June 2, 2025 • 39 mins
The happiness of young people has taken a big hit since the advent of the smartphone - and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that there is a direct link. He warns that allowing children easy access to the internet and social media adversely impacts their sleep, their self-esteem and even how their brains develop.
Jonathan explains the dangers he sees in letting kids use smartphones, while Jill Murphy of Common Sense Media suggests ways parents can navigate introducing tech into children's lives.
This series on parenting coincides with Dr Laurie's new free online class, The Science of Wellbeing for Parents which is available now at Coursera.org. You can sign up at drlauriesantos.com/parents.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Do you remember when you got your first cell phone.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I do.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
It was the late nineties and I was a grad
student back in Boston. All my friends were starting to
get mobile phones, so I wanted one too. I remember
sitting outside in Harvard Square and finally unboxing my new Nokia,
and it felt really cool, futuristic. Even I could call
my mom while walking to work, and I could text
my friends. That new Nokia made it easy to travel
(00:48):
and to find people while you were out in the world.
Granted it didn't have email, or maps, or music, or
a camera or even a calculator, I think, but it
was still a game changer even today. I remember that
first ring tone very fondly. But if I were to
show one of my Yale students that Noki today, they'd
(01:10):
probably be very confused. It's easy to forget just how
much and how quickly mobile phones have transformed and how
they've transformed us. Today's young people can't comprehend what life
was like without infinite access to information and more streaming
content than anyone could possibly consume. So for this final
episode in our series on Happier Parenting, we're going to
(01:32):
turn to how this massive technological shift has affected our
children and what caregivers can do to offer guidance and
support amidst this avalanche of information overload. And for this episode,
I knew there was one expert I had to speak with.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
In twenty ten, kids mostly have flip phones, we call
them millennials, But by twenty fifteen kids have smartphones with
social media. They can be on for ten fifteen hours
a day, and we call them gen z.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Social psychologist Jonathan Heite is a world renowned expert in
how technology and especially social media is impacting children. In
twenty twenty four, he published a number one New York
Times Best say, The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring
of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. His thesis,
the rapid evolution in how kids interact with technology has
(02:20):
contributed to the alarming rise in mental illness among young people.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Teen mental health was actually pretty stable from the late
nineties through twenty ten, even twenty eleven. It's really no
sign up or down. You know, it moves around, but
there's no trend, And then all of a sudden twenty twelve,
twenty thirteen, it's as though someone flipped on a light switch. Somewhere,
and girls all around the Western world, especially in the
English speaking countries, began cutting themselves. They were more anxious.
(02:45):
So it wasn't just self report, it wasn't just oh,
you know, I'm so open and honest because we can
talk about it now on social media. It was also
hospitalizations for self harm, and it was suicide. And it
wasn't just America. Very similar patterns in Canada, Australia, UK,
New Zealand, Scandinavia, Europe overall, although not in every country
in Europe. So something big was happening. And then Gene
(03:06):
Twankie was the first to stick her neck out and
she wrote an article The Atlantic gave it the title
have Smartphones destroyed a generation? And she had like three
years of solid data showing things going up, and I
thought at the time, just three years, like this could
turn around next year. And she was so roundly attacked
by other psychologists who said, it's just correlation, it's just
a trend, and nothing's happening. So she really took a
(03:28):
lot of flack, but she was right. She was absolutely right,
and it's gotten worse and worse and worse since then.
This is not caused by Covid. Everything I say in
the Anxious Generation, everything Gene was talking about, it was
all there. By twenty nineteen, Covid made it a little worse.
But we're kind of just returning to the trend line.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
What were some of the other cultural changes that were
happening and how childhood played out around that time.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
So my story in the book is that this is
a tragedy in two acts. In Act one, we lose
the play based childhood. Kids who grew up in the
eighties still played outside, they still went out on supervised
they rode their bicycles. So in the nineties is when
we lose the play based childhood. That's the first act
of the tragedy. And in Act two, twenty ten to
twenty fifth, we get the phone based childhood. So in
(04:11):
my previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind, we
went deep into play and the importance of play. And
we're mammals, and anybody who knows any mammals knows that
they play when they're young. If you've ever had a
puppy or a kitten, they want to play, play, play, play, play,
I mean, and they have to. It's a biological imperative.
Their genes don't tell the brain how to grow. It
just kind of starts things rolling and then the neurons
(04:33):
have to wire up. But with feedback from the environment.
That's why kids will do something over and over and
over again, and so it's crucial that they play. They
have a lot of independent play, and we took that away.
We took that away in the nineties, completely insane.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
And this is a change that was not necessarily caused
by the tech companies per se. This was a change
that was caused by parents. When did adults start over
parenting and what happened?
Speaker 2 (04:56):
So I have done this demonstration all over the country
and around Europe. I simply asked the audience at what
age were you let out? At what age could you
go out on your bicycle, walk to a friend's house,
go to a store, no adult with you, and certainly
all over a mind America. The answer was six to eight,
around first grade, second grade. Certainly by third grade everyone
was out. Now. I grew up during the Great crime Wave.
(05:17):
I mean there was a lot of crime in the
seventies and eighties, but we all went out and played
gen X and the older millennials, they were all out
age six to eight. But then you look at gen z.
If you were born in nineteen ninety five and you
grew up mostly in the early two thousands, everyone says
ten to twelve, it's three or four years later. So
why did this happen? There were some horrible abductions that
were widely publicized. I'm sitting here in Greenwich Village, New York,
(05:40):
about four blocks south of me, is where Aton Pates
was abducted six years old, wanted to walk to the
bus stop by himself. Never came back. This was nineteen
seventy nine, I think. But it wasn't that one that
did it, because there wasn't cable TV very much then.
It was really the abduction of Adam Walsh and Florida,
another six year old abducted from in front of a
(06:01):
store his father created I think America's most wanted and
he put out the idea that you must never take
your eyes off your child or he will be abducted.
It's because of him we get the milk cartons. You know,
I grew up with kids staring back at you on
the milk cart missing. Now almost all the missing kids
were abducted by the non custodial parent or some other
family member. There is hardly any kidnapping or abduction in
(06:23):
this country, but we freaked out about it, and we
began locking our kids up, or at least not letting
them out to have independent It used to be you
could kind of count on all the adults your kids
out riding his bicycle. You know, I knew, like if
I wiped out on my bicycle was actually hurt. You know,
my friend could just like go knock on a door
and they call my mom and she'd come pick me up.
But I don't think people think that. How they think
they have to be there all the time for their kid.
(06:45):
So for a lot of reasons, we stopp trusting our neighbors,
especially in the nineties. But we said, no, no, it's
too dangerous to go outside. You'll be abducted. You know.
Sit here, Oh look, we have a new computer. Oh look,
it connects to the internet. And the kids loved it,
and the parents loved it because the kids are safe
sitting in their room on a computer all day, talking
with strangers, perfectly safe. So that's what we did, and
mental health didn't change. Actually, the millennials who grew up
(07:07):
that way are fine. So we thought this was all okay.
What we didn't realize was that the early Internet, where
you sit at your parents' computer for a couple hours
a day, I mean, you can't take the computer to class,
you can't take it into the bathroom. A couple hours
a day you're online. It was decentralized. There was no Facebook,
there was no one company controlling things. That actually was
pretty marvelous and fun. And the millennials look back on
(07:30):
that fondly. We didn't realize that in the two thousands
things really changed. So early Facebook and my Space and
friends or those were not bad. They were ways to
connect with people.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
That was all it was.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
And honestly, you couldn't be on friends dirt that long
as a child of the nineties, I know, like you
could hop on it for a second, but it wasn't
going to be pinging in your pocket and stealing your attention.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
And so on. That's right.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
So to be doing that quasi social thing for a
couple hours a day is fine. You know, a little
bit of television is fine. The transition happens when you
get the iPhone. That's two thousand and seven. But at
first it's just a digital Swiss army knife. There's no
push notification, there's no app store, there's no social media,
and kids don't have it until twenty ten. Eleven is
when kids start getting it. In twenty ten, you get
(08:11):
the first friend facing camera, and you get the creation
of Instagram, and now you get increasingly kids have high
speed Internet. Because you remember when you had to pay
for your text like what a couple cents every text?
So you wouldn't send thousands of texts a day, You
couldn't spend sixteen hours a day on. But between twenty
ten and twenty fifteen, I call it the great rewiring
of childhood. Half of our kids, beginning in the late
(08:33):
twenty tens, half of American teenagers say that they are
online almost constantly. If you're waiting for the elevator, the
phone comes out. If you're in the elevator, the phone
comes out. If you're online anywhere, the phone comes out.
If you're sitting at lunch there's a loll in the conversation,
the phone comes out. If you're sitting on the toilet,
the phone comes out. The phone is always with you.
It takes up every spare moment because the amount they
(08:54):
have to process, the amount of stuff coming in the
videos they have to watch to keep up. It fills
up every moment.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
And you've talked in your book about these four specific
harms that this phone based childhood came with. Let's kind
of walk through them. The first is one that you
talk about in terms of the social deprivation that comes
from me in a phone based childhood. In some ways
this is ironic, right, because our phones are supposed to
be connecting us. You could imagine our phones kind of
increase connection. But what do the data really show here?
Speaker 2 (09:19):
There's the American Time Youth Survey, so we track what
people do at minute by minute and for all ages
down to I think fifteen, And what the data clearly
show is that when you look at the fifteen to
twenty four age group, but when they aggregate, how much
time do you spend with friends each day outside of
school and work? So this is not school or work,
just hanging out with friends getting together. How much time?
(09:41):
And it used to be more than two hours a
day for the young people, and then like thirty forty
minutes for everybody who's older. All the older groups, they
have jobs, they have families, they're not hanging out with
their friends, and it's dropping a little bit in the
early two thousands, and that's you know, the Internet, and
you begin to get multiplayer video games. But it plunges
after about twenty twelve because once everyone gets their iPhone,
(10:01):
now everything moves online and now you can just as
well go home and lie on your side for three
hours and do this scrolling and this wiping, the texting
and things like that. So a plummet's down almost to
where the adults are by twenty nineteen. Of course they're
connecting with hundreds of people. But if you're connecting with
hundreds of people, then you have no real time for
(10:22):
close friends. That's when we see the breakout of loneliness
boys and girls. They become so lonely once they get
on their phones.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
And why is this sort of in real life social connection,
or at least in real time social connection, so much
more important than the connection is happening online, especially for
growing kids.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, well, here I would return to our status's evolved organisms.
You know, if you go back to child development and infancy,
one of the most important things that infants are doing
socially is eye contact and then synchrony, and that takes
a long time. And it's really pleasurable for the kid
and for the parent. So there's all this programming for
(10:58):
face to face synchronous communication, and so you know, a
zoom call is we're doing right now. This is you know,
at least as good as an old telephone call when
you and I were young. It's better in some ways.
The synchronous art is okay, there are the uses for that,
but the asynchronous stuff has very little value. Like someone
posts something and then you like it or you comment
on it. It doesn't bring you together. It encourages everyone
(11:20):
to display. It turns kids into brand managers. And if
you're constantly trying to manage your brand, you're not connecting,
You're not really bonding with other kids. I just saw
a video in which teenager was saying, you know, I
sit down to watch a TV program and before I
know it, I'm doing things on my phone. Like the multitasking.
It just takes away from everything. There's an amazing phrase
(11:42):
from Sherry Turkle at MIT. She says, because of our phones,
because of our technology, we are forever elsewhere. We're never
fully present with the people that we're with. But we
evolved for these intense small group communities. So this is
a gigantic experiment we've performed on kids in theory back
in two thousand and seven. In theory it might have worked,
(12:03):
but now it's clear it backfired catastrophically, and we have
a generation around the world that has poor social skills,
difficulty making eye contact, higher levels of anxiety, poor sexual development,
cognitive development test scores are going down around the world.
People call me alarmist, but if there is really something
going wrong, then it's right to raise the alarm.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
I love the Shelley Trickle quote. And that gets to
maybe a second harm that we know comes from a
phone based childhood, which is this idea of attention fragmentation.
How do phones mess with our attention? And why is
it so bad when it's happening at the kind of
ages we're seeing it.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
One of the most sort of subtle and advanced cognitive
abilities that humans have. It's called executive function, and toddlers
don't have much of it. But we learn how to
stay focused on a task. We think, Okay, I have
a goal. What do I need to do to execute
the goal? Your brain has to have sustained attention on
that over time as you are pursuing the goal. And
(12:57):
if you can do that, then you will be successful
in life. You will be able to pursue goals. But
what if you have a goal and then you start
pursuing it, but oh, look at that, Well what's that?
Oh this is fun? Oh let's do that, and you
never get to your goal. This is what's happening. I
was just listened to a podcast. So Scott Galloway and
Richard Reeves are two people who've been writing about boys.
I think the problem for boys here with attention fragmentation
(13:19):
is even more serious. For girls girls anxiety depression, they
have huge increase. That's sort of the focused social media
anxiety depression. But I think attention fragmentation at behavioral addiction
is really more central for the boys. Boys are more
attracted to video games, which gives you quick dopamine. But
when you get lots of quick dopamine, that means that
your brain, which has adapted to the high levels now
is craving it and everything is boring. And so if
(13:41):
you're a boy and you've been on video games since
you were four or five, those neurons seeking.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Each other out.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
They didn't wire up properly and it's very hard for
you to make a goal and then pursue it over
the course of ten minutes or an hour. So the
cognitive fragmentation, even though I didn't focus on in the book,
I'm now seeing, my God, this is possibly worse than
the mental health. I mean, if you have a whole
generation that can't pay attention for sustained periods. And again
they're exceptions, but I think we can say half of
(14:09):
the generation, half say they're online almost constantly. So if
half of humanity can't pay attention, this boats really badly
for the future of innovation, work, marriage, everything that we
expect people to be able to do.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
It kind of connects with the social deprivation in a
really interesting way, right, because obviously social connection has some friction.
There are some boring downtimes with people in real life.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
And you have to work it through, you have to
stick with it.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
It can be annoying to push through the awkwardness of
in person interactions, especially when you've got a fire hose
of information and excitement waiting for you in your pocket.
So how do you get a kid to put down
this mesmerizing tool and notice what's going on in the
real world? After the break, we'll dive into other ways
a phone based childhood may be reshaping our kids development,
(14:56):
and here are some effective strategies for making it better.
The Happiness Lab will be right back. Psychologies. Jonathan Heights's
book The Anxious Generation argues that the rise of smartphones,
social media, and overparenting has triggered a cataclysmic shift in
(15:17):
how young people experience childhood and a corresponding surge in
mental illness. Before the break, we covered two of the
four ways a phone based childhood has negatively affected our kids.
Is deprived them socially and fragmented their attention. So what's
harm Number three? More screen time means less shut eye.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
So sleep. There was a drop in the nineties minute
levels off. I don't know if that was the early Internet.
I don't know what that was, but it levels off
in the two thousands, then it drops again after like
twenty twelve or so. Certainly this correlational research showing that
people are heavy users have more sleep problems, especially when
they use social media or browsing the internet. Those are
the two that are especially correlated with poor sleep. If
(15:57):
you're doing that just before bedtime, I'm in a big
debate with some other researchers to say it's just correlational,
there's no evidence of causality. But you know, if you
have a technology that is causing on average, let's say
something like half an hour less slip, certainly for heavy users,
and teenagers already aren't getting of sleep, So if we
make it worse by half an hour, you know that's
another ram cycle. You're going to have kids being more irritable,
(16:18):
it'll be harder for them to focus, more anxious, and
then that you get a vicious cycle, because then that
pushes you into more anxiety and depression. Now you're doing
badly in your classes, and you were having conflicts with
your friends, and you mul this over at night, you
can't sleep, so to stop your racing thoughts, you watch TikTok.
So you get this vicious cycle. And there's just no
dispute among the scientific community that adolescence needs sleep for
(16:42):
brain development. And if you're depriving a whole planet full
of teenagers of sleep, this has to have a variety
of physical, cognitive, and emotional consequences.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Which I think gets to the fourth phone based harm,
which is that kids wind up showing these addictive behaviors
when it comes to their phone. I think you had
a story about your own daughter with Candy Crush, if
you want to share.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Yeah, Oh my god, it was. This was I guess
twenty seventeens before I was working on on this and
my family we took a winter break trip to this
lovely farm, Liberty Hill Farm in Vermont, and my daughter
was in the next room at breakfast time and she
called out to me, and this is an exact quote, Daddy,
can you take the iPad away from me? I'm trying
(17:23):
to take my eyes off it, but I can't. And
she's about six years old. There these games are designed
explicitly to retain their users. It's a very competitive environment.
Most of these apps, once for kids, have an advertising
base model, and so the more you keep them on,
the better for the company. And you know, again, I'm
in this debate with the skeptics who say, well, it's
(17:43):
not true addiction, we shouldn't call it addiction. Well, gambling
is an addiction as long as you have compulsive use,
often against your better judgment. It sometimes causes you to lie.
And if slot machine gambling can be addictive, well, so
much of the iPhone was literally modeled after slot machines. Literally,
I mean like the thing where you know, you pull
down kind of bounces, that was really modeled after the
(18:05):
slot machine. I mean, we have age limits all over
our sisciety for four reasons. If something is about graphic
sex or violence, if it's addictive, or if there's physical
or psychological harm. Those four reasons we put age limits
on unless it's online. And then we say whatever, companies,
go for it. You can do whatever you want to
(18:26):
a child as long as the child's old enough to lie.
If the child's old enough to say she's thirteen or eighteen,
doesn't matter, and we can't sue them. They can show
whatever they want to our kids.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Tough luck.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
But you know what, wait, can I turn this around.
I'm always looking for criticisms. I want to know what
I missed because there are some psychologists whore skeptical. First,
tell me what you think of the general argument that
it was the technology that phones the social media.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Oh my gosh. I mean, I think you cannot explain
the hockey stick curve as you've called it without turning
to that. But the question is, like, are there other
factors going on as well? But I think the timing
of it just looks like it absolutely has to be
social media. I talk a lot about social media in
my course, right Instagram, TikTok. Think what's fascinating about TikTok
(19:10):
in particular, we talked a little bit before about addiction,
is that this is the first social media tool where
I've seen students articulate the fact that they feel addicted.
I mean, your daughter had this, maybe for candy crush.
The games might look different, right, but I'd never heard
college students talk about how Facebook felt so addictive, even
Instagram Snapchat a little. But with TikTok, they talk about
(19:32):
this all the time. Oh my god, So to my students,
that's right. So let me make a major point here.
We all agree social media is not monolithic. There are
different kinds of social media, different effects Instagram. The main
harm that I see is that Instagram causes chronic social comparison,
especially for girls, especially about face and bought. The correlational
studies clearly show girls and Instagram depression anxiety. That's a
(19:54):
much tighter correlation than anything else. I would urge everybody
don't let your daughters, or don't let anybody go on
Instagram until they're an adult. Snapchat, I don't think causes
depression anxiety. Snapchat connects you to strangers who are trying
to extort you, sell you drugs, and even sell you guns.
Many horrible, horrible things happen to kids on there. Snapchat,
we know from memos that have come out as the
(20:15):
States are suing them. Snapchat gets ten thousand reports of
sextortion from American kids each month. Wow, every month, ten thousand,
and that's just the ones that are reported to them.
How the great majority are not reported to them. So
you invent an app that has disappearing pictures students feel
safe for young people feel safe for sending a nude
of themselves. It turns out it's not a beautiful young
(20:37):
woman wanting to flirt with you. It's a sextortion ring
lookated somewhere in West Africa. And now if you don't
pay them right away, they will send your photo out
to everyone in your contacts, and a lot of boys
kill themselves. That's not mistaken correlation for causation. Their parents
are not wrong that Snapchat is what killed their kid.
So again, you got Instagram, depression anxiety and girls Snapchat
(20:59):
dangerous activities, interacting with strangers that ruins your life, even
if it's fun most of the time. And then we
got TikTok. And what I'm coming to see is that
TikTok is so bad for you attention and so addictive.
I think nobody should use it. Certainly, no one under
eighteen should use it. Yeah, but it doesn't just waste
your time. It changes your brain because now you need
that quick stimulation. So now let's get to some solutions.
(21:20):
If you're a parent who's worried about the phone based childhood,
what can you do to fix things?
Speaker 2 (21:25):
So the first thing is to realize that you're not alone.
If you feel like you're alone, then it's going to
be very hard to solve this because you'll think, what
do I do. You know, everyone else is giving their
kid the phone. My daughter comes home, you know, from
fifth grade, and she says, Mom, everyone else has a smartphone.
I'm the only one who doesn't have one. I'm being
left out. And so that's why we keep giving our
(21:47):
kids phones and social media at a younger and younger age,
because it's a collective action problem and we are not
able to solve it. So it goes down younger and
younger ages. And so the solution to a collective action
problem is collective action. We got trapped into this by
the companies, but if we act together, we can get
out of it. With four simple norms here they are
no smartphone till age fourteen or high school really in America.
(22:07):
Give them a flip phone or a phone watch. They
can call in text if you're sending them out into
the world, but don't give them the entire Internet and
all the strangers and all the apps and all the addiction.
Don't do that until high school minimum. Second, no social
media until sixteen. They know exactly how to get your
kid's brain before the prefrontal cortex is developed, so don't
let them have your kid until at least sixteen. The
(22:29):
third is phone free schools, and this is just a must.
If your child is able to have their phone on them,
in their pocket or even their backpack, but especially pocket
during the day, it's very likely your child is not
being educated as well as they should. And this, I
think is one of the reasons that test scores were
going up for forty years until twenty twelve, and they've
been going down, not just in America but around the
(22:51):
world test scores going down. Kids can't pay attention to
class so much else is going on in their pocket.
And then the final norm is far more independence, free play,
and responsibility in the real world. We have to get
back to the understanding that our children are young mammals
who need to develop by engaging with the environment without supervision.
Now you know two, three, four years old, Yeah, you
(23:12):
need to supervise them because they'll do all kinds of
stupid things. But around the world, one thing I learn
from cultural psychology seven or eight is called the age
of social sense. That's the age in which many societies
give their kids like here, take the sheep down to
the river, let them drink and bring them back. You
can begin being responsible. So I think we need a
sort of a norm by age eight your kids should
have some kind of independence, maybe not wandering around town alone,
(23:35):
but like out playing with some friends without a parent
watching them. Because when the parents are watching what a
kids learn. They learn how to appeal to the adult
to punish the other kid, which is a skill for authoritarianism.
Whereas if kids have no rule maker above them, they
have to work out the conflicts they have to negotiate.
They have to adjudicate, they have to forgive, and those
(23:57):
are skills of democracy. So we have to give kids
back a childhood worth having. Those four norms. Parents can
roll back the vone based childhood.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
It would be easier if some hero could jump into
a Dolorean, travel back to the late nineties and stop
social media from devolving into a polarized miss and maybe
prevent tech designers from adding those front facing cameras. Sadly,
that's not going to happen, but that doesn't mean that
society is simply forced to accept the great rewiring. There's
still a lot parents can do to make things better.
(24:27):
To recap here are Jonathan's four suggestions. Delay smartphones until
at least age fourteen, hold off on social media until sixteen,
advocate for phone free schools, and give kids more freedom
and independence in the real world. But these solutions require widespread,
coordinated action, which means you might be asking what can
(24:47):
I do as a parent right now to support my
child in the face of such potentially harmful technology. After
the break, we'll speak to an expert who's thought carefully
about essential conversations you can have with your kids to
help them navigate the modern digital landscape. We'll hear how
parents can support kids' technology use while protecting their mental
health and fostering a sense of safety. The Happiness Lab
(25:10):
will be right back. If you've ever wondered whether it's
developmentally appropriate for your toddler to watch Coco Melon, or say,
for your team to play Call of Duty, you might
be familiar with the work of our next.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
Expert, someone names Jill Murphy. And I am the Chief
Content Officer at Common Sense Media, which really just means
I oversee all of our ratings and reviews.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Common Sense Media is an awesome nonprofit advocacy organization known
for their reviews of children's entertainment and TV shows. These days,
the organization also offers research backed guides for digital parenting.
These new guides have become essential resources for parents navigating
day to day technology questions for kids of all ages.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
When you think about younger children, so maybe you're distracted
by something, you hand over the phone and with the
lunch videos, and I think that right there, that handover
moment is at first introduction to you know, I just
need to distract my kids so I can get this
other thing done. But what it's become is a distraction
in their life, and we are just all distracted all
(26:20):
the time.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Jill believes the most important thing parents can do to
protect their kids is to have honest conversations about technology,
and Jill says it's best to start those conversations earlier
than you think, even with a baby or toddler who's
curious about what you're looking at on your screen.
Speaker 3 (26:36):
Narrate what you're doing. Actually let your kid know what
you're doing within this tiny screen so they have a
sense of what's going on because they have no idea.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
As children get older, Jill recommends creating a family media agreement.
Common Sense offers templates for these contracts on their website,
but the key is to simply start a dialogue. Whether
it's written down or not, it's.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
Really a conversation. When you hear the title, it sounds
a little idealistic, but I think what they can be
used for is really anything. Whether it's a kid is
ready to start going on YouTube, but I want to
say some boundaries and guidelines. It just guides you through
a conversation around how you can start laying out what
is and isn't okay. And then with older kids it
(27:18):
might be they're getting a phone, what's okay for them
to do? What isn't okay for them to do. It's
a little bit of a negotiation, a little bit of
a contract where they may say, and this is for
my own life, I want to have social media. Is
it okay if I go on maybe just for thirty minutes?
And then we say you can have this app, but
we're not going to get you on this app yet.
And so it's just a discussion around where your rules
(27:41):
are and holds everybody to a set of shared principles.
The challenge with that is it needs to be revisited often.
And I can speak from experience where we did it
when my older daughter got a thund My kids are
fifteen and twelve. Two girls live.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
In the dream in the night now, all at the
same time we did it when my older daughter got
a phone, and it was probably a good year before
we really revisited it.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Is something that we need to encourage families to revisit
quite regularly, almost like your quarterly goals, like what is
it and what needs to be adjusted? And then the
run chanelle of why is something getting adjusted? You know,
the underlying factor here is their development, What are they
ready for We use their age as a guide, but
it's not always a one size fits all.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
And so what wound up in your family media agreement?
Like what were some of the things that you have
to negotiate with your kids to that?
Speaker 3 (28:35):
Definitely social media. My older daughter got a phone when
she is going into middle school. Biggest regret of my life,
and my husband is always kind of like, shouldn't you
have known better? Sure, I should have known better. For
lots of reasons, we let her get a phone that
we were not letting her get on social media, so
that was the stop gap. It's just too much access.
(28:56):
And then that was really the big like aha moment
for me. I'd say about six to eight months in.
It's a computer, She's just online and she has access
to literally anything, even if it's a news story around
school shooting, Like do I want her really seeing that
right now without conversation from els? Does she need notifications
(29:17):
coming up in her day around what's going run in
the world. And parental controls was something that happened a
little bit later. I've always been a little like around
parental controls because it's it's a little bit of a
false promise. And there's a ton of videos online about
how to get around literally any any of the parental
(29:37):
controls that are out there, there is a hack to
get around them. More recently, we had started using a
parental control to just completely shut down the phone and
to just go to a dumb phone at certain times
of the day except for texting, Like she could text
on her phone, she could call on her phone, but
otherwise everything was turned off. So it's like during the
school day at night. And when I first started doing it,
(30:00):
my daughter was like what the heck, Like, why would
you do that? But after a couple of weeks of
doing this consistently, she started asking me to turn it
off at night. She was like, can you just turn
this off? Don't forget to turn it off, Like she
knows that it's not something that she can easily do
on her own, which is obviously the goal that I mean,
they'll struggle with that, and it just allows her to
(30:23):
focus in another place, in this case, on her sleep.
But even during the school day or like her homework time,
she knows like, Okay, it's going to go off between
three and six. So I just feel like it's really
helped her take back some of her time. There's something
about it that's provided her a little bit of like okay, good,
like a little relief from feeling like she has to
(30:45):
be on. And I think that because we've discussed it
so much, I love that she's kind of taken this
approach of like, Okay, I need it off, but I
might not have the self control at fifteen to do
it and stick with it.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
And you've talked about some of these essential conversations, some
of these elements that you might want to get in there,
and I know one of the big ones is this
idea of a digital footprint. What are the conversations that
you need to have about a child's digital footprint.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
I think kids are very quick to be like less
concerned about that sort of thing until probably high school
and they're thinking about college or jobs, really having them
understand the trail that they're leaving behind, that it's all findable,
the way that other kids are getting screenshot and screen
grab conversations and use that information or share it, whether
(31:34):
it's in a gossipy way or a dangerous way. And
then in addition to that, of course images that they're sharing,
personal information that they may be sharing, who they're actually
sharing it with and when they or not they know
that person. And the trick with that is when is
it okay to have that conversation. I think that that
Twain set is very quick to say, no, it's a kid,
(31:56):
I'm talking to this kid. They friended me on my
blocks or they friended me on discord. They're less inclined
to be skeptical that who they're talking to may actually
be somebody that is not what they say say. They
are so starting to lay all that groundwork, I think
early and often without a fearful approach, but just as
(32:18):
an awareness, just like don't cross the street until the
button says walk, and even when it does say walk,
look to your left to make sure no one's taking
a right turn, and make sure you have eye contact
with the drivers. And you know, there's a lot of
elements to consider before you go ahead and cross the street.
And I think we need to be thinking about that
(32:38):
multi pronged approach in conversation.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
We're doing this kind of boundary setting with our kids
anyway and other domains where they need to be safe
across the street. We kind of need to get to
them how to cross the digital street as yeah, yeah,
One of the things common says has noted that you
need to get across the digital street are conversations about
reality versus perception. And I think this specifically comes up
when it comes to social media.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
What do you mean by that, Well, I mean there's
this idea of perfection, right, and then it's talked a
lot about now with Instagram in particular, but what people
are putting out versus what's really going on, and that
comes down to, you know, embedded products in a video
that I kid not watch something and think that, oh,
just this girl that I watch and I love her,
(33:21):
and she's buying this product and she loves it, and
I want to have that product too, and explaining to
her what product placement is like and that she's paid
for this video and that isn't actually just her saying that,
and that's not necessarily her real life. She's not necessarily
getting ready in the morning and looking like that and
going somewhere. And then there's just this front that kids
(33:44):
are putting out there, teens are putting out there, and
we know that adults are putting out there as well.
Perfect house, perfect, whole video, perfect dorm room, perfect, whatever
it might be, and just projecting an image that doesn't
really portray real life, and it sets up a false aspiration.
And I think as adults, we also know once you're
in that vacuum, it's really hard to break out. And
(34:05):
I'm a fully developed adult, and so when our kids
kids aren't even developed in a place where they can
make that distinction between reality and fiction, we're just putting
them in front of so much information at one time.
How do they parse it and how does it help
shape their reality.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
I know there's a lot of parents out there wondering
what they need to be paying attention to to figure
out if their teen or their child might be struggled
with technology. What things do you suggest that parents look
out for.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
There is this slow drip of content and what kids
are being exposed to, and again, how that's kind of
shaping their reality and their self identity and self worth.
And if they feel that they can't measure up to
what they're watching or compete with it or compared to it.
And if you are predisposed, which I think is an
important element for parents to consider, is depression in my family,
(34:56):
is anxiety in my family? Have we dealt with other
mental illness in the family? That's an important factor to
take into consideration. My daughter is anxious, Do I really
want her to be put into a scenario where that
might be like heightened in some way? Do I want
to put her in a situation where it's heightened but
she's got the tools and knows how to calm herself.
(35:17):
Some of it's preparation, but I think some of it
is about you really have to have this knowledge of
your kid and what they how they interact and feel
and function in the world.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
And it seems like some of it is also including
your children in these conversations. One of the things that
comes since media recommends even in the case some of
these mental health concerns, is not for parents to be like, well,
I'm worried about anxiety provoking informations all just ban phones
or like put parental controls in. It really is about
empowering your kids to notice when they're going through that
stuff and to have conversations about what they can do
(35:49):
to do better.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Right, And I think we're having those conversations at ages
that we probably wouldn't expect to have them. And I
think a lot of parents are still feeling like I
don't need to worry about that until they're in high school,
no take an action. So what you're going to say
to your six or seven year old compared to what
you're going to say to your sixteen or seventeen year old,
it's going to be very different. But the subject of
mental health can be talked about at any age, at
(36:12):
any point. And you know, for your younger kids, it's
if you see that they might be acting out after
they have played a game, you know they have a
stronger reaction of playing that kind of game than they
do to just a board game. Those are the kinds
of things that you want to just keep an eye
on and not just wait and watch, but maybe after
once or twice, say what is it about this game?
(36:33):
Or can I play this game with you? Or can
I watch you play this game? You don't always have
to jump in with all the answers, which I have
to remind myself all the time. It's about kind of
observing and letting them process and letting them articulate that
to you what's going on, and then kind of layering in,
like I see that you're angry about this game, what
(36:54):
is it about it? It's really getting you? Maybe that's
when you might make decisions to Okay, he's really reacting
running strongly to this.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
I might need to learnit.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
How much time they're spending on a particular game if
they can't start to manage it a little bit or
balance it. And I think that parenting, we're doing that
with lots of stuff. Yeah, they can play that friend. Okay,
that friend's starting to be not the best friend. Maybe
we should pull that. Maybe we'll make a play yet
with this other friend. She's only eating fast food. We
need to balance that out with maybe some vegetables. We're
(37:24):
doing it all the time. It's the same when it
comes to digital media. It's just we don't have the insight.
It takes more work because again, they're behind this screen.
So that is one element that I think when we
decide to get phones and tablets, putting them in a
common area, making sure that we can see over their
shoulder what they're doing on the screen. We all have
(37:47):
to be a little bit more mindful when we hand
those devices over, whether it's theirs to own or just
to borrow ours for the moment, about what's going on
before during afterwards. There's a lot of considerations to think
about when we're making these decisions about what our kids'
mental well being is going to look like, and there's
(38:09):
so many outlying factors that we cannot control, but being
present and being available for them to come back to
and share some of that information is really essential as well.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
All this goes to say, if you want your kids
to be safe online, you need to talk to them
about new media and technology, and you need to start
earlier than you think. Consider making an official family media
agreement that can help foster the sort of dialogue you
need to return to regularly. Pay attention to how your
child reacts to different technologies, but don't just assume you
(38:40):
know how it's affecting them. Ask questions, listen closely, and
then adjust your approach as needed. None of these strategies
will fully roll back the phone based childhood that Jonathan
Hite talked about earlier, but if you can help your
child think critically about digital technology, you're well on your
way to fostering a bit more flourishing and happiness. Finally,
(39:00):
give yourself some self compassion as a parent helping to
raise the next generation in these changing technological times. Plus,
if you want more strategies, there's still time to check
out my free online course The Science of Well Being
for parents. To learn more, just head to doctor Laurisanto's
dot com slash parents. That's Dr Laisanto's dot com slash parents.
(39:23):
That concludes our series on Happier parenting, But dot to
worry is The Happiness Lab will be back soon. We'll
be shifting gears with a new series exploring creative coping
strategies for handling life's current baels. Think job loss, illnesses,
heartbreak tragedies. When times get really hard, we need creative
ways to cope, so we'll be looking at the weird
(39:44):
and wonderful ways people find relief and the science behind
why these strategies work. So be sure to come back
soon for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with
me Doctor Lauri Santo's
Pushkin. Do you remember when you got your first cell phone.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I do.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
It was the late nineties and I was a grad
student back in Boston. All my friends were starting to
get mobile phones, so I wanted one too. I remember
sitting outside in Harvard Square and finally unboxing my new Nokia,
and it felt really cool, futuristic. Even I could call
my mom while walking to work, and I could text
my friends. That new Nokia made it easy to travel
(00:48):
and to find people while you were out in the world.
Granted it didn't have email, or maps, or music, or
a camera or even a calculator, I think, but it
was still a game changer even today. I remember that
first ring tone very fondly. But if I were to
show one of my Yale students that Noki today, they'd
(01:10):
probably be very confused. It's easy to forget just how
much and how quickly mobile phones have transformed and how
they've transformed us. Today's young people can't comprehend what life
was like without infinite access to information and more streaming
content than anyone could possibly consume. So for this final
episode in our series on Happier Parenting, we're going to
(01:32):
turn to how this massive technological shift has affected our
children and what caregivers can do to offer guidance and
support amidst this avalanche of information overload. And for this episode,
I knew there was one expert I had to speak with.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
In twenty ten, kids mostly have flip phones, we call
them millennials, But by twenty fifteen kids have smartphones with
social media. They can be on for ten fifteen hours
a day, and we call them gen z.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Social psychologist Jonathan Heite is a world renowned expert in
how technology and especially social media is impacting children. In
twenty twenty four, he published a number one New York
Times Best say, The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring
of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. His thesis,
the rapid evolution in how kids interact with technology has
(02:20):
contributed to the alarming rise in mental illness among young people.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Teen mental health was actually pretty stable from the late
nineties through twenty ten, even twenty eleven. It's really no
sign up or down. You know, it moves around, but
there's no trend, And then all of a sudden twenty twelve,
twenty thirteen, it's as though someone flipped on a light switch. Somewhere,
and girls all around the Western world, especially in the
English speaking countries, began cutting themselves. They were more anxious.
(02:45):
So it wasn't just self report, it wasn't just oh,
you know, I'm so open and honest because we can
talk about it now on social media. It was also
hospitalizations for self harm, and it was suicide. And it
wasn't just America. Very similar patterns in Canada, Australia, UK,
New Zealand, Scandinavia, Europe overall, although not in every country
in Europe. So something big was happening. And then Gene
(03:06):
Twankie was the first to stick her neck out and
she wrote an article The Atlantic gave it the title
have Smartphones destroyed a generation? And she had like three
years of solid data showing things going up, and I
thought at the time, just three years, like this could
turn around next year. And she was so roundly attacked
by other psychologists who said, it's just correlation, it's just
a trend, and nothing's happening. So she really took a
(03:28):
lot of flack, but she was right. She was absolutely right,
and it's gotten worse and worse and worse since then.
This is not caused by Covid. Everything I say in
the Anxious Generation, everything Gene was talking about, it was
all there. By twenty nineteen, Covid made it a little worse.
But we're kind of just returning to the trend line.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
What were some of the other cultural changes that were
happening and how childhood played out around that time.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
So my story in the book is that this is
a tragedy in two acts. In Act one, we lose
the play based childhood. Kids who grew up in the
eighties still played outside, they still went out on supervised
they rode their bicycles. So in the nineties is when
we lose the play based childhood. That's the first act
of the tragedy. And in Act two, twenty ten to
twenty fifth, we get the phone based childhood. So in
(04:11):
my previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind, we
went deep into play and the importance of play. And
we're mammals, and anybody who knows any mammals knows that
they play when they're young. If you've ever had a
puppy or a kitten, they want to play, play, play, play, play,
I mean, and they have to. It's a biological imperative.
Their genes don't tell the brain how to grow. It
just kind of starts things rolling and then the neurons
(04:33):
have to wire up. But with feedback from the environment.
That's why kids will do something over and over and
over again, and so it's crucial that they play. They
have a lot of independent play, and we took that away.
We took that away in the nineties, completely insane.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
And this is a change that was not necessarily caused
by the tech companies per se. This was a change
that was caused by parents. When did adults start over
parenting and what happened?
Speaker 2 (04:56):
So I have done this demonstration all over the country
and around Europe. I simply asked the audience at what
age were you let out? At what age could you
go out on your bicycle, walk to a friend's house,
go to a store, no adult with you, and certainly
all over a mind America. The answer was six to eight,
around first grade, second grade. Certainly by third grade everyone
was out. Now. I grew up during the Great crime Wave.
(05:17):
I mean there was a lot of crime in the
seventies and eighties, but we all went out and played
gen X and the older millennials, they were all out
age six to eight. But then you look at gen z.
If you were born in nineteen ninety five and you
grew up mostly in the early two thousands, everyone says
ten to twelve, it's three or four years later. So
why did this happen? There were some horrible abductions that
were widely publicized. I'm sitting here in Greenwich Village, New York,
(05:40):
about four blocks south of me, is where Aton Pates
was abducted six years old, wanted to walk to the
bus stop by himself. Never came back. This was nineteen
seventy nine, I think. But it wasn't that one that
did it, because there wasn't cable TV very much then.
It was really the abduction of Adam Walsh and Florida,
another six year old abducted from in front of a
(06:01):
store his father created I think America's most wanted and
he put out the idea that you must never take
your eyes off your child or he will be abducted.
It's because of him we get the milk cartons. You know,
I grew up with kids staring back at you on
the milk cart missing. Now almost all the missing kids
were abducted by the non custodial parent or some other
family member. There is hardly any kidnapping or abduction in
(06:23):
this country, but we freaked out about it, and we
began locking our kids up, or at least not letting
them out to have independent It used to be you
could kind of count on all the adults your kids
out riding his bicycle. You know, I knew, like if
I wiped out on my bicycle was actually hurt. You know,
my friend could just like go knock on a door
and they call my mom and she'd come pick me up.
But I don't think people think that. How they think
they have to be there all the time for their kid.
(06:45):
So for a lot of reasons, we stopp trusting our neighbors,
especially in the nineties. But we said, no, no, it's
too dangerous to go outside. You'll be abducted. You know.
Sit here, Oh look, we have a new computer. Oh look,
it connects to the internet. And the kids loved it,
and the parents loved it because the kids are safe
sitting in their room on a computer all day, talking
with strangers, perfectly safe. So that's what we did, and
mental health didn't change. Actually, the millennials who grew up
(07:07):
that way are fine. So we thought this was all okay.
What we didn't realize was that the early Internet, where
you sit at your parents' computer for a couple hours
a day, I mean, you can't take the computer to class,
you can't take it into the bathroom. A couple hours
a day you're online. It was decentralized. There was no Facebook,
there was no one company controlling things. That actually was
pretty marvelous and fun. And the millennials look back on
(07:30):
that fondly. We didn't realize that in the two thousands
things really changed. So early Facebook and my Space and
friends or those were not bad. They were ways to
connect with people.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
That was all it was.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
And honestly, you couldn't be on friends dirt that long
as a child of the nineties, I know, like you
could hop on it for a second, but it wasn't
going to be pinging in your pocket and stealing your attention.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
And so on. That's right.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
So to be doing that quasi social thing for a
couple hours a day is fine. You know, a little
bit of television is fine. The transition happens when you
get the iPhone. That's two thousand and seven. But at
first it's just a digital Swiss army knife. There's no
push notification, there's no app store, there's no social media,
and kids don't have it until twenty ten. Eleven is
when kids start getting it. In twenty ten, you get
(08:11):
the first friend facing camera, and you get the creation
of Instagram, and now you get increasingly kids have high
speed Internet. Because you remember when you had to pay
for your text like what a couple cents every text?
So you wouldn't send thousands of texts a day, You
couldn't spend sixteen hours a day on. But between twenty
ten and twenty fifteen, I call it the great rewiring
of childhood. Half of our kids, beginning in the late
(08:33):
twenty tens, half of American teenagers say that they are
online almost constantly. If you're waiting for the elevator, the
phone comes out. If you're in the elevator, the phone
comes out. If you're online anywhere, the phone comes out.
If you're sitting at lunch there's a loll in the conversation,
the phone comes out. If you're sitting on the toilet,
the phone comes out. The phone is always with you.
It takes up every spare moment because the amount they
(08:54):
have to process, the amount of stuff coming in the
videos they have to watch to keep up. It fills
up every moment.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
And you've talked in your book about these four specific
harms that this phone based childhood came with. Let's kind
of walk through them. The first is one that you
talk about in terms of the social deprivation that comes
from me in a phone based childhood. In some ways
this is ironic, right, because our phones are supposed to
be connecting us. You could imagine our phones kind of
increase connection. But what do the data really show here?
Speaker 2 (09:19):
There's the American Time Youth Survey, so we track what
people do at minute by minute and for all ages
down to I think fifteen, And what the data clearly
show is that when you look at the fifteen to
twenty four age group, but when they aggregate, how much
time do you spend with friends each day outside of
school and work? So this is not school or work,
just hanging out with friends getting together. How much time?
(09:41):
And it used to be more than two hours a
day for the young people, and then like thirty forty
minutes for everybody who's older. All the older groups, they
have jobs, they have families, they're not hanging out with
their friends, and it's dropping a little bit in the
early two thousands, and that's you know, the Internet, and
you begin to get multiplayer video games. But it plunges
after about twenty twelve because once everyone gets their iPhone,
(10:01):
now everything moves online and now you can just as
well go home and lie on your side for three
hours and do this scrolling and this wiping, the texting
and things like that. So a plummet's down almost to
where the adults are by twenty nineteen. Of course they're
connecting with hundreds of people. But if you're connecting with
hundreds of people, then you have no real time for
(10:22):
close friends. That's when we see the breakout of loneliness
boys and girls. They become so lonely once they get
on their phones.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
And why is this sort of in real life social connection,
or at least in real time social connection, so much
more important than the connection is happening online, especially for
growing kids.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, well, here I would return to our status's evolved organisms.
You know, if you go back to child development and infancy,
one of the most important things that infants are doing
socially is eye contact and then synchrony, and that takes
a long time. And it's really pleasurable for the kid
and for the parent. So there's all this programming for
(10:58):
face to face synchronous communication, and so you know, a
zoom call is we're doing right now. This is you know,
at least as good as an old telephone call when
you and I were young. It's better in some ways.
The synchronous art is okay, there are the uses for that,
but the asynchronous stuff has very little value. Like someone
posts something and then you like it or you comment
on it. It doesn't bring you together. It encourages everyone
(11:20):
to display. It turns kids into brand managers. And if
you're constantly trying to manage your brand, you're not connecting,
You're not really bonding with other kids. I just saw
a video in which teenager was saying, you know, I
sit down to watch a TV program and before I
know it, I'm doing things on my phone. Like the multitasking.
It just takes away from everything. There's an amazing phrase
(11:42):
from Sherry Turkle at MIT. She says, because of our phones,
because of our technology, we are forever elsewhere. We're never
fully present with the people that we're with. But we
evolved for these intense small group communities. So this is
a gigantic experiment we've performed on kids in theory back
in two thousand and seven. In theory it might have worked,
(12:03):
but now it's clear it backfired catastrophically, and we have
a generation around the world that has poor social skills,
difficulty making eye contact, higher levels of anxiety, poor sexual development,
cognitive development test scores are going down around the world.
People call me alarmist, but if there is really something
going wrong, then it's right to raise the alarm.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
I love the Shelley Trickle quote. And that gets to
maybe a second harm that we know comes from a
phone based childhood, which is this idea of attention fragmentation.
How do phones mess with our attention? And why is
it so bad when it's happening at the kind of
ages we're seeing it.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
One of the most sort of subtle and advanced cognitive
abilities that humans have. It's called executive function, and toddlers
don't have much of it. But we learn how to
stay focused on a task. We think, Okay, I have
a goal. What do I need to do to execute
the goal? Your brain has to have sustained attention on
that over time as you are pursuing the goal. And
(12:57):
if you can do that, then you will be successful
in life. You will be able to pursue goals. But
what if you have a goal and then you start
pursuing it, but oh, look at that, Well what's that?
Oh this is fun? Oh let's do that, and you
never get to your goal. This is what's happening. I
was just listened to a podcast. So Scott Galloway and
Richard Reeves are two people who've been writing about boys.
I think the problem for boys here with attention fragmentation
(13:19):
is even more serious. For girls girls anxiety depression, they
have huge increase. That's sort of the focused social media
anxiety depression. But I think attention fragmentation at behavioral addiction
is really more central for the boys. Boys are more
attracted to video games, which gives you quick dopamine. But
when you get lots of quick dopamine, that means that
your brain, which has adapted to the high levels now
is craving it and everything is boring. And so if
(13:41):
you're a boy and you've been on video games since
you were four or five, those neurons seeking.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Each other out.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
They didn't wire up properly and it's very hard for
you to make a goal and then pursue it over
the course of ten minutes or an hour. So the
cognitive fragmentation, even though I didn't focus on in the book,
I'm now seeing, my God, this is possibly worse than
the mental health. I mean, if you have a whole
generation that can't pay attention for sustained periods. And again
they're exceptions, but I think we can say half of
(14:09):
the generation, half say they're online almost constantly. So if
half of humanity can't pay attention, this boats really badly
for the future of innovation, work, marriage, everything that we
expect people to be able to do.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
It kind of connects with the social deprivation in a
really interesting way, right, because obviously social connection has some friction.
There are some boring downtimes with people in real life.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
And you have to work it through, you have to
stick with it.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
It can be annoying to push through the awkwardness of
in person interactions, especially when you've got a fire hose
of information and excitement waiting for you in your pocket.
So how do you get a kid to put down
this mesmerizing tool and notice what's going on in the
real world? After the break, we'll dive into other ways
a phone based childhood may be reshaping our kids development,
(14:56):
and here are some effective strategies for making it better.
The Happiness Lab will be right back. Psychologies. Jonathan Heights's
book The Anxious Generation argues that the rise of smartphones,
social media, and overparenting has triggered a cataclysmic shift in
(15:17):
how young people experience childhood and a corresponding surge in
mental illness. Before the break, we covered two of the
four ways a phone based childhood has negatively affected our kids.
Is deprived them socially and fragmented their attention. So what's
harm Number three? More screen time means less shut eye.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
So sleep. There was a drop in the nineties minute
levels off. I don't know if that was the early Internet.
I don't know what that was, but it levels off
in the two thousands, then it drops again after like
twenty twelve or so. Certainly this correlational research showing that
people are heavy users have more sleep problems, especially when
they use social media or browsing the internet. Those are
the two that are especially correlated with poor sleep. If
(15:57):
you're doing that just before bedtime, I'm in a big
debate with some other researchers to say it's just correlational,
there's no evidence of causality. But you know, if you
have a technology that is causing on average, let's say
something like half an hour less slip, certainly for heavy users,
and teenagers already aren't getting of sleep, So if we
make it worse by half an hour, you know that's
another ram cycle. You're going to have kids being more irritable,
(16:18):
it'll be harder for them to focus, more anxious, and
then that you get a vicious cycle, because then that
pushes you into more anxiety and depression. Now you're doing
badly in your classes, and you were having conflicts with
your friends, and you mul this over at night, you
can't sleep, so to stop your racing thoughts, you watch TikTok.
So you get this vicious cycle. And there's just no
dispute among the scientific community that adolescence needs sleep for
(16:42):
brain development. And if you're depriving a whole planet full
of teenagers of sleep, this has to have a variety
of physical, cognitive, and emotional consequences.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Which I think gets to the fourth phone based harm,
which is that kids wind up showing these addictive behaviors
when it comes to their phone. I think you had
a story about your own daughter with Candy Crush, if
you want to share.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Yeah, Oh my god, it was. This was I guess
twenty seventeens before I was working on on this and
my family we took a winter break trip to this
lovely farm, Liberty Hill Farm in Vermont, and my daughter
was in the next room at breakfast time and she
called out to me, and this is an exact quote, Daddy,
can you take the iPad away from me? I'm trying
(17:23):
to take my eyes off it, but I can't. And
she's about six years old. There these games are designed
explicitly to retain their users. It's a very competitive environment.
Most of these apps, once for kids, have an advertising
base model, and so the more you keep them on,
the better for the company. And you know, again, I'm
in this debate with the skeptics who say, well, it's
(17:43):
not true addiction, we shouldn't call it addiction. Well, gambling
is an addiction as long as you have compulsive use,
often against your better judgment. It sometimes causes you to lie.
And if slot machine gambling can be addictive, well, so
much of the iPhone was literally modeled after slot machines. Literally,
I mean like the thing where you know, you pull
down kind of bounces, that was really modeled after the
(18:05):
slot machine. I mean, we have age limits all over
our sisciety for four reasons. If something is about graphic
sex or violence, if it's addictive, or if there's physical
or psychological harm. Those four reasons we put age limits
on unless it's online. And then we say whatever, companies,
go for it. You can do whatever you want to
(18:26):
a child as long as the child's old enough to lie.
If the child's old enough to say she's thirteen or eighteen,
doesn't matter, and we can't sue them. They can show
whatever they want to our kids.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Tough luck.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
But you know what, wait, can I turn this around.
I'm always looking for criticisms. I want to know what
I missed because there are some psychologists whore skeptical. First,
tell me what you think of the general argument that
it was the technology that phones the social media.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Oh my gosh. I mean, I think you cannot explain
the hockey stick curve as you've called it without turning
to that. But the question is, like, are there other
factors going on as well? But I think the timing
of it just looks like it absolutely has to be
social media. I talk a lot about social media in
my course, right Instagram, TikTok. Think what's fascinating about TikTok
(19:10):
in particular, we talked a little bit before about addiction,
is that this is the first social media tool where
I've seen students articulate the fact that they feel addicted.
I mean, your daughter had this, maybe for candy crush.
The games might look different, right, but I'd never heard
college students talk about how Facebook felt so addictive, even
Instagram Snapchat a little. But with TikTok, they talk about
(19:32):
this all the time. Oh my god, So to my students,
that's right. So let me make a major point here.
We all agree social media is not monolithic. There are
different kinds of social media, different effects Instagram. The main
harm that I see is that Instagram causes chronic social comparison,
especially for girls, especially about face and bought. The correlational
studies clearly show girls and Instagram depression anxiety. That's a
(19:54):
much tighter correlation than anything else. I would urge everybody
don't let your daughters, or don't let anybody go on
Instagram until they're an adult. Snapchat, I don't think causes
depression anxiety. Snapchat connects you to strangers who are trying
to extort you, sell you drugs, and even sell you guns.
Many horrible, horrible things happen to kids on there. Snapchat,
we know from memos that have come out as the
(20:15):
States are suing them. Snapchat gets ten thousand reports of
sextortion from American kids each month. Wow, every month, ten thousand,
and that's just the ones that are reported to them.
How the great majority are not reported to them. So
you invent an app that has disappearing pictures students feel
safe for young people feel safe for sending a nude
of themselves. It turns out it's not a beautiful young
(20:37):
woman wanting to flirt with you. It's a sextortion ring
lookated somewhere in West Africa. And now if you don't
pay them right away, they will send your photo out
to everyone in your contacts, and a lot of boys
kill themselves. That's not mistaken correlation for causation. Their parents
are not wrong that Snapchat is what killed their kid.
So again, you got Instagram, depression anxiety and girls Snapchat
(20:59):
dangerous activities, interacting with strangers that ruins your life, even
if it's fun most of the time. And then we
got TikTok. And what I'm coming to see is that
TikTok is so bad for you attention and so addictive.
I think nobody should use it. Certainly, no one under
eighteen should use it. Yeah, but it doesn't just waste
your time. It changes your brain because now you need
that quick stimulation. So now let's get to some solutions.
(21:20):
If you're a parent who's worried about the phone based childhood,
what can you do to fix things?
Speaker 2 (21:25):
So the first thing is to realize that you're not alone.
If you feel like you're alone, then it's going to
be very hard to solve this because you'll think, what
do I do. You know, everyone else is giving their
kid the phone. My daughter comes home, you know, from
fifth grade, and she says, Mom, everyone else has a smartphone.
I'm the only one who doesn't have one. I'm being
left out. And so that's why we keep giving our
(21:47):
kids phones and social media at a younger and younger age,
because it's a collective action problem and we are not
able to solve it. So it goes down younger and
younger ages. And so the solution to a collective action
problem is collective action. We got trapped into this by
the companies, but if we act together, we can get
out of it. With four simple norms here they are
no smartphone till age fourteen or high school really in America.
(22:07):
Give them a flip phone or a phone watch. They
can call in text if you're sending them out into
the world, but don't give them the entire Internet and
all the strangers and all the apps and all the addiction.
Don't do that until high school minimum. Second, no social
media until sixteen. They know exactly how to get your
kid's brain before the prefrontal cortex is developed, so don't
let them have your kid until at least sixteen. The
(22:29):
third is phone free schools, and this is just a must.
If your child is able to have their phone on them,
in their pocket or even their backpack, but especially pocket
during the day, it's very likely your child is not
being educated as well as they should. And this, I
think is one of the reasons that test scores were
going up for forty years until twenty twelve, and they've
been going down, not just in America but around the
(22:51):
world test scores going down. Kids can't pay attention to
class so much else is going on in their pocket.
And then the final norm is far more independence, free play,
and responsibility in the real world. We have to get
back to the understanding that our children are young mammals
who need to develop by engaging with the environment without supervision.
Now you know two, three, four years old, Yeah, you
(23:12):
need to supervise them because they'll do all kinds of
stupid things. But around the world, one thing I learn
from cultural psychology seven or eight is called the age
of social sense. That's the age in which many societies
give their kids like here, take the sheep down to
the river, let them drink and bring them back. You
can begin being responsible. So I think we need a
sort of a norm by age eight your kids should
have some kind of independence, maybe not wandering around town alone,
(23:35):
but like out playing with some friends without a parent
watching them. Because when the parents are watching what a
kids learn. They learn how to appeal to the adult
to punish the other kid, which is a skill for authoritarianism.
Whereas if kids have no rule maker above them, they
have to work out the conflicts they have to negotiate.
They have to adjudicate, they have to forgive, and those
(23:57):
are skills of democracy. So we have to give kids
back a childhood worth having. Those four norms. Parents can
roll back the vone based childhood.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
It would be easier if some hero could jump into
a Dolorean, travel back to the late nineties and stop
social media from devolving into a polarized miss and maybe
prevent tech designers from adding those front facing cameras. Sadly,
that's not going to happen, but that doesn't mean that
society is simply forced to accept the great rewiring. There's
still a lot parents can do to make things better.
(24:27):
To recap here are Jonathan's four suggestions. Delay smartphones until
at least age fourteen, hold off on social media until sixteen,
advocate for phone free schools, and give kids more freedom
and independence in the real world. But these solutions require widespread,
coordinated action, which means you might be asking what can
(24:47):
I do as a parent right now to support my
child in the face of such potentially harmful technology. After
the break, we'll speak to an expert who's thought carefully
about essential conversations you can have with your kids to
help them navigate the modern digital landscape. We'll hear how
parents can support kids' technology use while protecting their mental
health and fostering a sense of safety. The Happiness Lab
(25:10):
will be right back. If you've ever wondered whether it's
developmentally appropriate for your toddler to watch Coco Melon, or say,
for your team to play Call of Duty, you might
be familiar with the work of our next.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
Expert, someone names Jill Murphy. And I am the Chief
Content Officer at Common Sense Media, which really just means
I oversee all of our ratings and reviews.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Common Sense Media is an awesome nonprofit advocacy organization known
for their reviews of children's entertainment and TV shows. These days,
the organization also offers research backed guides for digital parenting.
These new guides have become essential resources for parents navigating
day to day technology questions for kids of all ages.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
When you think about younger children, so maybe you're distracted
by something, you hand over the phone and with the
lunch videos, and I think that right there, that handover
moment is at first introduction to you know, I just
need to distract my kids so I can get this
other thing done. But what it's become is a distraction
in their life, and we are just all distracted all
(26:20):
the time.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Jill believes the most important thing parents can do to
protect their kids is to have honest conversations about technology,
and Jill says it's best to start those conversations earlier
than you think, even with a baby or toddler who's
curious about what you're looking at on your screen.
Speaker 3 (26:36):
Narrate what you're doing. Actually let your kid know what
you're doing within this tiny screen so they have a
sense of what's going on because they have no idea.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
As children get older, Jill recommends creating a family media agreement.
Common Sense offers templates for these contracts on their website,
but the key is to simply start a dialogue. Whether
it's written down or not, it's.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
Really a conversation. When you hear the title, it sounds
a little idealistic, but I think what they can be
used for is really anything. Whether it's a kid is
ready to start going on YouTube, but I want to
say some boundaries and guidelines. It just guides you through
a conversation around how you can start laying out what
is and isn't okay. And then with older kids it
(27:18):
might be they're getting a phone, what's okay for them
to do? What isn't okay for them to do. It's
a little bit of a negotiation, a little bit of
a contract where they may say, and this is for
my own life, I want to have social media. Is
it okay if I go on maybe just for thirty minutes?
And then we say you can have this app, but
we're not going to get you on this app yet.
And so it's just a discussion around where your rules
(27:41):
are and holds everybody to a set of shared principles.
The challenge with that is it needs to be revisited often.
And I can speak from experience where we did it
when my older daughter got a thund My kids are
fifteen and twelve. Two girls live.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
In the dream in the night now, all at the
same time we did it when my older daughter got
a phone, and it was probably a good year before
we really revisited it.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Is something that we need to encourage families to revisit
quite regularly, almost like your quarterly goals, like what is
it and what needs to be adjusted? And then the
run chanelle of why is something getting adjusted? You know,
the underlying factor here is their development, What are they
ready for We use their age as a guide, but
it's not always a one size fits all.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
And so what wound up in your family media agreement?
Like what were some of the things that you have
to negotiate with your kids to that?
Speaker 3 (28:35):
Definitely social media. My older daughter got a phone when
she is going into middle school. Biggest regret of my life,
and my husband is always kind of like, shouldn't you
have known better? Sure, I should have known better. For
lots of reasons, we let her get a phone that
we were not letting her get on social media, so
that was the stop gap. It's just too much access.
(28:56):
And then that was really the big like aha moment
for me. I'd say about six to eight months in.
It's a computer, She's just online and she has access
to literally anything, even if it's a news story around
school shooting, Like do I want her really seeing that
right now without conversation from els? Does she need notifications
(29:17):
coming up in her day around what's going run in
the world. And parental controls was something that happened a
little bit later. I've always been a little like around
parental controls because it's it's a little bit of a
false promise. And there's a ton of videos online about
how to get around literally any any of the parental
(29:37):
controls that are out there, there is a hack to
get around them. More recently, we had started using a
parental control to just completely shut down the phone and
to just go to a dumb phone at certain times
of the day except for texting, Like she could text
on her phone, she could call on her phone, but
otherwise everything was turned off. So it's like during the
school day at night. And when I first started doing it,
(30:00):
my daughter was like what the heck, Like, why would
you do that? But after a couple of weeks of
doing this consistently, she started asking me to turn it
off at night. She was like, can you just turn
this off? Don't forget to turn it off, Like she
knows that it's not something that she can easily do
on her own, which is obviously the goal that I mean,
they'll struggle with that, and it just allows her to
(30:23):
focus in another place, in this case, on her sleep.
But even during the school day or like her homework time,
she knows like, Okay, it's going to go off between
three and six. So I just feel like it's really
helped her take back some of her time. There's something
about it that's provided her a little bit of like okay, good,
like a little relief from feeling like she has to
(30:45):
be on. And I think that because we've discussed it
so much, I love that she's kind of taken this
approach of like, Okay, I need it off, but I
might not have the self control at fifteen to do
it and stick with it.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
And you've talked about some of these essential conversations, some
of these elements that you might want to get in there,
and I know one of the big ones is this
idea of a digital footprint. What are the conversations that
you need to have about a child's digital footprint.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
I think kids are very quick to be like less
concerned about that sort of thing until probably high school
and they're thinking about college or jobs, really having them
understand the trail that they're leaving behind, that it's all findable,
the way that other kids are getting screenshot and screen
grab conversations and use that information or share it, whether
(31:34):
it's in a gossipy way or a dangerous way. And
then in addition to that, of course images that they're sharing,
personal information that they may be sharing, who they're actually
sharing it with and when they or not they know
that person. And the trick with that is when is
it okay to have that conversation. I think that that
Twain set is very quick to say, no, it's a kid,
(31:56):
I'm talking to this kid. They friended me on my
blocks or they friended me on discord. They're less inclined
to be skeptical that who they're talking to may actually
be somebody that is not what they say say. They
are so starting to lay all that groundwork, I think
early and often without a fearful approach, but just as
(32:18):
an awareness, just like don't cross the street until the
button says walk, and even when it does say walk,
look to your left to make sure no one's taking
a right turn, and make sure you have eye contact
with the drivers. And you know, there's a lot of
elements to consider before you go ahead and cross the street.
And I think we need to be thinking about that
(32:38):
multi pronged approach in conversation.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
We're doing this kind of boundary setting with our kids
anyway and other domains where they need to be safe
across the street. We kind of need to get to
them how to cross the digital street as yeah, yeah,
One of the things common says has noted that you
need to get across the digital street are conversations about
reality versus perception. And I think this specifically comes up
when it comes to social media.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
What do you mean by that, Well, I mean there's
this idea of perfection, right, and then it's talked a
lot about now with Instagram in particular, but what people
are putting out versus what's really going on, and that
comes down to, you know, embedded products in a video
that I kid not watch something and think that, oh,
just this girl that I watch and I love her,
(33:21):
and she's buying this product and she loves it, and
I want to have that product too, and explaining to
her what product placement is like and that she's paid
for this video and that isn't actually just her saying that,
and that's not necessarily her real life. She's not necessarily
getting ready in the morning and looking like that and
going somewhere. And then there's just this front that kids
(33:44):
are putting out there, teens are putting out there, and
we know that adults are putting out there as well.
Perfect house, perfect, whole video, perfect dorm room, perfect, whatever
it might be, and just projecting an image that doesn't
really portray real life, and it sets up a false aspiration.
And I think as adults, we also know once you're
in that vacuum, it's really hard to break out. And
(34:05):
I'm a fully developed adult, and so when our kids
kids aren't even developed in a place where they can
make that distinction between reality and fiction, we're just putting
them in front of so much information at one time.
How do they parse it and how does it help
shape their reality.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
I know there's a lot of parents out there wondering
what they need to be paying attention to to figure
out if their teen or their child might be struggled
with technology. What things do you suggest that parents look
out for.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
There is this slow drip of content and what kids
are being exposed to, and again, how that's kind of
shaping their reality and their self identity and self worth.
And if they feel that they can't measure up to
what they're watching or compete with it or compared to it.
And if you are predisposed, which I think is an
important element for parents to consider, is depression in my family,
(34:56):
is anxiety in my family? Have we dealt with other
mental illness in the family? That's an important factor to
take into consideration. My daughter is anxious, Do I really
want her to be put into a scenario where that
might be like heightened in some way? Do I want
to put her in a situation where it's heightened but
she's got the tools and knows how to calm herself.
(35:17):
Some of it's preparation, but I think some of it
is about you really have to have this knowledge of
your kid and what they how they interact and feel
and function in the world.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
And it seems like some of it is also including
your children in these conversations. One of the things that
comes since media recommends even in the case some of
these mental health concerns, is not for parents to be like, well,
I'm worried about anxiety provoking informations all just ban phones
or like put parental controls in. It really is about
empowering your kids to notice when they're going through that
stuff and to have conversations about what they can do
(35:49):
to do better.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Right, And I think we're having those conversations at ages
that we probably wouldn't expect to have them. And I
think a lot of parents are still feeling like I
don't need to worry about that until they're in high school,
no take an action. So what you're going to say
to your six or seven year old compared to what
you're going to say to your sixteen or seventeen year old,
it's going to be very different. But the subject of
mental health can be talked about at any age, at
(36:12):
any point. And you know, for your younger kids, it's
if you see that they might be acting out after
they have played a game, you know they have a
stronger reaction of playing that kind of game than they
do to just a board game. Those are the kinds
of things that you want to just keep an eye
on and not just wait and watch, but maybe after
once or twice, say what is it about this game?
(36:33):
Or can I play this game with you? Or can
I watch you play this game? You don't always have
to jump in with all the answers, which I have
to remind myself all the time. It's about kind of
observing and letting them process and letting them articulate that
to you what's going on, and then kind of layering in,
like I see that you're angry about this game, what
(36:54):
is it about it? It's really getting you? Maybe that's
when you might make decisions to Okay, he's really reacting
running strongly to this.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
I might need to learnit.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
How much time they're spending on a particular game if
they can't start to manage it a little bit or
balance it. And I think that parenting, we're doing that
with lots of stuff. Yeah, they can play that friend. Okay,
that friend's starting to be not the best friend. Maybe
we should pull that. Maybe we'll make a play yet
with this other friend. She's only eating fast food. We
need to balance that out with maybe some vegetables. We're
(37:24):
doing it all the time. It's the same when it
comes to digital media. It's just we don't have the insight.
It takes more work because again, they're behind this screen.
So that is one element that I think when we
decide to get phones and tablets, putting them in a
common area, making sure that we can see over their
shoulder what they're doing on the screen. We all have
(37:47):
to be a little bit more mindful when we hand
those devices over, whether it's theirs to own or just
to borrow ours for the moment, about what's going on
before during afterwards. There's a lot of considerations to think
about when we're making these decisions about what our kids'
mental well being is going to look like, and there's
(38:09):
so many outlying factors that we cannot control, but being
present and being available for them to come back to
and share some of that information is really essential as well.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
All this goes to say, if you want your kids
to be safe online, you need to talk to them
about new media and technology, and you need to start
earlier than you think. Consider making an official family media
agreement that can help foster the sort of dialogue you
need to return to regularly. Pay attention to how your
child reacts to different technologies, but don't just assume you
(38:40):
know how it's affecting them. Ask questions, listen closely, and
then adjust your approach as needed. None of these strategies
will fully roll back the phone based childhood that Jonathan
Hite talked about earlier, but if you can help your
child think critically about digital technology, you're well on your
way to fostering a bit more flourishing and happiness. Finally,
(39:00):
give yourself some self compassion as a parent helping to
raise the next generation in these changing technological times. Plus,
if you want more strategies, there's still time to check
out my free online course The Science of Well Being
for parents. To learn more, just head to doctor Laurisanto's
dot com slash parents. That's Dr Laisanto's dot com slash parents.
(39:23):
That concludes our series on Happier parenting, But dot to
worry is The Happiness Lab will be back soon. We'll
be shifting gears with a new series exploring creative coping
strategies for handling life's current baels. Think job loss, illnesses,
heartbreak tragedies. When times get really hard, we need creative
ways to cope, so we'll be looking at the weird
(39:44):
and wonderful ways people find relief and the science behind
why these strategies work. So be sure to come back
soon for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with
me Doctor Lauri Santo's