Jonathan Haidt — The Kids Are Not Alright | Prof G Conversations

and you said we're overprotecting our children offline and underrot them online so I I'll pick up first your point about how vulnerable we all are to someone saying something about us on social media when the reputation was sullied that's painful in a way unlike anything else unlike physical pain and when you feel like you've lost status massively people are laughing at you that is one of the most painful things that humans can go through and that very often needs to Fe thoughts about [Music] suicide Jonathan what does this podcast find you it finds me in my office Stern you can see from the purple wall behind me so I won't say I'm jealous or envious but I'm like massive jealous and envious I think you're arguably the most influential scholar in the world right now do go on as you would say I mean you're every to resist to resist Professor Hy is feudal right now you are literally everywhere I mean you're in my Instagram feed all these famous people are talking about you I see you on Joe Rogan which is obviously you know the the I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing but I know it's mostly a good thing congratulations this is you're everywhere well thank you I think I can explain it like this um over my life as I've picked stocks to invest in if I simply always did the opposite of what I actually did I would be a much richer man I have no ability to pick stock but when it comes to picking academic topics to study because I have a a kind of an intuitive sense that the world's going to hell for this reason I'm going to dig in here and I want to look and I want to trace this out I have a pretty good track record of that looking at polarization looking at emotions like moral disgust um and looking at at you know the over protection of kids and the coddling the American mind and now what I'm finding is even though a lot of that other stuff had culture War overtones and there was always a left right Dimension now I've hit on a topic which everyone is seeing everyone is concerned about Republicans Democrats anyone with children has seen it and so I find I don't have to persuade people I just walk in and people say thank you yes tell us what what do we do what's going on so yeah I think I'm really riding I I just I came along with with this at the right time the world's going to hell our kids are in big trouble and I hope I think my book The anxious generation is the the clearest and fullest statement of what happened yeah you described it I read on I think one of your feeds that you're pushing on open doors um yeah so Le let's let's talk about this when you say the anxious generation you're talking about gen Z you explain in the book how this generation is the first generation to go through puberty with a and and you say this open quote portal in their pockets that can take them into an alternative universe that's exciting addictive unstable and unsuitable for adolescence why do you highlight puberty specifically for a couple of reasons one is what the data shows shows us is that Millennials are actually doing okay so if you were born in not you know millennial generation goes from 1981 to 1995 if you were born in 1992 93 you're a late Millennial odds are you don't have issues with anxiety your people in that year generally have pretty good mental health but if you were born on the other side of the Divide 1996 and later so if you're born say 19898 99 you have a much higher likelihood of having depression or anxiety disorders and I what I've come to believe and here I'm drawing on Jee twangy was one of the first to call attention to this the Millennials are okay because they didn't get smartphones and Instagram and social media until they were largely done with puberty they got it in late high school or college and they're fine it's the kids who got it in middle school it's Middle School is the beginning of puberty in puberty your brain is rewiring very rapidly it's a period of very rapid Brain Change um and that's exactly when we should be helping kids to make it through that's when other cultures have initiation rights and they they they bring kids into the knowledge of what they need to do as adults but we give them Tik Tok and say here here kid your brain's about to start rewiring let's have random weirdos on the internet selected by algorithm for their extremity let's have them do the socialization for us and that's why I think kids who go through puberty on social media that's where the damage is greatest can these things be undone or is it that these this Neurosis or anxiety um or desperate need for affirmation does it get cemented I mean is it especially dangerous to be exposing them to this at this sort of formative point in their lives well it is so the period from around age eight or nine through about 156 might be a sensitive period for cultural learning that is it's a time when things you learn really stick that's true for language if you uh move to a different country you're exposed to a language before puberty you'll speak it like an native speaker but if you don't move there till you're 14 or 15 you probably will never speak like a native speaker so there are sensitive periods but with that said I don't want parents whose whose kids are are older gen Z I don't want them to despair because with the brain very little is ever set in cement it can be easier or hard to change but it can still be changed and so uh so I teach a course called flourishing a positive psychology course it's a 35 uh most these sophomores they're 19 years old and a lot of them have anxiety issues most most of them spend several hours every day on social media um and we get amazing results just by working through how do you get control of your life how do you regain control of your attention how do you take that last hour before you close your eyes and make it something that's going to recharge you not that's going to just you know keep you up on what so and so is saying about so and so and so by working on their morning routine their evening routine and especially by shutting down almost all notifications you know I tell them you can leave on five Uber and lift probably you want to leave those on you want to know if the car is coming but you don't need breaking news alerts about somebody getting a divorce from somebody else that's just not something that is worth you giving away your attention to uh so anyway my point is there's a lot we can do for young people and they want to do it uh a lot we can do to help them regain control of their attention and improve their their moods you talk about specific foundational harms or four of them of a phone based childhood sleep deprivation social ration attention fragmentation and addiction walk us through each of those and if you could stack rank them what are you most concerned about well the sort of the the biggest and most obvious one that hits everybody is is you know what's called in economics the opportunity cost and so this is kind of like the foundation of the foundations um the opportunity cost it's everything that you give up when you commit to something else so um recent Gallup data shows that American teens spend 5 hours a day just on social media mostly Tik Tok and YouTube you add in all the other stuff they're doing on screens video games all that you know you're up to 89 10 hours is where the estimates are um on a this is average and if you can imagine you know anybody listening to this program imagine that you suddenly started spending 10 hours a day on anything that pushes out everything else there really isn't room there's no room for books there's not much room for talking to friends you have to do it all through the app so I think the of the four foundational harms I think I think the biggest one is social deprivation kids really really need to be spending a lot of time with other kids and with adults but they need to be developing their social skills um that's gotten crushed once they move on to phones you see it in the data time with friends plunges in the 2010s young people used to spend a lot more time with their friends than their parents did but now they spend only a little more time with their friends than their parents do something's really wrong there now you might say oh well you know sure but they're Spending All This Time online together no no it does not substitute it's asynchronous it's performative it's one to many so I think the most important one is the social deprivation the second one which is um also very serious and just really the easiest is sleep deprivation sleep is so important for all of us in fact if I could go back in time I think the you know I'm 60 and I never needed a lot of sleep but I kind of skimped on it because I was so psych like oh I can you know I can have a a longer work day and don't only need to sleep you know four five hours a day uh but now it it looks like um uh when you are sleep deprived it has long-term effects on your brain and your memory certainly for teenagers they're going to be in a better mood less anxious they'll be better at Social relationships if they get a good night's sleep but when kids bring a device into bed with them and many of them do the last thing they do before they close their eyes is check their mentions check their texts so these things disrupt sleep um very briefly the third one is uh um attention fragmentation and we all experience that you and I have our frontal cortices you know the frontal cortex developed I think we're about the same age they ours developed in the 70s uh now yeah there was you know too much drugs and alcohol and drunk driving there were all sorts of bad things then um but we got to develop normal executive function that is you make a goal and then you set out to achieve the goal and then you do it you you you stay on task you you learn to focus and that that ability really gets locked in in in puberty but if you're constantly being interrupted and kids get one study recently found 257 uh notifications a day on average if you're constantly getting pinged and distracted even while you're talking to people even while you're trying to do your homework you never develop the capacity to stay on task so attention fragmentation even if it doesn't make them depressed it's going to make them less successful in life poorer they won't make as much money um and just unable to achieve things then finally the fourth is addiction now there's a debate in the academic literature whether it's truly an addiction like cocaine or heroin and it certainly is chemically not exactly like cocaine and heroin but behaviorally it's very much the same as gambling if you can call gambling an addiction and many do I think social media and video games uh become an addiction now the research is actually pretty clear it's not the majority who are addicted in that sense or let's call it behavioral addiction the research uses the term problematic use what percent develop problem atic use a c of a compulsive use that's interfering with their ability uh in other life areas like friendships the ability to get school work done and so the numbers generally show anywhere from you know two or 3% like heavily ad addicted or intense dependency to around 10 or 15% problematic use that's a lot of kids like there's no other consumer product where we said well you know it's it's not necessarily an addiction but it's going to kind of damage the life prospects of 10 or 15% of our kids like we would let them use use it but this one we do one of the things I love about your work and I think is a decent description of inside or even genius is you'll say something and it seems so obvious but at the same time you weren't thinking about it and I had one of those realizations reading your work about this book where you said that online we have these friend groups that have very lowcost or easy entry and then lowcost exit whereas when when when we grew up you had uh High barriers or high cost entry and then high cost exit and it just reminded me when we were kids we kind of slowly but surely shaped the people we were hanging out with and then we just hung out with them all the time we had our crew and some of us didn't like each other or some of us liked each other more but you got into trouble together and that was your crew and I just looked back on that that that friend group I had in junior high school and high school and it played such an enormous role in I just got lucky everyone in my crew was going to college so that meant I was going to college but speak more about the importance of kind of this this your your crew your posy and the difference between developing them or having them online versus offline so we are a tribal species this is a major theme of my own research which I cover in my book The Righteous Mind we evolve to live in small groups these small groups hang together especially when they're in competition with other groups this is why Sports is so much fun remind me Scott what Athletics you did in high school I did everything in high school but not very well and then our road crew in college okay but but you you were on teams and I assume a lot of your friends and your crew was overla with your sports activities right 100% yeah so especially for boys girls tend to have uh more intense pairs girls do a lot in pairs in smaller groups boys tend to when you let kids do whatever they want boys tend to form larger groups and then part of what they do in those larger groups is compete with other groups and that can sometimes even escalate to violence uh but usually it's more Sports it's ribbing it's competition that's incredibly helpful we're tribal species and the crew you were describing it's like this is Junior tribalism this is Master those skills and as you said an important part of it is that you don't necessarily like everyone in the crew you could have tensions with someone and you learn to live with it because you can't just press a button and expel them and it takes a lot of time it this develops over years and so you wouldn't just burn your Bridges you wouldn't just quit cuz it's going to take you years you may never get another crew contrast that with what j z has gone through we don't let them out very much so they don't get to hang out with other kids very much um for boys you know if they they really enjoy playing video games the video games are amazing but for boys they can't go over each other's houses if they want to play video games they literally have to go home to their own house and sit alone with their headset their controller their screen if they want to play with other boys so over and over again this be a major theme of our conversation today the internet has made almost everything that kids need to do super easy to do lowcost easy low embarrassment and in the process you don't have to exert much effort you don't learn any skills you don't develop abilities that transfer outside of that closed Digital World talk about the decline of free play so that is that's the other half of this you know my basic argument in the book is that humans had a play-based childhood uh from hundreds of Millions of years because we're mammals and that's what mammals do so play is extremely important for brain development for developing skills that's why animals play that's why they take risks that's why human children seek out risk so we must have play and risk and thrill and excitement boys especially need Rough and Tumble play physical play wrestling things like that and we had that until the 1980s or 90s um you and I grew up during a giant crime wave um there were risks there were drunk drivers uh but kids still played outside got into trouble and learned to get out of trouble in the '90s we freaked out about child abduction we started focusing much more on the competition in our economy to get into a good college childhood became as it is in East Asia childhood becomes test prep for some Circles of Americans uh we lose the interest in free play kids get less and less recess we think they need more math less recess that was wrong so for a whole variety of reasons we greatly cut down on the on what kids really desperately need which is unsupervised free play where they will learn how to make rules Norms develop relationships manage relationships we cut down on all of that and the Millennials were victims of that the Millennials the older Millennials had Freer range childhoods generally but by the if you're born in the early 90s you probably had some restrictions even still they didn't get particularly depressed it's only when the second piece comes in which is the phone based childhood and that just sweeps in in the blink of an it wasn't there in 2008 2009 in the first years of the iPhone um but by 2015 most kids have a smartphone not a flip phone and so what I'm calling in the book The Great rewiring of childhood it has a back story in the 80s and 90s about the loss of play but the peak of the action is 2010 to 2015 that's the period when human childhood not just in our country but in many developed countries human childhood leaves the real world and comes to take place primarily through phones and other digital devices in the book you mentioned or you referenced French sociologist Emil durheim I'm not sure if I'm saying that correctly of all time that's so interesting really that says a lot when you say that but the concept you highlight is enemy I'm not sure or normalness in English say more about this research and how it helps illustrate some of the things that you're discussing so the reason I'm so grateful to uh to durkheim u i I never took a sociology course in college uh and then in graduate school at Penn I sat I took one course on criminology it was just I don't know why I picked that course but the professor assigned Emil durkheim's classic text suicide uh where durkheim had studied suicide statistics in Europe in like the 1890s when they were just beginning to gather statistics and he observed certain patterns and he observed that people are tightly bound into communities like or Ox Jews religious Catholics they had much lower levels of suicide whereas people who had a lot of freedom especially in the Protestant countries they were more likely to feel disoriented not tied in not connected uh and they were more likely to suffer from anomy or normlessness uh it it's not a good feeling of freedom to be freed from social norms it's disorienting and so this was just a revelation to me that to see that actually you know Freedom isn't like of course we need freedom in many ways but we don't need the maximum Freedom possible we actually need to be bound in to flourish and so durkheim has just helped me see that a lot of what we're doing is we're trying to create groups that's what religion is for he said that's why we love sports teams and sports and sports super fandom and the and it really helped me to see that the digital world has atomized everything it's split everything it's allowed me to see that even television used to be so social because you sit there you watch it with your sisters or brothers you fight you argue you eat food you talk about it but now kids even if they go over to each other's houses they might be sitting separate on their separate screens watching separate separate videos so um durkheim really allowed me to see atomization splitting the loss of meaning and this is something you see in the data this is the saddest part of all the graphs I've got like 30 graphs in the book there are several graphs of what young people say in response to questions one of them is a statement um sometimes I feel my life has no meaning do do you agree with that disagree with it and for for all these questions or sometimes I think I'm no good at all and on all these questions the lines were pretty flat in the 2000s and pretty low most students don't don't agree with that but all of a sudden around 2012 2013 all of those lines go up as soon as our kids moved their social lives online they began to wallow in despair disconnection anomy Norm harmlessness depression and suicide it's I mean it's just um I I think of this we don't we don't like to it's especially rough I think on adolescence but I I wonder and I'm curious if you feel this way I don't like to admit that a lot of the things you're talking about have impacted me tell me more which ones did you recognizing yourself well I don't like to admit this but my mental health when I think about any Mental Health episodes I've had in the last 3 years half of them have been triggered by something online by a total stranger someone comes after me for some of my work or tries to discredit me and I I don't even know if it's a bot and a bunch of people who for whatever reason you know agree or don't feel good about me weigh in and it just triggers uh a downward spiral and I I think a lot of times that successful people and men who have some weird notion of masculinity and success and like to think that we're immune from these types of body blows you know I I I I I think about how much it's impacted me and then I think about my kids and the fact that they haven't built up scar tissue or they have no real ability or perspective or life experience to be able to deal with this and you just think you just think Jesus Christ how how are we letting this happen to our kids talk about the disconnect it seems so obvious and I think your work and Jee twang his work is sort of bringing us into the light or the realization of just how damaging this is but what's interesting is the contrast and you talk about this one of the things you said that I just thought was so Illuminating you said we're overprotecting our children offline and underprices I use stoicism in my flourishing class uh Marcus Aurelius has some great quotes about that you know why do you make yourself vulnerable to whatever anybody would say about you um many of us like to think that we're tough and maybe you're physically strong maybe you can handle a lot of physical pain but even the Ancients the know Roman times um when the reputation was sullied that's painful in a way unlike anything else unlike physical pain and when you feel like you've lost status massively and people are laughing at you that is one of the most painful things that humans can go through and that very often leads to fear to thoughts about suicide uh we just naturally think about well uh let me just vanish let me disappear this is unbearable nobody likes me so this is true for adults and these were you know Marcus aurelus the emperor of the Roman Empire you know he was subject to these These Feelings now let's look at uh you know 11 12 13 year old girls and boys they're coming out of childhood they have to renegotiate their status who's cool who's attractive who's High who's low and kids always did that but in the sort of the slow local way that you and I were talking about before now you suddenly it's like you supercharge it it's like you say let's take all the all the difficult parts of Middle School let's multiply all the bad parts by 10 and this is going to take up almost all of your life most of your time in middle school will be spent not having fun not learning in class it's going to be spent managing your brand you are going to be desperately desperately managing your brand one false move and you're down these are natural normal psychological processes that these platforms have knowingly hacked and there are quotes from some of the early people at Facebook and elsewhere um you know we you know that they that they these were hackers tricks to to to play on our insecurities see what someone said about you click here so yeah we we all care about our reputations and social media makes us all live on thin ice it's not a happy way to live we'll be right back one of the things you do in the book and I think the thing that's getting arguably the most play is you've outlined a series of pretty actionable Solutions speak to those Jonathan yeah so I'm not doing any of that I'm not doing that stuff about how to make the time less toxic what I'm saying is the reason why our 10 and 11 year olds have iPhones is only because everybody else gave the kids an iPhone we're all in a trap and uh this is called a collective action problem or a common dilemma in the social sciences and they're very hard to get out of as individuals because if you say no sorry I read this book by John Hyde and you know I'm not giving you a phone until you're 97 or you know I'm not going to give you you know I'm not going to give you a smartphone till you're in high school height says well if your kid is the only one without a smartphone and the only one without uh social media then yeah your kid will be isolated it's going to be tough and so the solutions that I propose are all things we can do together to liberate our kids from the social action problem very briefly four steps four Norms no smartphone before high school just give them a flip phone the Millennials were fine with flip phones two is no social media till 16 social media is just not suitable for minors frankly it certainly isn't suitable in early puberty let them get most of the way through puberty before you invite them to stick their head in a toilet bowl and flush every day forever and ever third Norm is phone- free schools the phone is the greatest distraction device ever invented kids text during class they watch videos during class they watch porn during class it's completely insane that there are schools in this country namely most of them almost all of them that allow kids to keep their phones in their pockets during the day and they just say don't take it out during class but they do take it out during class so uh the phones need to be locked up in a phone Locker or Yonder pouch first thing they get them back at the end they have six hours seven hours a day to listen to their teachers talk to each other make jokes flirt have fun so that's the third Norm phone preschools and the fourth Norm is far more free play Independence and responsibility in the real world this is the harder one because we have to overcome our own anxieties but we we if we're going to take away the phones from especially in middle school if we're going to reduce their time on screens we have to give them something to do and the healthiest thing they can do is hang out play with each other unsupervised let them learn how to work out conflicts uh and and choose activities if we do those I'm confident that we would see these lines these incredibly surging lines of anxiety and depression they just go up up up they never go down since 2012 if we do these four things I'm pretty confident we're going to see those lines come down we're going to actually reverse the mental health epidemic do you feel like you've gotten a tra any traction do you think it's realistic to think we might have this outbreak of schools Banning phones do you think it's a real possibility oh it's happening it's absolutely happening um so in fact this is the easiest one to do because this is one where schools can just make the decision themselves or Boards of education for school district can make the decision themselves all the principles hate the phones all the teachers hate the phones it's making their lives miserable it's interfering with learning so they want to do it they just I say well why don't you do it they always say the same thing because some of the parents will freak out they feel they have to they have a right to communicate with their child during math class all the time so it's just overcoming parental objection but now that more parents are seeing the problem now that we're past covid now we can see the mess is not because of covid it was it was baked in before covid covid actually didn't have a long-lasting impact um now that parents are turning and supporting this uh and the research is getting stronger and stronger and it's clear that there are huge no that there are learning deficits now around the world not just in the US now the appetite has turned and phone uh many schools are Banning phones the UK just mandated uh phone-free schools throughout this throughout the school day throughout throughout England and and other parts of the UK um Australia has done it um Florida just did it a couple days ago DeSantis signed the bill I think that was yesterday so this is happening this will improve educational outcomes and guess what the kids love it they some of them object at first but what they're most afraid of isn't being off social media it's being off social media when everyone else is on Jonathan height is a Thomas Cy professor of ethical leadership at New York University Stern School of Business his research focuses on moral and political pschology as described in his book The Righteous Mind his latest book The anxious generation how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness is out now he joins us from New York University uh Professor height I look forward to seeing you all of your colleagues are just so proud of you anyways congratulations on everything Jonathan thanks so much Scott it's always fun to talk with you I really appreciate your work and your [Music] friendship [Music]

Channel: The Prof G Show – Scott Galloway

Views: 39,671

Keywords: Jonathan Haidt, Scott Galloway, Prof G, Social Media, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Children, Kids, Adolescence, Depression, Anxiety, Mental Health, Mental Wellness, Prof G Conversations

Id: Bn3QmcAwI5Q

Length: 28min 38sec (1718 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2024