‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
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From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. In March of last year, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published this book called The Anxious Generation, which caused, let's call it, a stir.
The subtitle of this book says it all. How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
I don't think anybody can dispute that. What he says is controversial.
Oh my God, enough with the panic about kids using smartphones. Facing enormous pushback from other researchers. You cannot disentangle cause from effect.
Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story that many parents are primed to believe. I always found the conversation over this book a little annoying because it got to me. at one of the difficulties we're having parenting, one of the difficulties we're having in society, which is this tendency to instrumentalize everything into social science. Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it's bad. It is to me a collapse in our sense of what a good life is, what it means to flourish as a human being. And so I stayed a bit out of that debate because on the one hand, I couldn't settle it. And on the other hand, I didn't think I should come in and say it wasn't important.
We're a year later, though, and two things have happened. One is Heitz's book has never left the bestseller list. That is rare. It has struck a chord. The other is that policy is moving in Heitz's direction.
Well, the governor of Utah has signed a sweeping bill to limit children's access to social media.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed one of the most restrictive social media laws in the country.
This asshole Ron DeSantis might have done something I agree with. The no cell phones in schools movement is going national.
Florida classrooms. All schools in the Buckeye State.
Michigan. South Carolina. This morning, Virginia. We're talking statewide at all Arizona schools. And now nine other states are considering the bans as well. How are your phones? Oh!
We are seeing a genuine policy revolution happening in places governed by Republicans, governed by Democrats, in how we treat children in this era of social media. I feel a lot more confident as a parent. We're gonna figure this out by the time my kids are old enough for it to matter. And then, of course, the truck of AI is about to T-bone whatever consensus we socially come to, which scares, to be quite honest, the hell out of me. So I wanted to have Haidt on the show to talk about it. He's a professor at New York University Stern School of Business. He's also the author of The Righteous Mind, which I think is one of the best books on political psychology, as well as a bunch of other books. And he is also the author of the After Babel Substack, which is free, where he and some co-authors are continuing to prosecute the case and think through the research around social media. As always, my email, EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com.
John Haidt, welcome to the show. Ezra, it's great to be back with you. So I want to just begin with the big question.
What is childhood for? Childhood is evolution's answer to how do you have a big-brained cultural creature? You have to play a lot. You have to practice all sorts of things, all sorts of maneuvers, all sorts of social skills in order to tell your brain how to wire up to have the adult form. So if you focus on brain development, especially for a big-brained cultural species like ours, there's a plastic period, a period where stuff comes in and it shapes who you are. And then once you've got that, now you're ready to convert to the adult form, be reproductive, have a baby. But if you don't have play in the childhood, you're not going to reach the adult form properly.
You had one statistic in the book that I think I've actually read before, but every time I read it, it shocks me anew and maybe now because I have a five-year-old who just turned six, but that at five years old, the human brain is 90% of its adult size and it has more neurons than it will when you're an adult.
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