TED Talks Daily
TED Talks Daily Book Club | Are smartphones ruining childhood? | Jonathan Haidt
15 Sep 2024
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, you're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hu. And today, an edition of our Summer Book Club series where we check out new books that will spark your curiosity all summer long. We are resharing our interview with Jonathan Haidt today. And now you can check out a videotape of our conversation on TED.com too. We wanted to bring this to the feed in honor of back to school season.
And because a peculiar trend is popping up across schools, Cell phone bans in the classroom. Jonathan has a lot to say on the subject. He is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller, The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. We talked about the effects smartphones are having on children and frankly, all of us.
And finally, summer is winding down, but the book club isn't. To be a part of our next book club event, sign up for a TED membership at go.ted.com slash membership. You'll get live access to a virtual podcast recording session and the chance to ask authors like Jonathan your burning questions. Now we'll get to the episode right after a quick break.
Welcome back to TED Talks Daily's Summer Book Club. John Haidt, welcome and thank you for digging into this with us. Well, thank you, Elise. So much of this book really hinges on the moment around 2010 when a few dramatic changes took place in the digital world. Talk to us about what happened then and why you consider it a big deal.
So let me actually start in 1990, because you have to understand how we all got tricked into this. So if we go back to 1990, there was no internet. Nobody knew what the internet was. So the internet arrives around 1994, 1995. And it's amazing. It's like God said, hey, do you want to know anything instantly? I still remember how exciting it was. So the internet was amazing.
And the millennials were teenagers at the time. They were going through puberty. And they... charged onto it, and they made it their own, and they found all kinds of ways to do things. And they started internet companies, and they're a creative, successful generation. Also, the Berlin Wall fell just before that, and democracy is ascendant in the 90s.
And we're thinking, democracy, its best friend is the internet. How could a dictator ever keep it out? Good luck, China, keeping up the internet. So we were all super optimistic. Once you get the smartphone, 2007, now you start getting the App Store and apps, you get... Uber. So all of this is miraculous. So our kids love it. And we're all like, well, OK, they're spending a lot of time on it.
But maybe it's making them smarter.
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Chapter 2: What role do smartphones play in the mental health crisis among children?
It's going to teach them tech skills. So this is all good, we thought. That's the setup. And if you were born in 1990, let's say, then you hit puberty around 2002, 2003. You go through puberty with a flip phone. You use your flip phone to call your friends and to text them one-on-one, and you meet up, and you do things in the real world.
So you have a normal human development, normal human puberty, and you come out the other end as a mentally healthy person. But suppose you're born in the year 2000. You are seven when the iPhone comes out. You got a front-facing camera in 2010, high-speed internet. You are 11 when you probably got one. You got on Instagram when you were 12.
So when you hit puberty, you're going through puberty not meeting up with your friends. You're going through puberty swiping, tapping, liking, and hanging on. What if I post something? How will people react? Half of our kids say they're on the internet almost all the time. 50%. Almost all the time. This is not a normal human childhood. There's not as much face-to-face contact.
You don't get to develop social skills. You don't have hobbies. You don't read books. You're just on your phone all day long. And guess what? Their mental health collapsed, especially for the girls. Instantly, it's not a slow thing. Instantly, around 2012, you get these hockey stick shapes in all the graphs in my book. There was no sign of a problem in 2010. And by 2015, it's all over the world.
We don't know about the developing world, but all over the Western world, we start seeing this, especially for girls. So that's the story. And what do you think was going wrong? So the story I tell in the book is two things. I decided not just to write a book about what social media is doing, but to write a book which is really more about childhood. 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. We've never seen such a sharp change in generations in terms of their mental health. So that's what we see when we look back historically.
We can certainly now discuss the research trying to pin it down. But what I'm pointing to is an incredible pattern of changes that happened in many countries simultaneously, always with more increases for the girls, not affecting the middle-aged people, but only affecting the teenagers. And no one can offer another explanation other than the transformation of childhood by the technology.
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Chapter 3: What are the consequences of a phone-based childhood?
And some kids are killing themselves after using the toy. So what I'm saying is we have a defective consumer product. Do you think that that toy maybe would be recalled, maybe regulated, like maybe you have to change it so that it doesn't wreak such damage. So that's what the Surgeon General is saying.
The Surgeon General is saying, while the scientists fight about whether social media caused the increase of the population level, like the graphs I show in the book with the hockey sticks, did social media cause that increase at the population level? That's an academic debate. I can't be 100% certain I'm right. But what the Surgeon General was saying was, regardless of that debate,
Here are hundreds of cases of kids who were sextorted, they were bullied, they were shamed, and then they killed themselves that day. So the Surgeon General is saying, if this was any other consumer product, we'd regulate it and we'd put warning labels on it. Why not this one?
You have two kids. How have you wound up navigating phone use at your own house?
Yeah, so we gave my son a phone, my old iPhone, as most people do, when he was in fourth grade, when he started walking to school. This was back, you know, whatever, in the early 2010s. We didn't know any better. Now, in retrospect, we should have just given him a phone watch or a basic phone. And that's what we did with my daughter, who's three years younger.
I gave her a big pink, a gizmo watch. And in third grade, she loved it. And I could send her out in third or fourth grade. I could send her out into the park, out to get bagels. So we at least did that for my daughter. The place where I did hold the line is on social media. I said, no way, you're not getting social media, at least until high school. But both kids, you know, they accepted that.
And my daughter, when she then was in seventh grade, she said that she was actually glad she wasn't on Instagram because she could see what it does to girls. It's a terrible thing to take 11- and 12-year-old girls and make them be conscious of their face, their skin, their body, constantly, all day long, having people comment on it. It's a horrible thing to do to girls.
I want to close on a story that you have told about your son, Max, that I think illustrates the kind of world that you're ultimately advocating for. Tell us about his walks home and what happened eventually.
Yeah. So because my wife and I got to know a woman named Lenore Skenazy, who wrote a book called Free Range Kids. I recommend this to everybody. Free Range Kids.
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Chapter 4: How does overprotective parenting affect child development?
What do they do? They say, now I can do my homework. And it's actually not hard anymore. And I have time to read a book or I have time to talk to a friend or I have time to play guitar. So regaining control of your attention is where a lot of this starts. I'd say read Cal Newport.
Chapter 5: How did parenting styles change alongside technology?
I assigned the book Deep Work. It's a fantastic book. And it'll really change the way you see what's happening to us adults.
Okay, let's end on a question from Kathleen. Since your book release and tour, so following the release, are you more or less hopeful about your collective action proposals catching on?
I am wildly more optimistic. I'm optimistic by nature, but I've been working on democracy issues since the early 2000s. And I'm not optimistic there. I mean, the problems are huge, and I don't know the answers. And that's what my next book is going to be on. But on this one, on can we roll back the phone-based childhood, I was kind of optimistic last year.
And now I am just, I'm wildly optimistic because it's happening. It's happening at lightning speed. I can't believe how fast it's happening. The number of schools, the number of states, the number of countries that have acted in the last six months is mind-blowing. I've never seen anything like it. And that's especially schools and governments.
Every day I'm getting emails from parents saying, thank you, my friends and I, we did a reading group on the book, and now we're all doing this together, and all the families at the end of our street, and the kids are playing, and they're riding their bicycles.
So it's not as though our children have somehow biologically forgotten how to ride a bicycle, and they're still thrilled to be out from under your thumb. They're thrilled to have some independence. So this is happening. We don't need everybody, but if we get... Most people, we solve this problem.
Genomics pioneer Robert Green says many parents want their healthy newborn's DNA screened for diseases that may or may not show up later in life.
There is an argument that knowledge is power and many families would like to know everything, whether it's treatable or not.
the debate over revealing the secrets in babies' DNA. That's next time on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR. Subscribe or listen to the TED Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts.
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