Jonathan Haidt

A lot of kids don't even know how to play.

You hear this a lot.

You push the kids outdoors, you say, go out and play, and they sit there like, what do we do?

We don't know what to do.

What they do is they all get on their phones.

Yes.

That's right, exactly.

That's what they do.

When you push them out, you have to take the phones away.

That's why I think we're entering an era where grandparents are gonna be a lot more important because grandparents in a sense are the repository of the cultural knowledge of why it's so much fun to go out and have adventures.

That's right.

So as a social scientist, I tend to want to first understand what caused a situation.

What are the large structural factors, economic factors that caused this massive destructive change in childhood?

Because if there's all these factors pushing one way and we say, parents, you need to go the other way, that might be too much to ask.

So one, I'll just give you one other factor that's very important here, and I'll get back to your question in just a moment, but you mentioned Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, church groups.

Almost all human societies have initiation rights.

How do you turn a girl into a woman?

How do you turn a boy into a man?

Around the world, that is not done by the parents.

It's done by other adults in the community of the same sex.