Jonathan Haidt Urges Us All to Take Action Getting Kids Off Their Smartphones and Into the Real World

For more from Jonathan Haidt, visit letgrow.org and jonathanhaidt.com and order your copy of his book here.

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Full Transcript:

Maria: As a grandparent, I'm super interested in this and as a mother of four kids, I’m super interested in this. Congratulations for getting it out into the world to create a much needed conversation. What's the reaction been like for you, Jonathan?

The reaction has been unlike anything I've ever seen. Because I've done a lot of things where I have to try to persuade people of something, and here I don’t have to persuade anyone. Wherever I go or when a journalist interviews me, they always say, “You know, I've seen this in my own children. I have a daughter who's going through this.” So parents everywhere are fed up, parents everywhere are sick of having the same arguments with their kids because of the technology companies making these addictive technologies. So it's been really kind of weird—there's almost no opposition other than there's a normal debate with a few other psychologists. But out in the public, there's no dissent, no disagreement.

Maria: What about disagreement from the media companies themselves and social media companies?

They have their PR strategy and they say the things they say. I have cordial relations with some people at Meta and some people at Google—I don't know anybody had Snap—so far, nobody's attacked me. Nobody said anything from those companies. If they were working against me, they would certainly go through various agencies to try to change the idea field, they wouldn't, I don't think it’d happen direct. 

Maria: I think this book is so important, not just for people who are parenting, but for those of us with adult children out there. Also for those of us who are grandparents, as well. My granddaughter, she's always trying to get at my phone at three, right? She's looking at my phone saying, “I can help you” at three, but her parents are very strict about the phone time, or tablets, or any kind of media. What I like about this is instead of like, let's just talk about the problems, you're very clear about these are solutions that can get us out of this mess. Why don't you walk through the four things you think can really turn this around and then I want to talk about the conversation I had with my kids last night.

So the basic thesis of the book is that we have over protected our children in the real world where they need a lot of play and independence and exposure learning. And we've been underprotecting them online, which is this this bizarre new world full of weird people and people who want to meet children. So we've got to fix both of those mistakes. What I propose is four norms that we can all adopt, they're hard to adopt if you're acting on your own, but they're actually easy if we do it together. 

Norm number one: No smartphone before high school. Just give your kid a flip phone. Do not give them their own smartphone to have with them all the time until they're in high school.

Two: No social media until 16. This is a little harder, but if most of us do it, then our kids can't say, “But dad, I'm the only one who doesn't have Instagram.” They can't say that because we'll know it's not true. Most kids won't have Instagram until they're 16. 

The third norm is phone free schools. This is probably the most powerful one that we can do this year. We can get this done this year. Anybody watching this: If your kids go to a school where they say, “Oh, you know, we lock up phones during class.” That's nothing. The kids are using the phone during class. They have to lock up the phone in a phone locker in the morning. 

And the fourth norm is far more independence, free-play and responsibility in the real world. Because if we're going to reduce their screen time by 80%, we have to give them back a normal childhood where they're playing with other kids or teenagers hanging out with other teens. They need people.  

So those are the four norms, we can do them if we act together.

Maria: My daughter was saying last night, “Well, if you take their phones away, what about their tablets. They're going to do the exact same thing on their tablets at school. 

So yes, I hear you. The tablets are not quite as bad in that they can't take them with them everywhere. So the phone is the biggest problem because it's literally with them everywhere. Now, if your kid has their own tablet at home, if you have an eight-year-old, a third or fourth grader, and it's their own tablet? That's bad too. Because once they can customize it, and the various apps can customize themselves for your child. So yes, a tablet is that too. 

Now to be clear, I'm not saying keep them away from the internet. You can have a computer in the living room and they can play on that within limits. You can have a tablet that you sometimes give them to play games or to watch shows. So I'm not saying don't let your kids see screens. It's not that a screen is dangerous, per se. It's that once a child has one of these touchscreen devices, internet enabled, it will take over every bit of attention, every free minute and so you've got to stop that.

Maria: I found with my Gen Z son, his school moved into tablets. So everybody was on a tablet. Out went the books, and in went the tablet. So he may leave his phone—and I'm not singling him out just because he's Gen Z—but you know, he may put the phone down, but he's doing everything on his iPad or at school, everything was on his tablet. 

That’s right. So that's the next step. The next battle is once we get the phones locked up, we have to get all the school administrators to understand, and actually they do understand this, the kids cannot attend to the teacher or to each other, if they have a device that they can text on. Because if any one of the classes texting, everybody has to check their texts, because they don't want to be the only kid who doesn't know the thing that was said in third period that everyone's laughing about. 

So this is going to be really hard because a lot of schools, they've accepted the free technology from the tech companies. They've got either the iPads or the Chromebooks and as long as the kids can text on those and customize them, it can get to porn usually it can get around—that's terrible. We've got to get all of this stuff at least out of K through eight, high school is going to be harder. But I really think elementary and middle school, we have to rip all the devices or the personal devices out. There are times we'll use a computer, but we can't let them sit in class with a device that can text send texts, read texts, otherwise they just don't pay attention.

Maria: I've talked to parents who say look, this is all well and good, but I'm working, my husband's working, or I'm a single mom and I can't be home when my kids come home. I can't control what they're doing or not doing. I need a break too and the iPad is a babysitter when I can't afford some. So how do we have a conversation without shaming, recognizing that so many people are in two parent households or single parent households, but everybody's working and they rely sometimes on the phone or on the technology to help them get through?

No shame here. I wrote the book with no blame for parents and I explain: How did we let this happen? Because we thought that this stuff was amazing! You know, if you're Gen X or older, you remember the 1990s. You remember when you first saw the internet. It was incredible. And then you got your first iPhone—incredible. And we thought, “Oh my kids playing with my iPhone, amazing. He's going to get smart, He's going to learn to master the technology.” 

So if you go back, this all happened between 2010 and 2015. In 2010, most adolescents had a flip phone. In 2015, the overwhelming majority had a smartphone with a front facing camera, and Instagram, and high-speed internet—so I call that period the ‘Great Rewiring of Child.’ In that period, most of us were still techno-optimists. Most of us still thought this technology is just going to be so amazing that maybe it's not bad if a kid is spending so much time on a device, but now we know better. Now we know that it was a mistake. So there's no shame here. We got suckered into this and didn't know what we were doing. Now we know it's really hard for any of us to take our kid off if we're the only one, but if we work together, if you just reach ou—you're probably on a text thread with the parents of some of your kids’ friends. Just do it with a few other families and you can do it.

Maria: So you're also advocating for families to get together, go to principals and say we want to be that school, we want to be that phone-free environment. We want to get rid of this because our kids are really struggling.

Exactly. Schools are the place to do this. Schools are the most powerful way to change these norms. Because first of all, I've spoken in many schools and the teachers all hate the phones. They don't want to be the phone police, they can see that the kids are watching porn, they can't get through to the kids. The principal's hate the phones, the drama is constant, they can't even see what the drame is—they all hate it. So I say why don't you just use phone lockers? And they say, because there are a few parents that yell and scream and insist they must be able to communicate with their child throughout the day during math class and the principals are afraid of that small number of parents. My hope is that the large majority of parents can see what this is doing to their kids and the kids’ education. The scores are literally dropping since 2012. American kids were getting smarter and smarter, very slow but steady academic improvement over many decades till 2012, then it turns around, and our kids are getting less smart because they're on phones all day rather than listening to their teachers. So schools are the place to start. Go in a group. If you're in the PTA, if you have any influence, do it as a group. And really not to beg, but really show how important it is that you want your child to have six or seven hours every day when they don't have the phone in front of their face. When they actually have to listen to another human being and look at them in the eye.

Maria: Somebody just wrote an interesting thing that said sadly phones have helped during school shootings. So you might be up against some of that pushback where people are really afraid at school.

That is the main argument that I hear. I have two high school kids and I can't imagine being in that situation. All I can do is say, let's listen to the experts. What do they say? The experts say in the event of a horrible thing what do you want? Do you want all the kids on their phones crying and not listening to what they're supposed to do? Or do you want all the kids following directions? The teacher has a phone. The adults all have phones. Do you want your kids following the plan? Or do you want your kids all calling their parents? I know it's emotionally very hard to say this, but I want to do what's gonna most likely make my kids survive.

Maria: What I thought was really interesting is you also talk about the kind of helicopter parents that have also kind of led to this kind of anxious generation, and that many kids who have been brought up in this time are being brought up by really anxious parents, parents who hover parents who helicopter, parents who don't let their kids do anything on their own. What role do we as parents bear for this?

This is where I've learned so much from my friends, Lenore Skenazy, who wrote a book called Free Range Kids—that book is so good. She helped me and my wife with our parenting so much, that Lenore and I founded an organization called Let Grow. If listeners will go to letgrow.org, we have all kinds of suggestions. Give your kid back the kind of play that you had as a child. The world is much safer now than it was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. It's hard for us to believe and we're afraid, but the thing is we give each other the anxiety, and especially it's transmitted to mothers as, ‘Hey, I caught your eight-year-old kid walk into a store with no adult. What are you doing?’ That falls on the mothers especially as though they did something wrong. If you send your eight-year-old child out to get a quart of milk, that is a very, very good thing. You should be doing that. Our most powerful program at Let Frow is called Let Grow Experience. The school gives a homework assignment to all the kids that says to third graders, go home, talk with your parents and find one thing that you can do that you've never done alone, by yourself. Maybe it's walk the dog, maybe it's go get a quart of milk, maybe it's make dinner. Agree with your parents that you're gonna do it, and then do it. Then you come into school and you put a leaf up on your tree, and gradually you see you’ve done all these things. Well, this has absolutely transformative effects on the kids. The kids who are anxious, they're often anxious the first time they step out of the door without an adult. They are anxious, but they do it and then they are just thrilled. They're like jumping up and down with excitement. And if you do this as a homework assignment, now all the families are supposed to do it, and now the parents can let go and before you know it, it's normal to have eight-year-olds walking a few blocks to a store. It's normal to see a group of kids playing together on a front yard or heaven forbid in a park. So we have to let go of our anxieties because our anxieties as parents are major contributors to our kids’ anxiety disorders because they don't get the experience of overcoming challenges.

Maria: I thought this would be interesting about the role of grandparents because there's so many grandparents who are doing caregiving, who are stepping in to help their kids—some who are raising kids entirely on their own—raise kids in a completely different environment. What do you think the role of grandparents could be?

You know what, I haven't really thought about that, but it's actually kind of obvious that they can have a huge role here. What's happening now is the oldest members of Gen Z are now 28. So they're beginning to have children. So we're beginning to have children who never had any independence as children who are now trying to raise children and we're telling them to give the kids independence. Whereas every single grandparent, just about, had a free-range childhood. Every single grandparent knew the excitement of meeting up with other kids and getting into a little trouble, inventing a game, running around outside, every grandparent knows that joy. So I think grandparents really can step in, and really help their kids to let go and to say, look, I know it's hard, but this is what we did with you. So yes, grandparents really can play a huge role in breaking up the cycle of anxiety.

Maria: Yet several people I see here are going, I just can't imagine letting my eight-year-old go out into the world alone. He's not aware of how dangerous it actually is out there, especially kids who live in cities, kids who live in areas that aren't safe. So what do you say to that the idea of like letting an eight year old walk around alone?

It certainly is true that there are some parts of our country where there really is a lot of crime that really is danger. And of course, some people live in areas where it's made for cars and there's no sidewalks. So I'm not saying this works for every single person, but just an example, I live in New York City in Greenwich Village, I teach at New York University. It’s a little sketchy now in the last couple years, but it was great in the 2010s and it feels so much better than when I was growing up. So because I'm friends with Lenore, I let my kids do errands in third grade, and they were eight years old. They could walk to the store across the street, they could go to CVS a block and a half away, and they you could see them grow, you could see them just fill out. So yes, we have to overcome our fears, but remember, crime is down so low compared to what it was in the 70s, 80s, 90s. When I was growing up, my friends and I would drink and drive. That was a normal thing to do in the 70s. That is very rare, now, there's very little drunk driving—there's distracted driving that's true. The point is just that, yes, you're going to be a little afraid starting off, but just try it. Try it and you'll discover that your kid actually is much more capable than you realize. 

Maria: This woman here Monica said this is an equity issue. Can you address that, Jonathan? 

It's an equality issue in two ways. One is that with the research we have shows that our kids are spending about seven to nine hours a day on their devices, average. But kids who have a single parent, it's substantially higher. Kids who are poor, substantially higher. Black and Hispanic families, higher. So yes, the white and Asian, married-parent, college degrees—they're on it, they're trying. But you know, even they are having trouble. Even they are having trouble getting good norms in their household. It's hard for all of us. But, it's in those more advantaged families, I think we're going to be able to see more progress in terms of putting on restrictions and so that does raise an equity issue. That's why phone-free schools are so crucial, because phone-free schools sort of works the other way. That is, phone-free schools are going to help everybody, but especially going to help the kids who have a single parents, the kids who are in a poor family, to kids who otherwise would spend 16 hours a day, like literally 16 hours a day on their device, because they're almost always on it. Even if they're talking to you, they're still on their device. Give everyone six hours a day during the school day, device free. That's going to especially help.

Maria: Jonathan you also talk about how the effect of this has been different depending on the gender. Talk a little bit about that. So if you're the parent, of a boy of a girl than LGBTQIA, a child, how is it played out depending on your gender, there?

So the story for girls is very clear. And I thought at first that my book was going to be mostly about what social media is doing to girls because that's where the data is clearest. The correlational data of the time use on mental health is clearest, the experimental data is clearest. And for girls, their mental health doesn't really change in the 2000s. All of a sudden, right around 2013, it goes way up. So for the girls, it is very clearly social media. It's the social comparisons, the perfectionism, it's the eating disorders, it's being contacted by strange men, it's being extorted by other boys in their class. I mean, girls are really getting shredded, especially in middle school, seventh grade is the peak year of bullying and we give our kids smartphones and social media and fifth or sixth grade, it's crazy. So girls are really being harmed by social media in particular. Boys, I can't show that. I can't show that it's social media that’s harming the boys so much. Now, we saw those horrible stories in the Senate hearings, boys who were sextorted, and then were suicidal or actually killed themselves because of the shame. So boys are getting harmed by social media too, but the data is not as clear as it is for girls. For boys, it's a different story. When they all got phones and they all got internet connections, the girls went especially for Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest—visual platforms. The boys went for video games, multiplayer video games, and also pornography. So the boys have a lot of time with video games and porn. It's not making them depressed, so it doesn't show up in the mental health stats as much what's happening to our boys. They're not making efforts in the real world. They're not doing anything that's hard. The technology for boys makes it really easy for them to get what they want. I want to play board games with my friends, I just press a button and we're connected. I don't have to actually find anyone and run around and fall down and handle arguments—none of that stuff. The platform takes care of all the all the rules, all the arguments. Then of course, porn is giving them sexual satisfaction without letting them make any progress in How do you approach a girl? How do you talk to a girl? How do you flirt? How do you seduce? They don't get any practice in this. So for boys, it's not that they're getting so depressed and anxious, although they are more, it's that they are failing to do the hard things it takes to become a man. They have to have that trial and error, that failure, that exertion, they have to run around, they have to have more physical activity, rough and tumble play. Compared to girls, when we crack down on recess—we give our kids very, very little recess in America—that hurts the boys even more than it hurts the girls. So there are big, big gender differences in what the technology is doing.

Maria: I think what Jonathan is really telling us is that the evidence is there. It's there for us as parents, it's a call to grandparents which I think is exciting—or I'm making it a call to grandparents because we remember when there was no phone or there was no technology, we had board games or you got in the dirt. But what Jonathan, is your biggest fear if we don't heed your warning? 

Well, the levels of anxiety and depression are so high that it is now normal if you're an American girl, it's just a normal thing that you're thinking about suicide. A third of them are thinking about suicide. 30 to 40% have either anxiety disorders or depression. It's a normal thing. Now, it's not a majority yet, but if we keep going, the majority of our girls will be suicidal and the majority of our boys will be sort of just video game players who don't really get life experience. So we have to turn it around. The main opposition I face is resignation, people tell me, ‘the trains left the station. It’s too late.’ Really? If the train had left the station full of our kids, and it's going somewhere, and we know the track is out, and we know it’s going to plunge off a bridge and they're all gonna die—I think we should try to call it back. What do you think? So we don't have a choice here. We have to know if someone can come up with an alternative hypothesis and nobody has, if someone can come up with an alternative explanation for why this happened right around 2012-2013 in so many countries, exactly the same in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Canada, the Nordic countries. So that's not because of anything in America, this is a global—it's not every country but it's in the freest, most developed countries—where kids have a lot of freedom. Those kids get washed out to sea as soon as they move their lives on to social media platforms. 

Maria: You're saying that anybody who feels that the train has left the station, there’s too many phones, we can't pull it back—you're saying join forces with other parents, join forces in your community. You can pull it back, you can change this loneliness epidemic, the suicide, the depression, the anxiety in yourself and your children, right. It's really cross generational.

Yep, that's right and that's really the hopeful message. Yes, it feels like you can't call the train back if you're one person and that's true. But if we act together, we actually can call it back. Now, it's gonna be harder for the older kids who are already well through it and there's a lot they can do. I have students in my class here at NYU and they’ve made amazing progress just by getting a handle on their phone use: reducing notifications, taking social media off. So don't give up no matter how old your kids are. But if your kids are in elementary or middle school, there's so much that you can do to give them a better trajectory. Through adolescence we have to especially protect early puberty—middle school, elementary and middle school—gotta protect that. That's where the maximum damage seems to be done, especially for girls.

Maria: I remember the worst fight I ever had with my oldest son was over the phone. I won't go into it—but I have a very strict rule at the table, when you come in phones are gone. I find that people are relieved, really relieved when they go to a party and people say no phones. People are like, “Oh, thank God.” As long as everybody doesn't have the phone, then it's a relief, but if there's one or two outliers, then people are like, oh, what am I missing? But I think this kind of uniformity—there's that great Margaret Mead quote that said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” 

Exactly. That's right. I would just end with a really hopeful note or reason why I think we're going to succeed, is that the young people themselves see the problem. They're not in denial. Gen Z sees the problems. They know what the phones are doing to them. You say, ‘Well, why don't you quit?’ And they always say the same thing, ‘I can't because everyone else is on them. But if we all do it together, at least to roll it back for the younger kids, and to put limits on it for the high school kids. If we act together with our children, with Gen Z, they want to be liberated, as you say, if you show them like a summer camp, either with no phones or phones, they're going to realize it's so much better for all of us. So that's why I think we're actually going to succeed within a year or two. We're going to really change what childhood feels like not just in America, but around the world.

Maria: Well, we'll keep in touch with you to see how the progress is going. Remember your power is in your community, the more people that think the way you do and want to put their children's health and their mental health and yours as well. I find when I put my phone away I could think, I could walk, I’m clearer, and I can figure out what do I want to do. This helps parents, it helps grandparents, it helps everybody. So I want to thank you so much, Jonathan, for this work. So much work goes into a book like this. Your research is incredible. And I want to thank you for initiating this conversation. I've talked to some people who have kids in boarding school back Est and they've actually had phone free schools for the last year, and they had one for an all-boys school and said it was dramatic what the result was.