I never thought of that. And then also I'm profiled on YouTube. They know I love history. So I'm getting this instant patent bio as a segue to this battle in World War Two. So there can be positives to this. We're expanding your mind. I thought to myself, instead of maybe reading the news, I just expanded my mind in history. So there could be a positive today for adults.
Absolutely. And so first, I always encourage people to remember that social media is not the Internet. The Internet is amazing. You know, people like you and me, we remember the 90s first encountering it. I mean, it was mind boggling that you could have access to information all over the world instantly.
Books that I do not have to go to Washington. That's right. That's right. So the Internet is fantastic. I'm not saying let's ban the Internet for kids. Social media is something different. Social media is a tool by which companies can use us to gain our attention for advertisers. It's also a tool that we can use for our purposes. I use Twitter to get the word out. I use Twitter to find things.
So I have no objection. I understand the value of social media platforms for adults who need to network and get information out. So tell me what seven-year-old needs to network with millions of people or get the word out. My argument is that these tools, which adults can make their own minds about, as with gambling, but we wouldn't say, you know what? Let's just let 11-year-olds into casinos. Let's let the companies design special slot machines that appeal to children to take all their money and debit their credit card.
That would be insane, but that's kind of what we're doing when we allow any 11-year-old, any 9-year-old can just lie about their age because the age enforcement is not mandated by Congress. Right. And to parents listening right now, this is one of those things I think classic is you went into the pool and the water gradually got hotter. And then when it started boiling, you didn't want to be the first to get out because there were positives to it. And what you're trying to do with this book is saying this is how you get out and we can all get out together.
That's right. No one wants to be the only one stepping out. But if everyone's uncomfortable and somebody said, hey, folks, what do you say we all get out? That's how we do it.
That's why it's so important to have clear norms. More of Jonathan Haidt on this special July 4th edition, weekend edition of The Brain Kill Me Joe in just a moment. Stick around. Four things you can do to help your children reclaim their childhood right after this. You're listening to Reclaiming America's Childhood with Brian Kilmeade. It's gradually become one of the hottest issues around most coffee tables, around most barbecues, tailgates. And that is about kids.
Even if you don't have kids, it's a constant issue. You see these children. You go and watch them on their iPads in restaurants.
You see them sitting at a table and looking down on their knee. And they're sure enough, there's a phone there. You wonder, is this really helping kids? Now, on the surface, you might think, wow, they're getting news. They're getting information. They're getting sports. They're communicating with people and able to queue up with their friends, maybe keep up with their sports teams.
But there's more downside than upside. So now it's time for the four things all parents and schools can do. No matter what, no smartphones until high school, whatever. The things that you need to do to stay off the TikToks of the world and start making eye contact with people and getting to know people again and yourself. So here are those four things.
The four norms that we can all coalesce around, all parents, all schools, we can do these if we do them together. No smartphone before high school. Give them a flip phone or a phone watch.
It doesn't have a browser on it. That's the key thing. Or social media platforms. The second rule, no social media before 16. Just don't let them open accounts. Don't let them download the app. Third rule, phone-free schools.
The phone must be locked up in the morning in a phone locker or a yonder pouch. Kids get it back in the afternoon. Otherwise, it's in their pocket distracting them while they're in class, while they're at lunch with each other.
They're all paying attention to their phones. And the fourth rule is far more free play, independence, and responsibility in the real world. If we're going to greatly reduce screen use by, say, 50, 70 percent, we can't just expect them to just sit there and do nothing. We need to let them out to play with each other, to hang out, to have adventures.
The world is so much safer than it was when you and I grew up. And give them chores. Yes, absolutely.
Give them chores. Hey, guys, I need you to go. Someone's got to go to the supermarket.
I'm going to need X, Y, and Z. Absolutely. Because one of the things that Gen Z is really suffering from, this comes out very clearly in the surveys, is a pervasive sense of meaninglessness, pointlessness, and uselessness. They agree with a statement on one of the surveys, sometimes I feel my life has no value or I feel my life has no purpose. Do you agree with that? And very few kids agreed with it before 2010. By 2015, it's about double the number who agree with it. Right. I have an email question for you.
This is from Erez. So many of our parents don't want our kids to have smartphones, but we don't know where to start. Have you seen any parents or community successfully aligned to overcome the collective action problem and commit to delaying smartphones and social media access? Is it happening?
It is happening, yes. So religious communities are actually doing great at it. I just spoke to a collection of 50 Jewish day schools. Jewish schools are doing fantastically because Jews already have the Sabbath. They already have one day every week when there are no electronics allowed for Orthodox Jews. So religious communities have a lot more social capital, more trust, more ability to work together.
They're doing it. The other thing is there's an organization, Wait Until Eighth, which has this great idea that a bunch of parents, when the kid's in first or second grade, they sign a pledge to wait until eighth grade. And then when they get 50 people in the school, then the pledge is sort of live.
And so that's a great way to get out of the collective action problem. The only difficulty is that that age, eighth was picked long ago, not really for a mental development reason. And what I'm arguing is it has to be ninth. It has to be high school because we have to clear this out of middle school. If phones come flooding into eighth graders, that's going to affect the seventh and sixth graders. We've got to, I mean, middle school, we can win. Getting phones out of high school is going to be harder, but elementary and middle school, for God's sakes, get them out.
Let the kids pay attention to their teachers and to each other. You know, I let them, my kids saw Social Dilemma and they got ticked off. Really? Tell me. Because they see how they're being manipulated. Oh, good, good, good.
Right. And they said, well, this is really aggravating. They know how to hook you in. They know how to mold what you think. Lastly, on TikTok, there's a lot of pushback in Congress. I don't even think they're going to put it up for a vote in the Senate, which is nuts. There's a national security element to TikTok. Absolutely.
It's unbelievable. Maybe, Professor Haidt, maybe you could tell us why. So the national security issue is because TikTok is an incredibly influential platform, perhaps the most influential platform on our children's development. The kids are spending more time on it.
And what I'm coming to see is the short form video is the most destructive thing possible. Just to give you an example, I do a little thing I did with my students at NYU. I asked, how many of you watch Netflix at least once a week? Almost everybody.
How many of you wish Netflix was never invented? Nobody. Nobody.
Watching stories is good. Then I say, how many of you use TikTok regularly? Almost everybody. How many of you wish TikTok was never invented?
Almost all of them. Wow. They see, because they see it. And I say, well, why don't you get off? And they say, well, I have to be on it if everyone else is. I have to keep up, because people are talking about the latest TikTok thing.
I have to be in the know. So it's a collective action problem. One reason I'm so optimistic is that Gen Z is really savvy about this. They're not in denial. They're not fighting us. They're actually beginning to organize. There are a bunch of others design it for us.
There's a whole bunch. If listeners go to anxiousgeneration.com, that's the website for my book, we have a page of aligned organizations, a number of which are run by Gen Z founders. So Gen Z is beginning to rise up and say, stop exploiting us. Stop trapping us. We want to have a life. Exactly.
Wow, I love that. And also national security. The Chinese, there's a law that if you have any tech that you have, it has to be shared with the country, with the nations. I understand that Chinese law says that every company must do what the Chinese Communist Party tells it. And so when TikTok executives tell us, oh, well, the data for Americans is kept over here in Singapore, whatever it is, we don't share. Oh, come on.
I mean, there is no way to believe that. So I'm wary about Congress banning companies, but this is a very special case where our primary geopolitical rival, not enemy, but our rival, there's possible tensions coming up, controls the most influential platform on our children, as Tristan Harris has pointed out, he made the social dilemma. You know, it's as if in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the Soviet Union controlled PBS and Sesame Street and ABC and NBC.
I mean, if they controlled our media that was broadcasting to our kids, we would never have allowed that. And that's sort of the situation now with TikTok. And you know, that's what, and I'm sure you might have seen some of the bipartisan work on China and the 300-plus votes in the House. Yes, that's exciting.
Yes, that's great. And there has been times where the Chinese government has accessed information and the CEO has not been candid about that. And in the New York, they would not even know in America what's going on. And one of the guys is directly linked to the current Communist government of China on the board.
So I mean, to me, it's not even, you know, the people have said, well, it's not fair to have open competition. Not really when it comes to national security. They can't buy Fox. Rupert Murdoch, to have Fox, had to become an American citizen.
Oh, interesting. And CBS, yeah, CBS can't be bought. You can have the best company in the world. They cannot. We'll never have the... Oh, I didn't know that. That's great. Yeah, you cannot buy a communications network here if you're a Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
It's not allowed, right? That's amazing. That's very important. Thank you for that.
Right. No problem. So listen, congratulations on the best seller. It's called the anxious generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Jonathan Haidt, thanks so much. Thank you, Brian. Thank you.
