October 1, 2024 • 16 mins
Justin shares four big ideas based on Jonathan Haidt's new book in the hope that it generates some constructive conversations with your kids at home:
- The key to building a resilient child,
- Getting comfy with our children experiencing a healthy level of discomfort in life,
- The impact of social media on the brain development of teens, and
- Looking at problematic use of or addiction to social media.
(R) This episode originally aired 01/5/24.
In this episode:
- Healthy/unhealthy childhood stressors
- Supportive parenting vs "tough love" or over-protective parenting
- Resilience
- Anxiety
- The cycle of incompetence
- Anti-fragility
- Impact of social media on teenage brain development
- Social media addiction / problematic use
Links:
- After Babel | Jon Haidt | Substack
- The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
- Honestly with Bari Weiss: Smartphones Rewired Childhood. Here's How to Fix It
Leave a voice memo here or email your questions/comments to podcasts@happyfamilies.com.au
Find out more about joining THE QUEST at our website
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
It's The Happy Family's Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
It's the podcast for the time poor parent who just
once answers me ow.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Hello, Welcome to the Happy Family's Podcast. My name is
doctor Justin Colson. Every Wednesday we bring you an interview
with somebody who knows stuff that you need to know
so that you can make your family happier. Today, an
interview with an author, in fact, the world's leading most
recognized academic thinker. I would have loved to have had
him with me to have this conversation, but some people
are just a bit too hard to get a hold of.
(00:35):
And so what I've done today is lent heavily on
a podcast interview that Professor Jonathan Hate from New York
University had with Barry Weiss on The Honesty Podcast. I'm
going to just share a couple of quick snippets of
what he had to say, share a few of my
own ideas around that as well, and hopefully have a
really constructive conversation that sounds like an interview based on
(00:57):
his brand new book, The Anxious Generation. So let me
tell you a bit about who Jonathan Hate is. Many
years ago I read one of his first books. I
think it might have even been his first book, it
was called The Happiness Hypothesis. It remains to this day
my favorite book about well being and happiness. The guy
is just a phenomenal thinker and such a clear communicator.
(01:18):
You might also have heard of Jonathan Height in his
book The Righteous Mind or The Coddling of the American Mind.
The new book is called The Anxious Generation. I've pre
ordered mine. The book has now come out. I still
haven't received my pre ordered one. That's one of the
disadvantages sometimes when you do a preorder, you missed out.
But Professor Hyde has been absolutely blitzing podcasts and media
(01:41):
writer around the world and has reached so many people.
He also has a free sub stack called after Babel.
You can subscribe and support the work that he does.
I recommend it. It's absolutely brilliant. So let's get onto
the conversation that he had with Barry Weiss of the
Honestly podcast. Honestly with Barry Weiss, part of the Free Press.
This is what he had to say when Barry Wisse
(02:02):
asked him, Jonathan, where is the anxiety with this Anxious
Generation coming from?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
It's all the little small stuff that was unpleasant as
a child, so it's being excluded. It's vital that kids
be excluded. Can you imagine? So, I'm sorry, your daughter
is what howled douth two? Three? Yeah, she's less than two. Yeah,
we're not at the excluding mean girls phase yet. Okay,
but Barry, so supposed we'll get there. That's right, you will.
(02:30):
And so given that she's going to get there, if
I gave you the option, I said, if you sign
this deal, I can guarantee you that she will never
face exclusion before her eighteenth birthday. Would you sign it? No? Right,
because we know intuitively that they have to experience it
otherwise it's going to be devastating when they're eighteen. And
(02:50):
it's the same thing for let's say losing. It's very
important that children lose a lot in competitive games. Now.
I remember when my kids were young. It was very
painful for them to lose. They sometimes upset, but after
a while then they just you know, then they get
used to it. And now you can have a lot
more fun because they know, you know, we're going to
play twenty games and I'm going to lose a bunch
of them and win a bunch of them. So winning
(03:10):
and losing being excluded certainly, you know, falling down and
getting hurt, and then getting hurt when there's no adult around,
so you know, like I remember crashing on my basicle
and you have to kind of limp home and maybe
the peddle is bent, but you get home and then
you realize, oh, I can do that, I can get home.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
I really love this conversation. The idea that there are
healthy stresses in the environment. Now, we've got pretty good
research that shows that if we experience way too much
stress at a developmentally inappropriate age or just in an
inappropriate way, that stress can lead to negative outcomes. But
that's not what he's talking about here. And what people
like me and obviously Jonathan Hyde and many others who
(03:48):
do this kind of work have seen is it increasingly,
as we invest more and more into our children, that
parental investment is very much oriented towards protecting our children
from these stresses, the kind of stresses that build resilience
and reduce anxiety. In fact, not in that part of
the interview, but certainly in research that I've read, there
(04:10):
is good data that shows that when our children are
exposed to appropriate, developmentally appropriate and healthy stresses, they do
better they're less likely to experience anxiety disorders, they're more
likely to thrive. There's a metaphor and analogy that I
use when I'm giving my presentations on resilience in schools
and in organizations, and I use the idea of a
(04:32):
balance beam. So when your children are walking through life, metaphorically,
they're walking across a balance beam. Some parents, when they
see their child start to overbalance, maybe lean a little
too far to the left or right, they kind of
stand back and say, well, you're going to figure this out, kiddo,
And sometimes their kids fall and they hit the ground.
The difficulty with that, I'm going to call it the
(04:52):
tough enouugh princess approach to building resilience is research shows
that doesn't work. Sometimes that fall is too far, developmentally inappropriate,
too hard, And it's so important that as parents were
discerning enough to recognize that it's not going to be
in our kid's best interest to keep on falling off
the balance beam of life. Don't see that happening as
much as it used to. What I see happening a
(05:14):
lot more now is that parents will get up onto
the balance beam with their kids and carry them across.
But you cannot carry your kids through life, and that's
why it's just so important. In fact, that creates something
called the cycle of in confidence, which we're going to
talk about in just a sec What I encourage parents
to do is to walk alongside their children as they're
up on that beam, and as their child starts to overbalance,
(05:36):
it's completely appropriate to put your hand up on their leg,
on their thigh and say, hey, just lean on me
for a second while you regain your bearings, regain your balance,
Let's work out how you can take the next step
on your own. Then you take your hand away, and
your kids take those steps on their own with a supportive, loving,
compassionate adult beside them. All the very best work on
(05:56):
resilience shows that the kids who are most resilient the
ones who have at least one significant supportive adult in
their lives. But those adults don't do the work for them.
They also just make sure that they don't fall and crash,
or if they do that it's not too hard that
there's something supporting that landing. I think it's so important
if we want to move away from raising an anxious generation,
(06:18):
that we get the balance ride. If you're pardon the pun. Now.
The second highlight from the conversation that Jonathan Hight had
with the Honestly Podcast and Barry Weiss related to a
concept called anti fragility. There's a book called Anti Fragile.
It's on my bookshelf. It's by Nasim Nicholas Taylor, and
the idea of anti fragile goes like this. We often
(06:40):
think that the opposite of resilience is fragility, but that's
not entirely true. See resilience, if we look at it
from an engineering perspective, you build a resilient house, a
resilient bridge, a resilience stadium or road. And what that
means is that when the traffic or the weight, or
the rain or the floods or whatever it is, when
(07:02):
those things hit it, it stays firm. Fragile means that
when adversity strikes you break down. Now, staying firm is
not the opposite of breaking down. Getting stronger is the
opposite of breaking down. But we don't have a word
for it in English, and so tailored Nasim Taylor calls
it anti fragility, being anti fragile, And that's what this
second clip is all about. How we help our kids
(07:23):
to be anti fragile.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
So because we came to see our children as vulnerable
or fragile rather than anti fragile. If you see your
because it's anti fragile, say go out and play. And
if they say you know, it's called that you said,
you know, tough it out, or you know, if they
fall and say you know, you're okay, go back. So
that's what you would do if you think kids are
anti fragile. But if you think kids are fragile, you're
going to never leave them in supervise, which means they
never learn to work things out for themselves, and you're
(07:46):
going to swoop in at this first sign of trouble.
And so what happens if you assume that they're incompetent
and fragile, then they don't have the experience that would
make them competent and non fragile. So you're actually making
them incompetent and fragile. And then you look at these competent,
fragile fifth graders and then you say, well, how can
we trust you? You know, I can't let you, I can
let you walk to the store. What if you get lost?
(08:07):
It's a sacred it's a vicious sacle and so that's
what we have to break.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
So I really love a handful of elements in here.
One of the central things that I'd highlight is what
we've got is one of the world's leading thinkers saying
a little bit of tough love is okay for your kids. Now,
this isn't any kind of neglectful or abusive or aggressive
tough love. Rather, it's acknowledging that the everyday bumps and
scrapes of life can be gotten over by our children,
(08:32):
and we shouldn't make too big a deal of them.
The more we make their emotions king, and the more
we make their discomfort a problem that needs to be fixed,
the less anti fragile, the more fragile they become, and
the more we perpetuate that cycle of incompetence. We need
to get comfortable with our kids being uncomfortable in an understanding, appropriate, caring,
(08:56):
compassionate way. But we still need to say, and I
do this all the time, when my kids and they've
hurt themselves, I'll say, oh, kiddo, that looks like it
really hurt. Come and give me a hug. I'll give
them a hug, and then I'll say all right off
you go. It looks like you'll be okay now, so
they can still be that kindness and that warmth, that nurture,
that relatedness, the mattering and belonging. That's all part of it.
But ultimately we're saying, I have faith in your ability
(09:16):
to figure this out and to move ahead with it.
As we encourage our kids to become more competent, they
get out of that cycle. But we need to understand
why we are uncomfortable. What is it in us that's
causing us to be so uncomfortable with our children experiencing hardship, difficulty, challenge.
(09:37):
As we get comfortable with them having that difficulty and
having that growth, they're much more likely to figure this out.
In just a second, we're going to talk about how
the adolescent brain changes during the teen years and the
impact of social media on those changes. It's the Happy
Famili's podcasts. It's the Happy Families Podcast with me doctor
(10:05):
Justin Coulson, and some snippets from an interview with Professor
Jonathan Hyte from New York University, the author of The
Anxious Generation, talking with the Free Presses Barry Weiss on
The Honestly with Barry Weiss podcast. Everybody knows that the
adolescent brain changes so much during those teen years, but
what's the impact of social media on those changes. Jonathan
(10:29):
Hate explains this to Barry Weiss in the Honestly podcast.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
The brain grows very quickly in the first few years
of life, and then it actually slows down a lot,
and from then on it's not so much growth. It's
more it's rewiring. It's neurons connecting, its synapses forming, it's
neurons feeding away, you know, if they're not used. So
there's a lot of rewiring going on, and that speeds
up during puberty. There was especially early puberty around each
eleven or twelve to around fifteen sixty, and there's a
(10:57):
huge amount of change as the brain basically, you know,
sort of like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. You
have the young form of a human brain kind of rewires.
Now that it's learned culture, it sort of rewires to
lock down into the format of an American or a
suite or whatever. And this is exactly the period, unfortunately,
when we put our kids on social media and let
(11:18):
random weirdness on the Internet control how their brain is rewiring.
One of the main things that is happening is in
the prefrontal cortex. That's the last part to really go
through the change, which is the seat of executive function.
That is the ability to formulate a goal, figure out
the means to achieve the goal, and then execute the
plan to achieve the goal. So if you want to
do your homework, you know, I know, I want to
(11:38):
watch this TV show at ten o'clock tonight, so I
an hour. I better do my homework. I have one hour.
You know, kids struggle to do that, especially if you
don't love doing your homework. It's going to take concentration
and willpower to stay on task. But what happens you
have an infinite number of really fun digital experiences just
waiting for you if you touch the right buttons. But
it's much more than that, because you don't have to
(11:58):
touch the right buttons. The pop ups are going to
be popping up saying come play, come out, come, look
what someone just said about you. So they're getting I
think on average now, two hundred and fifty notifications a
day is what American teens now get. That's two hundred
and fifty times a day that their attention is interrupted.
Most of them don't put it on a focus mode.
They just take it as normal that any company that
(12:18):
wants to take some of their attention can just take it.
So it was always hard for teens to focus and
do their homework or do anything, but doing that gives
you practice in doing it, and if you do it repeatedly,
you're actually helping your brain to develop good executive function.
So what would happen if you have a teen who
never gets to practice that, They literally never get an
(12:39):
hour without interruption. I think it could lead to permanent
decrements in their ability to function as an adult.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
I think that it's important to highlight that we don't
know yet. It's still too early, but it's a reasonable
supposition that Jonathan Hyde identifies here two hundred and fifty
notifications a day. I've watched my kids and how much
their funds doing, and my kids pretty light on compared
to what I see in other places. This point about
practicing ignoring helping kids to recognize that they don't have
(13:09):
to respond to every message the second it comes through.
That they can leave things on read or even on
unread for more than five or ten minutes, In fact,
for an hour or two letting them sit with that,
letting them learn how to do that is such a
vital skill and it will be good for their wellbeing.
So the last thing that I'm going to share with
you is we wrap up this really important conversation from
(13:31):
Jonathan Hight and what's going on in his book The
Anxious Generation, Why our kids are struggling so much. We're
going to talk about this idea of social media addiction.
When I wrote my book Ten Things Every Parent Needs
to Know, I made it really clear that addiction is
a bit of a funny word in psychological terms, and
most of the time researchers try to avoid it unless
they're genuinely talking about addiction. The more appropriate term, which
(13:55):
I hate will mentioned just to se is problematic internet use.
And I wrote an entire chapter about this idea and
even included, with the permission of the author of the scale,
a way of measuring whether or not your child is
experiencing problematic Internet use. But he's Jonathan had from his
conversation with Barry Weiss and the Honestly podcast talking about
social media addiction and whether it's the thing.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
The better term to use is what they call problematic use.
So you know, if you're spending four hours a day
on Instagram, but you're still seeing your friends, you're still
getting good grades in class, you know it's a time suck,
but you can't say that it's interfering with basically love
and work, the two areas that psychologists look at love
and work basically relationships and either you know, work or
(14:39):
school work. So if you're doing fine on those, well, okay,
you know that's maybe it's your choice. But wherever we look,
the numbers come up between five and fifteen percent as
having problematic use. So video games are tremendous fun. You know,
boys really defend them and they don't want them taken away,
But it turns out about five to fifteen percent have
problematic use where they can't stop. They're surly with their parents.
(15:01):
If they're deprived for a day or two, they' to
get really surly and maybe even aggressive. It's interfering with
their school work, with their ability to function with friends.
So people say, oh, you know, my kids are fine,
or you know most kids are doing okay, sure most are,
but can you think of any consumer product in the
world where if there was a one to ten chance
that your kid uses it they're going to get hooked
and have problematic behavior to the point where it's going
(15:23):
to interfere with other life domains. And if they do
it for two or three hours a day over many years,
it could change the brain development. Is there any other
product that we would ever let our kids use? So
that's the way I think about it.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
It's such a great communicator that final point brings at home.
That's one thing to say there's five or ten percent
of kids who have this challenge, But when you talk
about creating a product and allowing them to use it,
knowing that, it really shifts the conversation. I think this
book is going to be one of the most important
books to be published this year. If you haven't ordered already,
it's called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Hyte. I would
(15:56):
encourage you to check it out because it's been so topical.
I really wanted to bring you those snippets and create
the conversation for you in your home with your kids
around such a challenging idea. The Happy Families podcast is
produced by Justin Ruland from Bridge Media. For more information
about making your family happier, please visit us at happy
families dot com. Dot au
It's The Happy Family's Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
It's the podcast for the time poor parent who just
once answers me ow.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Hello, Welcome to the Happy Family's Podcast. My name is
doctor Justin Colson. Every Wednesday we bring you an interview
with somebody who knows stuff that you need to know
so that you can make your family happier. Today, an
interview with an author, in fact, the world's leading most
recognized academic thinker. I would have loved to have had
him with me to have this conversation, but some people
are just a bit too hard to get a hold of.
(00:35):
And so what I've done today is lent heavily on
a podcast interview that Professor Jonathan Hate from New York
University had with Barry Weiss on The Honesty Podcast. I'm
going to just share a couple of quick snippets of
what he had to say, share a few of my
own ideas around that as well, and hopefully have a
really constructive conversation that sounds like an interview based on
(00:57):
his brand new book, The Anxious Generation. So let me
tell you a bit about who Jonathan Hate is. Many
years ago I read one of his first books. I
think it might have even been his first book, it
was called The Happiness Hypothesis. It remains to this day
my favorite book about well being and happiness. The guy
is just a phenomenal thinker and such a clear communicator.
(01:18):
You might also have heard of Jonathan Height in his
book The Righteous Mind or The Coddling of the American Mind.
The new book is called The Anxious Generation. I've pre
ordered mine. The book has now come out. I still
haven't received my pre ordered one. That's one of the
disadvantages sometimes when you do a preorder, you missed out.
But Professor Hyde has been absolutely blitzing podcasts and media
(01:41):
writer around the world and has reached so many people.
He also has a free sub stack called after Babel.
You can subscribe and support the work that he does.
I recommend it. It's absolutely brilliant. So let's get onto
the conversation that he had with Barry Weiss of the
Honestly podcast. Honestly with Barry Weiss, part of the Free Press.
This is what he had to say when Barry Wisse
(02:02):
asked him, Jonathan, where is the anxiety with this Anxious
Generation coming from?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
It's all the little small stuff that was unpleasant as
a child, so it's being excluded. It's vital that kids
be excluded. Can you imagine? So, I'm sorry, your daughter
is what howled douth two? Three? Yeah, she's less than two. Yeah,
we're not at the excluding mean girls phase yet. Okay,
but Barry, so supposed we'll get there. That's right, you will.
(02:30):
And so given that she's going to get there, if
I gave you the option, I said, if you sign
this deal, I can guarantee you that she will never
face exclusion before her eighteenth birthday. Would you sign it? No? Right,
because we know intuitively that they have to experience it
otherwise it's going to be devastating when they're eighteen. And
(02:50):
it's the same thing for let's say losing. It's very
important that children lose a lot in competitive games. Now.
I remember when my kids were young. It was very
painful for them to lose. They sometimes upset, but after
a while then they just you know, then they get
used to it. And now you can have a lot
more fun because they know, you know, we're going to
play twenty games and I'm going to lose a bunch
of them and win a bunch of them. So winning
(03:10):
and losing being excluded certainly, you know, falling down and
getting hurt, and then getting hurt when there's no adult around,
so you know, like I remember crashing on my basicle
and you have to kind of limp home and maybe
the peddle is bent, but you get home and then
you realize, oh, I can do that, I can get home.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
I really love this conversation. The idea that there are
healthy stresses in the environment. Now, we've got pretty good
research that shows that if we experience way too much
stress at a developmentally inappropriate age or just in an
inappropriate way, that stress can lead to negative outcomes. But
that's not what he's talking about here. And what people
like me and obviously Jonathan Hyde and many others who
(03:48):
do this kind of work have seen is it increasingly,
as we invest more and more into our children, that
parental investment is very much oriented towards protecting our children
from these stresses, the kind of stresses that build resilience
and reduce anxiety. In fact, not in that part of
the interview, but certainly in research that I've read, there
(04:10):
is good data that shows that when our children are
exposed to appropriate, developmentally appropriate and healthy stresses, they do
better they're less likely to experience anxiety disorders, they're more
likely to thrive. There's a metaphor and analogy that I
use when I'm giving my presentations on resilience in schools
and in organizations, and I use the idea of a
(04:32):
balance beam. So when your children are walking through life, metaphorically,
they're walking across a balance beam. Some parents, when they
see their child start to overbalance, maybe lean a little
too far to the left or right, they kind of
stand back and say, well, you're going to figure this out, kiddo,
And sometimes their kids fall and they hit the ground.
The difficulty with that, I'm going to call it the
(04:52):
tough enouugh princess approach to building resilience is research shows
that doesn't work. Sometimes that fall is too far, developmentally inappropriate,
too hard, And it's so important that as parents were
discerning enough to recognize that it's not going to be
in our kid's best interest to keep on falling off
the balance beam of life. Don't see that happening as
much as it used to. What I see happening a
(05:14):
lot more now is that parents will get up onto
the balance beam with their kids and carry them across.
But you cannot carry your kids through life, and that's
why it's just so important. In fact, that creates something
called the cycle of in confidence, which we're going to
talk about in just a sec What I encourage parents
to do is to walk alongside their children as they're
up on that beam, and as their child starts to overbalance,
(05:36):
it's completely appropriate to put your hand up on their leg,
on their thigh and say, hey, just lean on me
for a second while you regain your bearings, regain your balance,
Let's work out how you can take the next step
on your own. Then you take your hand away, and
your kids take those steps on their own with a supportive, loving,
compassionate adult beside them. All the very best work on
(05:56):
resilience shows that the kids who are most resilient the
ones who have at least one significant supportive adult in
their lives. But those adults don't do the work for them.
They also just make sure that they don't fall and crash,
or if they do that it's not too hard that
there's something supporting that landing. I think it's so important
if we want to move away from raising an anxious generation,
(06:18):
that we get the balance ride. If you're pardon the pun. Now.
The second highlight from the conversation that Jonathan Hight had
with the Honestly Podcast and Barry Weiss related to a
concept called anti fragility. There's a book called Anti Fragile.
It's on my bookshelf. It's by Nasim Nicholas Taylor, and
the idea of anti fragile goes like this. We often
(06:40):
think that the opposite of resilience is fragility, but that's
not entirely true. See resilience, if we look at it
from an engineering perspective, you build a resilient house, a
resilient bridge, a resilience stadium or road. And what that
means is that when the traffic or the weight, or
the rain or the floods or whatever it is, when
(07:02):
those things hit it, it stays firm. Fragile means that
when adversity strikes you break down. Now, staying firm is
not the opposite of breaking down. Getting stronger is the
opposite of breaking down. But we don't have a word
for it in English, and so tailored Nasim Taylor calls
it anti fragility, being anti fragile, And that's what this
second clip is all about. How we help our kids
(07:23):
to be anti fragile.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
So because we came to see our children as vulnerable
or fragile rather than anti fragile. If you see your
because it's anti fragile, say go out and play. And
if they say you know, it's called that you said,
you know, tough it out, or you know, if they
fall and say you know, you're okay, go back. So
that's what you would do if you think kids are
anti fragile. But if you think kids are fragile, you're
going to never leave them in supervise, which means they
never learn to work things out for themselves, and you're
(07:46):
going to swoop in at this first sign of trouble.
And so what happens if you assume that they're incompetent
and fragile, then they don't have the experience that would
make them competent and non fragile. So you're actually making
them incompetent and fragile. And then you look at these competent,
fragile fifth graders and then you say, well, how can
we trust you? You know, I can't let you, I can
let you walk to the store. What if you get lost?
(08:07):
It's a sacred it's a vicious sacle and so that's
what we have to break.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
So I really love a handful of elements in here.
One of the central things that I'd highlight is what
we've got is one of the world's leading thinkers saying
a little bit of tough love is okay for your kids. Now,
this isn't any kind of neglectful or abusive or aggressive
tough love. Rather, it's acknowledging that the everyday bumps and
scrapes of life can be gotten over by our children,
(08:32):
and we shouldn't make too big a deal of them.
The more we make their emotions king, and the more
we make their discomfort a problem that needs to be fixed,
the less anti fragile, the more fragile they become, and
the more we perpetuate that cycle of incompetence. We need
to get comfortable with our kids being uncomfortable in an understanding, appropriate, caring,
(08:56):
compassionate way. But we still need to say, and I
do this all the time, when my kids and they've
hurt themselves, I'll say, oh, kiddo, that looks like it
really hurt. Come and give me a hug. I'll give
them a hug, and then I'll say all right off
you go. It looks like you'll be okay now, so
they can still be that kindness and that warmth, that nurture,
that relatedness, the mattering and belonging. That's all part of it.
But ultimately we're saying, I have faith in your ability
(09:16):
to figure this out and to move ahead with it.
As we encourage our kids to become more competent, they
get out of that cycle. But we need to understand
why we are uncomfortable. What is it in us that's
causing us to be so uncomfortable with our children experiencing hardship, difficulty, challenge.
(09:37):
As we get comfortable with them having that difficulty and
having that growth, they're much more likely to figure this out.
In just a second, we're going to talk about how
the adolescent brain changes during the teen years and the
impact of social media on those changes. It's the Happy
Famili's podcasts. It's the Happy Families Podcast with me doctor
(10:05):
Justin Coulson, and some snippets from an interview with Professor
Jonathan Hyte from New York University, the author of The
Anxious Generation, talking with the Free Presses Barry Weiss on
The Honestly with Barry Weiss podcast. Everybody knows that the
adolescent brain changes so much during those teen years, but
what's the impact of social media on those changes. Jonathan
(10:29):
Hate explains this to Barry Weiss in the Honestly podcast.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
The brain grows very quickly in the first few years
of life, and then it actually slows down a lot,
and from then on it's not so much growth. It's
more it's rewiring. It's neurons connecting, its synapses forming, it's
neurons feeding away, you know, if they're not used. So
there's a lot of rewiring going on, and that speeds
up during puberty. There was especially early puberty around each
eleven or twelve to around fifteen sixty, and there's a
(10:57):
huge amount of change as the brain basically, you know,
sort of like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. You
have the young form of a human brain kind of rewires.
Now that it's learned culture, it sort of rewires to
lock down into the format of an American or a
suite or whatever. And this is exactly the period, unfortunately,
when we put our kids on social media and let
(11:18):
random weirdness on the Internet control how their brain is rewiring.
One of the main things that is happening is in
the prefrontal cortex. That's the last part to really go
through the change, which is the seat of executive function.
That is the ability to formulate a goal, figure out
the means to achieve the goal, and then execute the
plan to achieve the goal. So if you want to
do your homework, you know, I know, I want to
(11:38):
watch this TV show at ten o'clock tonight, so I
an hour. I better do my homework. I have one hour.
You know, kids struggle to do that, especially if you
don't love doing your homework. It's going to take concentration
and willpower to stay on task. But what happens you
have an infinite number of really fun digital experiences just
waiting for you if you touch the right buttons. But
it's much more than that, because you don't have to
(11:58):
touch the right buttons. The pop ups are going to
be popping up saying come play, come out, come, look
what someone just said about you. So they're getting I
think on average now, two hundred and fifty notifications a
day is what American teens now get. That's two hundred
and fifty times a day that their attention is interrupted.
Most of them don't put it on a focus mode.
They just take it as normal that any company that
(12:18):
wants to take some of their attention can just take it.
So it was always hard for teens to focus and
do their homework or do anything, but doing that gives
you practice in doing it, and if you do it repeatedly,
you're actually helping your brain to develop good executive function.
So what would happen if you have a teen who
never gets to practice that, They literally never get an
(12:39):
hour without interruption. I think it could lead to permanent
decrements in their ability to function as an adult.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
I think that it's important to highlight that we don't
know yet. It's still too early, but it's a reasonable
supposition that Jonathan Hyde identifies here two hundred and fifty
notifications a day. I've watched my kids and how much
their funds doing, and my kids pretty light on compared
to what I see in other places. This point about
practicing ignoring helping kids to recognize that they don't have
(13:09):
to respond to every message the second it comes through.
That they can leave things on read or even on
unread for more than five or ten minutes, In fact,
for an hour or two letting them sit with that,
letting them learn how to do that is such a
vital skill and it will be good for their wellbeing.
So the last thing that I'm going to share with
you is we wrap up this really important conversation from
(13:31):
Jonathan Hight and what's going on in his book The
Anxious Generation, Why our kids are struggling so much. We're
going to talk about this idea of social media addiction.
When I wrote my book Ten Things Every Parent Needs
to Know, I made it really clear that addiction is
a bit of a funny word in psychological terms, and
most of the time researchers try to avoid it unless
they're genuinely talking about addiction. The more appropriate term, which
(13:55):
I hate will mentioned just to se is problematic internet use.
And I wrote an entire chapter about this idea and
even included, with the permission of the author of the scale,
a way of measuring whether or not your child is
experiencing problematic Internet use. But he's Jonathan had from his
conversation with Barry Weiss and the Honestly podcast talking about
social media addiction and whether it's the thing.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
The better term to use is what they call problematic use.
So you know, if you're spending four hours a day
on Instagram, but you're still seeing your friends, you're still
getting good grades in class, you know it's a time suck,
but you can't say that it's interfering with basically love
and work, the two areas that psychologists look at love
and work basically relationships and either you know, work or
(14:39):
school work. So if you're doing fine on those, well, okay,
you know that's maybe it's your choice. But wherever we look,
the numbers come up between five and fifteen percent as
having problematic use. So video games are tremendous fun. You know,
boys really defend them and they don't want them taken away,
But it turns out about five to fifteen percent have
problematic use where they can't stop. They're surly with their parents.
(15:01):
If they're deprived for a day or two, they' to
get really surly and maybe even aggressive. It's interfering with
their school work, with their ability to function with friends.
So people say, oh, you know, my kids are fine,
or you know most kids are doing okay, sure most are,
but can you think of any consumer product in the
world where if there was a one to ten chance
that your kid uses it they're going to get hooked
and have problematic behavior to the point where it's going
(15:23):
to interfere with other life domains. And if they do
it for two or three hours a day over many years,
it could change the brain development. Is there any other
product that we would ever let our kids use? So
that's the way I think about it.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
It's such a great communicator that final point brings at home.
That's one thing to say there's five or ten percent
of kids who have this challenge, But when you talk
about creating a product and allowing them to use it,
knowing that, it really shifts the conversation. I think this
book is going to be one of the most important
books to be published this year. If you haven't ordered already,
it's called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Hyte. I would
(15:56):
encourage you to check it out because it's been so topical.
I really wanted to bring you those snippets and create
the conversation for you in your home with your kids
around such a challenging idea. The Happy Families podcast is
produced by Justin Ruland from Bridge Media. For more information
about making your family happier, please visit us at happy
families dot com. Dot au
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