March 20, 2026 • 34 mins
Over the past decade,ratesofdepression and loneliness have surged among young people. Many researchers point to one major change: the rise of smartphones and social media. But what does the data actually show?
Psychologist Jean Twenge has spent years studying how technology shapes adolescent happiness. Dr. Laurie sits down with her to unpack new findings from the 2026 World Happiness Report on how social media use affects teen wellbeing around the world.
What happens when kids spend hours a day on these platforms? Is any amount of social media actually beneficial? And what can we all do to build healthier relationships with our phones, regardless of age?
Resources mentioned in this episode:
“What is the International Day of Happiness?”
“Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”
“National Trends in the Prevalence and Treatment of Depression in Adolescents and Young Adults”
“Pew Research Center Mobile Fact Sheet”
“The Effects of Social Media Restriction: Meta-Analytic Evidence from Randomized controlled Trials”
“Over 20,000 Educators Share Insights on School Cell Phone Policies”
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Hey Happiness Lab listeners, Happy International Day of Happiness.
The International Day of Happiness is a holiday established by
the United Nations as a global day of recognition about
the fundamental importance of human happiness, and on this day
each year, the United Nations and its partners release the
(00:37):
World Happiness Report, their annual snapshot of how happy people
are around the globe. The report is also famous for
ranking the happiest countries in the world, and this year
the happiest country is Finland for the ninth year in
a row, So congratulations to Finland and all its lucky inhabitants.
For a social science nerd like me, the World Happiness
(00:59):
Report is an absolute tree. It brings leading researchers around
the world together to dig into the political, social and
economic forces that shape our well being. Edition of the
World Happiness Report centers around a different theme, and this
year's theme feels especially relevant.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
If we're going to think about psychological well being and
happiness in the modern age, we have to look in
depth at technology.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
This is doctor Gen Twangie, one of the researchers behind
this year's World Happiness Report. Jane is an internationally celebrated
psychologist at San Diego State University. Her chapter looks at
how young people around the world use and respond to
social media. Gene is something of a rock star when
it comes to understanding teens and technology. In fact, she
(01:44):
was one of the first people to sell the alarm
on how smartphones might be damaging adolescent mental health.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
The article in The Atlantic was an excerpt of my
book Eejet, which came out in August twenty seventeen. It
was headlined have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
Speaker 1 (02:00):
As you can imagine, people had some very strong reactions
to this title.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
I always like to point out number one, it's a question,
and number two, I didn't write it because headlines are
written by editors, not by the authors, and they're supposed
to be clickbait. And it did its job.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
But the article itself was grounded in some pretty revolutionary data.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
It really came from what I was seeing in these
big national surveys of teens. All of a sudden, around
twenty twelve, more and more teens started to say that
they felt lonely, that they felt left out, that they
felt like they couldn't do anything right, that their lives
weren't useful, that they didn't enjoy life and those last
three year classic symptoms of depression.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
One of the things I find so harrowing about that
article reading it now, is that you had this sentence
that young people might be quote on the brink of
a mental health crisis. What has happened since that time?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I mean, if you follow that metaphor through, if they
were on the brink of a cliff, they fell off
the cliff.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
But what if our young people have fallen off the cliff?
Is there any way for them to climb back on top?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Well?
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Stay tuned because in this episode, Gina and I will
explore new data from around the world and how young
people today are using social media and what the latest
research shows about how all of us can build healthier
relationships with these platforms. The Happiness Lab will return right
after some quick messages from our sponsors. I was so
(03:34):
excited to hear that psychologist Gene Twangie was part of
the twenty twenty six World Happiness Report. Jean's been a
research hero of mine for a while, in large part
because she was one of the very first researchers to
call out the negative effects of smartphones on teen happiness.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
And then other folks started to notice as too. There
was an article on pediatrics about clinical level depression suddenly
going up around twenty twelve, that emergency room admissions for
self harm were going up, that suicide rate was going up.
So there was a lot of stuff going on with
that turning point around twenty twelve.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
And so what did you think was going on? At first?
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I had no clue. I mean, really, it was a mystery.
I just remember thinking, like, what's going wrong in the
lives of teens at that point? And you know, when
you work with big data sets that go over time,
when you have one year of data, you always have
to pause and go, Okay, this could be a blip.
I might go back to normal the next year. But
it didn't. So then I started thinking more broadly, well,
(04:33):
could it be the economy that's always kind of the
first place that you have to go. It was clearly
not the economy. Those of us who lived through the
Great Recession and know how bad that got. But it
was finally finally over by twenty twelve and things were
getting better in the US. Economy was a mystery. But
at the same time that I started to notice these trends,
I've been working on a few other projects with these
(04:54):
surveys and noticed that around that same turning point in
twenty twelve, teens also started to sleep less, and maybe
even more crucially, teens and young adults are spending less
time hanging out with their friends, going to parties, just
getting together with friends, and normally in socializing. All of
it was going down, and I thought about all of
(05:15):
those things. You know, we have depression going up, we
have less time with friends in person, less time sleeping.
What might possibly explain that? And then I saw a
few research had data on ownership of smartphones, and it
turns out that the ownership of smartphones among Americans passed
fifty percent around the end of twenty twelve, and that
(05:37):
started to coalesce into a theory that it was the
rise of smartphones, the rise of social media that might
explain these threads.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Did we know about the mechanisms how technology might be
affecting kids' mental health.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
I mean, I had that theory about displacing sleep and
displacing in person social interaction with friends, so that seemed
like one very clear mechanism, But we didn't know as much,
I think at the time about some of the other mechanisms.
Even back then, people were certainly talking about, Hey, there's
(06:12):
this competition for likes and followers, there's the body image
problems cropping up on Instagram, that people are behaving compulsively
when it comes to their phones and social media. We
didn't know all the ins and outs of that, but
teens knew. That's what I also think is really interesting
(06:33):
is when I first started to give talks on this
in twenty seventeen twenty eighteen, I was really afraid that
the teens in my audience would be like, you're old,
you don't know anything. This stuff is fine, we love it,
And that's not even close to what happened.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
It's so interesting in part because those were the early
days of some of these technologies. You know, that was
like old school Instagram, that wasn't like reels and all
this stuff that's right them and even more yeah, exactly,
so give the listeners a sense of just how bad
the statistics are these days.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Clinical level depression among teens doubled between twenty eleven and
twenty nineteen, before the pandemic was on the scene. That's
how big the problem already was. But it's pretty common
to see, especially for depression and anxiety. Heavy users of
social media usually somewhere between fifty percent and two hundred
percent more likely to some kind of criteria for clinically
(07:22):
significant depression or high depression.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
And so, now that you've been studying this connection for
so long, what are some of the new things that
we've learned.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
We just have a lot more data from a lot
more sources. Now, when I wrote Igen, there were really,
as far as I knew, only three experimental studies on
social media reduction or abstinence and then looking at outcomes.
Just in the last year, we've had several meta analyzes
come out because there's now so many social media reduction experiments.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
So these meta analyzes are big studies of studies where
not only do we have more experimental studies, you put
all the experimental studies together statistically and ask what's going.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
On exactly, So that the two most recent ones that
came out in twenty five both show is significant reduction
in depression and a significant increase in psychological well being,
so happiness, life satisfaction, those types of measures. When people
give up or cut back on social media, especially if
(08:20):
they do that for three weeks or more, what's interesting though,
is you can't exactly really ethically do kind of the
ideal experiment in this area, which would be to randomly
sign a bunch of twelve year olds to spend eight
hours a day on social media, not really ethical, and
even doing that with twenty two year olds would probably
not be ethical. So that's why most of the studies
(08:42):
have focused on kind of the opposite premise of giving
up or reducing social media. By definition, what those studies
are doing is taking people from the average use of
social media to light and this I think is an
opportunity for future research because that's not where the action
is in the correlational data, not even close. It's the
(09:02):
heavy users were really see high rates of depression and unhappiness.
So I'm hoping there'll be a study that will take
the heavy users and try to get them to cut back.
I mean, that might be a little bit of a challenge,
but I would expect you to see even bigger effects sizes. There.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Another thing I know you've talked a lot about is
this idea that we need better data when it comes
to cross cultural social media use, and that's where this
New World Happiness Report fits in. And so before you
started the World Happiness Report. What were some of the
open questions that you wanted to look at with this
new data set.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
So this is the piece of data set. PIEZA standsor
of the Program for International Student Assessment. Its primary purpose
is to look at academic performance in math, reading, and
science and it's a teenagers so it looks at fifteen
and sixteen year olds in countries around the world. So
we're between thirty and forty depending on what measures you're using.
(09:56):
And we know from international data sets including PISA, that
there's been an increase over the years and the number
of adolescents who say that they're lonely, and the number
of adolescents who say that they have psychological difficulties like anxiety.
But what hasn't been as present is those international data
(10:18):
sets asking about hours per day spent on social media
and then also having some other measure of mental health
or psychological well being. And so the twenty twenty two
administration of PISA does that.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
So you had the PISA data set from twenty twenty two,
what did you find?
Speaker 2 (10:37):
So for girls around the world, there's a significant link
between spending a lot of time on social media and
having lower life satisfaction. That was pretty universal across the
different regions. It was strongest in English speaking countries and
Western Europe. In Western Europe, for girls, heavy users were
(10:59):
sixty three percent more likely to report low life satisfaction
than light users. In Asia, they were forty six percent
more likely. Overall, you average across the world forty nine
percent more likely.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
So so far, the piece of data lines up with
the idea that very heavy social media use isn't great
for teen girls well being, and the report heavy use
meant spending about five hours or more a day on
social media. But when Jane looked beyond girls, the story
started to get a little more complicated.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
For boys, it was a little bit more of a
mixed picture. You do see a link, especially again in
the UK and Western Europe, that spending more time on
social media's link to lower life satisfaction, but that wasn't
universal In some regions. We don't see much of an
effect at all. For girls, it seems to have a
bigger impact on their happiness, their life satisfaction, their body image,
(11:50):
everything compared to boys.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
But the strangest results came from the boys who were
the heaviest users of social media. Think seven plus hours
a day on these platforms.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
There were some surprises in here, especially in the data
for boys. The heaviest users of social media also were
a little bit more likely to say that they had
the highest life satisfaction, So choosing a ten on the
zero to ten scale, that was a mystery that I'm
still trying to figure out. Danny Blanchflower, who's an economist
(12:22):
at Dartmouth, has worked with PISA. He noticed that, especially
for boys and especially in the non English speaking countries,
that those who were choosing a ten on life satisfaction
also had very low standardized test scores. Maybe there's a
reading comprehension problem, there's something going on there that I
(12:42):
don't know. We're still trying to figure out.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Another interesting thing you saw in the World Happiness Report data,
as I understand it is there was this little slight
bump in life satisfaction when teens were on social media
just a little bit. What was that about.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Yeah, So for girls, for examples where we really see
this pattern, and it's across most of the regions, those
who said that they used social media for less than
an hour a day had the highest mean life satisfaction.
It could be that yeah, if you're using social media
in that limited way, maybe you're just communicating with your
friends a little bit, seeing a couple funny videos, and
(13:15):
then getting off. But it's such an interesting pattern because
the mean life satisfaction is a little lower for the
non user's social media but at least for girls. We
also see in most regions that those who didn't use
social media at all were the most likely to have
that very high lighte satisfaction, choosing a ten on the
zero to ten scale.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
So to clarify, on average, the happiest girls were the
light users of social media, the ones spending less than
an hour a day on these platforms. But when Jane
looked at the teens reporting the very highest life satisfaction
that perfect ten out of ten, those tended to be
the girls who said they didn't use social media at all.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
So it's a little more complex than some of the
other studies on this topic across the world.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
The report showed that, minus a few puzzling exceptions, heavy
use of social media is really not great for young
people's well being, which means that if we really care
about teen happiness, we should find ways to limit their
time on these platforms to less than an.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Hour a day.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
But how on earth do you do that in a
world where these tools have become completely ubiquitous forms of
social connection and entertainment. We'll be back with Jane's answer
to that when the Happiness Lab returns from this quick break.
(14:42):
When psychologist Gene Twangy first began researching the connection between
social media and teen mental health, it was mostly an
academic question, but over time this issue has become much
more personal, both for her and for the three daughters
she's been raising. It's this family challenge that Jeane discusses
in her most recent book, Ten Rules for Raising Kids
(15:02):
in a High Tech World.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
So in twenty sixteen when I was working on that
research day or nine, six and four, and now they're nineteen,
sixteen and fourteen.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
So it seems like the adolescents you are studying have
turned into adolescents that are in your own life and
in your own home and who have their own technology
struggles in your house. Yeah, what's that been like?
Speaker 2 (15:24):
It's been interesting. I mean, pretty much everybody I know
who's a kid over the age of about five, and
many with toddlers too, are struggling with this. And I
think it becomes especially hard, you know, late elementary school,
when more kids start to get smartphones, when more kids
end up having school laptops, and then middle school hits,
(15:45):
and then the smartphone seems to become almost the norm,
and so does the school laptop, and the devices are multiplying,
and it just becomes really hard. So the collision of
my research life and my life as a mom trying
to figure out how to stem this tide and how
to make the best choices for my own family resulted
(16:06):
in the Ten Rules Book. I was frustrated because so
much of the advice that was out there, whether it
was online or in other books or other experts documented in interviews,
it was squishy, like what age should a child get
a smartphone? It was it depends. So I've been asked
that for ten years. When I first got asked that,
I'm like, d're in the headlights. I have no idea.
(16:28):
So I kind of went back to the it depends,
and then I realized at some point that's actually horrible advice.
Can you imagine having this discussion with your twelve year old?
But we'll do this when you're ready. We'll do this
when you're the most pitch they're gonna bug you every
minute of every day, try to convince you that they're
ready and they're mature and so on. You need a
draw line in the sand, like we do for alcohol
(16:51):
and driving and everything else. With teenagers. Let's choose an
age and run with it, because that's easier if you
do you like we ended up doing in my house.
You get your first smartphone with your driver's license, then
that's it. It's a line in the sand. It's done.
Conversations over why.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Is the driver's license there?
Speaker 2 (17:09):
So giving kids real world freedom, the ability to get
around on their own, which is another huge generational change
that kids and teens don't have as much independence as
they used to. High school seniors are a lot less
likely to have their driver's license now than they were
in the eighties, for example. And I like tying the
(17:30):
driver's license to the smartphone because you know, first smartphone
is a tool. It's useful when you start driving. I
like the Maps app is good to have that, but
it's also then it's not the choice that so many
teens have of well, I don't have that license, I
don't have a way to get around. I really want
to spend time with my friends. Mom and dad are busy.
(17:51):
They can't drive me, so let's just go on Snapchat.
So if the smartphones with the driver's license, then you
don't have that false choice. Then it's I can get
in that car and go do something with my friends.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
But also gets the kids who are a little reluctant
to get their driver's license getting their driver's license, which.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Is awesome exactly. And I know that because that's my
sixteen years I don't think she would be motivated to
get that license if it wasn't or it being tied
to the phone. So interesting in a big steady you
can modify that if it's at least sixteen and getting
around the city, you know, on public transportation. I live
out in the suburbs, so it's the driver's license here,
but in the middle of New York it would be different.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
And as you point out, as a society, we do
this for so many other things. When they're going to vote,
when can they join the military, when can they drive?
We have rules about this, and that's one of the
first things that you talk about in your book. Why
it's called ten Rules is that you argue that we.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Need rules, not just conversations and I always want to
say from the outset, we should have the conversations too.
I have a list of things you should talk to
your kid about in terms of you know, online safety
and everything else. But they're not enough. They're not enough
against the peer pressure, the billions of dollars at social
media companies apport into algorithms. It's just not enough. And
that's why it is helpful to have the rules to
(19:02):
try to do everything you can to keep them off
social media until they're at least sixteen, if not eighteen.
And that could be hard to do, but it is
easier if when you give them a phone, don't give
them an actual smartphone, give them a flip phone, or
give them well my kids have is a phone designed
for kids. I call them basic phones and calling it
(19:22):
a kid phone. Then they don't want to use it
even at ten. You know, oh, I don't want the
little kid phone. But those types of phones look like
an android phone, so they don't stand out as much.
They can still text their friends. So we have to
counter that narrative of like, if my kid doesn't have
a smartphone, or my kid doesn't have social media, they'll
be left out. I'm here to tell you it's not true.
Your kids can absolutely have friends and communicate with them
(19:45):
without social media, but there's generally in most of these
no internet browser, no social media, no gambling apps, no
dating apps, and no AI girlfriends and boyfriends. That last
one is the one that terrifies me the most these days,
is that if you hand your kid a smartphone with
no parental controls on it, there is nothing to stop
them from having their first romantic relationship romantic in quotes
(20:06):
with an AI chatbot.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Man, could you imagine if back in twenty sixteen, when
you were first looking at this, we knew that this
was like on the horizon, yet another thing to worry
about with our kids. It's incredible.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
It's just becoming increasingly common for teens to be wanting
to do AI sexy chat, or AI girlfriends, or even
just for platonic friendship. They're turning to them for advice
and companionship. And we already have a loneliness crisis. We
already have a lot of teens who are alone in
their bedrooms way too much and not getting together with
(20:41):
friends in person. So what is that going to do
to their friendships and their relationships when they've had these
early experiences with these psychophantic chatbots that always tell them
they're right, that never sleep, that don't have any of
their own needs. It's really scary. It just reinforces and
(21:01):
makes even more important the need for having some concrete rules.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
You know, you've talked about this idea that the adults
are in charge, which is your first choules, Why is
this so critical to remember?
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Look, you know, I think a lot of parents now
and I put myself in this category when we have kids.
We think it's kind of weird that we're the authority
figure now, even if you wait till you're older to
have kids, like I did, you know, Like, wait, am
I in charge? Now? What's going on with this? We
live in an individualistic society. We live in an era
when we have the idea that everybody is equal, but
(21:34):
you're the parent and you have to take on a
little bit of a different role, and that feels unnatural
to a lot of us. I think our own parents
said no, and they said no a lot. Sometimes they
didn't even have a good reason, and yet we seem
kind of afraid to do that, especially with technology.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Problem is, then, of course parents are disappointing their kids,
and we send the short term. But this is something
you point out in the book as well, and also
something that we talk a lot about in the Happiness Lab.
The point of parenting is to not raise kids, but
to raise adults. Tell me about the advice that you
got with your own kids and how this ended up
sticking with you so much.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
Yeah, at this point, I'm not sure I can even
remember who told me that, but it has stuck with
me ever since. It's such great advice that that is
your job to raise a successful adult. Your job is
not to make your kid happy at every single moment,
and that makes your job a little harder in some ways,
(22:28):
but even in kind of the short long term, it
can make your job easier because if you have those
roles and stick with them even when your kids are toddlers,
if you have said no and you have tried to
keep them safe not just in the real world but online,
and introduce technology later when they're more ready for it,
(22:49):
then they're less likely to have those mental health problems
and more likely to do all the other things we
need them to do, like sleep and spend time with
their friends in person, and exercise and maybe read a book.
Every once in a while and help them be more
successful adults.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
So one of the ways you do that as a
parent is to set rules about technology free zones. What
are some of these zones that you recommend? Which ones
are the most important?
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Well, the most important overall is no phones in the
bedroom overnight. It's just so important for people of all ages.
Tons of studies on this. People do not sleep as
well or as long if that phone is in the bedroom,
even if it's off, much less lighting up with notifications.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Around the holiday times. As a happiness expert, I'm often asked,
is there a particular gift we can give our kids
to make them the most happy? And I always say,
get them one of those old school alarm clocks, the
plastic kind underte happiness boosting gift.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Yes, my youngest who's fourteen, that actually was one of
her big Christmas gifts was a very fancy alarm clock
that lights up with sunlight and you can wake up
to different noises or there was one, and this was
especially great because we live in southern California. That went, dude, cude,
it's time to wake up.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
I love that. I think one of the most dastardly
things cell phone companies ever did was to put an
alarm clock in your phone, because then you think you
can have it when you're sleeping there. So far, we've
talked about what individual families can do to protect kids'
mental health. But when we get back from the break,
we'll zoom out. We'll look at what we should all
be doing as a society to deal with this challenge.
(24:31):
We'll also hear what even experts like Gene sometimes struggle
to follow their own advice when it comes to limiting technology.
The Happiness Lab, we'll be right back. One of the
(24:52):
most important places where experts are tackling kids growing dependence
on smartphones is in schools, where the battle for kids
attention is happening in real time. And the last year,
many districts across the country have begun experimenting with a
band on phones during the school day. But I asked
psychologists Gene Twangy do those bands actually make a.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Difference, So that research is still emerging. We really only
have a few good studies, but they tend to point
toward mental health benefits, especially for girls. And then academic
is where you get the biggest benefits of no phones
during the school day. Bell to bell, because then you
preserve the social time of lunch and passing periods for students.
(25:33):
It's actually easier to enforce if it's the blanket bell
de bell ban as opposed to classroom by classroom, the
teachers don't have to police it. There's also a bunch
of studies on high school and college students that even
expand that to say, hey, even laptops, tablets. These are
also a problem that when people take notes on paper
they get better grades, especially on comprehensive exams. It's that
(25:54):
deep understanding that seems to be compromised when people are
distracted by electronic devices, and we have to think about
this talking about the PISA data set, well, one of
the main things that's come out of the PISA data
set in the last couple of years is that test
scores are down the world, and those declines aren't just
due to the pandemic. They started around twenty twelve, just
(26:15):
like all of these other trends. Another project that I
did with the piece of data set was the twenty
twenty two you survey had a question asking students how
much time they spent using electronic devices for leisure purposes
on non educational purposes during the school day, and the
countries where the students were spending a lot of time
for leisure purposes on electronic devices during the school day
(26:36):
had a much more severe decline in those standardized test scores.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
I mean, especially being a professor at Yale, I always
get parents telling me, oh, what can my kids do
to boost their academic performance. It's like, fight and get
phones out of your schools. That's going to help significantly.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
The idea of no phones during the school day has
really gained traction in the last year or so, and
a lot of schools are having a lot of success
with that. They're seeing kids paying more attention in class,
they're talking at launch. They're finding, especially after the initial
adjustment period, actually fewer discipline issues because there's not the
draw I'm over social media and other things. So that's
(27:11):
really a good development.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
So that's the no phone zones. But sometimes when I
hear the retorts parents go to and they're like, no, no, no,
my kid needs a phone. One I often hear is like,
I have to give my kid a phone so I
can get in touch with them. There are fears that
parents have about, you know, school shootings and these awful things,
but they're.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Actually safe for without access to a phone in that situation.
School safety experts are pretty unanimous on that, because phones
get make noise and alert shooters to where people are hiding,
they can tie up bandwidth that is needed for police
and first responders. And if they contact their parents, which
like sounds comforting but isn't really going to help. In fact,
it's going to hurt because then parents are going to
(27:49):
rush to the school, and then the police and the
ambulances can't get through.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
You've also argued that you're just solving one problem, but
at the expense of lots of others. What do you
mean there?
Speaker 2 (27:58):
Yeah, and I think this is a dilemma a lot
of parents have faced. You know, there's this very strong
belief today that your kid has to have a phone
to be safe. It's more about the parents anxiety than
it is the kid's safety in many, many, many cases.
You know, admittedly there are practical reasons, especially once your
(28:19):
kid gets a little bit older and they're traveling around more,
that you might want to get in touch with them,
but you try to solve that problem by giving them
a smartphone. In many cases without any parntal controls on it,
and you create a problem that's going to be happening
eight hours a day, every day, which is that your
kid's going to be staring at that phone all the time.
Whether that's social media or texting or the internet or
(28:40):
games whatever, You're creating two hundred other problems. Part of
it is, you know, is a lot of people talk
about it's a collective action problem. I am hopeful about
there being more regulation and more laws, especially for minors,
around social media and AI chatbots. I don't know when
or if that'll happen in the US, but Australia took
(29:02):
that bold first step of doing that for social media,
making it sixteen and they have to verify age. So
I'm hoping that that will catch on that more and
more countries will do that, because I think that would
make an enormous difference for kids and for their parents.
If nobody fifteen and under was on social media.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
I'm guessing at least some parents might be listening right
now and thinking, oh crap, I already gave my thirteen
year old a phone. What do I do? What if
it's too late? What advice do you have for those parents?
Speaker 2 (29:27):
So I get that question a lot, and sometimes people
are resigned about it. They're like, oh, you can't put
the genie back in the bottle. Well, yeah you can.
You're the parent, you pay that bill. You absolutely can.
So when I get this question, I usually ask first,
you know how old a child are we talking about?
So we're talking about a fifteen year old, I'm like, okay, sure,
but put some pretty strict controls on it, like no
(29:49):
downloading apps, you can't use it for anything but calling
after nine pm or something like that. But if you're
talking about thirteen and under, take it back and give
them a basic phone and say I made a mistake,
and that's on me. I'm going to give you this
fun You're still going to be able to text your
friends on it if you want to have a couple games, maybe,
(30:09):
but they'll have a time limit and it's this phone
or nothing. Most kids will say, Okay, that's cool. I
want a phone where I can text my friends as
opposed to nothing.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
I also like this idea of just admitting as a
parent that you know you made a mistake. These tools
are new. You're trying to figure it out too, and
what your goal is is to do what's best for them,
what's safest for them.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
And you know the reaction is going to depend on
the kid. For some kids it might be volcanic, which
shows in many cases that there is kind of an
addiction problem here. If the reactions that extreme. It does happen,
but it will go away, it will extinguish. It's just
going to take a little time.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
And you're parenting for the future. You're parenting for the future.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah, for it, that's right, And that's what you got
to think about.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
I'm also curious. We've already talked a little bit about
the mechanisms that increase young people's prevalence of depression and
anxiety and things like that. Do those mechanisms stop, Like
are they just as bad for adults, people in midlife
and older too? Do?
Speaker 2 (31:03):
We know there's not quite as much data on older adults,
but there's a good amount. And those studies also show
that the more hours a day someone spending on social media,
or the more frequently they check social media, that the
more likely they are to be depressed and lonely.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
We've talked about all the strategies and the rules you
bring to your kids. Do adults need rules too? And
do you follow the rules all the time yourself?
Speaker 2 (31:26):
So I didn't have any social media at all until
right before my igen book came out in twenty seventeen, ironically,
because that's my book that talked about social media for
mental health, because I went to a meeting with my
publisher and the young social media and marketing manager said,
(31:47):
am I spelling your name wrong? Because it looks like
you don't have any social media? And I said, that's right.
I'm the last person or my generation who never had
a Facebook page. So yeah, I don't have any, and
I don't really want any. He's like, well, you probably
need to get something. Okay. At the time, this doesn't
as true anymore. But at the time, the platform that
(32:09):
was most used by academics and journalists. So I joined Twitter,
and yeah, it was Dickens. It was the best and worst.
I made some connections to that platform, was with other
academics that were really beneficial. But there was a lot
of really bad stuff, really bad stuff, and it is
now even more dumpster fire than ever. So I don't
(32:34):
spend a lot of time on it anymore. I do
go and look at it, and it is I've learned
a few things every once in a while, and I
still post occasionally. But I mean, there was a reason
why I chose not to have any social media to
begin with. I think I have an addictive personality. I'm
compulsive about certain things, and you know, at its height
when I was using it, maybe in twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen,
(32:56):
a little bit more, it became that and I did
not like that. But I'm sure they would have loved
it if I was putting up Instagram reels, and to them,
I probably should be doing that.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Should for the success of the book. But right there's
little hypocrisy there of.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
The absolutely absolutely so. I mean part of it is, Yeah,
with the topic, it would be somewhat ironic, but I'm
sure it would sell books. But would it be good
for my mental health to be making the video and
then worrying about how many views or likes it got, No,
it would not.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
If there's one takeaway from all this research is that
technology itself isn't the enemy. But in a world where
our phones are within reach twenty four to seven, the
limits we set around them do really matter. And that
applies whether we're a teen, an adult, or even a
researcher studying these questions directly. For more tips on how
to develop a healthier relationship with smartphones, check out Jean's
(33:49):
newest book, Ten Rules for Raising Kids in a High
Tech World. If you have thoughts about today's episode or
about the connection between social media and mental health, we'd
love to hear them. You can email us at Happiness
Lab at Pushkin dot fm, or leave us a review
and tell us what resonated. You can also sign up
to learn more about the science of happiness and join
(34:10):
my free newsletter on my website, Doctor Lauri Santos dot com.
That's d R l A U R I E S
A N t O s dot com. And if you're
curious to learn more about what's in this year's World
Happiness Report, then tune in next week because we'll be
speaking with world renowned legal scholar doctor Cas Sunstein about
his chapter and the report.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
People are trapped. They are kind of forced into a
situation where they're on social media, even though they would
be happier social media didn't exist.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
That's in the next episode of The Happiness Lab with
me Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin Hey Happiness Lab listeners, Happy International Day of Happiness.
The International Day of Happiness is a holiday established by
the United Nations as a global day of recognition about
the fundamental importance of human happiness, and on this day
each year, the United Nations and its partners release the
(00:37):
World Happiness Report, their annual snapshot of how happy people
are around the globe. The report is also famous for
ranking the happiest countries in the world, and this year
the happiest country is Finland for the ninth year in
a row, So congratulations to Finland and all its lucky inhabitants.
For a social science nerd like me, the World Happiness
(00:59):
Report is an absolute tree. It brings leading researchers around
the world together to dig into the political, social and
economic forces that shape our well being. Edition of the
World Happiness Report centers around a different theme, and this
year's theme feels especially relevant.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
If we're going to think about psychological well being and
happiness in the modern age, we have to look in
depth at technology.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
This is doctor Gen Twangie, one of the researchers behind
this year's World Happiness Report. Jane is an internationally celebrated
psychologist at San Diego State University. Her chapter looks at
how young people around the world use and respond to
social media. Gene is something of a rock star when
it comes to understanding teens and technology. In fact, she
(01:44):
was one of the first people to sell the alarm
on how smartphones might be damaging adolescent mental health.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
The article in The Atlantic was an excerpt of my
book Eejet, which came out in August twenty seventeen. It
was headlined have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
Speaker 1 (02:00):
As you can imagine, people had some very strong reactions
to this title.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
I always like to point out number one, it's a question,
and number two, I didn't write it because headlines are
written by editors, not by the authors, and they're supposed
to be clickbait. And it did its job.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
But the article itself was grounded in some pretty revolutionary data.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
It really came from what I was seeing in these
big national surveys of teens. All of a sudden, around
twenty twelve, more and more teens started to say that
they felt lonely, that they felt left out, that they
felt like they couldn't do anything right, that their lives
weren't useful, that they didn't enjoy life and those last
three year classic symptoms of depression.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
One of the things I find so harrowing about that
article reading it now, is that you had this sentence
that young people might be quote on the brink of
a mental health crisis. What has happened since that time?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I mean, if you follow that metaphor through, if they
were on the brink of a cliff, they fell off
the cliff.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
But what if our young people have fallen off the cliff?
Is there any way for them to climb back on top?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Well?
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Stay tuned because in this episode, Gina and I will
explore new data from around the world and how young
people today are using social media and what the latest
research shows about how all of us can build healthier
relationships with these platforms. The Happiness Lab will return right
after some quick messages from our sponsors. I was so
(03:34):
excited to hear that psychologist Gene Twangie was part of
the twenty twenty six World Happiness Report. Jean's been a
research hero of mine for a while, in large part
because she was one of the very first researchers to
call out the negative effects of smartphones on teen happiness.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
And then other folks started to notice as too. There
was an article on pediatrics about clinical level depression suddenly
going up around twenty twelve, that emergency room admissions for
self harm were going up, that suicide rate was going up.
So there was a lot of stuff going on with
that turning point around twenty twelve.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
And so what did you think was going on? At first?
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I had no clue. I mean, really, it was a mystery.
I just remember thinking, like, what's going wrong in the
lives of teens at that point? And you know, when
you work with big data sets that go over time,
when you have one year of data, you always have
to pause and go, Okay, this could be a blip.
I might go back to normal the next year. But
it didn't. So then I started thinking more broadly, well,
(04:33):
could it be the economy that's always kind of the
first place that you have to go. It was clearly
not the economy. Those of us who lived through the
Great Recession and know how bad that got. But it
was finally finally over by twenty twelve and things were
getting better in the US. Economy was a mystery. But
at the same time that I started to notice these trends,
I've been working on a few other projects with these
(04:54):
surveys and noticed that around that same turning point in
twenty twelve, teens also started to sleep less, and maybe
even more crucially, teens and young adults are spending less
time hanging out with their friends, going to parties, just
getting together with friends, and normally in socializing. All of
it was going down, and I thought about all of
(05:15):
those things. You know, we have depression going up, we
have less time with friends in person, less time sleeping.
What might possibly explain that? And then I saw a
few research had data on ownership of smartphones, and it
turns out that the ownership of smartphones among Americans passed
fifty percent around the end of twenty twelve, and that
(05:37):
started to coalesce into a theory that it was the
rise of smartphones, the rise of social media that might
explain these threads.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Did we know about the mechanisms how technology might be
affecting kids' mental health.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
I mean, I had that theory about displacing sleep and
displacing in person social interaction with friends, so that seemed
like one very clear mechanism, But we didn't know as much,
I think at the time about some of the other mechanisms.
Even back then, people were certainly talking about, Hey, there's
(06:12):
this competition for likes and followers, there's the body image
problems cropping up on Instagram, that people are behaving compulsively
when it comes to their phones and social media. We
didn't know all the ins and outs of that, but
teens knew. That's what I also think is really interesting
(06:33):
is when I first started to give talks on this
in twenty seventeen twenty eighteen, I was really afraid that
the teens in my audience would be like, you're old,
you don't know anything. This stuff is fine, we love it,
And that's not even close to what happened.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
It's so interesting in part because those were the early
days of some of these technologies. You know, that was
like old school Instagram, that wasn't like reels and all
this stuff that's right them and even more yeah, exactly,
so give the listeners a sense of just how bad
the statistics are these days.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Clinical level depression among teens doubled between twenty eleven and
twenty nineteen, before the pandemic was on the scene. That's
how big the problem already was. But it's pretty common
to see, especially for depression and anxiety. Heavy users of
social media usually somewhere between fifty percent and two hundred
percent more likely to some kind of criteria for clinically
(07:22):
significant depression or high depression.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
And so, now that you've been studying this connection for
so long, what are some of the new things that
we've learned.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
We just have a lot more data from a lot
more sources. Now, when I wrote Igen, there were really,
as far as I knew, only three experimental studies on
social media reduction or abstinence and then looking at outcomes.
Just in the last year, we've had several meta analyzes
come out because there's now so many social media reduction experiments.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
So these meta analyzes are big studies of studies where
not only do we have more experimental studies, you put
all the experimental studies together statistically and ask what's going.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
On exactly, So that the two most recent ones that
came out in twenty five both show is significant reduction
in depression and a significant increase in psychological well being,
so happiness, life satisfaction, those types of measures. When people
give up or cut back on social media, especially if
(08:20):
they do that for three weeks or more, what's interesting though,
is you can't exactly really ethically do kind of the
ideal experiment in this area, which would be to randomly
sign a bunch of twelve year olds to spend eight
hours a day on social media, not really ethical, and
even doing that with twenty two year olds would probably
not be ethical. So that's why most of the studies
(08:42):
have focused on kind of the opposite premise of giving
up or reducing social media. By definition, what those studies
are doing is taking people from the average use of
social media to light and this I think is an
opportunity for future research because that's not where the action
is in the correlational data, not even close. It's the
(09:02):
heavy users were really see high rates of depression and unhappiness.
So I'm hoping there'll be a study that will take
the heavy users and try to get them to cut back.
I mean, that might be a little bit of a challenge,
but I would expect you to see even bigger effects sizes. There.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Another thing I know you've talked a lot about is
this idea that we need better data when it comes
to cross cultural social media use, and that's where this
New World Happiness Report fits in. And so before you
started the World Happiness Report. What were some of the
open questions that you wanted to look at with this
new data set.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
So this is the piece of data set. PIEZA standsor
of the Program for International Student Assessment. Its primary purpose
is to look at academic performance in math, reading, and
science and it's a teenagers so it looks at fifteen
and sixteen year olds in countries around the world. So
we're between thirty and forty depending on what measures you're using.
(09:56):
And we know from international data sets including PISA, that
there's been an increase over the years and the number
of adolescents who say that they're lonely, and the number
of adolescents who say that they have psychological difficulties like anxiety.
But what hasn't been as present is those international data
(10:18):
sets asking about hours per day spent on social media
and then also having some other measure of mental health
or psychological well being. And so the twenty twenty two
administration of PISA does that.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
So you had the PISA data set from twenty twenty two,
what did you find?
Speaker 2 (10:37):
So for girls around the world, there's a significant link
between spending a lot of time on social media and
having lower life satisfaction. That was pretty universal across the
different regions. It was strongest in English speaking countries and
Western Europe. In Western Europe, for girls, heavy users were
(10:59):
sixty three percent more likely to report low life satisfaction
than light users. In Asia, they were forty six percent
more likely. Overall, you average across the world forty nine
percent more likely.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
So so far, the piece of data lines up with
the idea that very heavy social media use isn't great
for teen girls well being, and the report heavy use
meant spending about five hours or more a day on
social media. But when Jane looked beyond girls, the story
started to get a little more complicated.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
For boys, it was a little bit more of a
mixed picture. You do see a link, especially again in
the UK and Western Europe, that spending more time on
social media's link to lower life satisfaction, but that wasn't
universal In some regions. We don't see much of an
effect at all. For girls, it seems to have a
bigger impact on their happiness, their life satisfaction, their body image,
(11:50):
everything compared to boys.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
But the strangest results came from the boys who were
the heaviest users of social media. Think seven plus hours
a day on these platforms.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
There were some surprises in here, especially in the data
for boys. The heaviest users of social media also were
a little bit more likely to say that they had
the highest life satisfaction, So choosing a ten on the
zero to ten scale, that was a mystery that I'm
still trying to figure out. Danny Blanchflower, who's an economist
(12:22):
at Dartmouth, has worked with PISA. He noticed that, especially
for boys and especially in the non English speaking countries,
that those who were choosing a ten on life satisfaction
also had very low standardized test scores. Maybe there's a
reading comprehension problem, there's something going on there that I
(12:42):
don't know. We're still trying to figure out.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Another interesting thing you saw in the World Happiness Report data,
as I understand it is there was this little slight
bump in life satisfaction when teens were on social media
just a little bit. What was that about.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Yeah, So for girls, for examples where we really see
this pattern, and it's across most of the regions, those
who said that they used social media for less than
an hour a day had the highest mean life satisfaction.
It could be that yeah, if you're using social media
in that limited way, maybe you're just communicating with your
friends a little bit, seeing a couple funny videos, and
(13:15):
then getting off. But it's such an interesting pattern because
the mean life satisfaction is a little lower for the
non user's social media but at least for girls. We
also see in most regions that those who didn't use
social media at all were the most likely to have
that very high lighte satisfaction, choosing a ten on the
zero to ten scale.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
So to clarify, on average, the happiest girls were the
light users of social media, the ones spending less than
an hour a day on these platforms. But when Jane
looked at the teens reporting the very highest life satisfaction
that perfect ten out of ten, those tended to be
the girls who said they didn't use social media at all.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
So it's a little more complex than some of the
other studies on this topic across the world.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
The report showed that, minus a few puzzling exceptions, heavy
use of social media is really not great for young
people's well being, which means that if we really care
about teen happiness, we should find ways to limit their
time on these platforms to less than an.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Hour a day.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
But how on earth do you do that in a
world where these tools have become completely ubiquitous forms of
social connection and entertainment. We'll be back with Jane's answer
to that when the Happiness Lab returns from this quick break.
(14:42):
When psychologist Gene Twangy first began researching the connection between
social media and teen mental health, it was mostly an
academic question, but over time this issue has become much
more personal, both for her and for the three daughters
she's been raising. It's this family challenge that Jeane discusses
in her most recent book, Ten Rules for Raising Kids
(15:02):
in a High Tech World.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
So in twenty sixteen when I was working on that
research day or nine, six and four, and now they're nineteen,
sixteen and fourteen.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
So it seems like the adolescents you are studying have
turned into adolescents that are in your own life and
in your own home and who have their own technology
struggles in your house. Yeah, what's that been like?
Speaker 2 (15:24):
It's been interesting. I mean, pretty much everybody I know
who's a kid over the age of about five, and
many with toddlers too, are struggling with this. And I
think it becomes especially hard, you know, late elementary school,
when more kids start to get smartphones, when more kids
end up having school laptops, and then middle school hits,
(15:45):
and then the smartphone seems to become almost the norm,
and so does the school laptop, and the devices are multiplying,
and it just becomes really hard. So the collision of
my research life and my life as a mom trying
to figure out how to stem this tide and how
to make the best choices for my own family resulted
(16:06):
in the Ten Rules Book. I was frustrated because so
much of the advice that was out there, whether it
was online or in other books or other experts documented in interviews,
it was squishy, like what age should a child get
a smartphone? It was it depends. So I've been asked
that for ten years. When I first got asked that,
I'm like, d're in the headlights. I have no idea.
(16:28):
So I kind of went back to the it depends,
and then I realized at some point that's actually horrible advice.
Can you imagine having this discussion with your twelve year old?
But we'll do this when you're ready. We'll do this
when you're the most pitch they're gonna bug you every
minute of every day, try to convince you that they're
ready and they're mature and so on. You need a
draw line in the sand, like we do for alcohol
(16:51):
and driving and everything else. With teenagers. Let's choose an
age and run with it, because that's easier if you
do you like we ended up doing in my house.
You get your first smartphone with your driver's license, then
that's it. It's a line in the sand. It's done.
Conversations over why.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Is the driver's license there?
Speaker 2 (17:09):
So giving kids real world freedom, the ability to get
around on their own, which is another huge generational change
that kids and teens don't have as much independence as
they used to. High school seniors are a lot less
likely to have their driver's license now than they were
in the eighties, for example. And I like tying the
(17:30):
driver's license to the smartphone because you know, first smartphone
is a tool. It's useful when you start driving. I
like the Maps app is good to have that, but
it's also then it's not the choice that so many
teens have of well, I don't have that license, I
don't have a way to get around. I really want
to spend time with my friends. Mom and dad are busy.
(17:51):
They can't drive me, so let's just go on Snapchat.
So if the smartphones with the driver's license, then you
don't have that false choice. Then it's I can get
in that car and go do something with my friends.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
But also gets the kids who are a little reluctant
to get their driver's license getting their driver's license, which.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Is awesome exactly. And I know that because that's my
sixteen years I don't think she would be motivated to
get that license if it wasn't or it being tied
to the phone. So interesting in a big steady you
can modify that if it's at least sixteen and getting
around the city, you know, on public transportation. I live
out in the suburbs, so it's the driver's license here,
but in the middle of New York it would be different.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
And as you point out, as a society, we do
this for so many other things. When they're going to vote,
when can they join the military, when can they drive?
We have rules about this, and that's one of the
first things that you talk about in your book. Why
it's called ten Rules is that you argue that we.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Need rules, not just conversations and I always want to
say from the outset, we should have the conversations too.
I have a list of things you should talk to
your kid about in terms of you know, online safety
and everything else. But they're not enough. They're not enough
against the peer pressure, the billions of dollars at social
media companies apport into algorithms. It's just not enough. And
that's why it is helpful to have the rules to
(19:02):
try to do everything you can to keep them off
social media until they're at least sixteen, if not eighteen.
And that could be hard to do, but it is
easier if when you give them a phone, don't give
them an actual smartphone, give them a flip phone, or
give them well my kids have is a phone designed
for kids. I call them basic phones and calling it
(19:22):
a kid phone. Then they don't want to use it
even at ten. You know, oh, I don't want the
little kid phone. But those types of phones look like
an android phone, so they don't stand out as much.
They can still text their friends. So we have to
counter that narrative of like, if my kid doesn't have
a smartphone, or my kid doesn't have social media, they'll
be left out. I'm here to tell you it's not true.
Your kids can absolutely have friends and communicate with them
(19:45):
without social media, but there's generally in most of these
no internet browser, no social media, no gambling apps, no
dating apps, and no AI girlfriends and boyfriends. That last
one is the one that terrifies me the most these days,
is that if you hand your kid a smartphone with
no parental controls on it, there is nothing to stop
them from having their first romantic relationship romantic in quotes
(20:06):
with an AI chatbot.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Man, could you imagine if back in twenty sixteen, when
you were first looking at this, we knew that this
was like on the horizon, yet another thing to worry
about with our kids. It's incredible.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
It's just becoming increasingly common for teens to be wanting
to do AI sexy chat, or AI girlfriends, or even
just for platonic friendship. They're turning to them for advice
and companionship. And we already have a loneliness crisis. We
already have a lot of teens who are alone in
their bedrooms way too much and not getting together with
(20:41):
friends in person. So what is that going to do
to their friendships and their relationships when they've had these
early experiences with these psychophantic chatbots that always tell them
they're right, that never sleep, that don't have any of
their own needs. It's really scary. It just reinforces and
(21:01):
makes even more important the need for having some concrete rules.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
You know, you've talked about this idea that the adults
are in charge, which is your first choules, Why is
this so critical to remember?
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Look, you know, I think a lot of parents now
and I put myself in this category when we have kids.
We think it's kind of weird that we're the authority
figure now, even if you wait till you're older to
have kids, like I did, you know, Like, wait, am
I in charge? Now? What's going on with this? We
live in an individualistic society. We live in an era
when we have the idea that everybody is equal, but
(21:34):
you're the parent and you have to take on a
little bit of a different role, and that feels unnatural
to a lot of us. I think our own parents
said no, and they said no a lot. Sometimes they
didn't even have a good reason, and yet we seem
kind of afraid to do that, especially with technology.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Problem is, then, of course parents are disappointing their kids,
and we send the short term. But this is something
you point out in the book as well, and also
something that we talk a lot about in the Happiness Lab.
The point of parenting is to not raise kids, but
to raise adults. Tell me about the advice that you
got with your own kids and how this ended up
sticking with you so much.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
Yeah, at this point, I'm not sure I can even
remember who told me that, but it has stuck with
me ever since. It's such great advice that that is
your job to raise a successful adult. Your job is
not to make your kid happy at every single moment,
and that makes your job a little harder in some ways,
(22:28):
but even in kind of the short long term, it
can make your job easier because if you have those
roles and stick with them even when your kids are toddlers,
if you have said no and you have tried to
keep them safe not just in the real world but online,
and introduce technology later when they're more ready for it,
(22:49):
then they're less likely to have those mental health problems
and more likely to do all the other things we
need them to do, like sleep and spend time with
their friends in person, and exercise and maybe read a book.
Every once in a while and help them be more
successful adults.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
So one of the ways you do that as a
parent is to set rules about technology free zones. What
are some of these zones that you recommend? Which ones
are the most important?
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Well, the most important overall is no phones in the
bedroom overnight. It's just so important for people of all ages.
Tons of studies on this. People do not sleep as
well or as long if that phone is in the bedroom,
even if it's off, much less lighting up with notifications.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Around the holiday times. As a happiness expert, I'm often asked,
is there a particular gift we can give our kids
to make them the most happy? And I always say,
get them one of those old school alarm clocks, the
plastic kind underte happiness boosting gift.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Yes, my youngest who's fourteen, that actually was one of
her big Christmas gifts was a very fancy alarm clock
that lights up with sunlight and you can wake up
to different noises or there was one, and this was
especially great because we live in southern California. That went, dude, cude,
it's time to wake up.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
I love that. I think one of the most dastardly
things cell phone companies ever did was to put an
alarm clock in your phone, because then you think you
can have it when you're sleeping there. So far, we've
talked about what individual families can do to protect kids'
mental health. But when we get back from the break,
we'll zoom out. We'll look at what we should all
be doing as a society to deal with this challenge.
(24:31):
We'll also hear what even experts like Gene sometimes struggle
to follow their own advice when it comes to limiting technology.
The Happiness Lab, we'll be right back. One of the
(24:52):
most important places where experts are tackling kids growing dependence
on smartphones is in schools, where the battle for kids
attention is happening in real time. And the last year,
many districts across the country have begun experimenting with a
band on phones during the school day. But I asked
psychologists Gene Twangy do those bands actually make a.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Difference, So that research is still emerging. We really only
have a few good studies, but they tend to point
toward mental health benefits, especially for girls. And then academic
is where you get the biggest benefits of no phones
during the school day. Bell to bell, because then you
preserve the social time of lunch and passing periods for students.
(25:33):
It's actually easier to enforce if it's the blanket bell
de bell ban as opposed to classroom by classroom, the
teachers don't have to police it. There's also a bunch
of studies on high school and college students that even
expand that to say, hey, even laptops, tablets. These are
also a problem that when people take notes on paper
they get better grades, especially on comprehensive exams. It's that
(25:54):
deep understanding that seems to be compromised when people are
distracted by electronic devices, and we have to think about
this talking about the PISA data set, well, one of
the main things that's come out of the PISA data
set in the last couple of years is that test
scores are down the world, and those declines aren't just
due to the pandemic. They started around twenty twelve, just
(26:15):
like all of these other trends. Another project that I
did with the piece of data set was the twenty
twenty two you survey had a question asking students how
much time they spent using electronic devices for leisure purposes
on non educational purposes during the school day, and the
countries where the students were spending a lot of time
for leisure purposes on electronic devices during the school day
(26:36):
had a much more severe decline in those standardized test scores.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
I mean, especially being a professor at Yale, I always
get parents telling me, oh, what can my kids do
to boost their academic performance. It's like, fight and get
phones out of your schools. That's going to help significantly.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
The idea of no phones during the school day has
really gained traction in the last year or so, and
a lot of schools are having a lot of success
with that. They're seeing kids paying more attention in class,
they're talking at launch. They're finding, especially after the initial
adjustment period, actually fewer discipline issues because there's not the
draw I'm over social media and other things. So that's
(27:11):
really a good development.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
So that's the no phone zones. But sometimes when I
hear the retorts parents go to and they're like, no, no, no,
my kid needs a phone. One I often hear is like,
I have to give my kid a phone so I
can get in touch with them. There are fears that
parents have about, you know, school shootings and these awful things,
but they're.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Actually safe for without access to a phone in that situation.
School safety experts are pretty unanimous on that, because phones
get make noise and alert shooters to where people are hiding,
they can tie up bandwidth that is needed for police
and first responders. And if they contact their parents, which
like sounds comforting but isn't really going to help. In fact,
it's going to hurt because then parents are going to
(27:49):
rush to the school, and then the police and the
ambulances can't get through.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
You've also argued that you're just solving one problem, but
at the expense of lots of others. What do you
mean there?
Speaker 2 (27:58):
Yeah, and I think this is a dilemma a lot
of parents have faced. You know, there's this very strong
belief today that your kid has to have a phone
to be safe. It's more about the parents anxiety than
it is the kid's safety in many, many, many cases.
You know, admittedly there are practical reasons, especially once your
(28:19):
kid gets a little bit older and they're traveling around more,
that you might want to get in touch with them,
but you try to solve that problem by giving them
a smartphone. In many cases without any parntal controls on it,
and you create a problem that's going to be happening
eight hours a day, every day, which is that your
kid's going to be staring at that phone all the time.
Whether that's social media or texting or the internet or
(28:40):
games whatever, You're creating two hundred other problems. Part of
it is, you know, is a lot of people talk
about it's a collective action problem. I am hopeful about
there being more regulation and more laws, especially for minors,
around social media and AI chatbots. I don't know when
or if that'll happen in the US, but Australia took
(29:02):
that bold first step of doing that for social media,
making it sixteen and they have to verify age. So
I'm hoping that that will catch on that more and
more countries will do that, because I think that would
make an enormous difference for kids and for their parents.
If nobody fifteen and under was on social media.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
I'm guessing at least some parents might be listening right
now and thinking, oh crap, I already gave my thirteen
year old a phone. What do I do? What if
it's too late? What advice do you have for those parents?
Speaker 2 (29:27):
So I get that question a lot, and sometimes people
are resigned about it. They're like, oh, you can't put
the genie back in the bottle. Well, yeah you can.
You're the parent, you pay that bill. You absolutely can.
So when I get this question, I usually ask first,
you know how old a child are we talking about?
So we're talking about a fifteen year old, I'm like, okay, sure,
but put some pretty strict controls on it, like no
(29:49):
downloading apps, you can't use it for anything but calling
after nine pm or something like that. But if you're
talking about thirteen and under, take it back and give
them a basic phone and say I made a mistake,
and that's on me. I'm going to give you this
fun You're still going to be able to text your
friends on it if you want to have a couple games, maybe,
(30:09):
but they'll have a time limit and it's this phone
or nothing. Most kids will say, Okay, that's cool. I
want a phone where I can text my friends as
opposed to nothing.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
I also like this idea of just admitting as a
parent that you know you made a mistake. These tools
are new. You're trying to figure it out too, and
what your goal is is to do what's best for them,
what's safest for them.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
And you know the reaction is going to depend on
the kid. For some kids it might be volcanic, which
shows in many cases that there is kind of an
addiction problem here. If the reactions that extreme. It does happen,
but it will go away, it will extinguish. It's just
going to take a little time.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
And you're parenting for the future. You're parenting for the future.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah, for it, that's right, And that's what you got
to think about.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
I'm also curious. We've already talked a little bit about
the mechanisms that increase young people's prevalence of depression and
anxiety and things like that. Do those mechanisms stop, Like
are they just as bad for adults, people in midlife
and older too? Do?
Speaker 2 (31:03):
We know there's not quite as much data on older adults,
but there's a good amount. And those studies also show
that the more hours a day someone spending on social media,
or the more frequently they check social media, that the
more likely they are to be depressed and lonely.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
We've talked about all the strategies and the rules you
bring to your kids. Do adults need rules too? And
do you follow the rules all the time yourself?
Speaker 2 (31:26):
So I didn't have any social media at all until
right before my igen book came out in twenty seventeen, ironically,
because that's my book that talked about social media for
mental health, because I went to a meeting with my
publisher and the young social media and marketing manager said,
(31:47):
am I spelling your name wrong? Because it looks like
you don't have any social media? And I said, that's right.
I'm the last person or my generation who never had
a Facebook page. So yeah, I don't have any, and
I don't really want any. He's like, well, you probably
need to get something. Okay. At the time, this doesn't
as true anymore. But at the time, the platform that
(32:09):
was most used by academics and journalists. So I joined Twitter,
and yeah, it was Dickens. It was the best and worst.
I made some connections to that platform, was with other
academics that were really beneficial. But there was a lot
of really bad stuff, really bad stuff, and it is
now even more dumpster fire than ever. So I don't
(32:34):
spend a lot of time on it anymore. I do
go and look at it, and it is I've learned
a few things every once in a while, and I
still post occasionally. But I mean, there was a reason
why I chose not to have any social media to
begin with. I think I have an addictive personality. I'm
compulsive about certain things, and you know, at its height
when I was using it, maybe in twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen,
(32:56):
a little bit more, it became that and I did
not like that. But I'm sure they would have loved
it if I was putting up Instagram reels, and to them,
I probably should be doing that.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Should for the success of the book. But right there's
little hypocrisy there of.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
The absolutely absolutely so. I mean part of it is, Yeah,
with the topic, it would be somewhat ironic, but I'm
sure it would sell books. But would it be good
for my mental health to be making the video and
then worrying about how many views or likes it got, No,
it would not.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
If there's one takeaway from all this research is that
technology itself isn't the enemy. But in a world where
our phones are within reach twenty four to seven, the
limits we set around them do really matter. And that
applies whether we're a teen, an adult, or even a
researcher studying these questions directly. For more tips on how
to develop a healthier relationship with smartphones, check out Jean's
(33:49):
newest book, Ten Rules for Raising Kids in a High
Tech World. If you have thoughts about today's episode or
about the connection between social media and mental health, we'd
love to hear them. You can email us at Happiness
Lab at Pushkin dot fm, or leave us a review
and tell us what resonated. You can also sign up
to learn more about the science of happiness and join
(34:10):
my free newsletter on my website, Doctor Lauri Santos dot com.
That's d R l A U R I E S
A N t O s dot com. And if you're
curious to learn more about what's in this year's World
Happiness Report, then tune in next week because we'll be
speaking with world renowned legal scholar doctor Cas Sunstein about
his chapter and the report.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
People are trapped. They are kind of forced into a
situation where they're on social media, even though they would
be happier social media didn't exist.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
That's in the next episode of The Happiness Lab with
me Doctor Laurie Santos
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