Steve Joordens

Except it turns out from the research that social connection is more important than eating well, than exercising well, in terms of your mental health, your physical health, your longevity, your happiness.

Social connection is the variable.

When you have it, you have a lot.

But when you don't, this is the kind of situation that can arise.

Well, I mean, if it's caught early enough, there could be things like clubs or hobbies or maybe that kid needs to be part of a hockey team.

Maybe that kid needs to find some other way of interacting with other humans that are interested in the same things they're interested in, finding those points of connection.

Often it involves making them visible.

Like quite often when these children that end up ostracized, they're often the ones people don't talk to, ignore.

So the simple thing from a teacher's point of view of making that child more visible, talking to them by their name again, you know, team projects in school sometimes, you know, having sort of students have to interact with each other.

That's how friendships sometimes form.

But doing this all in a much more intentional way.

I think it used to be easier to make friends back when I was younger.

And youth are having a lot of trouble with this now.

And I think we need to help them.

Yeah, I mean, we at least have to understand, you know, there's great things with technology and there's really bad things with technology.

We need to understand those those two things.

And so, for example, social media, I think we've done a pretty good job.

I think any parent who wants to take the time to learn why social media is dangerous and how it happens, you can find like the social dilemma, other things you can find.

But there's other things like text messaging is one that I push quite a bit with text messaging.

It feels safe to the student, but they get this habit of ruminating over everything they say, ruminating over everything that's said to them, and they're not getting the emotional inputs that come from the nonverbal cues.