What is Happening to Gen Z? | Jonathan Haidt | The Tim Ferriss Show

foreign we haven't talked about what's happening to gen Z we haven't talked about what's happening to kids you know I talked about them before in a sort of negative way like gen Z shows up on campus and then all of a sudden there's all these problems but but again I don't get angry I'm not moralistic we have to understand what's happening to gen Z so I just want to talk if I can just talk a little bit about that and could you also Define gen Z yeah and then please continue so Millennials are those who were born in 1982 and we used to think that it would go to maybe 2 000. but it turns out that kids were born in 1996 and later are different from those born say 1994 and earlier I mean it's a surprisingly sharp cut equivalent to what we find with birth year in 1946 you know the post-war world really was different to grow up in and I believe so I'm drawing on work by Gene twangy but I've also added she and I are working together and I've added a lot what happened is that if you were born in say 1990 you didn't get you couldn't you didn't get an iPhone until maybe around 2009 is when teenager at 10 is when teenagers started getting it so if you're born in 1990 you didn't get an iPhone a smartphone until you were 20. and you didn't get on social media you might have been on Facebook partly but you don't live on social media until you have your own smartphone whereas if you're born in 1997 you are 13 in 2010 when you might get your first smartphone and you might get on Instagram in 2012 when huge numbers did so I believe gen Z is defined by the fact that they got smartphones and social media during early puberty there's a lot of research pointing to early puberty around 11 to 13 for girls 12 to 15 for boys what's coming into your brain then is really important because your your frontal cortex is wiring itself up so when human beings are raised without much Independence but yes with a phone and they spend their childhood just interacting with the screen and especially social media I believe it it messes up cortical development the girls in particular the rates of anxiety and depression are more than a much more than 100 since 2010 the rate of self-harm hospitalization for self-harm is nearly tripled for pre-teen girls so gen Z is in big big trouble they're hurting they're fragile they're not doing well in the workplace managers are finding them very hard to work with so we have a generation that's running off the rails and this is not a moralistic thing like oh those kids these days this is a compassionate thing like these are our children like my kids are 13 and 16. everyone either has kids or is you know is has nieces and nephews so this is I think the greatest emergency we Face the greatest Health Emergency I think for kids this is much much bigger than covet covid was a big deal for old people it wasn't a big deal for children in terms of the risk but this is you know a doubling more than doubling of suicide rates for kids since 2010. so that's what I'm working on now what decisions have you made in your parenting that you feel have been perhaps most impactful less typical or the Venn diagram of those two overlapping so the terrible mental health of gen Z is caused by two factors one is the vast overprotection kids need to practice independence self-governance from the time they're seven or eight they need Independence but they don't get it anymore you and I when we were growing up you're younger than me but I presume you were allowed to roam around your neighborhood oh I was free range yeah riding bikes everywhere when I was younger I was also in a rural environment but yeah I was out and about very early yeah so kids must have free-range childhoods they must Practice Independence and they had that before the 90s and in the 90s things got incredibly safe we locked up the drunk drivers we took the perverts off the street crime plummets but we freaked out about child abduction unnecessarily so in the 90s we stopped letting kids out and this affects gen Z in the late Millennials anyway but you asked about me so what my wife and I did we live in here in New York City in Greenwich Village we because we're friends with Lenora scenesi who wrote this fantastic book free-range kids we let our kids out to play in Washington Square Park we sent them out on errands when they were eight nine years old you know New York City was very safe back then it's a little more dangerous now but it was very very safe in the 2010s and we sent them out and we had them walk to school way you know a year or two before before anyone else was doing it so I'm very glad we did that we also made it clear no social media at least until High School absolutely none in Middle School then that's been very good when they start sixth grade my kids tell me everyone's on Instagram and we said no you we're not going to let you do it the one mistake I made was that when my son wanted Fortnight in sixth grade and we said no because video games can be addictive I but now that I've dug into the literature a lot more now I see that yes a lot of boys do get in trouble from video games because they're on it so much they're addicted to it and it pushes out everything else but a couple hours a day for boys to be in a group that's battling other boys it turns out that's actually a good thing and my son was somewhat cut off in sixth grade good in what respects how is that assessed just in terms of acting as a release valve for aggression or social cohesion group dynamics so the release valve idea from Freud does not to end up being true kids don't need to blow off aggression it's not like that it's rather that girls and boys each need to practice their gendered behaviors this is what play is play for all mammals is a way you practice in childhood the skills you'll need as an adult and so boys and girls have very different play boys tend to break up into groups to compete with other groups and multiplayer video games allow them to do that so I'm not saying these are great I'm saying ideally the kid should be out having Adventures but given that all the kids are home they're not allowed out until they're you know 11 12 years old so at least a multiplayer video game allows them to be part of a group now it's not a very creative group the rules are all set by the company so it's not like video games are anywhere near as good as being had on their own but they're not bad until it gets to be heavy so that was a small mistake once covet hit we did let him get fortnite and then that was the only way he talked with his friends so that was okay the mistake the one mistake I think we did make was we didn't we tried a few different summer camps we never quite found one but if we I wish we'd found a really good summer and I would urge this for everybody who's a parent of young kids from the time your kid is about eight or nine certainly I'd say eight find a Sleepaway Camp that is pretty unstructured and unsupervised the kids have to have a lot of Independence you know some summer camps now are sober protective you can't go to the bathroom unless you have an escort and sometimes you need two escorts because what if one escort falls down and gets hurt like it's crazy overprotective everywhere but if you can find a summer camp that is not crazy or protective send your kid there every summer that I think is one of the few chances they really have to develop skills to be out in the woods so I wish we'd done that

Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 150,016

Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, timothy ferriss, entrepreneur, author, writer, angel investor, ferriss, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Tim Ferriss Podcast

Id: h2g9fxVYdCw

Length: 7min 37sec (457 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 14 2023