A phone based child is not a human childhood, and our kids are deprived of so much of what they need in order to grow into healthy adults.

You’re listening to TEDMED conversations, where we share stories in health and medicine to inspire change for a healthier world. I’m your host, Kelly Thomas.

What if the way kids are growing up today with smartphones always in hand is quietly fueling a mental health crisis?

That’s the big question we’re tackling with today’s guest, Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist, NYU professor, and New York Times bestselling author.

Jonathan’s most recent book, The Anxious Generation, has sparked a wave of urgency among parents, educators, and policymakers to rethink childhood in the digital age.

We dig into the research on how social media is impacting kids, why girls and boys are affected differently, and what happens when we take away free play and independence.

We also talk about how smartphones are fragmenting our attention and why it’s time for the medical community to take digital health seriously.

Welcome, Jonathan Hite, to TEDMED conversations. Thank you for sitting down with us today. We’re really excited to have this conversation.

My pleasure, Kelly. I love TED. I’ve never spoken to TEDMED, so thanks for giving me this connection.

Absolutely. So first, congratulations. You just celebrated the one year anniversary of the release of The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. And it’s been an incredible year. The book has had such success around the world, and you’ve shined a spotlight on this shift towards a phone based childhood and the negative effects it’s having on our kids’ mental health. So first, what has been the most surprising thing for you that has happened over the past year since the release of Anxious Generation?

So the most surprising thing to me is that all around the world, mothers in particular have stood up and said, let’s go.

I knew that the book would do well because while I was writing it, I’d tell people about it, everyone would say, I need this book tomorrow. I I I don’t know what to do. All around the world, family life has turned into a fight over screen time, and everyone is sick of it. And I think mothers were more sensitive to their kids being pulled away. I opened the book with the metaphor that it’s as though someone took our kids off to Mars to grow up on Mars, and it’s not going well.

And so all around the world, female legislators or spouses of legislators have said, we gotta do something. Let’s act. And so phone free school bills have been passed around the world. Many, many countries are now making their schools phone free.

Many states are doing it. Thousands of school districts are doing it. So the speed I’ve been involved in various social change efforts. I’ve never seen anything like this, and that’s because almost everyone sees it.

And finally, we’re taking action.

And I’m so grateful for that. As a parent, you call the beginning of the two thousand tens of the this rewiring period. So what happened, and where has it taken the childhood experience?

Yeah. So the book is not primarily about social media and screens. It’s about childhood. It’s about the great rewiring of childhood.

It’s a tragedy in two acts. In act one, we lost the play based childhood. So everyone born before about nineteen eighty five, the great majority of us, we had freedom. We went out.

We were on our bicycles. We had adventures. We sometimes got hurt. We came back in time for dinner.

In the nineties, American parents freaked out and stopped letting their kids out. Crime was plummeting, actually, but we were scared about abduction.

Strange that this happened in Canada and the UK as well. It’s not just an American thing. It but it’s all the English speaking countries. This didn’t happen in Scandinavia or Northern Europe, but all the English speaking countries.

We crushed childhood independence in the nineties. Now the kids don’t get depressed right away. In fact, they’re getting on the Internet. The Internet’s amazing.

And so if anyone has seen the the Netflix show adolescence, we all thought like, oh, well, my kid’s upstairs in his bedroom on his computer. He’s learning things. He maybe he’ll learn to program. This is gonna be good for him.

He’s safe. That’s what we all thought. So that’s act one of the tragedy. We lose a human play based physical real world childhood.

Then act two is twenty ten to twenty fifteen. It’s incredibly sudden. If you’re born in nineteen ninety five, the last year of the millennials, you turn fifteen in twenty ten, which means you made it through puberty without Instagram. You might have had Facebook near the end, but Facebook wasn’t very toxic early on. It was just you go back and forth to people’s pages.

Oh, and you had a flip phone. You probably had the Razer flip phone, and your mental health is fine. The millennials are fine. But what happens if you’re born five years later, if you’re born in the year two thousand? Let’s suppose you’re a girl born in two thousand. You turn fifteen in twenty fifteen.

Twenty twelve is the year that most Americans now have a smartphone, not a flip phone. It’s the year that Instagram becomes super popular because Facebook buys it huge attention. Now all the phones have front facing cameras, high speed data. And so in twenty fifteen, you’re turning fifteen.

That means you went through puberty. You had early puberty with a smartphone, front facing camera, posting photos of yourself for strangers to judge. You’re always checking. You’re so concerned what people are saying about you.

Constant drama. You’re always on your phone. You rarely make eye contact. You have very little shared laughter with friends.

Life for a teenager in twenty fifteen is radically different than life for a teenager in twenty ten, and I believe it’s that change that caused the sudden international synchronized rise in anxiety, depression, self harm, and fall in academic achievement around the world. Not all countries. We don’t have data from all countries. But across the developed West, in the early twenty tens, mental illness skyrockets, school achievement plummets. There we are.

It feels like we kind of did this blindly. Right? We’re not letting them have freedom outside, but we’re letting them have freedom in this world that we, even as adults, like, are just starting to learn. So how did that happen to us?

There are two big factors to consider here. The first, the innocent one, is that we were all techno optimists once. You know, in the nineteen nineties, I was walking around saying, oh my god. The the Cold War is over.

Technology is amazing. The Internet, it’s gonna be peace and prosperity from here on in, and it’s the best thing to ever happen to democracy. So a lot of us thought that. And, you know, the millennials, born nineteen eighty one through nineteen ninety five, they grew up with computers and the Internet.

They learned how to program. They started companies. They were creative. They’re flying all over the world.

So we’re all thinking, oh, well, this is just the way things are now, and it’s pretty good.

And the early Internet was amazing. Everyone loved the early Internet. So we didn’t notice when things got dark, and things got dark beginning two thousand nine. So in two thousand nine is when we get the like button and the retweet button. So everything gets super viral now. Before then, it was I go to your page. You come to mine.

But now you get the news feed conditioned by algorithms based on engagement data, so now it gets super addictive and super viral. This is around twenty ten, twenty eleven. Social media is changing, and it really is getting its hooks in kids. We know from the internal documents and the things they’ve said, they studied child development.

They studied adolescent brain development. They knew where the weak points were. They knew how to play on kids’ insecurities about their social standing and prestige, and they hooked kids. They knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway.

So it gets really dark in the early twenty tens.

And guess what? That’s when social media becomes really damaging, I believe. That’s when the the phone based childhood really takes shape right around twenty twelve, and that’s when the mental illness crisis hits. But we don’t recognize it at first because we still we have the Arab Spring in twenty eleven.

Facebook is gonna save democracy. So we’re still techno optimists in the early twenty tens. Now things are beginning to shift in the late twenty tens. After the Trump election, many people on the left, especially, are saying, oh my god.

Look at the disinformation. Look at all the things that can happen. Gene Twenge published a very important article in the Atlantic in twenty seventeen titled, have smartphones destroyed a generation? So the conversation about well, wait.

Maybe this isn’t a good idea. Maybe it’s not a good idea to have our kids basically grow up looking at a screen rather than running around and talking to each other. That conversation begins in twenty seventeen, and it’s making progress by twenty nineteen. That’s when I really get into it.

And Jean and I are publishing articles saying, wait. There is research showing harm, and then COVID hits. What kids desperately need in twenty nineteen was less time on screens, more time outside playing. What COVID gave the entire world that did lockdowns was no time outside because you might catch COVID on a playground with other kids and all day on screens.

So we have this wreckage happening to childhood minds, to child to childhood in the early twenty twenties, but we don’t know that it’s caused by the screen based life. We think, oh, COVID, fear, lockdowns.

As COVID began to clear, twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three, that I believe is why my book did so well in twenty twenty four. Because by twenty twenty three, we’re seeing, wait. Everything is still really bad, and education keeps going down and down and down. This wasn’t COVID.

It was something else. And so it’s only in twenty twenty four, I think, that me and some others were able to make the case. Wait. This global destruction of human potential, human capital, human happiness, human education, this was in place before COVID.

This started in twenty twelve. And so I think that’s why there’s a lot of recognition now of what we’ve done, but we didn’t know it really before COVID.

It did feel like during COVID that we were forcing them to be on the screen to learn, and it was actually hard because they didn’t wanna be stuck on a a Chromebook. But when people push back and say, well, it’s correlational, the mental health issues are increasing, we’re seeing more self harm, more suicides, more anxiety, what data is showing that’s directly related to this explosion of accessibility.

What is the cause of this disaster?

This all starts with the simple correlational observation that just as kids get on social media and smartphones, we get the phone based childhood. That’s when all these terrible things start, right around twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. That was just a correlation. I’m a social scientist. We all know that.

It’s very difficult to prove what caused a historical event.

And my critics say, oh, it’s just correlational. You have no evidence of harm.

To which I say, wait a second. There are so many different lines of evidence of harm. Here we go. First, the correlational data itself is not compatible with the null hypothesis.

So my critics say, oh, this is just another moral panic. Oh, the phones are harmless. Oh, you know, some studies show benefits, some show harm. So the null hypothesis is that there’s no connection.

But yet what we find, my research team and I, is whenever we go into these studies, what we find is they all blend together, all the platforms for all the kids and all the outcomes, and you get a correlation of around point zero three to point one.

But when you unblend it, when you say, no. Let’s not look at all screen time. Let’s look at social media use by girls on anxiety depression, then you get a much larger effect. So, of course, correlation doesn’t prove causation, but the pattern in the correlations is not compatible with the null hypothesis. That’s the first.

Second, then we always turn to experiments. Let’s do random assignment. Now you can’t randomly assign kids to grow up with or without social media. That we can’t do directly.

But, oh, wait a second. Nature did that. So high speed Internet came into different regions at different times in this period, and four studies that we found looked at that. And guess what?

When high speed social Internet comes in to an area of British Columbia or Spain or Italy, what you find is that rates of hospitalization for mental illness, especially for girls, goes up right afterwards. So that’s called a quasi experiment. And then there are lab experiments in which you randomly assign people to reduce their social media use. This should be the gold standard.

It’s just one way of operationalizing it, but at least this is a true random assignment experiment. What do they show? Almost all the studies that have people reduce their use for more than a week find reductions in anxiety and depression. That should be case closed.

We’re done.

The problem is that some studies only ask people to get off for a day. And when people are addicted to something, heroin, let’s say, and they get off for a day, are they happy? No. They’re in withdrawal.

So some of my critics say when they combine all the studies together, they get only a small benefit close to zero. And I keep saying, you’re combining one day studies. Do not blend this together. All the the critics usually are doing what we call blender studies. They blend everything together. But if you look at the most relevant cases, you find the evidence. And finally, let’s move outside the lab.

If something terrible happened to a generation, well, what do they say? And the eyewitness testimony from Gen Z, they point to this as the major cause of their problems. What do the parents say? They think this is the major cause of their problems. What do the teachers and the principals say? It’s very hard to find groups that are working with kids that think the phones are anything but harmful.

And finally, we have confessions from the perpetrators. We have all kinds of quotes because all of the especially the big three, Meta, Snap, and TikTok, those are the big three that are really destroying childhood.

They’re all being sued, and so a lot of documents have come out from in discovery. And at my Substack, after Babbel, we put up one for TikTok just using quotes from TikTok employees. They know they are shattering attention, causing addiction, exposing kids to sex and violence and drugs. Like, they say it.

So my attitude is, okay. Wait. We’ve got correlational evidence that is consistent. We’ve got experiments.

We’ve got quasi experiments. We’ve got eyewitness testimony. We’ve got confessions from the perpetrator. What more do you want?

And still, some of them say, oh, there’s no evidence of causality. No evidence.

You keep coming back to a point about especially girls. What is it about the development of girls in particular that makes them so sensitive to this social media exposure at an early age.

Yeah. So let’s talk about girls and social media because that is a very tight connection. And that’s what I thought my book would be about because that’s where the evidence is clearest. But then we’re gonna talk about boys and everything else, not just social media. Because it turns out the boys are actually doing worse than the girls, but I didn’t realize this until the book came out. So girls and social media.

One way to think about this is if you were designing a trap for an animal, if you wanted to catch raccoons or butterflies, what do you do? A trap, you put bait, you put something that the animal wants, and they were attracted to it. But once they take it, they can’t get out. That’s what a trap is.

Now suppose you’re a company fishing for girls. You want to trap girls, monetize their attention, show them advertisements. If that’s your goal, what’s the bait? What’s it gonna be?

It’s gonna be social information.

Girls have a much more developed map of social space. Girls’ popularity, girls’ social lives are much more about who knows whose secrets, who’s friends with who, who’s fighting who.

Boys are literally more autistic. This is the work of Simon Baron Cohen. The male brain has just literally shifted a little bit over to high systemizing, low empathizing. Boy, they don’t think ahead.

They’re not thinking, well, who had a fight with who? Therefore, I social information is is is much better bait for girls. So okay. So here, girls.

Come on on. It’s free. Post photos. Talk about each other. And then you ping girls by saying, do you wanna see what someone said about you?

Do you wanna see a new photo that has you in it? And so they’re very good at getting the girls on. Now once all the girls are on this is twenty twelve when all the girls rush on.

Once the girls are on, they’re trapped. No girl can leave. Because if you leave, you’re alone. You don’t know anything.

You don’t know any information. Your prestige drops. And especially if you’re in middle school, middle school girls are so sensitive. Middle school is the worst period of life for boys and girls, but especially girls.

That’s when bullying peaks at seventh and eighth grade. This is a horrible time to put kids on social media. So girls are especially drawn in, locked in, and their insecurities get preyed upon relentlessly. Because what are you doing?

You’re putting up photos of yourself. You’re trying to make yourself look beautiful. But guess what? Most of the photos you see are more beautiful.

Their lives are happier. They’re richer. Their skin is more perfect. And so it’s a giant machine to make most girls feel below average.

And so we wonder why girls have such difficulty with self esteem, with body image, with eating disorders.

So that’s why I think there’s a special relationship with girls. And we see this in a lot of the studies. The correlational studies, the correlation between time spent on social media and mental illness outcomes is almost always bigger, multiple, twice as big often as that relationship for boys.

So there’s a special relationship, and this is why I say there is no way to make this safe. The companies wanna keep saying, oh, but we pulled down bad content. Oh, we’ve taken up millions of pieces of bad content. Well, yeah.

Fine. But even if all girls saw was pictures of other girls having fun, this is not good for girls. There’s no way to make this safe. That’s why I say we’ve gotta just raise the age from thirteen with no enforcement to sixteen with enforcement.

This is just not appropriate for kids. We need to think of this as like gambling or going to strip clubs or other things that we allow adults to do, but they’re just not appropriate for children.

It’s so true. And just to go back to what you’re saying about the data and the strong correlation between social media and the rise in anxiety.

These blender experiments, to me, as a scientist, you’re really only supposed to look at one variable change Yes.

At a time. So the trying to blend everything together just doesn’t make sense. And if we can just hone in on this idea that social media is really negatively affecting, especially the girls, that’s something that we can try to manage. And I think with the anxious generation, people are trying to do that now. People are taking it into their own hands, which is incredible.

Yeah. That’s right. Actually, let me just build on what you just said about blender studies. This is a very important point. So even if you zoom in on social media, you’re still blending Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok and others, but those are the big three. And what happens?

Instagram is by far the best at causing girls to be anxious, depressed, think that they’re ugly, think that they’re fat. So Instagram has a special relationship. It causes internalizing disorders in girls.

Snapchat doesn’t do that. Snapchat, however, is the main way that sexual predators get to kids. Sometimes it’ll start on Instagram, but then they move to Snap because Snap is designed to have disappearing messages, and Snapchat does not keep records of the conversation. So drug dealers and sextortionists, it’s perfect for them. They go on. They communicate. And while they tell me that they do keep the metadata, they know that there was some connection, but they destroy the evidence.

So Snapchat isn’t causing depression, but it is causing sextortion. And then many suicides happen when boys get sextorted. They sometimes kill themselves. So Snapchat causes all kinds of severe harms, but it’s not connected to the number of hours you’re using it.

It’s are you talking to strangers? Are you looking for drugs that are laced with that end up laced with them? So Instagram, depression in girls. Snapchat, meeting men who want money or sex from you will harm you.

TikTok, destroying your concentration. TikTok is by far the worst thing for concentration. So it’s three different platforms, three different effects. How does the research go? First thing we do is we say, well, all we’re gonna look at is time, just hours spent, on any social media platform.

And what’s the correlation of that with depression?

And the answer is very small. Of course, it is. You’re taking three platforms, only one of which has a special relation with depression. You’re ignoring all the other harms, and then you conclude that, oh, the core the correlation is there, but it’s too small.

And then when you look at boys, we’re not seeing same kind of correlation between That’s right.

The social media use and the anxiety and depression.

But notice how you phrase that. We’re not seeing a correlation between social media use because all we’re thinking about is, are they on it for how long?

And if we look at that, let’s say, with Snapchat, we’re not gonna find an effect. In fact, I saw a study recently. The correlation of time spent on Snapchat with mood and things is actually slightly positive. Now does Snapchat cause the positivity, or is it the really social kids are more positive?

But for Snap, the problem isn’t that it makes them depressed. For Snap, the problem is that it introduces them to strangers on disappearing platforms. And so when boys are sextorted I just saw a movie. There’s an amazing movie, Can’t Look Away, about the parents that are suing Snapchat and others.

And a lot of these boys were healthy, happy athletes, good relations with their parents. They weren’t depressed, but they were tricked into sharing a naked picture of themselves with what they thought was a sexy girl who was interested in them. And then this extortionist reveals himself and says, I’m gonna send this now to everyone that you know and unless you give me money right now. And then they keep going and going and going.

And there are someone sent me a list of forty known suicide cases. The FBI found they investigated a bunch. They found twenty. So we already know of dozens of boys who have committed suicide sometimes within hours.

So this is not because they were on it for a lot of time. This is just for boys, just a lot of bad stuff happens. For and girls, a lot of bad stuff happens on Snapchat, but it’s not depression. So, again, that’s the point that you have to look at each platform.

What are the harms it’s causing?

If there was any other consumer product in the world where the correlation of amount consumed with depression, anxiety was point one or point two, which is what it is for all social media, we’d be freaking out. We’d say, no way. And when we zoom in and we find bigger and bigger effects, you know, it’s just for some reason, we’ve gotten into this situation where, well, we’re not gonna get rid of it unless there’s proof. There has to be proof that it’s harmful.

But in public health, we don’t use a beyond a reasonable doubt standard. We use, is there a reasonable doubt standard? And I think I think that Gene Twenge and I and the others, we’ve shown, and parents have seen it. There is a reasonable I could be wrong.

Maybe the phones are totally harmless. But can anyone say I’m definitely wrong? Can anyone say they’re so confident that these things are safe? Nobody can say that.

We’re seeing these studies, and there is harm, then we should be setting regulations around it.

Just to go back to to one thing you said about the sharing on Snapchat. If you’re a parent, and let’s say you have a a teenager who now is sixteen, is on Snapchat, how do you manage that?

So I’m thinking a lot about Snapchat these days because my daughter is fifteen, and I have kept her entirely off of all social media while all her friends are on it. And she understands about Instagram. She sees why that’s harmful.

But she really does want Snapchat because that’s the way the kids communicate. And I’ve been tempted to let her have it, but a couple of things. First, I polled my own students at NYU. Should I let her have it?

And some said yes, but the majority said no. Just lots of bad stuff happens. You’re talking with lots of strangers. I’ve spoken with people at Snap.

They keep saying, oh, no. It’s just a platform by which you connect with your close friends. That’s all it is. It’s just like texting with photographs.

But that’s not really true. I created an account myself, and I was relentlessly pushed to connect to people I don’t know, friends of friends. This is how sextortionists and bad actors get in. All you have do is get one kid in a school to accept your friend request, and now the platform will suggest that everybody connect with everybody who’s connected through that, at least by one degree.

And last week, I was talking with some high school boys about this, and they were saying, no. We just use it to talk to our friends. I said, okay. How many friends do you have on your how many contacts do you have?

And one said, about a thousand. Another said, about, yeah. About a thousand. Another said, seven hundred.

So the platform relentlessly pushes you to connect to people you do not know, and then it pushes you to keep sharing Snaps. The streaks push you to do it every day. And so if you let your kid on Snapchat, the platform is going to connect them to strangers, guaranteed, and the platform is going to push them to connect not the optimal amount, but the maximum amount. And when all three platforms are doing this, what we end up with is half of our kids say that they are online almost all the time.

One third of our kids say they’re on a social media platform almost all the time. Imagine imagine a child spending ten hours a day on TikTok or ten hours a day on Snap or ten hours a day on Instagram.

How can this not warp development, block development, block experience, block maturity, block social skills? So I know it’s hard, and when you’re doing it alone, it’s very hard. But my hope is that the book is starting conversations everywhere. So if you delay, if you don’t let your kids on until at least sixteen, at least you won’t be alone anymore. Now once they’re sixteen, I’m not advocating for laws that set it higher, but I think many parents would want to wait further.

Is there anything on Snapchat to kinda block that expanding web of context where you really don’t know who these people are?

All these apps have parental controls.

And what we know from the documents, all these attorneys general who sued them, we can see that a lot of their internal correspondence, they want to put on parental controls. They wanna make it look like they’re doing something, but their internal correspondence shows that they know parents rarely use them. They’re often hard to use. Kids can get around them.

And besides, even if you do put parental controls on your kid’s account, they can just create others without you knowing. So as long as they can get to a web browser now you can control their phone. You can watch their phone. Of course, they can hide the app on the phone.

But even if you rigorously check their phone, you’ve got all their passwords, you see what’s going on their phone, if they can get to a browser anywhere else, they can create as many accounts as they want. They can say they’re eighteen. So that’s why the most important thing we can do here is raise the age and have age verification. I’ll just summarize that my book is it’s an analysis of these collective action problems.

We’re all stuck because everyone else is doing it. The four norms that will get us out of this are as follows. No smartphone before high school. Just give them a flip phone, a phone that just does texting and calling.

No social media before sixteen. They should not open accounts. They can text their friends. One on one texting, it’s fine.

Small group texts are fine. The third is phone free schools. This is a must, and this is so obvious. When kids have a multifunction device on their desk, phone especially, they can’t concentrate on the teacher, and they don’t talk to their friends as much.

So phone free schools. The fourth is far more free play, independence, and responsibility in the real world. If we do those four things, we give our kids back a childhood where a lot of it is gonna be playing, laughing, flirting, teasing, but it’s it’s small scale among kids who know each other. It’s not spending all day talking with a vast web of people you barely know.

We are seeing so many phone free policies come into place. I spoke with the head of school at the Harvey School, which is in Catona, New York, in the fall, and they had just gone phone free using Yonder pouches so everybody has their phone in a pouch. They have possession of it, but it’s not accessible during the school day.

And he said in the first two months, it was transformational.

That’s what they all say. Tell me more. What did it transform?

He said instead of everyone walking around with their eyes down, their eyes are up. He’s seeing people eye to eye again, and he said he was hearing laughter.

Yep. That’s it. That’s the universal line. Every school that goes truly phone free, they all say the same thing. We hear laughter in the hallways. We haven’t heard that in ten years.

Right. And that’s what we wanna hear. There should be laughter.

And it creates relationships. Shared laughter and shared food and shared adventure, shared adversity, these are things that bond people together. This is why kids on sports teams or people who into the military, they are so tightly bonded. The rest of our kids don’t have that, and they’re dying of loneliness.

As soon as they got on smartphones around twenty twelve, the loneliness epidemic took off. These things do not connect people. They separate people. Because if you’re devoting literally ten hours a day to managing your image online, there’s no time to do anything with a friend.

And if you do go over to a friend’s house, you’re probably both just gonna be sitting on your phones.

That’s true. We actually do make an effort when we have play dates here. No phones.

Eight with no phones.

Go play. Last month, my daughter and her friend wanted to have a lemonade stand, but we live on a dead end street. So we know a lot of people in the neighborhood, so they made lemonade. And I said, well, why don’t you just go door to door?

And they were gone maybe half an hour. And then I started kind of freaking out a little. Like, I just had to take a moment and say, it’s okay. We set the rules.

You stay in our street. You come back when you’re done. And they came back, and they had a great time. And I They wanna do it again.

Right? Yeah. They wanted to do it again. And it’s so incredible to see these experiences.

You’re right. It has changed. Parents are more afraid to give these freedoms and let their kids fail. How do you encourage parents to do that?

Yeah. So there’s a super powerful method. It’s so simple. It’s called the let grow experience. I urge everyone listening to this. If you have kids under fourteen, go to let grow dot org. It’s an organization I cofounded with Lenore Skenazy, a woman, mother, and journalist who wrote a book called Free Range Kids.

And what we discovered is that if you give this assignment, let’s say, in the third grade class or sixth grade class, especially if you start middle school or I think around age eight is an ideal age. Here’s the assignment. You just give everybody a sheet of paper. They take it home.

And it says, talk with your parents. Find something that you think you can do with your parents’ permission but without your parents, something you’ve never done before. Let me give some examples. Maybe you think you can walk the dog by yourself if you’ve never walked the dog alone, or maybe you think you could make your own breakfast, or you could make breakfast for the family, or you could.

The best ones are where you go to a store or you go you go out. Those are the best one. In any case, you do this once a month for, let’s say, all of third grade.

What happens? The kids, they do things. They go out to a store, and everyone has the same experience as you, which is you set them up. Then your heart is beating, and you’re thinking of all the terrible things that could happen.

You’re anxious, and the kid is probably anxious too. But this is good because what’s the cure for anxiety? It’s exposure. The cure is you do something, you’re anxious, and if you back away instantly, you strengthen the anxiety.

But if you go through it, nothing bad happens, then you get the thrill, the excitement, the positivity. The next time, you’re gonna be a lot less anxious. And if the kids do this, let’s say once a month for the whole school year, by the end of third grade, you’ve got kids who are a lot less anxious, who are they feel, you know what? I can just walk over to my friend’s house three blocks away.

I don’t need you to drive me over there. I’m nine years old. I can do it myself.

Our kids are suffering from such high levels of anxiety and incompetence. They feel like we told them they can’t do anything. We told them the world is too dangerous. We can’t trust them or the world.

So they come to college, and they’re very limited. They’re anxious. They’re not in discover mode. They’re more in defend mode.

So it’s gotta start by age eight. I really think out by eight. Begin giving your kids independence by age eight. Obviously, some neighborhoods, you’re not just gonna push them out and say, go. But in most neighborhoods, you can.

And if you talk to a few neighbors, you know, if you’re afraid, arrange with a neighbor you know five houses down that your kid’s gonna come borrow a cup of sugar, and then tell your kid, hey. I need a cup of sugar even if you don’t need it. Just, like, do something like that to start, and it’ll get easier and easier and easier. So I urge anyone who has influence with the school, get the school to do the Let Grow experience at letgrow dot org. But you can even do it yourself as a family or as a few families.

I think it’s just fantastic, and I hope it continues to grow.

Speaking of independence and free play, our elementary schooler actually has a question for you. On their playground, there is a tube type slide, and after school, everyone climbs on top of it to get to the top of the playground. They all know what they’re doing. But during recess, they are not allowed to do this because that is one of the rules. She wants to know what she can do at her school to help change the rule.

That is a great example of several things. The first is that kids need risk, and they will seek it out.

When kids learn to skateboard, they don’t just go. They increase challenges. If you learn to skateboard, you are going to fall. You are going to hurt yourself. That’s part of the benefit, part of the process. You need to take risks to know what your limits are.

Playgrounds used to have some risk. When I was a kid, you could actually get hurt on a playground. There were tall jungle gyms. There were big seesaws. There were swings. You could get hurt.

And that means that every day you learn how to not get hurt, and very few kids got hurt. And what we’ve done since the eighties, the liability crisis, all the lawsuits, is we’ve said, let’s not have any way that any kids could get hurt. In fact, some playground guidelines say you must not have any trees with exposed roots because what if there’s a root above ground? Kid might trip. Now we wouldn’t want kids to learn how to run around a forest. We wanna make sure that there’s nothing that could trip them.

So we make them super safe. And then what happens? The kids are bored, so they climb on top of the slide. They do whatever they can because they need risk in free play.

That’s part of the point of free play is you take risks. Animals do this too. Puppies, kittens, they’ll they’ll extend themselves. They’ll climb a tree.

They’ll do things. They get scared. They come back to mom, then they go out again. That’s the way the attachment system works.

We have a great line from a playground play expert in the book. She says playgrounds should be as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible. But in America, we’re so afraid of lawsuits and so afraid that a kid would fall to make them as safe as humanly possible, and that means we’re depriving them of opportunities to grow.

Is that unique to the United States?

It’s especially bad in the US, but for some strange reason, everything happening here is happening in all the English speaking countries. Even in Canada and Australia where they have very little crime, they don’t have the crazy number of lawyers suing everybody. New Zealand actually is willing to take more risks. Now they interestingly they have a health insurance system, which is no fault.

If you get hurt, you get taken care of. There’s no lawsuit. And so they’re actually more willing to let their kids take risk. They’re the only English speaking country that lets kids climb trees.

Nobody else will let kids do that. It’s too dangerous. So and it’s creeping in Europe. In Northern Europe, they still let kids out.

But I was talking with a Finnish journalist, and I said, well, in Finland, like, don’t you let your kids out at age seven or eight? Aren’t they outside? And he said, oh, yeah. Yeah.

Our kids are out, but they’re all just walking around looking down at their phones. That’s why this is a global issue.

The overprotection is especially bad in America and the Anglo countries. It’s not nearly as bad in Northern Europe or the Netherlands or Germany.

But all over the world, these devices are designed to hook children, and they do. And so they’re causing a global increase in anxiety, depression, and incompetence.

And just to go back, you had mentioned organized sports briefly earlier. When we’re talking about incorporating more freedom and independence and free play, in our community, sports is a huge thing. A ton of kids start playing organized sports at an early age. Okay. They’re off the screens. They’re phone. Is that helping to provide some of the same building blocks towards resiliency and independence?

It is. It is. Especially, so having competition binds groups together, doing something physical, they’re off the screen. So the data is really clear.

The kids who spend more time with sports and religion are healthier. Kids who spend more time on television are a little less healthy. Kids who spend more time on social media are substantially less healthy. It’s really clear.

If you can get your kid into organized sports, that’s fantastic. Now the problem, though, is that some organized sports are so intense, intensely adult supervised. The healthiest kind of sports are pickup games where the kids make the rules and they enforce the rules. This is a very important part of childhood development.

You come together. You agree. What game are we gonna play? Soccer or kickball? Okay. Well but okay.

Most of us wanna play okay. We’ll play soccer. Okay. What are the goals? What are the boundaries?

And then somebody kicks in. You have to say, oh, offside. It’s like, no. I wasn’t.

It’s that adjudicating. That is incredibly valuable for moral and social development.

Jean Piaget, the famous developmental psychologist, observed kids playing marbles, how they do the rules, the rule making. Whereas on team sports that are heavily adult supervised, there’s no adjudication. The adults make all the decisions. Incidentally, that’s the problem with video games.

Video games, there’s no adjudication. The platform makes all the decisions. So sports are definitely good. Definitely try to get your kid into team sports.

My kids ran track, which is not team sports, but it’s still it’s still great. And they have they have a real sense of being a team. So that’s that’s been wonderful for them. But try to also have them be in a league that’s not so intense intensely adult controlled, that’s more playful, and try to give them opportunities to play that side.

You and I have been speaking mostly about depression and anxiety, But what I’ve learned since the book came out is that I grossly underestimated the harms of the phone based childhood because I focused on depression and anxiety and self harm and suicide.

But I think, actually, the bigger effect is the shattering of attention, the the fragmentation of attention. Just since I turned in the manuscript about a year and a half ago, there’s been a lot more data on educational declines around the world, Educational outcomes are declining and especially for the bottom quarters. We’re getting a huge counterequity effect. There was an article in the Financial Times a couple weeks ago where the reporter brought together several studies of cognitive ability, not just self report, but actual ability to read some text and answer questions.

And whether it’s you’re talking about kids or adults, we’re getting worse since twenty twelve. Not since COVID, since twenty thirteen actually. And I’m seeing this in myself. We’re all seeing this.

I don’t feel that my IQ is necessarily lower, but I find it very hard to read because there’s so many other things you can do. And I’m always called to something else, very hard to focus. And so the cognitive fragmentation, I think, is gonna be devastating because we can’t even adults, but especially kids, we’re not able to focus, apply ourselves.

What are you gonna accomplish in life if you don’t own your attention, you can’t read a book? Young people now say many say they can’t watch a movie. It’s too long. They can’t sit there for ninety minutes.

So the fragmenting of human attention, I think, is a cost to humanity that is vast beyond our ability to comprehend. And it wasn’t so clear a few years ago, but now the data’s coming in. It’s clear. And we haven’t even talked about physical health effects.

This is TEDMED, and nobody doubts that kids who have access to their smartphone at night are getting less sleep. That’s very clear. And everyone agrees that when kids are getting a half hour or hour less sleep a night every night of their childhood, there are significant health effects. So, you know, for this medical audience, when it’s not just mental health.

It’s also physical health, exercise, obesity, movement, physical touch, friendship.

A phone based child is not a human childhood, and our kids are deprived of so much of what they need in order to grow into healthy adults.

I agree. The sleep is a huge problem. And for adults as well, your immune system takes a huge hit. Even just with one night of poor sleep. This conversation has been really grounding, enlightening, and I hope that the message continues to spread, and you’re doing such incredible work. We appreciate you taking time to talk with us at TEDMED.

Well, thank you, Kelly. And I really appreciate you letting me talk to a medically oriented audience. It’s so important that doctors, pediatricians, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, counselors, anybody working with young people, it’s very important that you always ask about their digital habits. What are their addictions?

What are they doing? Which platforms are they on? Video games for boys. Pornography for boys.

So I really encourage the medical community to incorporate digital assessment because this is the cause or a contributor to so many psychological and psychiatric difficulties. And secondly, I hope you’ll all raise your voices. You command enormous amounts of respect.

And if doctors and if the AMA and the AAP were to say something about this, it would carry a lot of weight. The previous Surgeon General, Vivek Murti, he was fantastic on these issues. But my sense is the rest of the medical establishment has just been silent, and we need the doctors to be speaking up that this is just not healthy.

Vivek was actually a TEDMED speaker.

Oh, good. Of course, he was. Yes. Oh, he oh, I just saw him last week at a conference. He is amazing. He’s so moving.

Yes. He is. Well, thank you so much, John. We will be very happy to spread this message to the medical community and others.

Thank you so much, Kelly. Thanks to TEDMED.

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