An Update to The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt

[Music] [Applause] hello this is Russell Moore and you're listening to the Russell more show brought to you by Christianity Today every week we explore here conversations and questions from a Christian perspective to help you sort out how to live as a follower of Jesus in confusing times and this week we have a conversation to seek to do just that [Music] [Music] sometimes we have guests that are so popular that I get tons of questions and this is one of those times where I thought but let's have him back on and talk about some of the questions that have emerged since then and the timing is really good because Jonathan height of course American social psychologist and author he's written The Righteous Mind the codling of the American mind now has just released his new book that is causing waves and waves and waves of conversation called the anxious generation how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness we talked about a lot of themes back in the fall uh on this show and I was surprised by how much response I received not just you know through the normal channels but in regular conversation with people who fit into multiple different categories parents college students high school students themselves and church leaders about what do we do with this new rewired sort of world so Jonathan he thanks for taking the time to come back on with us today oh Russell how exciting part two I I don't know if I've ever gotten a follow-up like this but you but there's so much I mean there's so much about religion and mental health that I'm learning these days so I'm very pleased to come back and to explore some of these questions with you and your listeners well I wonder you know that often when when writes a book there's this gap of time between when the book is written and when it actually is is out there in the world and now it's out there in the world before we we talk about kind of what you've learned since then why don't you recap for us what the the basic argument that you're making in the book okay so it starts as a kind of a detective story which is Teen Mental Health was actually pretty stable in the 1990s and the and the 2000 from the early 90s through 2010 there's very little change the suicide rate is going down a number of indicators are getting slightly better and then all of a sudden like from out of nowhere all the lines all the graph lines for depression anxiety self harm suicide all of them they all start just going up up up beginning around 2012 suicide starts a couple years earlier but the all the others start going up right around 2012 2013 and we didn't really know this until around 2016 when Jee twangy started writing about this and that's when I got involved I was writing a book with Greg lukanov called the coddling the American mind about what was happening on college campuses so in the later 2010s we know something's going really really wrong for Americans who were born after 1995 so we now we now call them gen Z we thought they were Millennials originally but no there's a difference Millennials are actually doing pretty well psychologically but if Americans born after 1995 are doing terribly especially the girls on Mental Health the boys are doing badly in life but the girls are doing badly on anxiety depression self harm so that's the mystery now what caused it and so I had a strong inklink because I was studying the effects of social media on Society on politics I should say to your listeners my primary work I'm a social olist I study morality and I've especially looked at the Left Right culture War at how left and right disagree with each other and that's I guess part of what brought you and me together Russell was you know there's this large community of of people Center left center right who actually are not crazy and want to get along and like talking to each other and so the whole book is really about how we have overprotected our children in the real world and childhood what is childhood what do children need to do in childhood well they need to practice the skills they'll need in adulthood and they need to play play play that's what all mammal young mammals do play play play that's how they wire up their brains and in the 90s we in America we began cracking down on that saying no no you can't go outside and play it's too dangerous someone might abduct you even though that essentially never happens in in this country I mean I shouldn't say never ever but it's not you know it's like getting struck by lightning it's not something that should govern your life so uh we crack down on Play We over supervised our kids we blocked them from developing normal human strength resilience but even during that time their mental health didn't really decline you know we thought the Millennials were maybe a little soft maybe a little spoiled everyone gets a trophy but their mental health was actually okay it's not until the second piece comes in which is the very very rapid move from flip phones to smartphones and this matters for for this reason in 2010 so the iPhone comes out in 2007 but very few kids have one it's expensive they all have flip phones in 2010 2011 I think it's only 20 2011 yeah only 20% of American kids had a smartphone they're still on flip phones everyone's got a flip phone and with a flip phone you know you have to press the seven key three times to make you know the letter s or whatever you're not going to be typing out a long thing about your suffering you're just like you know I'll see you at 2:00 we'll meet at the corner whatever so in 2010 everyone has a flip phone there's no front-facing camera there's no high-speed internet there's no unlimited data plan and so they're not online all day long their phone is a tool that they use in order to connect to people and and get together later fast forward just a couple years by 2015 now 70% of American teens have an iPhone or smartphone most of them have a high-speed data plan on limited data their phones all have front-facing cameras so now you have especially the girls are taking a lot of selfies the girls especially have Instagram accounts they're posting those selfies up online and what that means for girls is that much and I think for a lot of them most of their day most of their conscious life is spent thinking about the photo that they put up what people are saying about it why someone commented on it or didn't comment on it and so they get caught up you know girls can easily be pushed into thinking that what matters about them is their beauty is that all that matters is their looks there's even an amazing quote from Marcus Aurelius on this about women in Rome and you know we've tried for so long to to help girls not grow up that way but boy is it back with a passion because of social media so so what I'm arguing in the book is that in fact the subtitle is how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness that's what we did between 2010 and 2015 we rewired childhood right away our kids began getting anxious depressed oh and the pervasive sense of meaninglessness and loneliness I mean it's so sad I mean you look at these graphs and graphs can almost make you cry when you see what has happened to our young people since about 2012 do you think that young people themselves recognize this or is this a situation where it's so much the atmosphere that one is in that it's difficult to see that things are abnormal yeah yeah now this is one of the most optimistic features of the landscape is that young people see it there's they're not in denial at all previous you know previous generations so there's always a moral Panic about whatever technology the kids are using yeah and so you know before my time I grew up in the 70s you know in the 50s I suppose there was a moral Panic about comic books but I don't think you'd have found kids saying oh yeah man these comic books are so bad for us but we just can't stop reading them but man they are really destroying us like no they wouldn't have said that and when you and I were growing up probably I don't know about your family but we watch you know too much television I'm not horrible amounts but you know probably two or three hours a day of television and our parents said oh it's going to rot your brain and you know we weren't like yeah you're right mom please please help me not watch television you know but television was actually pretty sociable I'd watch it with my sisters we'd argue about what to watch you know we' get food so it's actually pretty sociable compared to sitting alone in your room watching your own programs or your own feed so what I'm getting at is genz is very different from previous generations when you ask them do you think your generation is okay 100% they say no we're in big trouble we're anxious depressed no we're in big trouble you say why do you think that is and the leading answer in surveys is social media they know it's a problem and furthermore I talk about this with my students at myu you know we go through what it's doing to them we go through how they've basically given up all their attention you know like 8 10 hours a a day of their attention is given over to this this stuff and they know it's bad for them and I say well why why don't you just quit and they said well I can't quit because everyone else is on it and then I asked them what if would you rather that Tik Tok was never invented would you prefer to live in a world where Tik Tok was never invented and almost all of them say yes if we could just make this thing disappear we'd be better off so I'm actually optimistic about the possibilities for change because we don't have to persuade young people we just have to show them a way out well I wonder if there's anything you've learned since writing the book and its release I know you've been been having tons of conversations and doing constant research is there anything you would you would tuck into the book as an appendix oh yeah that's a good question yes so I turned the first draft of the book on August 21st of last year I remember the date because I I said to my wife okay finally my summer begins on August 21st and I had about a week off before you know the semester started started and and I and I had to go back to editing but since August 21st you know I've done a bunch of minor revisions of the book but I've continued to do a lot of research on my substack published with Zachary Rous my my research partner who created all the graphs did the data analyses for the book and so Zach has really been tracking down so I asked Zach to take charge of two things one is what's the story on boys and we really figured that out together and so there's a whole chapter on boys the cause is not social media person actually we'll get back to the boy that's a whole another conversation so the boy story is in the book and I'm very proud of that I think we really got it the other thing I ask Zach to do is figure out how International is this because when I hired him in 2020 I already knew or had was beginning to find like well we're not seeing evidence of this in Japan and Korea I can't show an increase in depression Japan and Korea you but but in the UK I can well what's going on and so Zach has tracked it down and he has a bunch of posts if your listeners would go to after babel.com that's the name of my substack they can find a bunch of posts by Zach showing that all the Anglo countries it's the same they all you know they all the kids especially the girls right around 2012 2013 started getting depressed and anxious in the US the UK Canada Australia uh New Zealand and he has another post on Scandinavia same thing Scandinavia and then he just came out about two months ago with a post on the rest of Europe because there is good data there's not good data for most of the world about adolescent mental health but in Europe in the developed countries there is and what Zack found is that the rise in depression and anxiety is happening across Europe when you look at Europe as a whole but when you break up Europe by region what he found is that mental health is actually getting a little bit better in Eastern Europe it's getting a little bit worse in southern Europe and it's getting a lot worse in northern Europe now I don't know what that if that calls out to you the way it calls out to me as a social scientist what is that the dividing line of yeah that's religion that's Eastern Orthodox versus Catholic versus Protestant Europe those are the three religion blocks and so I'm a huge fan of am durkheim the sociologist he really opened my eyes I mean he you know died 100 years ago but his his Books open my eyes to the fact that you have sociological realities you have sociological facts like the suicide rate is a is a is a fact about society and he said suicide is driven in in Western cultures a lot of is driven by the sense of anomy or normlessness and so you know it my my sense is that Christian communities especially more conservative Christian communities compared to Progressive or Progressive Christian communities they live in tighter more binding communities there are more restrictions the parents are going to be stricter no you can't read whatever you want no you can't listen to whatever music you want whenever you want no you can't go wherever you want whenever you want and you know secular folk would look at at at religious Christians and religious Jews and think oh they're uptight they're overc controlling there's no freedom and if you look at the data before 2012 you would see that religious kids kids in religious families and religious adults are a little happier than non-religious adults so all of this was known for a long time but what happened after 2012 and here's the new discovery that I don't really have in the book because this really came in after we've turned it in the new discovery was that when you look at when you look at who's getting who whose mental health collapsed after 2012 when you break up the data not just by male female which we always do when you also break it up by religious or not religious there's a question question on a big survey for high school seniors that's something like religion is important in my life strongly agree mildly agree you know agree disagree when you take the kids who say agree or strongly agree and you plot out their mental health it only gets a little a little bit worse whereas the kids who are secular they get a lot worse I think we might have talked about this in our last conversation because I was just finding that out around then last fall but to put it Al together what we find is that in the United States being in a family in which religion is important seems to give you some protection as though you are anchored you have roots and so when the Title Wave it was really like a tsunami when the Great rewiring swept across American society the kids who were rooted locked in had a moral compass had moral leaders had restrictions they were not washed out to see whereas the secular kids and the also there's also a liberal conservative difference the kids in secular households they had a lot more freedom and there are many good things that go with freedom but it also brought vulnerability and so it's those kids who really got washed out to see and so even though I think I I think we knew this right around when you and I last spoke but we didn't have the international data so to put it together in America religion is protective and internationally it's the countries that are getting more religious are protected the countries that are getting less religious are the ones where you see the most damage but why why would Japan and Korea be different those are very secular societies as well they're secular but they are very collectivist they are the textbook collectivist societies a lot of my early research was in cultural psychology my postto with Richard Scher at the University of Chicago was in cultural psychology I did some research in India and at the time in the 90s when cultural Psychology was really growing as a field we were mostly focused on Japan and China and then also you know basically you know East East Asian Confucian societies and so those are a puzzle in that there they don't have gods in the way that almost every other Society does they're sort of less religious in some ways but boy is that a binding respect culture um a sense of where you fit in the society do your duty what's your role so for all these reasons the kids there yeah they're on their screens all the time I mean in Korea you know they have very little playtime they are on their screens all the time but yet they are so bound into their families and their communities that I think they weren't washed away when they went on to social media also I don't know the social media platforms they're on they're they're different than the ones that American kids are on how much do you think this religious protection has to do with belief the sense that you have people with a a kind of meaning and ability to interpret the world with meaning and how much of it has to do with belonging that that there's actually a community of people around them so first I'll give you the stock answer that I gave from 2012 until about six months ago okay which is okay which is and this is what I said in the Righteous Mind which is well when you look at the data and you try to track out why are relig people happier is it because they believe in an afterlife so they think oh I'm going to have eternal Heaven and the answer is no like the evidence when you look at surveys it's not religious belief that predicts happiness it's belonging it's being part of a community it's do you go to church once a week you know do you go to religious worship once a week or more or do you go you know a couple times a year that's what the data showed about happiness is that it's not about your beliefs and here I was thrilled with that because it's like wow this is a durkheim again like and durkheim he has this book but it's about the the nature of religion and and you know durkheim said that it's not really about the beliefs it's about the the creation of a congregation the creation of a group okay that was my stock answer until about a year ago now when you look at the data and you'll see some of the readers will see some of the graphs in the book some of the saddest questions are statements like sometimes I feel my life has no purpose agree disagree and those numbers were kind of going down a little bit until 2012 and then boom they just go up like a hockey stick and when every other question about meaninglessness despair you see that skyrocketing especially in the non-religious kids and last night I was in Austin I was just on the Joe Rogan podcast and I was uh in taxi coming back and my driver you know I I'd mentioned that I had a book he said what's the book on I said well it's actually about you know what's happened to your generation because he was 20 23 what's happened to your generation and and he said yeah oh wow and I said what do you think is happening I didn't give him anything about who I am or what I'm you know what do you think is happen oh yeah you know we're got really bad mental health and you know yeah we're messed up we're in trouble which is what they all say Jen Z recognizes then I said why do you think that is and he said well I don't know I mean I think you know for the boys especially for the boys I think it's because you know they just they just feel useless they just feel that their lives don't matter and I said tell tell me more what do you mean you you know useless useful like you use that word a few times you just said what do you mean and he said well you know I don't know it's just like you just feel like you don't mean anything to anyone and so that while that might point to the belonging thing the belonging piece is key but I think the the sense that you're not you're not contributing something you're not here for a purpose it doesn't matter if you disappear I think boys especially you know boys need to be active they need to be doing building creating competing not just connecting you know connection is important for everyone but for girls it's more about connection uh as Richard reev says girls do things face to face boys do things shoulder Tosh shoulder and so there's just been a like a draining out of a sense of meaning or purpose in life which is especially harming boys so I'm actually now much more open to the belief mattering but you tell me because I I assume you have a view about this what do you think it is that confers the protection well obviously it's both but I I wonder with one of the things that coincided with almost not quite but almost perfectly with the data that you're showing here here is a big change in American evangelicalism especially with young people and especially with boys and young men toward a much more doctrinally robust kind of Evangelical Christianity the res like a wow like a great aw a Great Awakening like a more religious fervor sort of thing in the boys no it's it was it's actually a a Resurgence of Calvinism that that happened around the same uh time period which when asked why are so many people young people attending these big neoc calvinist new calvinist conferences and and events the response that some people would give is they're looking for a big God and so with Calvinism you've got historic Roots you've got a a God who actually is Sovereign and your life has purpose and meaning because every detail of your life is included in the plan of God so you could have songs like emerging in the say the early 2000s you could have songs like cadman's call this day's been crazy but everything's happened on schedule you know that sense of of Providence and of purpose I wonder if there's not a connection between those two things tell me more about that do you think that this spread like what year did this begin to spread and do you think it spread because the kids are connecting via social media or do you think it came from adults and was introduced I think it happened a little earlier than the the social media explosion so late late 9s uh early 2000s but I do think that there was a sense that the old model of Christianity wasn't working and and there there really did need to be a bigger concept of God so in some ways I think it probably lines up more with what you were talking about in Righteous Mind about awe and about a drivenness toward a and this is typical in I see too there are some of these some of the trends we're talking about began before 2010 but they almost always accelerate after 2012 and so the decline of religiosity and especially Church attendance I attribute that in part to the fact that once young people and us too all of us adults too once we got our smartphones and we're more on social media you know you're talking three to eight hours a day of this stuff it pushes out almost everything else so I think people just don't have time or or interest to to go to church or synagogue anymore now you would consider yourself an a IST or an agnostic I think is that is that still the case does looking at data like this about the positive good of religion do you see that just as one more aspect of human evolution or does it ever cause you to wonder what if there's something actually solid and true underneath all this yeah okay that's a good question let me be thoughtful about my answer here I guess what I have to say is you know as we talked about our last time when I was young I was kind of like a typical like you know Science Kid I took religion very literally and I thought religion is the statements in the Bible and I didn't think those were true so religion is false and I believe in EV all that stuff so that's the way I used to be and then as I began to study morality I began to see that Rel we I believe we evolve to be religious religion is woven into human nature we need we need Gods we need to hold something sacred and you know as I say in the new book I strongly agree with the statement from Pascal that there's a god-shaped hole in every human heart and if you don't fill that with something Noble and elevating it will get filled with garbage so I've come to as I said last time I've come to really respect religion my religious friends I've lost all hostility that I used to have but your question is not about my feelings towards it your question is has this changed my thoughts about God and and the universe and I guess I would say coming to a much more positive view as a social scientist has not changed my own personal beliefs about the universe but I would say that just getting older you know we're often very certain about our beliefs when we're younger and I you know I would have said I was pretty certain like even Richard Dawkins says in The God Delusion you know on a scale of one to 10 if 10 is you're absolutely certain that there's no God you know even he says he's not a 10 you know he would have to be below below that and I would say you know the same way I while I used to be very confident in my beliefs now I see I'm like I I saw a um a documentary in New York a couple months ago on the the James web telescope and what it's producing and when there was a moment when they show that you take a tiny little patch of Sky tiny little patch like much smaller than what the moon occupies and then you zoom in on that and what you see is millions of galaxies like Galaxy not just galaxies and just the vastness is just you know you cannot fit it in your mind and that and that's actually almost the definition of awe and so I I certainly do have experiences of awe about the universe about nature I do have spiritual feelings sometimes and so while I don't interpret them directly as evidence of God I do they do sort of at least signal to me that I don't know what's really going on like there are I'm a little creature with a small brain and I do not understand you know why we're here or or or how this all came to be so I you know I'm more open to it but no it hasn't made me a Believer you know CS Lewis and surprised by Joy talked about that god-shaped hold that you mentioned from Pascal but about this sense of longing that he called Joy uh not not in the same way that we tend to use the word the word Joy more of a a longing sort of sense and said that led him to ask the question if there's an appetite for something an appetite for food is because there is food what is this longing directed towards ah yeah and that's that's sort of leted him down the path of of rethinking this stuff okay well here you know and that's part of why durkheim so appealed to me is that durkheim also talked about that he didn't say quite long but he said was there's a voice of authority we feel it in our hearts we feel that some things are wrong and some things are right that morality speaks to us like a voice inside of us and what is that voice and he said people have often interpreted that to be the voice of God but durkheim says that's the voice of society that's what it is to be a member of a society so who knows but I'm just saying that kind of argument that there yes there is this longing and there is this moral voice in our hearts and you know I lean towards an evolutionary explanation although I admit that it's not it's really not Crystal Clear it's not like we you know like the evolution of the hand or something I mean it's yeah you know I don't really know what's going on there are a lot of people who would like to move toward a spiritual but not religious kind of mentality that says we have this sense of spirituality there's more than just the the material but it's not religious in the traditional sense so it's not church it's not religious books and so forth it doesn't sound to me like you would think that that can actually counteract what we're what we're facing now right because what what we see is that the protective effects of religion are not equal are not even between left and right Progressive religious movements are not as binding there are often movements of secular people to create something like religion I think it was called Sunday something there was a movement in the UK yeah you know of course the community is very important and you can have that without religion but there's something about the tight binding and the circling around shared sacredness that's very hard to do if everybody's bring in their own you can't each have your own religion just like you can't each have your own language religion is about linking religia relinking to together and back to the past so I think there are secular forms of community that are certainly helpful but I think it would be hard to sort of just engineer almost by intelligent design a social system that confers the benefits of of a of a successful religion one of the questions that's come up quite a bit from from listeners of our last conversation is along the lines of a friend of mine who said look I tried to implement some of the things that the anxious generation talks about uh not having a smartphone until 16 for instance those kinds of I said I said high school but yeah okay High School okay and and he said the problem was it actually caused the mental health situation to be worse for his child because everybody else has so it it it isolated it was pulling that child out of out of that so how does how does does a parent then or a high schooler himself or herself counteract that so that's a perfect illustration of a collective action problem yeah and that's what the last part of my book is about and that's why we have we signed our kids over to a horrible way of growing up and we seem powerless to change even though we know it and they know it because you can't solve it alone if you try to solve it alone as a parent and you say you're not having getting a phone then your kid really is isolated that will be bad for their Mental Health and that's why the theme of my book is we're stuck in four Collective action traps and we have to get out of them collectively so just to very quickly run down the four are no smartphone till High School hard to do that if you're the only family but what if half the families in your town do it then it's easy give them a flip phone you don't have to make them phoneless just give them a flip phone number two no social media till 16 and once again if you're the only one who's not on Instagram and everyone else is then it's hard but what if half the kids are not on then it's much easier the third is phone free schools and this is something that every religious school should do well I don't mean tomorrow but certainly for September you know if they don't already lock up the phones in the morning it's not enough to say keep it in your pocket because the kids will use it yeah um but going phone free is vital it's easy and I think religious schools are much better positioned to do that to say to their parents we need to do this can we all do this together for our kids mental health but that's what that's one of the things that also I received was from Christian School administrators who are saying we would love to lock up the phones the problem's not with the kids the problems with the parents yes okay right but here so right so but look what's happening this is a common thing in politics most parents are upset about the phones most parents hate what's happening most parents either already would favor phone free schools for their kids or they will once we start talking about once my book you know the book is out we're talking about this but the I've heard this in secular schools I went to my own my old Middle School my old high school in New York and I heard the same thing we'd love to ban them we hate the phones but yes some parents freak out yes some parents freak out and those are the ones you hear from and what I'm hoping and again everyone listening to this if you have kids in a school where they don't lock up the phones in the morning please contact like you know it's like contact your representative he needs to hear from you the head of school needs to hear from you because if most parents are saying please give our kids six hours a day free from this garbage just you know school is the best way to give them six hours a day free from it then the schools will feel that they have the political support in the community to actually do what they know is the right thing to do I would also add even since our last call new data has come in both from the American data the national assessment of educational progress which is the nation's report card and also Pisa the international assessment of educational progress around the world both of them show a big covid effect that's the news like oh look how much academic performance declined dur from from Co lockdowns and and school ures that's true it did but what the graphs also show is that after Decades of improvement from the 70s ' 80s 90s Decades of improvement both Pisa and the nap they both collected data in 2012 that was the high point academic performance in America and around the world begins to decline after 2012 then it accelerates after covid but the decline started after 2012 as soon as the kids get phones they're texting they're texting during class if you don't lock they are texting during class they're not paying attention to the teacher as much they're not paying attention to each other as much they're not talking to each other between classes they're on their phones so this is a must all schools must K through 12 and certainly Elementary Middle School there's no argument about that so that's the third Norm is phone free schools and then the fourth sorry to extend this but the fourth is far more Independence free play and responsibility in the real world that's the harder one but there too there too if you're the only one sending your kid out to you know to pick up something at store or sending him out to play you know if there's no one else out there it's scary you know it's lonely people will call the police so we have to get communities to say you know even though we were out by the time we were seven years old you know that was the norm during the crime wave when you and I were growing up by seven by second grade for me it was by three but okay there you go there you so right it varied but basically kids were out and they were caring for each other and I'm not saying we should go back to six or seven as the age when we give kids Independence but I think eight is pretty darn good eight third grade kids are really competent they can handle it they can figure out Subway systems I mean you know you see the videos of the kids in Japan at three or four they go on these long errands like kids can do it they can do it and it' be so good for their mental health if we start letting them feel that they matter that they can actually do things for the family I was having lunch yesterday with a friend of mine uh named Darren Whitehead who's a pastor of Church of the city here in the Nashville area where I live and he's written a book called the digital fast 40 days to detox your mind and reclaim what matters most and one of the things that that they have done at their church is to try to encourage everybody course there's no mandatory Authority but to encourage everybody to to take 40 days lent period to be completely away from their phones to try to get at that collection action Collective action problem and uh I as he said that I saidou know what this reminds me of is dry January and the effects that dry January tends to have if if you just have one month where everyone is saying I'm not drinking this month because it's dry January and we're all doing this together some people go right back to the way they were but there are other people who start to consider wait why why have I become so dependent upon this that this was so hard is that is that something that you would say could be the beginning of a collective action resp absolutely so when we look at kids a very common story I hear is about summer camp summer camps are amazing most summer camps are phone free never send your kid to a summer camp that isn't phone free why would you waste the time and money when you could actually give them exactly the kind of digital detox you're talking about I hear this story over and over again from parents and from the kids from teenagers they say you know the first two or three days at Camp were hard being away from my phone and I was worried about what other people were saying and by the fourth or fifth day I was over it and wow I could really talk with the other kids I had an amazing time I you know did arts and crafts I did Sports I looked at the stars and then they come home and the parents say wow my my my wonderful Sweet Child who I knew two years ago before her phone she's back and the kids are so happy and then they get back on their phones and a couple weeks later they're anxious and withdrawn once again so research on Addiction shows that it takes you know three or four weeks minimum but really 40 days sounds about right once you have hyper stimulated your dopamine neurons which are the ones about reward and motivation to consume more and more and more when you've hypers stimulated them for a long time every you know hours and hours every day they adapt they literally change the the surface to have fewer dopamine receptors or less less responsive dopamine receptors so your brain adapts so that when you don't have the video game or the social media or the alcohol or whatever ever it is then you're in a state of deficit you you have the opposite of reward it actually feels really unpleasant and kind of painful and that's what happens when you take your kid off of social media or video games the first few days they're probably going to be much worse off because their brain is craving it and it takes a number of weeks so yes doing it together is crucial it'll be very hard to do it if you're the only one but if it's part of a community it's part of your identity it's a team thing you it helps you connect then it can be done so yeah I would urge dig detox within communities you know in the Jewish Community we have Shabbat at least Orthodox Jews really take it seriously no cell phone no they have a kosher cell phone you know they they have a way around it but is clear no smartphone no internet they don't they don't do that so they have a day every week and I've heard from I I gave a talk to a a group of of Jewish Day schools on Shabbat on you know from Friday Sunset to Saturday Sunset there's no devices of any kind and all the kids are playing with each other it's really fun it's a fun day it's not a day of deprivation one of the other questions that I've gotten quite a bit has to do with boys and girls and and you mentioned uh Marcus aelius about Roman society First Timothy and first Peter first century uh Christian writing scriptures speak to uh congregations and direct toward the women don't be obsessed with your physical appearance raing of hair direct toward the men don't be quarrelsome and it's it's not as though either of those it's not as though Peter or Paul are saying if you're a woman be quarrelsome it seems to be these are unique problems that are happening within within the congregation but there are some people who are saying you know I intuitively kind of know that this is affecting boys and girls differently but it is really hard to say that right now in your community in my community sort of the more Progressive intellectual you're never supposed to say there's a difference between boys and girls but you're finding it even in Christian communities even in Christian communities because people have seen such a such an exaggeration of the differences a really heavy-handed kind of misogyny all kinds of okay aberant things and so there are a lot of people who say you know if we start talking about distinctions between boys and girls it easily can seem like it's going in that direction and so people tend to just shut up about it and back up oh this is really helpful because I can I think I can give you a simple idea that will make the problem much much you know much much less pressing so what I've always told I used to teach psych 101 at the University of Virginia and I had a whole lecture on sex differences and I would start it off by saying you know we're all afraid to talk about it we're all afraid that this will somehow show you know people are are we saying that women are inferior that they can't run for president like no look at the data on sex differences if we focus on differences in ability who is smarter who you know has has different skills the differences are very small there are some here and there you know men are a little better at like spatial rotations women are better at reading social I mean there's some small differences in ability but they're not that common when we look at differences in desire what do boys and girls like to do what do they choose to do when you leave them alone when there's no adult present how do they play huge differences huge you find them across species too chimpanzees you see sex differences in play that are similar boys want more Rough and Tumble play they wrestle girls don't wrestle they just don't do that so once you say you know what this is not about who's better this is about the fact that you know prenatal hormones affect our brains they change us you know from from the female pattern to the male pattern boys and girls enjoy different things there's a lot of overlap there are a lot of boys who are feminite or who you know Andrew Sullivan talks about this you know he didn't like to play Rough Sports he liked to read poetry and a and a girl said to him are you sure you're a boy you know so you know we need to make room for girls who are masculine and boys who are feminine but there is a real difference in what they enjoy every parent just about every parent who has one of each can see it so once we understand that now we can say not who's better but who's more vulnerable to different appeals and a platform that comes to you and says hey all your friends are here all your friends are on this they're all talking about this do you want to join now every kid wants to be connected but for girls that's like it's even more power they have to they're they're just pulled more or a platform that says hey you want to have fake war with a bunch of strangers and you form teams and you'll have you can choose your weapons you got amazing virtual weapons like that's just not going to appeal to girls as much as to boys so the platforms know what they're doing they know how to hook kids and the social media platforms and we know this from whistleblower Francis Hogan you know she brought out all this stuff Facebook knows what it's doing about how to how to appeal maximally to girls insecurities and the and the video game companies are appealing to boys desire not so much insecurities but their desires you have a phrase uh what is it coalitional competitiveness is that or coalitional comp uh competition about boys how does one balance that aspect of of connecting you talked about with that male sort of desire for competition well so one of the fundamentals of evolutionary psychology is that we evolved in a long period of time as hunter gatherers and there was a division of labor because we have you know babies with gigantic heads and a female can't raise a baby alone and so for all these reasons about early human evolution women are more specialized for gathering for finding plant-based products and men are more specialized for hunting and for war we are not just the descendants of those who found food were also the descendants of those who didn't get wiped out during war most people got wiped out during war most communities got wiped out or if not by War by starvation but there was always competition between groups and so boys are in a sense specialists in Coalition building to compete with other coalitions and you can call that sports or you can call that war but that's really fun for boys and that's why when you just let kids do what they want the girls are going to play in pairs they're going to play in groups of two or three whereas the boys are going to play in larger groups and they're going to spontaneously divide into teams to compete because it's really fun for boys to compete directly now girls of course are competing in all kinds of ways but it's not as it's not the direct team versus team that that is fun for them as much so that's the way I think about it that you know and that's why the video games it's the multiplayer Team games that's what's so exciting for the boys One Pastor said to after our conversation he said I I don't want to say this publicly but I'm frustrated by our failure when it comes to porn oh my God yes because it it seems that what we have ended up with is not categories of people who are porn resistant and people who are porn enthusiastic but instead We've Ended up with categories of porn addicts and Liars in his context and he said and so I look at that I say this is one aspect really clearly in a Christian sense clearly morally defined this is one aspect and we've completely failed on it how can we possibly try to deal with the the even bigger issue that that we're dealing with with these mental health concerns no I think porn is is has become unbelievably harmful to boy development and to girls sense of who they are or what sex is or why they would ever want to have sex with a man after what they've seen online so you know when older people if you might think well porn is like you know Playboy and sure you know boys are interested you know straight boys are interested in seeing naked girls what's the harm and I don't think there's much harm from even a 12 13year old boy seeing a photograph of a beautiful naked woman I don't I mean maybe it's harmful maybe it's not I don't think it's harmful but that's not what kids are getting these days once we got in the early 2000s once we get you know YouTube and streaming video now you have pornhub or rather lot of porn sites that are just like YouTube there's red tube there I can't remember what they're all called but they all become very popular in the early 2000s and now but boys don't have a smartphone then that doesn't exist yet once they get their own well laptops but then especially smartphones now boys can watch porn every day multiple times a day and many of them do I it's something around 30 to 50% I've seen different estimates of boys visit porn sites every day of girls it's just like one or two% you know they've all everyone has seen porn they all stumble across PornHub often in middle school and PornHub you know you've got I mean the sex portray there is you know very aggressive it's degrading so what kids are seeing is not a photo of a beautiful naked woman they're seeing women being dominated and degraded and for kids you know kids just coming into sexuality they're actually really disgusted by a lot of it even if part of them is interested in kissing and and so you know for kids in middle school to you know see Ric like high resolution videos of anal sex when they haven't even kissed anyone I think it's just a revolting State of Affairs in our society and the fact that there is no ageg gating any child can just go onto any porn site and they're on there's nothing stopping them we have to change this we absolutely have to change this so yes porn is interfering I believe and IAL I review some research in the book it's interfering with the sexual development of boys during the exact years of early adolesence when their hormones are kicking in their desire is is is is rising and this is when they need to learn how do you flirt how do you approach a girl girls are different from boys I can't just say the things I want to say you have to it takes a long time to learn how to court a woman and boys are not getting any practice they don't know how to approach a girl they don't need to for sexual satisfaction because they can find much sexier women online so yeah we've got to do something to to reduce access worship Services H there are a lot of uh people who are saying I have an hour where I come in and worship with my community and I'm distracted by I'll I'll get pings on my phone I I hear I'm getting distracted by all of that but a lot of people I mean when I preach somewhere and I say go in your Bibles to 1 Peter chapter 2 most people pull up their phones and go to their Bible app look at the Bible oh rather than their physical Bible okay yeah and I'm wondering if there was a a trend that happened in a lot of Evangelical churches for a while of sentree services which was say we have some people who have allergies and so we're going to have a service where you you don't have to go to this service but if you do you're going to say I'm not coming in wearing cologne and perfume or whatever oh interesting okay do you think it could work to say we're going to have specific worship services that are phone free we're not mandating that everybody come in with that phones but for this service would that do anything or is that just a COS that's a great that's a great idea cuz there's a couple things going on here that are interesting psychologically one is that we many of us have desires for how we want to be in the long run and from a distance but then when faced with temptation we cave so I'm quitting drinking is easy I've done it a thousand times and you know I want to eat less sugar but I you know then the chocolate's in front of me and I eat it and if you and so I'll bet if the pastor talks about this with the congregation and says how many of you feel that your phones your digital stuff is is distracting you in ways that you're not comfortable with almost all hands are going to go up how many of you would like to really be present when you're worshiping versus distracted all hands are going to go up so you know this is a kind of a trap like you know we want to be this way we want to connect with each other and to God but our phones keep calling us away so what would you say about having worship services and maybe it's just an optional one or maybe it's all the the services what would you say um if I asked you to literally turn your put your phone on airplane mode or power it down or put it in a phone caddy at the front you know what would you say so that would be an interesting question for a congregation to discuss because it might be the case as it is with my students that when you put it that way what if we all do it together I bet most of them are going to say yes let's do that and then if they all do it they're not going to feel you know because I'm sure there are times like it's getting boring I'm kind of bored by this you know let me just check you know my text like I bet that must happen in church a lot in the back row you know as in as in a classroom the back row is where they're all online so yeah I think they should try it I think you should definitely try it I bet I bet there'd be support listeners I've said this before Righteous Mind is one of those books over the last 20 years that I would say this is one of the most important books of the 25e period that we're in certainly one of the most influential in my own life anxious generation is going to be the same this is going to really change the conversation that we're having and I hope we'll change the conversation within the church not just in the culture it's called the anxious generation how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness Jonathan height it's always a a pleasure to have you on thanks for being here well thanks so much Russell I think Christian Christian families and Christian Schools really have a chance to lead on this and to develop ways of being that might even be of benefit to the rest of us so thank you for having me on [Music] if you enjoy the wrestle Mo show take a second to share this episode with a friend or leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts the Russell Mo show is a production of Christianity Today executive producers are Eric Petri Russell Moore and Mike cosper host is Russell Moore produced by Ashley Hales associate producers are Abby Perry and McKenzie Hill director of operations for CT media is Matt Stevens audio engineering provided by Dan Phelps video producer is Abby Egan and the theme song for the wrestle Mo show is Dusty Delta Day by Lennon [Music] Hutton [Music]

Channel: Christianity Today

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Length: 50min 33sec (3033 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2024