Jonathan Haidt
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Half of our kids say they're on the internet almost all the time.
50%.
Almost all the time.
This is not a normal human childhood.
There's not as much face-to-face contact.
You don't get to develop social skills.
You don't have hobbies.
You don't read books.
You're just on your phone all day long.
And guess what?
Their mental health collapsed, especially for the girls.
Instantly, it's not a slow thing.
Instantly, around 2012, you get these hockey stick shapes in all the graphs in my book.
There was no sign of a problem in 2010.
And by 2015, it's all over the world.
We don't know about the developing world, but all over the Western world, we start seeing this, especially for girls.
So that's the story.
And what do you think was going wrong?
So the story I tell in the book is two things.
I decided not just to write a book about what social media is doing, but to write a book which is really more about childhood.