Put The Phones Away with Jonathan Haidt

26:53I couldn't even, and maybe it was something about estrogen and my response to the crying. So we set it up where Barack took the night shift. I went to bed, which was helpful because it got me some sleep. I would have to cover my ears so that I couldn't literally hear the crying. And it took no longer than a week. Exactly. And it was really after the first two nights that it, you know, because we started early. How old? What month? It was when we weaned her off of breastfeeding, which was four months, five months. So it was very early. So she learned quickly. The sooner, this is the point to Josie, the sooner that you start sort of removing the symptom, the quicker you start to implement the action, the more responsive the child is sooner.

27:49Your family story is exactly my family story. We read this book by Ferber about sleep training. I forget the title. But the key idea is so simple. The key idea is all mammals sleep, all mammals dream, all mammals wake up briefly and go back to sleep, wake up briefly. So we all do this. And the infant has to learn like, oh, I wake up, I can go back to sleep. I don't need the breast. I don't need to be rocked and held. Like you wake up, you go to sleep. Back to Josie's question. So yes, she's moody when you take it away. and if you were to go cold turkey, it's going to be hard for a little while.

28:22Now you want to give her lots of other fun things to do. And that brings us to the second thing I said. So I said dopamine and then friends and then stories. So the devices are more engaging than anything in the real world. They're more engaging even than your friends in the short run. But in the long run, you have a lot more fun out with an afternoon with your friends than you do an afternoon on TikTok. And so we have to not just be taking away the screens from our kids. We have to be giving them back a fun and exciting childhood. So I'd say to Josie, find someone, find some other, some girl who your daughter knows and talk to their parents.

29:01This year, now that everyone's talking about the book, everyone's talking about this, you will find some other parents who agree with you and form a pact where you're going to say, you know what, we're going to try to get our daughters together fairly unsupervised. Like you drop them off, you know, I'll be there, but we'll let them play. You know, at seven, they don't need constant supervision. So the more you can give them, give them fun, real-world, analog friendship, the easier it is to wean them off the screens. That's the second principle. And then the third is stories. Because I'm not saying, some people interpret me to be saying, oh, you know, screens are the devil, never let them watch screens.

29:37And in the book, I didn't say a lot to counter that view, but now I'd like to, which is what I'm coming to see in thinking about this and dealing with my own kids, is this insight, which is that humans are storytelling animals. That's who we are. Every culture, we tell stories, we raise our kids on stories, we have myths, we have religion. So stories are good. And a TV screen is a pretty good way to present stories. And so here's the best thing you could do. Watch a 90-minute movie with your kid or the siblings together. So watching a long story in a social setting, on a TV set, that's great. I'm not saying five hours a day, but even an hour or two a day is probably fine.

30:24Not for two, three-year-olds, but by seven, eight, fine. Here's what's really bad. Not a TV screen, but a touchscreen device, which is not just entertainment, it's training your child because they touch, they get a reward. They get the dope. They touch, they get a reward. And before you know it, they're addicted. So, touchscreen device is much worse than a TV. Watching it alone is much worse than watching it with a friend. And watching short stuff and moving around a lot is fragmenting your attention, whereas watching a movie is teaching you to pay attention to a story for 90 minutes. So, what I would say is don't think about screen time.

31:00Think about story time and fragmenting time. How much story time should your kids have? I don't know the answer, but, you know, I mean, an hour a day should be fine. watching movies. So story time is generally a good thing. Just don't go too far. How much fragmenting time should, how much time on TikTok should they have? I think zero. I think zero is a pretty good number for fragmenting time.

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35:09You know, you talk about dopamine for kids. It's, you know, as I hear Josie's question, I hear the parenting question, the new parenting trap, which is parents suffer from this dopamine thing too when it comes to parenting. Because we want instant reward response from our children. We don't want to wait. We don't want to do the longer whole thing. A lot of times we have to ask ourselves, are we doing this for our kids or are we doing this for us? Because we have the screen too. And we're being trained on that instant gratification that maybe the 90-minute story is a problem for us because we can't sit still.

36:00The bottom line is that we've got to get tougher. We've got to get more resilient for our kids. because I know time and time again that a lot of parents do what's easy for them, you know, and not necessarily what's best for the kid. The intent is there. The love is there. But I think we've gotten really confused that we're kind of hooked on instant gratification. That's right. You know, we want silence. We want everybody. Harmony. Instant harmony. Craig, what are you? No, I was just thinking about how our parents parented and what my mom would say about saying no is that it's not just saying no.

36:48It's holding your no accountable. It is explaining why you're saying no, and it's outlasting your kids. And that is what I see that parents aren't doing today. And I wanted to get your take on that, and maybe there's a way we can help Josie, because you have to be able to outlast a whatever-year-old as an adult. That's how I look at it. I am not going to let a two-year-old or a six-month-old or a 15-year-old outlast me on something that I know is right. That's right. There's so much in what you both just said. So I'll start with this idea of outlasting. so the key idea I want to put on the table here is called anti-fragility.

37:37We treat our kids as if they're fragile and we don't want any harm to come to them. We don't realize or we forget, which our parents knew, is that our kids are anti-fragile, which means they actually need to fall down sometimes so they learn how to not fall down. They need to be in fights so they learn how to get, you know, how to deal with it. They need to be excluded sometimes. They learn how to deal with exclusion. We can't be jumping in all the time. You want to frustrate your kids every day. because learning to deal with frustration is how you create an adult that other people are going to want to hire or marry.

38:09Well, this is, we talk about this all the time. So the one thing I would say to Josie, understand that your children are not your friends. You love them deeply. And if you do it right, if you set some boundaries now, give them a lot of no's with a lot of love and a lot of encouragement. But if you set really clear boundaries that you believe in and you stick to all the time. All the time. Kids are just, they are waiting for you. That's right. They need structure. They respond to it. And they're waiting for you to go back on your word. They're waiting to see how long it will take. How many times can I outlast you?

38:48Because as I say, they got time on their hands. Kids don't have jobs. They have no responsibility. They're not paying bills. All they have time for is to outlast you. To wear you down. To wear you down. That's right. That's well put. That's really well put. The way you described it makes me think of Dr. Becky Kennedy. Talks a lot about this, about your job as a parent. Your job is to set the boundaries and choose what's safe and what's proper for their development. Their job is to experience negative emotions and learn how to deal with it. They can't have everything they want. And she uses the analogy of, in some ways, you're the pilot of an airplane.

39:24The pilot is not our friend. The pilot is not there to make us feel good. if I'm flying to LA and there's terrible weather in LA and the pilot says, oh, I'm sorry, we're going to have to reroute to Salt Lake. It's like, no, no, I need to get to LA. And the pilot is like, oh, yeah, I don't want to let you down. Okay, we'll go to LA. Like, no, no, no. And so if the pilot gets new information that's relevant to the safety of the passengers, it is obligatory for the pilot to take that into account and do what's in the interest of the passengers in terms of their safety. So similarly, we all gave our kids, most of us gave our kids screens way too early, the touch screens.

40:02We didn't know. And now we have new information. And it's like, you know, storm system over LA, we can't land there. And so I would say to Josie, I know it's really painful. It's difficult to take the iPad away, but you can do it. You can say, I've got new information and I love you too much to let you have this thing change your brain. I can also say, I'm now working with a lot of Gen Z. so there's so many wonderful things about Gen Z. They see the problem. They understand what's happening to them. A lot of them want to fix what they want to address. A lot of them are writing about it. You will often find members of Gen Z who say in their 20s, talk to the ones in their 20s, and they will often say, I'm so glad my parents didn't give me a phone or social media until later.

40:46What you'll never hear is a 23-year-old Gen Z saying, I wish my parents had given me a smartphone and social media in middle school. So it's hard now, but stick it out and find a couple of other families. It'll be so much easier because your kids are terrified of being the only ones. Now, Craig, you as a coach, you've also seen this. Some parents will be able to see themselves. I would echo everything you said and then layer on top your theory of anti-fragility. and sports was always the place where you sort of had some, where you learned how to deal with adversity. Toughening. And I am just amazed at the number of parents who are trying to shield their children from that adversity.

41:37And those are the biggest lessons that I think you learn in sports. And this new wave of children, they don't understand really what team is because they're all independent contractors puppeted by their parents. Right, oh no. So that's what I'm seeing as a coach. And it just, it worries me. And it makes me think, how can we encourage parents to set these boundaries and these no's and sometimes over know it, but understand we're doing this the right way and not turn them into these swooping in helicopter parents. I've got four kids, two older, two who are still 15 and 13 and 32 and 28. And I've tried to parent them the same ways, right?

42:38Right. Right. There's there's hard parenting and then there's an explanation for why we're doing it the way we're doing it. And but to get back to this to this screen time stuff, the 32 and 28 year olds, they didn't to your point, they didn't have the smartphones yet. Right. They didn't go through puberty. They didn't go through puberty with them. So it was really easy to say, OK, no phones until you got to high school. no social media stuff until you got to 16 it was really easy because there were more people like that so but it would have been easy for the way we were raised it would have been easy to say it anyway because with our younger kids I have seen exactly what you said and I've seen it through my own eyes because when people send me a tiktok and I look at that and I'm cracking up I flip to the next one and I know better.

43:39I know better. And I'm cracking up again and I flip to the next one. And then I realized my 15 and 13 year old, they don't have the willpower. They have a little, they have less willpower than I do. So we have gotten to the point where it's one hour of social media or one hour of Instagram. That's all they have is Instagram. Every day. So that's seven Seven days a week? One hour a day. Seven days a week. No, on the weekend, we're so busy, we can say, you can spend as much time as you want knowing they don't have any time to spend on it. So it's a little trickeration there where we're making them feel like, oh, man, we can't wait till the weekend comes.

44:24Mm-hmm. But when they're, when, I'm thinking about what you were saying about the dopamine, the friends, and the stories. The friends part for us is we've got a good group of close friends who are operating the same way. Great. Do the kids hang out with each other in person? They hang out in person. Fantastic. And they play games together online. Beautiful. Oh, online. Can you, well, okay. But they still get together in person. I mean, you know, we're a sports family, so we've got the sports that we're outside. And in the wintertime, it's a little hard. So I wanted to hear more about what we can tell Josie on how to get back to where she should be.

45:08Because I am well aware of what you're talking about, and it's hard. Yeah. So, okay, so I'll share a few ideas. And I'll share my own experience and my own mistakes. So when I started this whole project, I was focused on social media as the bad thing. And I was in a debate with other researchers who were saying, well, total screen time doesn't correlate as much. And so I thought, okay, maybe it's not the phone. Maybe it's just social media. So I did a really good job keeping my kids off social media until they were 16. But I didn't pay enough attention to the computer and the fact that, of course, also during COVID, they both were on their computer all day long.

45:49What were they doing? They were watching The Office and other shows on Netflix over and over and over again. They spent, I mean, you know, thousands of hours they spent just watching stuff when we thought they were in school. And so what I wish I had done, and here's a policy I would recommend to everybody with younger kids and even to Josie, even though you've already given them an iPad. I think the policy should be no screens in the bedroom ever. You start off with that policy when they're young. Yeah. You make a, now you can still have a screen in your bedroom because don't worry, your kids will point it out, but they're not really copying you.

46:23They want to do what other kids are doing. So if you have a policy, no screens in the bedroom ever, which is what a lot of us have when we were kids. You couldn't have a television in your bedroom. That'd be crazy. Now, at a certain point, maybe middle school, you're going to have to relent and say, okay, you can take your laptop into your bedroom or you can take the family laptop into your bedroom to do home. So you might relent. But you establish the principle early that screens don't belong in bedrooms. Bedrooms are a place to sleep. There are places to do hobbies or whatever else you do. My daughter has a sewing machine in her bedroom.

46:51So I wish I'd done that. And Josie can still do that. So you can certainly put restrictions on. And what some people who study this, the really terrible things, the talking with sextortionists, with people who are blackmailing you, with people who are after sex or money, that especially happens overnight. When kids are in bed with a phone under the blanket and for hours and hours, and they're missing out on sleep. So no screens in the bedroom ever. You can start with, have that policy. And the other thing is, beware of the seven day a week thing, because an hour a day, seven days a week, that is enough to get the brain kind of adapted to it and the habit.

47:33And so I can't prove this yet, but I think a wiser policy is to have some like just on weekends. Like, I didn't let my son play any video games when he was in sixth grade, any online video games. And he does kind of resent me for that because that's where all the boys were. Now, 10, 15 % of those boys got addicted. Their brains are changed. They might be diminished for life. So, you know, I'm not, I don't think I necessarily made the wrong decision. But what I could have done is to say to my son, you can play Fortnite for one hour a day on Saturday and one hour a day on Sunday. Then at least he could talk with other boys about the game.

48:08So, I would just say beware of anything that's every day. If you have clear boundaries, there's a lot less fighting. Whereas if it's an everyday, there's more risk of addiction.

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53:16Well, the real, you know, the unavoidable aspect to all of this, unfortunately for Josie, is that there will be parental pain. Yeah, that's right. And I just think that, you know, why I spend so much time talking about that is that I think that in addition to social media, the tech industry, the way people's minds work, that we have to become a little more resilient as parents. Yeah, we have to become tougher. We have to become tougher for the sake of our kids. And I just don't think that there's any way around making this easy for parents. And I think that that's what we... Parenting is never easy.

54:00It's not supposed to be. It's not fun. All of it is going to be really, really hard. And not physically hard. It's going to be emotionally one of the toughest things you do. Because the little child that you brought into this world that you will love beyond anything you can imagine. You will be disappointing them and scaring them and making them hurt and arguing with them and doing all the things that you don't want to do with your best friends. But in the end, as parents, we are responsible for securing the safety and the health of the children we bring into this world. And that means once we know that something isn't good for them, and now what you're saying, we know, even though there are arguments, we are getting the data and we are seeing it with our own eyes and our own homes, that this generation of children, they are more depressed, they are struggling with anxiety, the higher rates of suicide.

55:05I mean, if these weren't real statistics, we wouldn't be talking about this. That's right. But there is a connection. We do know that now. We didn't know that one generation ago, but we have the data now. And so that means that we've got to do the hard thing. We've got to take the substance from the addict. Yeah, that's right. And it's not going to be fun. That's right. But what I can promise parents is that it's going to be easier going forward than it was a year or two ago. Yeah, yeah. Because the danger began to be coming into view around 2019. And Jean Twankey, who really first diagnosed this in her book, iGen, 2017, she and I were saying by 2019, what kids really need is a lot less time on screens, a lot more time outdoors playing.

55:55And then COVID comes in and what do they get? In New York City, they locked the playgrounds. It was horrible. All kids could do was sit and rot on their screens all day. So we were confused for a number of years. And during that time, a lot of resignation set in in parents. People saying, what are you going to do? The genie's out of the bottle. The toothpaste is out of the tube. The train's left the station. The technology's here to stay. People felt powerless. And Josie conveyed that too. We all feel powerless when we try to do it alone. But what I can promise you, Josie, what I can promise all the parents out there, is if you step up now, if you talk to other parents, you're going to find allies.

56:33If you talk to your kids' teachers, you're going to find allies. Talk to the principal, you're going to find allies. If you initiate something, you're going to find people are ready to stand up. And it doesn't matter if they're on the left or the right. We're all united by being parents. We're all united by being human beings. And as you're saying, we see what it's doing to us. We have problems with it. And so, of course, it's wreaking havoc on our kids' development. John, before we sort of sum up for Josie's sort of next steps for her, in the realm of making the changes that you talked about, sort of the not seven days a week, have you seen or is there any data or have you seen anecdotally where you've seen results in teenagers where they've been able to turn it around?

57:25Oh, yes. So there's hope. Oh, yes. Oh, my goodness. I'm so glad you asked this question because sometimes I go on about the mental illness and it all seems so depressing and so terrible. And parents with younger kids love my book. Okay, we're on this. We're doing this and that. Parents with teenagers who already have a phone, they're like, oh, my God, what have we done? So let me give everybody some hope here. I'm a professor at New York University. I teach a course in the business school called Flourishing for the undergraduates and a version called Work Wisdom and Happiness for the MBA students who are older.

58:00And what I find over and over again with the undergraduates is first, as I said, they're not in denial. They know there are problems. They want to grow. They want mentorship. They want to be successful. And so once you get them on board on the project and you lay out, you know, the course is designed around three goals. we're going to try to make you stronger, smarter, and more sociable. And stronger means emotionally stronger. And yes, they want to do that. And then we go through some of the foundations. Like, okay, let's look at the foundations of flourishing. Are you getting enough sleep? And a third of them are not.

58:38And so, okay, you guys, you need to work on your sleep first. If you're getting six hours or less and you're feeling tired during the day, you got to start there. and there's a national epidemic of sleeplessness which causes loss of learning, mental health problems. So we say, okay, you start working on your sleep. How many of you are spending more than two hours a day on social media? And that'll be like a quarter or a third of them. But my students who are hooked on social media, in every class, there's always one kid who's spending six hours a day on TikTok. Six hours a day just on TikTok. And they're 19 years old.

59:13When they, for their project, they say, okay, I'm going to quit. or I'm going to reduce it to even just one hour, they get the most spectacular results. And what always happens is they report all these other benefits that they didn't even expect. You know, like I can do my homework. Like I used to think I had no time for homework, but I get my homework done and I have three hours left in the evening. So I go out with a friend. Oh, good. You're going out with a friend. That's great. And they just become more confident because you can't do anything in this life if you don't have your attention. and these are business students they want to be successful so it starts with regain control of your attention and if you do that you can then go on and do great things so i want to reassure everybody out there that while it's going to be tough for gen z overall because we deprive them of a lot of these growth experiences we're talking about but any single one of them who commits to regaining their attention cultivating healthy habits they're going to get amazing results the brain isn't really done sort of like locking down into its adult form until around age 25 is when the frontal prefrontal cortex finishes.

1:00:16So if you have a late teenager or kid in early 20s, they can really turn their lives around. I mean, look, we can all turn it. Humans are amazing. You can turn your life around at 30 or 42, but it's going to be a lot easier if you do it while you're still below 25. Yeah. Well, that's great. That's good. Good. Well, thanks for that because we needed that. But we've covered a whole lot of really neat stuff here for Josie. And I want to make sure that I don't leave anything out. I think the most important thing for Josie that I heard was you can't be afraid to say no and you can't be afraid to start over and say, okay, this is how we're going to operate.

1:00:57That's right. That's one thing. And the no screens in the bedroom, that's easy. You can definitely do that. But it's a revelation to a lot of people because that's something a lot of us have given in on. Well, but also, John, a point that you made is that some adults don't do it because they have TVs in their bedrooms, right? And this is another thing. Yeah. No, life isn't fair. That's right. I'm an adult. I can do things. Look, I drive a car. You don't. Right. Or even if mom's on the phone, right? Because mom hasn't broken her addiction. You can say, yes, I'm doing it, but you have a different set of rules.

1:01:34and the whole fairness. That's right. Life isn't fair, and that's another lesson for kids to learn. That's right. Unfairness and how to deal with that, and mom got to do something that I couldn't do, or older sister got to do it. I think it's okay for kids to have a different set of rules than their parents, especially if their parents can't break their own addiction. Yeah, yeah. Agreed, agreed. And then just one more thing to add for Josie, just to really emphasize at the end here, is it isn't just about taking away the technology. It's about restoring a play-based, exciting, amazing, fun, adventure-filled, risk-filled childhood.

1:02:14So when you look at it that way, the deal is, yeah, I'm taking this away from you and it's going to hurt for a couple of weeks, but you're going to have a lot more fun in your childhood. And I've already talked with three of your friends' parents and we're going to give you a better childhood. so so yeah there's if you keep your eye on childhood not just on the screens then I think it's easier to see what you need to do and what childhood should look like which is a lot of one-on-one play in real life what you guys talk about I listened to prepare for this I listened to a podcast discussion you guys did like five years ago so you guys just had a lot of fun together well it was you were each other's playmates right it was the way you grew up I mean I you were raised that way that's right We played a lot and we played unsupervised and we had to make stuff up and we had to play with broken toys and learn how to make games with kids in the neighborhood.

1:03:13The playgroup model is a good one. That's how I survived the majority of my parenting. We developed great groups of friends with kids in the same age. and a lot of times all we had to do was put them in the basement. Yeah, that's right. That's fine. They'll find a way to entertain themselves. So just two sources of information for all of your listeners. One is please go to letgrow.org. It's an organization I co-founded with Lenore Skenazy, the woman who invented the term free-range kids that you were talking about. So letgrow.org has all kinds of advice for families and schools on how to give your kid this fun, exciting childhood.

1:03:54The other is the website for my book, but really it's become the website for the movement. So if you go to anxiousgeneration.com, anxiousgeneration.com, in the upper right corner, there's a box that says take action. And then there's a line for parents, a line for educators, a line for legislators. We have all kinds of tools to help you act collectively because that's what this is all about. It's hard to act, Josie. It's hard to act if you're totally alone. I get that. We all are facing that. But if we can do collective action, then we can escape from this together. Yeah. That's great. Great. Thank you, John.

1:04:29Really appreciate you being here. And there's probably more we could talk about. Well, maybe we'll get you back. Keep your phone handy in a healthy way. Happy to come back. Let's do an update on parenting and coaching. That's right. Hopefully we'll see some progress. Well, thanks again. Great advice. Thank you, Michelle. Thank you, Craig. Thank you.

1:05:11I'm Hoda Kotb from Making Space. Okay, you and I are both on the other side of the jump, whether it is life after the White House, or in my case, life after the Today Show. So what has this new chapter taught you about starting something new at any stage, about being a beginner again. I would encourage all your listeners to embrace those transitions, to practice them. It's a muscle. And not to run away from change, but to embrace it as much as possible and turn that into something really special. There's a lot of learning that happens on the other side of our fear of change. And I'm living proof of that.

1:05:53You know, nothing keeps me sharper these days as somebody who's getting up there in years than doing something completely new and foreign. And with Misha and I doing IMO, it gives me particularly an opportunity to do something that is completely outside of my wheelhouse of experience that I've had before now. Please give Making Space a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And make sure you tell your friends. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening right now. Thank you.