Jonathan Haidt
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
What is it?
Why do we have it?
Why is human childhood so different from every other animal, including chimpanzees?
Because we grow fast after you're born, but then you slow down.
And we don't grow very fast until we hit puberty.
Why?
Why do we delay?
We have these amazing...
cultural brains.
This is our great adaptation.
This is why we cover the world and chimpanzees don't.
And that all depends on a slow growth process with a lot of cultural learning from your elders, from the people ahead of you in your culture.
So that's part of it.
Also part of it is play.
Young mammals need a huge amount of play, free play, to wire up their brains.
All animals practice skills they'll use as adults.
So you take what I call the play-based childhood and
which is what we've had for about 300 million years, going back to the beginning of mammals.
And then 2010 to 2015, kids now have a phone-based childhood.
And that, I argue, is what's blocking development.