Jonathan Haidt's Way Forward for an Anxious Generation

[Music] [Applause] hello this is Russell Moore and you're listening to the russle mo 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] the kids are not all right according to study after study after study we have record highs when it comes to anxiety and depression and other uh mental disorders and even apart from that just being around a lot of adolescents there seems to be such a heightened level of stress I have read the gys of a book that I think is amazing and is going to be a decades long conversation driver and that's really weird because most people don't ever have one like that but it's really odd for somebody to have two and if you think about my guest today Jonathan height who is social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business he wrote the book uh The Righteous Mind which not only have we quoted so many times here but it seems as though every kind of meeting that I'm in even when they're completely different religiously or or politically or in any other way cites that book and the work done in that book well here here comes another one that I think is going to do uh the same thing about the issue we're talking about today it's called the anxious generation how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness and it will be coming out soon so you want to you'll want to keep your eye out for it Jonathan height thanks for being with us today what a pleasure Russell it's always a pleasure always a pleasure to talk to you and uh I I appreciate your work and and I appreciate the many conversations I've had with you you argue something really is different now that's right that's right so you know every generation since the time of Plato and Aristotle has thought the one after them is soft there are certain things that are normal misunderstanding between Generations but this is the first time that all of the indicators on the dashboard are flashing red that is it's not just that we misunderstand each other it's that levels of anxiety and depression and self harm and suicide All Began going up at the same time suicide a little bit earlier suicide begins to go up around 2008 2009 but everything else goes skyrocketing around 2012 there's there's really very little sign of a of a mental health crisis in 2010 if you if you just looked at all the trends until 2010 you'd say things are as they as they've always been but then all of a sudden the levels begin going up especially for girls and here's the kicker everyone has a theory as to why it goes up around 2011 2012 but it's always like oh know because of you know school shootings or it's something about America well the exact same thing happened in Canada the UK Australia happen in the Scandinavian countries so there is no other Theory there is no nobody's even proposed another theory other than it's when kids stop seeing each other in person and they move their lives on to their devices you go from the play based childhood to a phone based childhood around 2011 2012 is when most kids switch over from a flip phone to a to an iPhone and that's when the Mental Health crisis begins all the Dashboard Lights begin flashing red and they've gotten worse and worse every year since then so it's not a coid related pandemic stress uh sort of marker it's it predates that that's right so a lot of people think that this was caused by coid and it wasn't at all I was writing about this jeene twangy was the first to notice this with her book ien Jee twangy was the first to say look something's going terribly wrong she said that in 2016 2017 a lot of people said Oh no you're over interpreting no it's just you know correlation but the numbers have gotten worse and worse since then and in 2019 when I started on this project things were looking terrible and Gan and I and others started saying what kids most need is less time on their devices and More Time Out playing with each other and then coid comes in what happens we say oh no kids you can't go outside and play with each other because you might transmit coid how about you spend all day on your devices and So Co made things worse but actually kids were were American children were already socially distanced by 2019 that is kids used to spend a lot of time with each other kids used to see their friends that's what kids do until around 2012 and then the number of the hours spent per week with friends drops and drops and drops so that by 2019 it's already so low that when Co restrictions come in it just goes down a little bit more so all of this was baked in before coid I was talking the other day to Amanda Ripley author of high conflict she's she's amazing and she she said at one point to me I don't know how you survived and then she she talked about some experiences that I had had in the past and I thought about that later and I thought well you know I would say grace of God but how did that grace of God come about and one of the key things I think was the way that my parents responded to me and and it I would go out in the morning when it wasn't a school day be in the wood Woods I'm in the woods all day long or I'm with one of my friends riding bicycles all day long nobody knew where I was nobody had a GPS tracker on me or or anything like that and I had no way to contact my parents if something had happened but it actually I think was necessary for me to to learn how to live that's right and you talk about in this book the difference between a play-based childhood and safetyism what what what's safetyism so so safetyism is the worship of safety of course we want our kids to be safe but there are lots of conflicting values and if you take one value you say safety trumps everything else so a tiny reduction in Risk is worth sacrificing thousands of hours of play outside and it's true that if you never let your kid out they'll never be abducted but then again if you do let your kid out they'll they'll never be abducted either there's essentially zero abduction in this country other than by the non-custodial parent in a divorce proceeding but safe ism is the worship of safety to the point where we are paranoid and we convey that paranoia to our kids and we teach them that the world is dangerous you can't cope with it and bad people will hurt you if you go out in it and so what you were describing before is what you might call a hunter gatherer childhood I believe that's what we evolved for uh we evolved uh in the woods essentially for millions of years and the the whole evolution of childhood is about kids mastering skills that they'll need as adults and so that then when they reach adulthood they actually are competent but what we began doing in the 90s just as the crime rate was dropping there was a big crime wave when you and I were growing up there was a crime there was a a big explosion of crime in the 70s and 80s in the 90s those rates drop it gets really safe but we freak out about child abduction and we say kids can't go out on their own you can't go play in a park it's too dangerous you'll be abducted and so satanic Panic yeah yes that's right there was there was a lot of that there were daycare panics there were all kinds of panics we we stopped trusting each other that's one of the big things we stop trusting other adults and so I imagine when you were a kid if you got in trouble you could go to somebody's house or an adult might step in adults were looking out for the kids right is that true when you were growing up they gave me the space it seemed to learn how to be and there was a safety net I knew there was a safety it there but they had me walk the Rope well that's right but that brings in a few additional elements to what a healthy childhood is and so I'll just put two words out there one is community and the other is mentors and so it doesn't make any sense for us to only learn from our parents there's no reason to think your parents know everything and so all over the world especially once kids reach around age 9 1011 they get really interested in adult activities and oh look at this Carpenter and and you know so kids are sort of GL they're they're looking at what adults are doing and then other adults are taking an interest in them so kids need to learn from multiple adults and that largely has stopped we don't trust other adults we think they're going to sexually molest them and the other key word as I said is community it was only late in writing the book you know I worked on this book for a long time and near the end I realized wait a second one of the biggest Concepts here is community versus networks so a community is a group of real people who are kind of stuck together you can't just come and go as you please takes a while to get in it's hard to get out and so you have to get along with each other human children need to be embedded in communities and I would say a religious community is the quintessential perfect Community because it's full it's saturated with moral meaning kids need moral guidance they need a sense that there is a way the world ought to be and I need to learn it and conform to it so kids need to be raised in human communities but what happened after about 2012 is there was no more time for that it was all about networks and what are these networks a network of followers on Facebook on Instagram you can come in you can go you don't use your real name PE so there it's transient it's not binding and it's not much of a moral community so actually way what you described to me sounds like actually the perfect human childhood with other adults and a lot of freedom and you made mistakes and I bet sometimes you were scared sometimes you probably got hurt but made it home that's what you need to do well what changed in terms of I I I know what what changed in terms of the kids or or you've convinced me of that after reading this book but why did we end up with such anxious parents I mean you you talk about this I had to chuckle when you mentioned a merrygoround on a playground and uh I I know at our school and I'll bet at your school there was sort of a rickety berrygo around that was just you know could go up to 90 M hour if you pushed it fast enough and it would never be allowed on any that's right that's right no I mean I still have those visceral feelings like you lie back and as you get closer to the edge the centrifugal forces are are you know they're harder on your head than on your feet you know and you try to like stand so and yeah it's dangerous but that's actually a benefit because if you have kids playing on a playground where it's possible to get hurt then they learn every day how to not get hurt but if we always keep kids in a situation where they can't get hurt they don't learn how to not get hurt and so the Europeans are actually way ahead of us in Britain they where they have fewer lawyers and fewer fears of you know of liability they've begun putting construction materials in playgrounds put bricks and lumber let kids make things out of bricks and lumber and yeah they're going to pinch their fingers and something's going to fall on their foot but they learn how to handle these construction materials and in America we don't do that we say if anyone can get hurt we're going to ban it if there's a snowball fight and someone gets hit we ban snowball fights and so we're you know we're we're Penny wise and pound foolish here we're we're trying to that's safetyism we we want absolute levels of safety which means we have fragile kids who are more likely to kill themselves so so how did the parents get that way I mean it's it's not as though previous generations of parents had a a manual that was lost somewhere in the in the ' 80s or '90s early 2000s what what happened to the parot because it seems that that kind of safetyism predates the 2012 era that we've been talking about with smartphones well in a way in a way actually parents did have a manual and it was lost for all of human history there were babies around and there were women taking care of babies and there were women nursing babies and there were girls you know seven eight 10 year old girls were helping care for the babies and there was wisdom about how to raise children passed down especially among the women but you know men saw it too uh and there were large families and so there was an accumulation of wisdom for thousands of years and certainly up until the 40s 50s even into the 60s there was that but then birth rates plunge divorce rates rise women enter the workforce people are spending more time in school they're spending more time at work and by the 90s that generational knowledge passed down in any Community is now very thin it's kind of shredding it's not really there so what happens then add on one more thing a kind of a professionalization an idea especially as and I'm take I'm drawing here from Allison gopnik she has this wonderful book the gardener and the carpenter She lays this out as as people get more educated as the professional class goes to school more they begin to treat child rearing like a school project hm let me just read the right the right manual let me read the right expert and then I'll do it right and then my kid will come out like a genius and that doesn't work kids are not like that you can't just like shape that's the you can't be like a carpenter trying to make a kid you have to be a gardener creating a garden and then plants are going to grow you want to pull out the bad weeds but ultimately the plants are going to grow and so if you think of parenting as a a gardener you're going to get the best outcome you can but but especially educated people became Carpenters that produces kids who are not as healthy I should say as a gardening parent I thought several times while reading your book about another book that was really uh influential on me as well that came out in the past couple years M Conor's book wayfinding in which the the argument is human beings don't have homing instincts the way that birds do say and so part of what it means to learn how to navigate life is by walking and by learning to when one gets lost find one's way back uh that that actually is a key part of uh growing up and I I think you you look at uh you look at the Bible and there's that pattern there almost exactly what you describe as a secure base so there are pillars and monuments Ebenezer and bethl and but there also is this sense of you don't know where you're going and there's something Preparatory uh about that with that that secure base I mean how how does a parent achieve that so so what you're asking about there is What's called the attachment system in Psychology uh and it was really studied and laid out by John bulby and Mary answorth back in the 40s and 50s and what they showed is that human childhood is about a child having needing a secure base that they can go to whenever there's a threat when things are frightening but the point of the secure base is not just to keep the child safe the point is to give the child the confidence to go explore off base cuz that's where all the learning takes place you don't learn very much when you're clinging to your mother but if you have a mother you can depend on then and you'll see this in toddlers they'll wander off they're really curious they'll wander off maybe they'll even go out of sight and if something bad happens they might come running back but as they get more confident they don't come running back at every little thing they can stay out longer they can learn more and so we have to see the the whole point of safety is not to just prevent the child from being eaten or abducted it's to encourage the child to leave leave the base and explore with smartphones one of the things that I've noticed is that when when that topic comes up it feels a lot to me like the conversation about climate change for a lot of people which is not that they disbelieve that climate change is happening but it seems so big to them that they say well what could I what could I do about it I mean so there there's a a sense in which both with parents but also with people who who will say my smartphone is really messing with me but I mean it's 2023 what are you going to do that seems to be the attitude uh there that's right it seems to be right it seems to be something so big what can we do and and so the the key idea I want to introduce here is called a collective action problem there are certain things that are impossible to solve as an individual but if we all work together together then they're easy to solve and the the the phones are are classic social science Collective action problem so you take the I'm sure many of your listeners are parents many of your listeners have teenagers and all of us hear the same thing my kids are both in high school we hear the same thing mom I'm the only one I'm the only one who isn't on Snapchat I'm the only one who doesn't have a smartphone and so the kid feels left out and then parents give in because nobody wants their kid to feel left out and so if you're alone if it's just you making the decision well maybe you're h hurting your kid you don't know but what if you and a few of your of the parents of your kids friends talked and you know what we're all not going to give our kids smartphon until high school until 16 we're all going to hold off well then suddenly it's much easier to do and so what I'm trying to do in the book is I'm trying to solve Collective action problems so that we can actually all escape this tragedy together and there are there are four solutions that I propose Each of which solves a collective action problem so the first is far more unsupervised play you now if you send your kid out to play in the park you're going to get arrested because your kid's the only one out there and there's no one to play with but if you organize it so that if you if you have a town or a school that supports free range kids that supports free range play and you have multiple people sending their kids out to the school playground or to each other's houses so you can solve the play Problem collectively it's even clear when we look at the phones no kid needs a phone at age 10 11 12 now they they could use a a basic phone to text to say Mom I'm I'll be home you know at 5:00 but nobody needs the internet nobody no kid needs a smartphone in their pocket so if we all just say no smartphones till High School let's just agree on that don't give a smartphone till high school you can give a basic phone if your kid is really out on on her own great give them a phone so you know you can keep in touch but no smartphone till high school that's the second one a third is no social media till 16 social media is incredibly bad for girls I mean the damage it's done to girls is greater than any public health threat we've ever seen it's much bigger than leaded gas lead poisoning girls all over the world are much more depressed and anxious and self Haring and suicidal because of these phones so and and especially the social media hits the girls so no social media till 16 which you know right now people might think well but everyone's on it well yeah but what if everyone wasn't on it what if half the families in your town said no not until 16 well now suddenly your daughter's not the only one who's excluded half the kids are not on it and guess what they can meet up and actually have fun together and then the last one the last coordination device is phone free schools every school K through 12 needs to say you check your phone at the door and then you have seven hours off you have seven hours in which you can attend to the teacher and you can attend to each other what happens now is 72% of schools say that they ban phones what they mean is we have a rule that you shouldn't take your phone out during class which is a joke because the kids are so addicted if anybody is texting everybody has to be checking during class so the kids are on during class they're just they just hide it and then as soon as they get out of class they're all on their phones instead of playing or talking to each other so it's those four things far more unsupervised free play no smartphone till High School no social media till 16 phone free schools if we could do those those are all attainable we would be living in a very different world and our kids brains would not be so scrambled you mentioned that that social media particularly is is much worse for girls than boys why is that so girls and boys sociality is very very different boys tend to do things together when they get together they do things and so video games has taken over for the boys and video games are not harmful to most boys but they're incredibly harmful to five or 10% of them who get addicted so this is I know less about this I've only begun to study this this part more recently but the boys are not really they're not out doing pickup soccer games they go home after school and they're on video games they play several hours a day and 5 to 10% of them are severely damaged by that now can you imagine a consumer product a toy Suppose there was a new toy oh yeah it's incredibly fun it's more fun than anything we've ever had 5 or 10% of the kids are going to be damaged by it but you know whatever we would never do that we would never allow a consumer product that damage five or 10% of the kids so that's for the boys they don't go in so much for posting photos of themselves and their perfect life they just don't do that whereas girls what happened in 2012 when they all got phones the girls went straight for the visual platforms girls went for Instagram Pinterest you know a couple others and and once they're posting photos now it's all about how do you look it's all about looks it's so sad you know we made so much progress in the last 50 years of girls not just being sex objects not just being judged for their beauty and that's all gone now because the girls are completely obsessed with makeup and videos about how do I do skin care I mean it's so superficial so the girls are all these visual platforms it's constant social comparison and most girls are below average now because the average is not the real average the what you see what every girl sees is all these beautiful girls with perfect lives it's not real it's all it's all you know manipulated to be as as attractive as possible so it's just been devastating for the girls for for many reasons that there's the eating disorder content there's the bullying there's the feeling of left out because you see on Snapchat oh everybody's over here and I wasn't invited so social media really targeted if you think about I you know I ask all your female listeners here what was the worst year of school most of them are going to say seventh grade plus or minus you know it's around seventh and eighth grade is the hardest that's when girls have the most bullying it's terrible imagine women listening to this podcast imagine if we took all the worst parts of what you remember about seventh grade and we made them 10 times worse that's what your daughters are going through you know one of the things that I've noticed is there there are all these studies uh showing that boys tend to Trend right now conservative politically and girls tend to Trend more Progressive and most of isin normals but I've noticed that when the extremes do happen with adolescence or college age kids the the girls tend to extreme left the sort of social justice Warrior stuff that that we've talked but the boys seem to be drawn to misogynistic fascistic often uh explicitly racist and sometimes even Nazi stuff so that there's someone and and it seems to me that that is even for the kids who aren't drawn to it I mean my my sons are more sheltered than 98% probably of of people and when somebody put up a meme of me next to Andrew Tate and said Which Way Western man my son immediately said why is D with Andrew Tate right and my thought was how do you know who that is well they all know they all know why is that happening where there's this sort of both this extreme this move to extremes but also why is it going in these two different directions no thank you that is a question I'm thinking a lot about because my original research was on moral foundations Theory morality and politics tribalism and it's tragic that we're seeing the split among our teenagers this gender difference split among our teenagers a lot of it I believe has to do with the nature of identitarianism that is we might think of the left as being associated with Socialism or communism back in the 20th century but not anymore it really became about identity and I call it identitarianism which is the idea that everything should be studied as a struggle between identity groups over power what matters is your race your gender lgbtq status all that now this is a terrible way to think this is an unamerican way to think this is a way that leads to constant conflict it leads to depression and anxiety as well what happens when all the kids get on social media around 2012 Tumblr and especially tumbler seems to be a real petri dish for nurturing these new ideas about identity that your identity is something you construct and if anyone disrespects it then they've harmed you no identity can only be conferred by a community your identity is your position in society traditionally but these new ideas about identity and vulnerability come in and it's the girls who embrace them it's the girls on the left who embrace them and they develop they go in for intersectionality they go in for seeing everything is a matrix of Oppression so even though things been getting better and better for girls suddenly around 2013 2014 left laning girls think the world is now full of sexism much more so than they did a few years ago so they're going in for these identitarian ideas about struggle and oppression whereas the boys generally especially the white boys the white boys are told identity is all that matters everyone has to think about their identity oh you're white well don't identify with whiteness otherwise you're bad so I've seen this at some of the schools I've spoken at the boys will be very quiet they don't say anything in public because they're just going to be shamed and attacked but in the age of the internet they then go online and they see they go to people who say no you're not the bad ones you're the good ones they're the bad ones and so the boys in part because we keep beating on them especially the white boys especially in any Progressive space the white boys are always told you're bad you have to address your privilege you shut up you're taking up too much space well that makes them very PR to recruitment by far right extremist and misogynists so this is a horrible State of Affairs girls are moving to the left as you said boys are moving to the right but guess what girls on the left will not date anyone who's not on the left girls who go to college won't date anyone who didn't go to college well who's graduating from college mostly girls on the left they're going to have nobody to marry there's going to be a huge shortage for women on the left of anyone to marry so we're going to see we've already seen the Sexes coming apart and not finding each other and then we can talk about dating apps the dating apps are able to drown you in possib abilities but yet somehow young people are having less and less sex and there's less and less marriage and that was for the Millennials now that we're talking about gen Z which is birth year 1996 and later my prediction is the Millennials are going to plummet infertility and marriage and happiness what about you mention in the in the anxious generation you talk about porn and one of the shifts that I have seen uh just over the past few years is there were a lot of parents who were worried about porn and there were a lot of young people who were concerned about porn in their own lives and then there seemed to be this sort of shift where people started to think about porn just the way they think about masturbation mhm eh you know that's just part part of growing up and I've seen that even with conservative Evangelical Christian folks they wouldn't articulate that way but that's kind of the attitude where is that going yeah well first tell me what year are you talking about when did you see this shift are you talking like in the '90s or you're talking about the Last 5 Years oh no I'm talking about just within the last maybe two years oh my okay okay because so I've just begun to study porn also I was focused on social media for a long time and only while writing the book did I realize oh my God no it's not just social media for boys it's video games and porn the girls aren't watching I mean they see it but almost no girls look at porn daily whereas you know many or most boys look at porn daily so so porn turns out to be a huge problem now I couldn't say too much about it in the book because there are almost no experiments you can't do experiments on teenagers in porn you can't bring half into the lab and say here you go look at this so so I so I didn't have a lot to go on in terms of the research but the stories I'm hearing from from young men about how they become addicted to porn it makes them less likely to pursue a woman a girl it is scrambling their brain in the exact years and so you would say addiction is a is a proper term in some of these Cas yes there is some dispute as to whether addiction is the right word because neurochemically it's a little different it is different from say a heroin addiction but if you believe that gambling is an addiction and of course it is if you believe that some people get addicted to slot machines this is exactly the same at least you know the phones social media is exactly the same and then you bring in pornography which goes much deeper into the brain much deeper into deep deep motives for sexuality that boy that adolescent boys are you know mad for so from what I'm hearing and from what I was able to find in the research in the book once kids become heavy users of porn it makes them less interested in in real women it makes it harder for them to get aroused by a real woman because she's not nearly as perfect and not perfect but you know unrealistically proportioned as as girls on porn and then something I haven't seen much about but I think might be a big deal here is it used to be that you had to use your imagination for a lot of things in the world you know like if you're playing games with a friend and you have two sticks you have to imagine a sword fight but now you have a video game in which there's no imagination it's just you have this incredbly graphic War it's amazing but no imagination well same thing with sex you know you when you and I were young the big thing was you know magazin if you somehow you had an older brother or something you could somehow get a magazine but you know then you had to use your imagination that was it but porn now is so graphic so explicit uh so inyour face if you go to these and they all you know they've all gone to Pornhub they all know PornHub there's no restriction anyone can go at any age so I I think there are so many things messing up our kids to have them going through through their Peak years of sexual transformation and development on porn I think is another disaster that that's that's occurring all around us some people might be surprised you're uh an atheist or an agnostic and you spend a lot of time uh in the anxious generation talking about religious communities yes and some people might be surprised by I really wasn't surprised by that having read The Righteous Mind but but why why is that the case why did you focus on that yeah so right so I'm you know I'm Jewish I you know like many Jews you can be Jewish without believing in God it was it was you know it's an option and so I was one of these you know scientifically minded you know young Jewish boys who went into the social sciences and I I had a prejudice against religion in general when I was young and uh you know I read the Hebrew Bible when I was in college and I was shocked by some of the things I read in the later books you with genocide so I was generally anti-religion in my 20s but because I was studying morality and the evolution of morality I came to see that we evolved with religion and religion is is intimately part of our creating moral communities and it was especially when I read works by um Robert putam and American Grace that religious people are better citizens more socially minded they give more to charity not just in their own congregation but even non-religious Charities and I really began to see my God the evidence about the benefits of religion for individuals and for communities is pretty large I can't ignore this so I I I came to have a lot of respect for religion and my first book was the happiness hypothesis which was about ancient wisdom and so much of the world's wisdom is contained in religious texts and I began to see that if you have a religious community that stretches back a long time they have kind of purified or perfected wisdom about human development about relationships about about Consciousness so I've come to respect religion more and more as I've gotten older I belong to a synagogue in New York my my son was Bar Mitzvah but I am still an atheist or agnostic to bring it back to your question about the anxious generation I want to share with you now a result that I I I didn't put this graph in the book but I'll be publicizing when the book comes out when we look at when we look at teenagers look at high school kids what was their mental state how depressed were they you you look back in you know the in the 1990s the early 2000s it's it's long been the case that religious kids are a little happier than non-religious kids and that's certainly true for adults too and it's also been true that conservatives are a little happier than liberals that's been true for a long time so you you see these lines and there you can see the slight differences until 2012 then what happens the secular liberals go skyrocketing up into mental illness skyrocketing I mean huge increase especially for the girls whereas this the religious conservatives they go up a little but not much and and what that means I think is in 2012 roughly is when the technology came like a tidal wave like a tsunami and it carried kids away it just swept them away from each other from their parents from Community from tradition from everything that came before swept them off into this bizarre virtual world of terrible short videos and influencers and craziness and social comparison who didn't get swept Swept Away the kids who had to be part of a community had to go to church on Sunday had to visit their grandparents or whatever actually you tell me you tell me how is it that Christian kids are raised that you think might have kept them from being Swept Away the way the secular kids were well I think many of the things that you you do mention in the book although I see some of those things fraying in religious communities as well tell me about it what do you particularly uh when it comes to I found fascinating your section on rights of Passage and there in most Evangelical churches there was a a basic structure of rights of Passage that was more uniform at least in certain Traditions than I see it being right now uh where baptisms often are kind of yeah we're going to have a baptism after the service if you want to come come that sort of a that sort of a thing but I think it was maybe it was you we we have a group of us that get together sometimes on on Thursdays and just talk it was either you or maybe it was John Rous that talked about one of the reasons why midlife and older age is not as happy for people is because you have all of these rights of Passage early in life and then it's over and there is no right of passage until the funeral that was that was John R yes that was John I found that to be a fascinating uh fascinating concept but why are rights A Passage important so most societies have they they see that you have a challenge how do you turn a girl into a woman how do you turn a boy into a man and for girls actually if you just wait they will menstruate and then if you just wait they will become fertile and so most societies do have rights of Passage and they're always key to menstruation when a girl menstruates all sorts of things happen there will be a ceremony to welcome her in she has to now get special knowledge that is reserved for women it's not shared with girls and interestingly it's never the mother who does it it's always going to be another woman not the mother and because she's she has to be brought into the community of women and it's always is very very gendered okay so so that's the the women's story is usually pretty simple and it's very similar across societies the story for men is very boys very very different because with boys there's no menstruation there's no obvious thing that happens and the boys are all in the girls world the boys when they're little they're toddlers they're surrounded by women who are caring for the kids and they're surrounded by sisters who are caring for the kids so for them they have to make a jump from these little soft you know girly things that don't look that different from girls in their bodies to a warrior and how do you do that so you have to have toughening so wrs of passes they often have physical pain puncturing the skin going days in the woods a survival challenge so many societies have very harsh writs of passage for boys because they see you have to turn this soft little boy into a hard strong man and that takes several years so I'm not saying we need that in our modern Western societies but I came to see that if you just take away all that stuff and instead you say okay you know what you just have birthdays on your birthdays we'll give you presents but that's it you're on your own we'll give you no guidance in how to be a man or a woman in fact we're going to make people stop talking about men and women when I was a kid grown up in the 60s and 70s really you know my mother would sometimes say you know John a gentleman would do this and to my sister you know a lady would do this like you know in the circles I travel in sort of you know Progressive educated Urban circles like no one would dare say that everything has to be ungendered and I think we're doing our kids a disservice girls need guidance on how to become a woman boys need guidance on how to become a man now 5% of each are going to be gay and their interest is going to be same seex that's you know that's wonderful that we now accept that and and everyone can find marriage everyone can find love but even still men and women are in different Developmental trajectories and in part because of our fear of gender of of saying something sexist we've abandoned kids to sort of an agender you know no guidance adolescence adolescence need guidance and so in the book I proposed a plan for having steps on a ladder to adulthood where kids get more they get more freedom but they also have more responsibilities every every even birthday it's a little much to specify every single year but I said let's make a big deal out of every even birthday 8 10 12 14 16 18 and at each step you have a bigger deal and it's not just a birthday present with presents you might have more people gathering around you say okay now you can do you know now we'll let you do this thing here and now you know you can go out and work for money now or I'll give you a bigger allowance in exchange for you doing more chores but kids need to make progress and they need adults to guide them on the progress once they all got on phones the amount of guidance we give them as parents dropped let let's suppose it was 20% of their input before I don't make up a number suppose you know 30 40 years ago 20% of the input to a kid was from parents and you know 10% from teachers what whatever numbers you want to make up cut all those numbers by 90% once they get a phone because everything goes through the phone and there's just very little input from adults in my church we didn't really have a exciting sort of youth ministry although to some degree but there was a moment and it wasn't really an official moment but there was a moment when there were expectations suddenly from the church where suddenly you weren't a vacation bible school child anymore you were expected to be part of the disaster relief stuff or part of the taking up of the offering or something like that and that sense of responsibility I think at least in my case really gave me a sense of membership and belonging in a way that doing fun things that I would want to do wouldn't have done so so tell me more about that because this is very very important one of the things we're seeing from young people today is that they feel their lives are meaningless they have no value to anyone else they have no sense of purpose are you saying that at a certain point they would just call on you to go on some mission to help help other people or was it at a certain age was it a certain grade was it at confirmation when was it it was just a there was a certain moment when I don't even think you would you would notice it in terms of marking a before and an after but there was just a certain point where you were invited not just invited you were kind of expected to be part of things that other people in the church was this around age 14 like when would you say it was yeah it was yeah maybe 12 13 somewhere in in there yeah so it's when so it would be you know both their bodies in their minds they really changing in that period of early puberty you know AG 11 to 14 is when the changes really start for both sexes boys a little bit later and so and they're they're ready for more adult responsibility and they Thrive if they're given it because that's how they learn that actually they matter what they do matters and what we've done to our kids now is we've said you know what I'm investing everything in you I want you to get into college but you know it's all about you and kids can't Thrive that way they can't Thrive if we just give them stuff they have to feel generative they have to feel a sense of effectance that they can make a mark on the world uh and it sounds like your community did that actually I'd love to talk with you about how Christian communities could not fight back that's not quite the right word how could Christian communities adapt to this current technological Onslaught and raise better kids because because I think that religious communities whether you're Orthodox Jews or Evangelical Christians they have moral resources and structure and and parental influence far beyond what we have in secular culture and it's going to be really hard to to restore childhood in secular circles but I think religious communities could do it you've read the book we're talking here about Christian communities what do you think what advice could you and I work up to give to Christian parents uh and let's focus on you know if your kids are you know 8 nine 10 years old that's about when they're going to they're about to get a phone what do you think we can do you know I think one of the things that we will need and you did this in the book I I found it was striking that you sort of you went through and you mentioned it here earlier from age 1 to 18 months only screen is a FaceTime with another adult or something like that and then you had these benchmarks and that's one of the things I think there are a lot of parents uh and a lot of people in Ministry who don't feel like they have the authority because there's a kind of legalism that that sort of misuses authority to to come in and say well this is what you do until this age and this so so no one wants to do that which means that parents are sometimes uh wondering well what is the what should I do and how should I do it and I think a lot of times adolescence and college age kids it's the same thing there's often not a template that's specific enough that a that somebody could come in and alter it if it wasn't appropriate for them but at least to have it okay and I think one of the things too that is going to be increasingly necessary in Christian communities you know I don't agree with Jordan Peterson on a lot of things but one of the things that I heard him say that I think is true is about the shift from having grandparents close by not just for the grandkids but for the parents because there's a certain aspect of of the kind of counsel that grandparent gives to his adult son or daughter to say yeah this is not a big deal MH because so much of it is trying to figure out and I think both if you're going through it and if you're parenting through it you don't know what's a alarm fire what is just a normal part of adolescence and so having the the kind kind of replacement when it's not there of grandparenting yeah with them we we spend a lot of time talking about spiritual parenting fathering and mothering but not a lot the time about spiritual grandparenting and I think there's something about that that we need to reclaim that that I think has been present in a lot of Christian tradition but in some of them is being lost okay that's that's great that's a real Way Forward because one of my concerns it didn't make it into a chapter in this book but it'll be in my next book life after Babel will be a chapter on wisdom deprivation disorder how in order to thrive in order to live a full human life you can't just invent everything yourself you have to come into a tradition and you know you change the tradition with each generation the tradition changes but you have to have a have a tradition that you were born into that binds you uh and forms you and then you can alter it perhaps and what's happened in recent years in recent decades I should say is the almost complete cutting off of everything before 5 minutes ago but and especially in a Christian household obviously you have the Bible you have words and ideas from long ago interpreted by people from decades or centuries ago so so you have much more of a Connection to the Past in a Christian house in a religious household I should say and I think what you just pointed out is just having grandparents around serves that same function it's a connection to ideas from the past because if you have to run everything based just on things that we've learned in the last 5 minutes you're just going to flounder you're just going to be lost you're going to be you know there are so many terrible ideas floating around that are going to be gone tomorrow but if if you're immersed in them as anyone is who's on Tik Tok or Instagram you're surrounded by terrible ideas and you don't know what's what and so yeah to have a grandparent say you know that's all silly all you need to do is this or whatever just to have have that perspective from decades ago is incredibly valuable when we're together we share emotions we share experiences and that happens in a community but when kids are connected just on a network well they're going to share emotions too but so much of it is so negative so dark everything's terrible everything's oppression everything is ecological disaster so negative emotions are stronger than positive emotions they're also more contagious so that's yet one more reason why we shouldn't hook kids up uh let them hook each other hook themselves up on networks to each other to share negative thoughts much better to have have them in real physical communities following moral exemplars and hearing testimonies from people who are grateful that's contagious too Jonathan height is the author of the book that's coming out uh soon the anxious generation how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness the book comes out March 26 2024 Jonathan height thanks so much for being with us Russell always a pleasure thank you [Music] the Russell Moore show is a production of Christianity Today executive producers are Eric Petri Russell Moore and Mike cosper host Russell Moore producer Ashley hailes associate producer Abby Perry director of operations for CT media is Matt Stevens audio engineering is provided by Dan Phelps our video producer is Abby and the theme song for the wrestle Mo show is Dusty Delta Day by Lennon [Music] hudon

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Length: 48min 20sec (2900 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2023