Jonathan Haidt

Oh, sure, I realize that, but you know what?

That's right.

If your children's lives depended on it, would you put toothpaste back in the tube?

So 10 years ago, that's what a lot of people thought.

And 10 years ago, it was possible to hope for that.

There was a phrase, digital natives.

These kids are digital natives.

Who knows what amazing things they're gonna do?

And I remember when I first saw Twitter and I saw kids where young people were tweeting, just had a hamburger.

And I think, well, that's stupid.

But then I thought, you know what, wait a second.

If they're doing little micro interactions with dozens and dozens of people every day, maybe they're gonna be super social.

Maybe they're going to have amazing social skills.

So that you could believe that back then.

That's not what happened.

What happened instead is that we, I think what we've learned is that we are a species, several million years old, depending on how you want to count it, hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, that has a certain developmental process that we have to go through.

And you could try to short circuit that.

You could try to put it all on a screen

I suppose in theory, we might've thought, why make kids walk?

Just show them an instructional video and they'll learn walking from an instructional video.