Daniel Goleman

By life, I mean actual interactions with your parents, with your siblings, with your friends.

And to the extent that you're staring at a screen instead of looking at them and interacting with them, you're not getting the implicit lessons in how to be a human being.

Right.

how to get along, how to be influential, how to lead people.

You're not getting those lessons at all.

So I think that it's likely creating a deficit in a skill set, and you could call the skill set emotional intelligence.

Perhaps.

We'll know in 10, 20 years.

But I think why risk it?

You know, there's a movement afoot.

I don't know if it's reached Australia, but a movement to ban phones from kids until their late teen years so that they can actually relate to the people around them.

On the other hand, there are people, and I know some, who babysit their kids with a phone.

They give a three-year-old a phone because they don't have to interact.

So it's somewhere in there.

And to the extent, as you point out, Simon, that kids are spending hours and hours staring at a phone.

To that extent, they're not learning what they would by having to interact or getting to interact with their parents and so on.

And that's the first place we learn.

Our first tutors in emotional intelligence are our parents, our siblings, our family, and then our friends.

And if you're not really relating to your friends face-to-face, you're just not getting those lessons.

So we'll see how that shows up.