Regulating Smartphones? Jonathan Haidt vs. Libertarians
Today’s guest is Jonathan Haidt, whose new book is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The New York University psychologist and Heterodox Academy cofounder argues that what he calls a play-based childhood has been replaced with a phone-based one over the past 50 years, leading to skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide among younger Americans. He says parents, schools, and society must keep young kids away from smartphones and social media if we want them to thrive.
Haidt is coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018) and he’s also cofounder of Let Grow, a nonprofit that lobbies for policies, laws, and pedagogy that will increase children’s resiliency and independence. “The Fragile Generation,” the 2017 Reason article he coauthored with Lenore Skenazy, is among the most-read stories on this website. Reason‘s Nick Gillespie asks Haidt about what is driving Gen Z and younger kids to distraction and whether it’s possible–or wise–to childproof the internet. This interview was taped in front of a live audience in New York City as part of the Reason Speakeasy series. For more information on live events, go here.
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This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
Nick Gillespie: Our guest tonight is Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychology professor whose new book is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Jonathan Haidt, thanks for talking to Reason.
Jonathan Haidt: My pleasure, Nick.
Gillespie: This book is currently at the top of The New York Times bestseller list. Is that correct? Okay, what’s the elevator pitch for the book?
Haidt: Actually, before I do that, I want to just make a very brief opening statement, which is when I walked in or we were all milling around before and Matt Welch said, “Welcome to the lion’s den,” because there’s an interesting thing going on with this issue, which is that there’s not really a left-right divide. Left and right are actually pretty much together. The main debate is actually between left and right and libertarians. And here’s the great thing about libertarians, when they disagree with you, if they hate what you’re doing, you know what they do? They make arguments, and they give evidence, and they have fun doing it. There’s humor and there’s excitement, things like this. As Matt acknowledged, it was a joke like, “You guys are very nice lions.” You’re not all libertarians, but you’re all nice lions.
Then the other thing I just wanted to say is when my wife Jan and I, when we moved to New York in 2011, we were welcomed by Gerry Ohrstrom, and you and Matt and many others. So the extended Reason network in New York City has been really the most exciting intellectual community. Anyway, I wanted to thank you for all of that.
Now, elevator pitch for the book. Something really, really changed for Americans born in 1996 and later. They were very different from those who were born just a few years before. And we first saw this with The Coddling [of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure]. Greg [Lukianoff] was the first to spot it. The students coming in 2014 were just very different from those who’d come in even as late as 2012. We didn’t know it then, but it was the Gen Z, millennial divide. Their mental health is much, much worse. And it turns out that’s happening in all the English-speaking countries and in Northern Europe as well. It’s very widespread.
So we have this giant global mystery: Why did mental health collapse in so many countries at the same time in the same way, hitting girls harder than boys? In The Coddling, Greg and I addressed a major cause which [is] coddling, like overprotection. That’s what we focused on. We didn’t know that. We speculated, “Well, maybe social media could be something. The timing is right, but we don’t know.” We wrote that in 2017. Since then, a lot new has come in, a lot of new evidence. People have seen it with their own eyes. Something is just going wrong when kids are raised on a screen rather than playing.
So the book is about how the play-based childhood got replaced by the screen-based childhood. And that disrupts almost everything about human development. The book explores much more than you can do in an article, it explores 15 different causal pathways and many interactions. So that’s what the book is about. Then it goes into solutions, which are some norms that I think will change this.
Gillespie: In the book, you talk about how there are two main contributing factors to the current mental illness problems with Gen Z. First, before we get into that, can you just quickly sketch, what are the problems that we’re seeing now that are so different?
Haidt: The ones for which we have the most evidence are the mental health studies, because that’s tracked very carefully. America and Britain have very good longitudinal surveys. My lead researcher and research partner, Zach Rausch is here somewhere. Zach, where are you? Stand up. Okay, back there. I hope everyone here will follow AfterBabel.com. That’s our Substack. Zach is the editor, and we put all our work up there.
What you see over and over and over again are hockey sticks. Mental health was pretty stable. Millennials were actually a little healthier than Gen Z, than Gen X before them. And then all of a sudden, right around 2012, plus or minus a year or two, the numbers go way, way up for anxiety, depression, self-harm; well, suicide starts a bit earlier, but that also goes way up. And it’s not just us. It’s the same in many countries. That’s the obvious thing. That’s where the debate has been. Almost all the scientific argument is, is social media causing mental illness?
Gillespie: There does not seem to be a debate about whether or not these indicators have changed. I mean, there’s some, but-
Haidt: Well, no, actually, there is. There is. And we’ll hear from Aaron [Brown], my colleague at NYU. There are some people who think maybe there’s not even any real rise, it’s just changes in diagnostic criteria. So that’s a separate argument, is there a mental health crisis? But I think most people now and almost all health authorities internationally are saying something’s going wrong for young people.
Gillespie: There are two major contributing factors, and it’s kind of like different types of insulin, of a fast-acting in a slow-acting one. One is the disappearance of what you call a play-based childhood. This really started decades ago. Can you talk about what was a play-based childhood, and what happened to it?
Haidt: The play-based childhood is Mother Nature’s plan for mammals. When mammals evolve, they quickly develop larger brains, especially the social mammals like dogs and cats and primates.
Gillespie: Dolphins.
Haidt: Dolphins. Yeah, that’s right. They play, that’s right. If you’re an intensely social species, you have a big brain for the sociality. And how do you wire it up? Because the genes don’t tell the neurons where to grow. They just start the ball rolling. You wire it up in play. That’s the most important thing. And that was the case from about 200 million B.C. till about 1980-something. All kids went out and played. It didn’t matter if it was raining.
Gillespie: It was Beavis and Butthead, right, that ended play-based childhood or something.
Haidt: They did. Yeah, I guess that was kind of the fall of a civilization. But play is just absolutely essential for human development. The most nutritious play is a group, mixed-age, outdoors. We evolved outdoors. We’re attracted to outdoor things. We want to run. That’s the healthiest kind of play, with no adult supervision. And here, I’m drawing on Lenore Skenazy, who wrote the book Free Range Kids: How Parents and Teachers Can Let Go and Grow, and helped me to write this book. She had a huge contribution to the sections at the end on what parents can do. Lenore, if you can stand up. This is Lenore Skenazy and she also writes at Reason.
Play-based childhood is what we evolved to do to wire up our brains. We develop our social skills, empathy, ability to read faces, turn-taking, all the skills of democratic engagement, all the skills that Alexis de Tocqueville praised about Americans that, “Oh, if there’s a problem, they get together and they figured out a way to solve it, whereas in France, we wait for the king to do it.” All those skills kids were developing until the 1980s. Then we started freaking out about child abduction. We stopped trusting each other with our kids. We also had fewer kids. So for a variety of reasons, the play-based childhood faded out.
Gillespie: Is it partly because women started entering the workforce on equal terms as men? So what do you do with kids, right? Because we’re both the same age. We’re 60. We grew up in a period … I mean, both of my parents worked. In the neighborhood you grew up, if you were in the baby boom or Gen X, to some degree, there were always parents in the neighborhood, mothers in the neighborhood. That kind of disappeared. That was part of you put the kids in institutional settings.
Haidt: That’s correct. That’s a big part of it. There was what was called Eyes on the Street. Jane Jacobs wrote about the sidewalk ballet. Kids were out playing. They were playing even if the weather was bad. Even if there was a crime wave, whatever, the kids were out playing, and in part, because there were adults around that you could trust. But as women begin to work and for related and unrelated reasons, family size begins to shrink, there just aren’t a lot of kids. Around Gen X, they were known as the latchkey kids, because part of the solution to mothers working was, “Well, sweetheart, here’s the key. You come home alone, let yourself in after school,” when you’re seven or eight, which you can do. Kids can do. So there was a brief period, but then we kind of said like, “No, let’s stop doing that. Let’s make sure there’s always an adult supervising. And if that means I have to put them in adult supervised activities every day, then so be it.” But in the process, kids lost.
Gillespie: Part of it is we professionalized childhood, right? It’s boomer parents who wanted their kids to have ballet lessons, music lessons, and be good at sports. We became richer, fewer kids.
Can you talk a little bit about how the end of play gave rise to what you wrote about with Greg Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind?
Haidt: As I was founding Heterodox Academy … And John Tomasi is here somewhere, the president of Heterodox Academy. John, can you stand up? Where are you? All right.
Gillespie: This is like a Dean Martin celebrity roast. I mean, it’s just like everybody’s here tonight.
Haidt: It’s like the intellectual royalty of New York City.
Gillespie: That’s right.
Haidt: It’s good. Moral dependency is this really great term that I learned from two sociologists who wrote the first major paper on microaggressions. Manning and Campbell were their last names. They pointed out that all this stuff of microaggressions, it was coming up not in the places where you’d expect there to be the most prejudice or the most reason for it, but in the places that were the most equal, in the places that were most egalitarian, in places where there aren’t big distinctions, but there is also an authority that you can call in if you need help.
They point out how in a culture of honor, a man cannot stand a microaggression. A man cannot stand a stain upon his honor. He must take vengeance himself. He can’t call the police, he has to do it himself. So there’s a culture of honor. Then that changed to a culture of dignity, where sticks and stones will break my bones. We let the law take care of it. What they observed was on elite college campuses among young people…and this is the beginning of Gen Z. They wrote this around, I forget when, 2015, 2014, something like that. On college campuses was emerging a culture which is kind of like an honor culture, in that if any little thing is said, it must be dealt with by the authorities.
Young people became expert at, “How do I make my case to the authority? I’m not going to argue with you. I’m going to convince him to punish you.” This is what really ruined things in universities, because we have to be able to challenge each other. We have to be able to study all sorts of things. We need open inquiry. But if someone is offended and they can call in a drone strike on you, it really kind of chills speech.
Gillespie: I don’t know how much this is mythic or not, but some of us, at least boys, although I think this was true of girls too, you would get into a fight, come home and complain to your parents. And they would say, “Go out and figure it out. We’re not stepping in.” That is over. Now it’s you come back to your parents, they call the other parent…
Haidt: Yeah, that’s right, or they report them or whatever. Yeah, that’s right. That’s moral dependency, where you don’t handle disputes yourself. Everyone needs to learn to handle disputes themselves and know when to escalate. There are times, but it shouldn’t be every day.
Gillespie: So that gives way, the play-based childhood has given way to the phone-based childhood. Talk about that.
Haidt: The play-based childhood is declining from the ’80s all the way down to 2010. Kids are spending less time alone, less time outside. It’s gradual. But mental health isn’t actually declining. As I said, the millennials, actually, they’re a little healthier than Gen X.
Gillespie: But that’s because Gen X is just a garbage generation, right?
Haidt: No, no. No, that is terrible. It’s because of leaded gas. They have brain damage from leaded gas. I’m actually mostly serious about that.
Gillespie: Yeah, it’s true.
Haidt: Oh yes, so that’s the puzzle, is that this is very important, but it seems to sort of weaken them, but it doesn’t make them anxious and depressed. The millennials, they still [have] this amazing spirit. My wife has lots of millennial friends. And you talk to them like, “Yeah, so I decided to go surfing in this place. And then I sold my car and I went here.” Like, “Wow, you really have a spirit of that exploration.” That seems to be almost entirely missing in Gen Z. They’re just a much more anxious generation.
Gillespie: What’s the age range in Gen Z?
Haidt: I say 1996 and later. Gene Twankey said ’95 originally. Pew now says ’97. Whatever. So I say ’96 is about the birth year it begins. So what happens, so it’s important to understand the chronology. So in 2010, there’s no sign of a problem. The mental health stats, they’re bouncing along. There’s no trend up. [In] 2010, very few young people have an iPhone. The iPhone comes out in 2007. Very few young people have one. It’s expensive. Less than 20 percent. Most don’t have high-speed internet. No one has a front-facing camera. No one has Instagram. So that’s the situation for teens in 2010. They use their flip phones to text each other to meet up, like, “I’ll meet you at the mall, or let’s go someplace after school.” Mental health is fine.
Five years later, everything is different about their daily life, because now 75 percent or 80 percent have a smartphone. These smartphones got front-facing cameras in 2010. Instagram was founded in 2010, but only becomes a real thing in 2012 when Facebook buys it. They’ve got high-speed data, unlimited texting. But it becomes possible to be online all the time. Half of Gen Z now says … How much of your day do you spend online? 45 percent in a Pew survey a couple of years ago said, “Pretty much all the time.” Even if they’re in school, they’re actually tracking what’s going on in their virtual world. They just hold the phone at their desk. Even if they’re talking to you at the dinner table, they’re actually thinking about it, and they’re checking whenever they can. They have the phone out.
It’s a complete transformation of consciousness, behavior. Imagine, take childhood in 2010, let’s take away a lot of outdoor time, a lot of sleep. Read fewer books. No hobbies, no time for hobbies. You don’t see friends very much. You basically go home. If you’re a boy, you have to go home in order to play with your friends, because you have to go to have your controller and your headset. You can’t go over to a friend’s house to play video games anymore, because now everything’s multiplayer. For all these reasons, these technological changes, they came in very, very fast. That’s why I say 2010 to 2015 is the great rewiring of childhood.
Just to finish up from a point before that I forgot to put the second half on, the mental health stats is what we’re fighting about. But there’s like 20 other outcomes. This is what I hear from employers. I always ask, I work in a business school, I talk to a lot of business people, “How’s it going with your young employees?” I never hear, “Oh, great. They’re so creative, they’re amazing.” It’s always, “They’re so anxious, and they need encouragement about everything. And they often won’t do things because they say they have an anxiety reason. They’ve been accommodated so much.” There’s just problems making the transition. None of this is their fault. We never let them have independence.
Gillespie: Where do we see that in terms of depression? How many kids are disabled by depression in 2010, 2015, 2020?
Haidt: In general, based on the self-report studies, the numbers go up, it depends on which study you’re looking at, generally between 50 and 150 percent. These are not small increases. Whenever you zoom in on… So girls, the percentage increase is usually larger, though not always. Young girls, 10 to 14, that is always the largest and it’s often gigantic. The increase there in, I forget the exact numbers for depression and anxiety, but there you often get numbers 150 to 200 percent. Self-harm is up I think 190 percent. That’s hospital visits for self-harm.
Gillespie: Do we know the absolute numbers, though? Because this is, if it’s from zero to one, that’s a massive increase. But it’s not like, okay, this is the new normal that kids are killing themselves. Kids are disabled by depression.
Haidt: Yeah. Obviously, it’s not the new normal that kids are killing themselves. But it is the new normal that if you’re a girl in an English-speaking country, you’re a little less than half, I mean one in three, let’s say, has anxiety or depression at a relative level of severity. This is on the order of 50 to 100 percent more than what it was in 2010. These are big increases. Because we see the same degree of increase in self-harm and suicide, some critics have said, “Oh, this is just changes in self-report criteria, or diagnostic criteria by psychiatrists. It’s not a real thing. The k
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