Jonathan Haidt

Puberty is an incredibly important sensitive period for brain development.

kids enter puberty with a child's brain, too many neurons, not enough myelin, and they leave puberty with an adult brain.

much more functional now locked into place.

So now much harder to rewire.

So if you don't get it right during puberty, there's a good chance that this is gonna be your setting for life.

And that's why it is so important that we not have children on social media in puberty, wait until 16.

We have to have a minimum age of 16, let them get through puberty because the social development that happens on the playground, you're arguing, you're cooperating, you're making up.

You do that thousands and thousands of times, you get a well-functioning social brain.

But our kids are not doing that now.

They literally spend most of the day on screens.

They literally spend less than half the time that they used to with their friends.

And so they're not getting that experience.

They're getting stimulus response, you know, stimulus response, dopamine, stimulus response, dopamine.

They're getting trained by these companies

by the algorithms and the presentation of stimuli.

And this is warping.

That's why I say this is rewiring their brains.

And I also say that childhood has gotten rewired because sort of the whole set of inputs and outputs that make up a healthy human childhood

which is going to involve a lot of frustration, cooperation, excitement, sunshine, conflict.

You need all these things, and if you take out most of it and replace it with TikTok videos, you've rewired childhood.