Are Smartphones Ruining Childhood? – Jonathan Haidt (Transcript) 

So how do you believe the minds of these Gen Z kids are wired differently now?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Think about it this way. For those of you who are over 35 or 40, you surely had a play-based childhood. What I’d like you to do is think back on the most exciting things that you ever did as a child. Think back on times you just were hanging out with your friends. Think back on how much time you spent laughing with your friends, laughing, joking, playing around. Okay?

Now take all of that, cut it by 80 percent because Gen Z didn’t get that. They have almost no unsupervised time. They don’t get to hang out behind the 7-Eleven or down by the river or in the playground or anywhere except online. So take 70 percent of that out. Think of all the times you smiled at a person or you made eye contact. Take 70 percent of that out. I don’t know the exact number, but for the kids who say they’re online almost all the time, it’s probably 70 percent.

Think of all the books you read. Take 70 percent of those out, maybe 100 percent. Gen Z has no time to read books. They have so much content to consume to keep up. There’s very little book reading. Think about hobbies. Did you have a hobby? Take that out.

So you take out almost everything because again, if the latest numbers are on average, teen kids are spending seven to nine hours a day on entertainment and screen stuff, not counting school. Seven to nine hours a day is the average depending on how you count it. Take childhood. Take out almost everything that you valued in it and what’s left.

Virtual vs. Real-World Connections

ELISE HU: But does hanging out have to be in person and with making eye contact in real life? Because a lot of these kids would argue we hang out all the time. We hang out in games. We hang out on social platforms. We are connecting. We are just connecting in a different way and Jon Haidt, you’re the fuddy-duddy for coming down on just the different tools that we’re using to hang out and connect.

JONATHAN HAIDT: That’s a great objection and 10 years ago or 15 years ago when I first saw Twitter and people sending out, “Oh, I just had a hamburger.” I thought, “God, this is so trivial.” But then as a social psychologist, I thought, “Well, actually, wait a second. If you’re sort of checking in with your friends hundreds of times a day, that could be really good.”

But what I’ve come to see is the online world gives you multiple ways to connect virtually which often lack certain properties. So the most important one is being synchronous. So right now, you and I are synchronous. We can see each other’s facial expressions. But on Zoom, there’s a little bit of awkwardness. You know, you don’t quite get the timing. So video games, Twitch, all these things that allow you to go two-way voice and face, those have some benefits. I’ll grant that.

Whereas going back and forth in group texts, group texts is performance, not connecting one-on-one like an old phone call. So synchronous is good. All the asynchronous ones, I think, miss that. Another feature is that you now have such vast quantity. Imagine taking the number of people you talk with every day, multiply that by 50, okay, that might sound great. But how much time do you then have for anyone? So you don’t get the kind of in-depth conversations.

When I was a kid, it was just sort of famous, but girls will talk on the phone for hours and hours at night, one-on-one, just one-on-one, they’re connecting. Boys don’t do that. But we call each other and say, “Hey, can you come out now?” We’d meet and we’d go do something together. One-on-one or in a small group, that’s all great. The large groups are not connecting, they’re performing.

And kids are anxious. They have to think carefully before they put something out because what if I make a mistake? A play needs to have lots of low-cost mistakes. You say something stupid, your friend says, “Oh, that was mean.” And you say, “Oh, sorry.” But when you grow up online, it’s like growing up in a minefield because you never know. One mistake, it could actually ruin your life. It could literally ruin your life and make you not get into college.

So this is something that so many professors have observed. We can’t get our students to disagree with each other anymore. They’re so afraid. They’ve grown up in a minefield. They know one false move and their leg gets blown off. So I think you can praise all those virtual connections all you want. They don’t seem to have the magic ingredient of hanging out with a friend in real life.

Changes in Parenting Culture

ELISE HU: And the way you explain it in the book, the rise in anxiety and depression isn’t really happening in isolation because it also sort of coincides or interacts with a change in parenting culture. So talk to us a little bit about that cultural shift that you’re seeing happening all at the same time.

JONATHAN HAIDT: A big part of this is the overprotective parenting. And so I can summarize the whole book by saying we’ve overprotected our children in the real world. We’ve underprotected them online. So let’s look at the overprotection. Until the 1980s, American kids had a free-range childhood. I grew up in the 70s and there was a huge crime wave. There were crazy people. There were serial killers. Crime was at historically high levels. All kids went out and it was amazing and exciting and we got into all kinds of arguments and fights and sports games and we had an exciting childhood. And that goes on until the 90s.

Now you get the new media environment, so you get cable TV, you get 24-hour news cycles. So in the 90s, for a lot of reasons, we freak out and we lock our kids up or rather I should say we no longer think it’s okay for an eight-year-old to be outside, unsupervised by an adult. Now it’s more like 10 or 11 is when kids get that level of freedom.

So here’s a big reason why. It’s not just the change in television and cable TV. The biggest reason, I now believe, is the loss of trust in everyone else. There’s a great phrase from a British sociologist, Frank Ferretti. He talks about the collapse of adult solidarity. So even in the 70s, when there was a lot of crime, if I wiped out on my bicycle and I got hurt, my friend could go knock on a door and say, “Hey, can you call my mother?”

But we begin to lose trust in each other. Life moves away from the streets and moves indoors as we get air conditioning and television. We don’t know our neighbors anymore. That’s why we don’t trust our kids to be let out. So there’s a whole back story that really begins in the 80s and into the 90s in which we took away the play-based childhood. And at the exact same time, the Internet arrives. And so, you know, we don’t want to let our kids out. But this new Internet thing, the kids love it. They’re sitting in the room on a computer. What could happen?

ELISE HU: Five hours a day is the stat now? For social media.

JONATHAN HAIDT: On average. Right. Seven to ten, seven to nine in there if you include video games and porn and all the other things that the kids are doing. But just social media is five hours a day average.

ELISE HU: If they’re spending so much time on social media, what are they doing less of?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Everything else. The most important things they’re doing less of in order are any kind of face-to-face contact with their friends or family, listening to their teachers because they’re doing this in school too because most schools let them keep their phones in their pockets, flirting or gossiping or talking with their friends in school or at lunch because even at lunch, if you have phones in your pockets at lunch, the kids are doing what’s called continuous partial attention.

So they’re continually paying attention to what’s going on in their phones. And then they’re also sometimes having conversations with the kid next to them. In other words, there’s no real quality human connection. That’s the most important thing. If you take most human connection out of childhood, there’s not a lot left.

The Impact on Sleep and Time Management

JONATHAN HAIDT: Number two, sleep. Kids really, really need sleep. We’re now discovering sleep is so much more important than we thought back when I was in graduate school. Kids are getting less sleep, especially those who have a device in bed. I mean, imagine if you had to suddenly give five to ten hours a day to some new thing.

ELISE HU: Yeah.

JONATHAN HAIDT: There’s nothing else. That takes a lot of time. You have to push that everything else.

Responses to “The Anxious Generation”

ELISE HU: I want to talk a little bit about the responses to the book because this was a number one New York Times bestseller and there have been plenty of responses following The Anxious Generation’s release. A number of social scientists have questioned the conclusions in the book, notably this article in Nature that gets published that is shared pretty widely where Candice Odgers writes that “hundreds of researchers, myself included, had searched for the kind of large effects suggested by height. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Both data are correlative.” She continues that when they can find a relationship between phones and anxiety or poor mental health outcomes, it tends to be that teens who are already depressed tend to use social media more. How do you respond to this correlation, not necessarily causation argument?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Let’s start by setting the scene. We have a massive collapse of mental health that happens in a synchronized format in many countries, especially to girls, happens at the same time. There is no other explanation. The parents see it, the teachers and principals see it, psychiatrists, psychologists see it. The presumption should be something is going on here and it may be related to the technology.

What do we know from the data? There are two main battlefields. There are the correlational studies where there are hundreds and hundreds of them. They’re easy to do. You just look who’s more depressed, who spends more hours on social media. Hours spent on social media is the variable that you’re correlating with some self-report of mental health. Then you look at the connection and the correlations tend to be around 0.1 for boys, they’re actually around 0.2 for girls. This is what we’re fighting about.

Now Candace Rogers says that this is a small correlation. She and others won’t be convinced unless we find large correlations like say 0.3 or 0.4. But in public health, you rarely get 0.3 or 0.4 because you have very poor measurement at both ends. So that’s the correlational studies. We’re sort of at a stalemate there.

The more important battleground is on the experiments. We all know correlation doesn’t show causation. We all know that. So we move to the experiments and what do the experiments show? I think we can show that the great majority of experiments do show a benefit from getting off social media and very importantly, all of these studies are taking individuals and asking them to get off and they’re mostly college students.

If you take a college student and say, “Hey, you, we’ll pay you to get off social media for a month. Now how do you feel?” It turns out they feel better but they’re also isolated. The real test is what happens if you take a whole school, a whole high school and get them off social media. My prediction is you would have a huge increase because now they’re not isolated. They’re actually more together and the most important theme of my book is that its collective effects that have to be addressed by collective action.

The reason every 13-year-old girl has to be on Instagram is because every other 13-year-old girl is on Instagram. My college students say the same thing. They can’t get off because everyone else is on. So she says we don’t find the large effects that would be necessary. That’s because those researchers, they’re not even considering the collective emergent properties of social media.

ELISE HU: Yeah. It does seem like an enormous task though, Jon Haidt, to take collective action on something because for younger generations, so much of the way that they connect these days and find community is taking place on devices and so how do you address kind of this problem where everyone else is on it, I don’t want to be the one left out and how do we get past this collective action?

Collective Action and the Four Norms

JONATHAN HAIDT: We get past it by acting together. Any one kid who gets off is alone. Any one parent who says you’re not getting a phone to a high school, now their kid is isolated. But there is a place where we all have community and that is our local kids school.

It’s as simple as this. If you’re a parent listening to this and you have kids under the age of 12, let’s say, just reach out to two other parents of your kids’ friends and say, “We want to do the four norms. We want to do the four norms for the next generation. Are you with me?” And they probably will be with you.

The four norms are no smartphone till high school around 14, no social media till 16, phone-free schools and so parents can push the school to go phone-free and the fourth is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. That’s the hardest one because that requires us to change but it’s the most important in that if we’re going to take the screen, the 10 hours a day of screen time, take that away from kids, we have to give them back an exciting childhood.

The Role of Big Tech and Regulation

ELISE HU: You mentioned big tech. Why place the onus of responsibility on individual families or neighborhoods or kids when it is these giant tech companies who are designing the apps and the phones for maximum engagement and profit? Can they not make changes to the way software is designed and can governments better regulate these companies?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes, they certainly could make changes but they’re in a collective action trap too. We know this from Francis Haugen who brought up the Facebook files. Facebook is actively recruiting underage kids. They really need those kids and they know that if they were to crack down, those kids would just go to TikTok. So the tech companies certainly could solve this but they’re in a collective action problem too because if one of them does the right thing, then the kids will just lie about their age and go somewhere else.

So Congress gave them immunity. The courts have interpreted Section 230 very broadly so that if your kids are harmed by anything that they saw online, well, Section 230 says you can’t sue the company. So these are the biggest, most powerful, richest companies in the world. They’ve been given free reign to own our kids’ childhood. They have limited legal responsibility so far and we’re trying to get a bill through Congress that does some fairly modest things about setting defaults and it just begins to establish children are not adults. You have to treat them differently.

If there was any other consumer product, let’s imagine a new toy comes out on the market. The kids love it and 90% of kids are using this toy five hours a day and thousands are being hospitalized for depression, eating disorders, anxiety and some kids are killing themselves after using the toy. So what I’m saying is we have a defective consumer product. Do you think that that toy maybe would be recalled? Do you think maybe someone may be regulated, like maybe you have to change it so that it doesn’t wreak such damage?

So that’s what the Surgeon General is saying. The Surgeon General is saying while the scientists fight about whether social media caused the increase of the population of like the grass I show in the book with the hockey sticks, did social media cause that increase at the population level? That’s an academic debate. I can’t be 100% certain I’m right. But what the Surgeon General was saying was regardless of that debate, here are hundreds of cases of kids who were sextorted, they were bullied, they were shamed and then they killed themselves that day. So the Surgeon General was saying if this was any other consumer product, we’d regulate it and we’d put warning labels on it. Why not this one?

Personal Experience with Phone Use

ELISE HU: You have two kids. How have you wound up navigating phone use at your own house?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, so we gave my son a phone, my old iPhone as most people do when he was in fourth grade when he started walking to school. This was back in the early 2010s. We didn’t know any better. Now in retrospect, we should have just given him a phone watch or a basic phone and that’s what we did with my daughter who is three years younger. I gave her a big pink Gizmo watch and in third grade, she loved it and I could send her out in third or fourth grade. I could send her out into the park, out to get bagels.

So we did that for my daughter. The place where I did hold the line is on social media. I said, “No way, you’re not getting social media at least until high school.” Both kids accepted that and my daughter when she was in seventh grade, she said that she was actually glad she wasn’t on Instagram because she could see what it does to girls. It’s a terrible thing to take 11 and 12-year-old girls and make them be conscious of their face, their skin, their body constantly all day long having people comment on it. It’s a horrible thing to do to girls.

The Importance of Independence: A Personal Story

ELISE HU: I want to close on a story that you have told about your son, Max, that I think illustrates the kind of world that you’re ultimately advocating for. Tell us about his walk home and what happened eventually.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Because my wife and I got to know a woman named Lenore Skenazy who wrote a book called Free Range Kids. I recommend this to everybody, Free Range Kids.

ELISE HU: I do too. I’m also a big fan of it. You said you have three daughters, you said?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes, and they all walk themselves to school and walk home every day.

ELISE HU: Fantastic. Good luck to them. I have no idea what’s happening in those two or three blocks, but that’s really important that you don’t have an idea.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Because we read Lenore’s book and we know her, we encouraged Max to walk to school a year or two before everybody else was walking. This is in Greenwich Village right here in New York City. It’s a safe neighborhood in terms of crime, but there are some busy streets to cross. But Max is really good at that, as I was when I was seven, eight, nine, ten years old.

So we let him walk to school. The first time we let him walk, we were terrified. We were watching the blue dot on the phone because we could track him. The next day we watched again. I think we might have watched the third day, but here’s the thing about anxiety. The way you get rid of it is by exposing yourself to the stimulus and then nothing bad happens and by Pavlovian processes, the anxiety drops. So we trusted him and he quickly learned the subway system. He’s just amazing as a navigator.

So then, I think the story you’re referring to is that then when he was 13, he got really into tennis and I took him to the US Open when he was 12 and then again at 13. And he really wanted to go to a night game and that would mean he’d have to come home very, very late. He loved going out to Queens alone. We let him do that during the day, but he wanted to go out to a night game.

And we were a little nervous about that, but we thought, “Okay, what would Lenora say?” And we said, “Okay.” So he went out and the tennis game, sometimes they go really late. This was a really late game. And so he’s coming home on the subway and there’s a huge crowd. Everyone’s happy. They’re all out together. He gets on the subway and comes back. And when he tries to transfer, I forget which line it was, somewhere in Manhattan, you get from Queens into Manhattan, then you had to transfer to go south to Greenwich Village. That train wasn’t running.

And here it is. It’s like one in the morning. And so what does he do? Well, he goes upstairs and he hails a yellow cab, which he had never done before. Now, I had shown him how to do it, but he’d never done it on his own without me. But he just went up, hailed a cab and came home. And he was nervous. He was.

But that’s the thing. Because he was nervous, when he succeeded, it just changed him. And this is what I really want to convey. We have to get over our own anxieties and trust our kids to be competent human beings just as we were at that age. And it’s hard at first, but by the third try, it actually gets easy. And then your kids flourish, they grow, they become more confident, and they’re going to be much less subject to anxiety disorders if you give them independence.

ELISE HU: Well, Jon Haidt, those are all the questions that I have for our conversation without the audience. But there are just audience questions piling up, so I’m going to jump right into them.

Political Action on the Smartphone Issue

ELISE HU: Great. The first is, is there anything we can do to raise the smartphone issue politically? Because it would be great to know whether politicians around the world would want to address this at a national level.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. This is what’s so exciting. This is the least polarized, most bipartisan issue that there is. It’s incredible. Because wherever you go, red state or blue state, Democrat, Republican in Congress, almost all of them are parents. Most politicians are parents. In so many countries, leaders are getting out in front. And they get massive support. So actually, it’s not a risky position.

And they’re actually making changes. So I’d urge everyone, talk to your legislators, let them know you want, let them know you support COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act. It’s actually, the Senate passed it almost unanimously. It was like 97 to 3.

But I’m very excited about this. And I think the phone-free schools is the place where it started. A whole bunch of states have already said they’re going to go phone-free statewide. Los Angeles School District announced it a month ago. New York City is going to announce it very soon. So I’m actually really optimistic that at least school districts and states are going to go phone-free in school.

Advice for Educators

ELISE HU: On the subject of schools, we have a few questions from educators who are on the fest. Bradley says, “I’m a teacher. How can I implement cell phone restrictions and talk to families about this without sounding too Ivory Tower-esque or like I’m telling parents how to raise their children?”

JONATHAN HAIDT: So first, let’s distinguish between what are you saying about phones in school and what are you saying about phones at home? Now, you’ve always had the right to talk about what to do at school. Parents respect that. And I guarantee you, other teachers in your school and your principal probably are reading about this.

If you raise the subject, if you say, “Hey, can we go phone-free?” you’re going to find a lot more support than you expect because things are really different than they were six months ago. So that’s the first thing. You can definitely go phone-free in school. So we’re seeing schools all around the country saying, “This is such a catastrophe for learning. We see it in test scores. We see it in discipline. We’re dealing with it at school by going phone-free. Here’s the new policy. And in addition, I hope you’ll consider rolling back the technology, giving kids a more play-based childhood, not giving them a phone so early.”

So I think we are seeing that happen. The key, again, is collective action. You’re going to find a lot more allies now than you would have a year ago.

ELISE HU: Okay. Amber asks, “I am an educator, and I’d like to know if Mr. Haidt recommends any specific activities or strategies for educators to help undo some of the negative effects of our students’ childhoods.”

JONATHAN HAIDT: Oh, yes. There’s an amazingly powerful one which costs zero dollars and is incredibly effective. It’s called the Let Grow experience. So I was so taken with Lenore Skenazy’s work that I and a few others co-founded an organization called Let Grow. So if you go to letgrow.org, you can sign up there to download the kit for the Let Grow experience. You can do this at home, too, but it’s especially powerful if you do it as a school.

So let’s imagine a third-grade class. All the third-grades, let’s say, or second-graders, say, “We’re doing the Let Grow experience.” So you give them a printout of the instructions. The kid takes it home. Basically it’s pick something to do by yourself that you’ve never done before by yourself. Work it out with your parents, and then do it. And so it’s something like, “Well, you know, I’ve never walked the dog, or I’ve never walked to a store. I’ve never been out.” So if there’s a store that’s three blocks away that your seven- or eight-year-old can walk to, that would be an ideal one. But let them pick.

So they pick something, and then they do it. And then they come back to class, and let’s say you do one of these a month, and they just say what they did. They put it up as a leaf on a tree. And if you do it every month for eight months, you get these eight activities that you’ve done by yourself. And it’s incredibly powerful because, first of all, the kids seem to almost grow taller. They feel much more confident.

But the more important effect, or as important, is what it does to the parents because the parents are so afraid, like, “Well, at what age can I let my kid out? I don’t know. No one else is doing it until 11, so we don’t know.” But what happens? Imagine a town in which all the elementary schools are doing this in third grade. Now you’ve got eight-year-olds all over the place. They’re walking to the store to get milk. They’re doing errands. They’re outside playing. They’re walking the dog. Now adults see eight-year-olds outside, and at that point, people will stop calling the police when they see an eight- or nine-year-old outside, which, at present, some people do because they think it’s some horrible, dangerous anomaly.

ELISE HU: I did get a bunch of texts from other parents when they saw my kids walking to school alone. They were like, “Are you aware of this?”

JONATHAN HAIDT: Oh, wow. Well, okay. Right. But, you know, look. But this year, things will be different. This year, they’ll cheer you on, and they’ll do it themselves. No, this is the year for collective action on all these fronts.

Phones vs. iPads and Advice for Parents

ELISE HU: All right. So some questions from parents, too. Melissa asks about kind of distinguishing, do you distinguish between phones versus iPads? Because iPads can create the same kind of issues. Parents seem to be more okay with iPads or tablets, and some schools actually require them. So I would love your perspective on that.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Sure. So from a parent’s point of view, a phone is the worst because it’s the most portable. A phone is with you all the time, especially when you’re outside the house. My advice is that nobody get a smartphone before high school. An iPad can do all the same stuff as a phone, it’s just less portable. So I would say, again, don’t give your kid their own iPad that they can hold on to and customize and communicate with strangers on and watch porn. Don’t do that either until high school.

Now for you to have an iPad in the house, your iPad, that you give them sometimes, there’s all kinds of good stuff that they can do. Yeah, there’s all kinds of good stuff. And also, let me be very clear, stories are good, movies are good, watching a movie with your kids is great. It’s the 15-second videos that have no redeeming value and that are, I think, are really the worst. That’s what I’ll be studying next.

So I would say just be careful of both the addictive nature and the distracting nature of these things.

ELISE HU: Okay. So a screen isn’t going to hurt the kid necessarily, but it’s the addictive possibilities. Sarah asks, “What kind of advice do you have for parents with younger kids if they have already given the kids smartphones? Do you have any advice about the removal process or the weaning?”

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. My advice is if you try to pull it out by yourself, it’s going to be very painful. But if you and four other families pull it out at the same time and you give them something in return, it’s going to be joyous. Yes, they’ll resist, but let’s look at the difference.

In one case, you gave your kid an iPhone when she was nine and she’s now 11. And everyone, everyone has an iPhone and they’re on it all day long. Now if you take your kid off, you’re condemning your kid to social death. So that’s a very hard situation.

But let’s suppose you gave your kid a phone when she’s nine and now she’s 11. And most of her friends are on Instagram, too. But you talk with the parents of her three best friends and you say, “I think we made a mistake. What do you think?” And if they agree, then what you can do is you can say, “We’re taking back the smartphone. Here’s a flip phone or a light phone or something else. You’ll get a smartphone when you’re in high school. You can still do a lot of the same stuff on a computer. You still have a laptop or something. So it’s not as if you’re not going to be able to do these things, but we don’t think you should have this with you all the time everywhere. And your three best friends, their families are also doing it.”

And what we really want is not to take stuff away from them. What we really want is for you to have a fantastic childhood. We want you guys to have fun. So we’re going to start off by saying every Friday, you girls are getting together for a sleepover. You plan it how you want, but we’re suggesting that every Friday, you guys get together, have a sleepover. We’ll give you money to go places. We want you to be with your friends in the real world.

And the more you give them the opportunity to hang out and do things, it’s not deprivation. It’s not doors closing. It’s doors opening. What they’re most afraid of is being alone, being cut off. So avoid that.

ELISE HU: Amy asks, “How do I lead by example? I want to be a good role model for my kids, and I acknowledge that I use my own phone too much. I realize I will check my Instagram, then two seconds later, check it again. Why am I checking it again,” she says, “but how does she lead by example?”

JONATHAN HAIDT: So when your kids are infants and toddlers, they are copying you. They’re looking for examples to copy. They’re definitely copying you. So do be careful when you’re with toddlers. You really need to do a lot of eye contact. Don’t do the continuous partial attention. Young kids, they really need to develop that sense of mutual gaze and interaction.

Teenagers are not really copying you. So I would say, insist on really good family norms and then honor those norms. And that means, like in my family, we have an absolute rule. No phones at the table. No matter how important it is for you to look up this fact relevant to the conversation, don’t go get your phone and look it up. That’s just the rule. No phone. We do not bring phones to the table. And they have to be out of the bedroom at a certain time, put them on the counter in the kitchen charging at 10 o’clock or whatever the time is you pick for your family.

So definitely establish family norms that you respect and then make those stick. But don’t expect that your kid is copying you. I mean, if you stop checking Instagram all the time, is your kid going to say, “Oh, well, I’ll stop.” No. They’re completely addicted. They’re socially addicted. They have to do it because everyone else is doing it, not because you’re doing it.

Essential Changes for Mental Health

ELISE HU: Okay. Last couple of questions. Isha asks, “What are the two most essential changes we can implement in our daily lives now so that there will be less damage to our own and younger generation’s mental health?”

JONATHAN HAIDT: The number one thing that you can do is regain control of your attention. What I found when I began teaching undergrads is that most of them, not all, but most of them have given up all of their free attention. If they’re in the elevator, they’re doing this because that’s like 60 seconds, 90 seconds they’re doing this. They never have a moment to think. They can’t daydream. They can’t meditate. And so what I start with at the very beginning of the class is let’s regain control of your attention. It’s your most precious commodity.

So shut off almost all notifications. Do not get alerts from any newspaper or magazine or anything else. You don’t need alerts. Move social media off your phone, onto your computer only, and then eventually maybe even off your computer.

And a lot of them are gaining three to five hours a day. They’re regaining three to five hours a day. What do they do? They say, “Now I can do my homework, and it’s actually not hard anymore, and I have time to read a book, or I have time to talk to a friend, or I have time to play guitar.” So regaining control of your attention is where a lot of this starts.

I’d say read Cal Newport. I assigned the book Deep Work. It’s a fantastic book, and it will really change the way you see what’s happening to us adults.

Optimism for the Future

ELISE HU: Okay. Let’s end on a question from Kathleen. “Since your book release in Tours, so following the release, are you more or less hopeful about your collective action proposals catching on?”

JONATHAN HAIDT: I am wildly more optimistic. I’m optimistic by nature, but I’ve been working on democracy issues since the early 2000s, and I’m not optimistic there. I mean, the problems are huge, and I don’t know the answers, and that’s what my next book is going to be on. But on this one, on can we roll back the phone-based childhood, I was kind of optimistic last year, and now I’m wildly optimistic because it’s happening. It’s happening at lightning speed. I can’t believe how fast it’s happening.

The number of schools, the number of states, the number of countries that have acted in the last six months is mind-blowing. I’ve never seen anything like it, and that’s especially schools and governments. Every day I’m getting emails from parents saying, “Thank you. My friends and I, we did a reading group on the book, and now we’re all doing this together, and all the families at the end of our street, and the kids are playing, and they’re riding their bicycles.”

So it’s not as though our children have somehow biologically forgotten how to ride a bicycle, and they’re still thrilled to be out from under your thumb. They’re thrilled to have some independence. So this is happening. We don’t need everybody, but if we get most people, we solve this problem.

ELISE HU: Thank you for being so witty and wise, Jonathan Haidt, and thank you TED members for being here and for your involvement. As a non-profit organization, all of TED’s work is made possible in part by you, so thank you so much to the TED membership community, and that is it for the Book Club for this time. See you next month.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Thanks very much, Elise. Thank you.

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