Why doesn’t the government trust teenagers?

0:01Sky News, the full story first.

0:11No social media after midnight for 16 and 17-year-olds. The government's latest bright idea leads to a much bigger discussion. When do we actually become adults? This is why.

0:36humanity. I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.

1:00At what age do you become? An adult. 18, of course, I hear you say. Except, not really. At 16, you can legally consent to sex. You can work, pay tax, leave home, and with your parents' permission, join the armed forces. And at 17, you can even drive a car. But you can't buy alcohol, you can't place a bet, get a tattoo, sit on a jury, or vote in the UK general election. For now, anyway. So you're old enough to make decisions about your body, your health, and potentially your country. But in law, at least, you are still a child. Under-16s will soon be banned from social media altogether. 16 - and 17-year-olds will have a default curfew on doom scrolling, though they will be allowed to opt out.

1:43Embarrassing to say, but I do use it quite a lot after school. I think I'll be a lot more bored because there's not much to do in my day-to-day life without it. I think I'll be spending a lot more time on homework, which is not ideal. So, does that make the plan entirely pointless? And why do we treat this age group not quite as children but not quite as adults either. Dr Adam Abdelnour is a chartered psychologist who's spent decades working with and assessing children and young people. Adam, this is an incredibly complicated topic but just starting with what the government is doing. They have announced that they are going to ban the use of social media for under-16s.

2:23There are protective defaults, I suppose you could call them, for 16 and 17-year-olds. I mean, psychologically, is there anything specific, anything significant about just turning 16 in and of itself? No, you're quite right to point out we have to pick an age. But some 16 year olds are ready for a lot more than other 16 year olds. And that applies to other laws. If you simply replace the word social media ban with alcohol ban, it diminishes the problem from one that's ungraspable to one that's graspable. because we say that 18 year olds can't buy alcohol we say that parents or adults who are 18 can buy alcohol for children of 14 to 18 and we say that you can't buy an alcoholic drink in a pub for a child under 14 let me ask you the question when did i first have an alcoholic drink yeah well my mother listens to this so perhaps i won't be answering that question to see what i mean we have that for good reasons good physical mental health reasons we have that ban on alcohol but But then there's that big bunch of children under 18 who can get a drink in pubs.

3:28So the plan doesn't work completely effectively, does it? You yourself have spent countless years assessing people's psychology, their ability to reason, their capacity to make decisions. Does a 16, 17-year-old cognitively have the same capacity to make informed decisions as an adult? Because I remember it well, that particular age, you know, and the frustration you feel. Because on the one hand, you can consent to sex, medical treatment, you can work, you can pay tax, you can join the armed forces. You can't fire a gun when you're in the armed forces. You can't buy alcohol. You can't gamble. You can't get a tattoo.

4:03You can't get a vote in the general election just yet anyway. I mean, it just seems a bit of a patchwork. And from what you are saying, it doesn't seem like there is any psychological underpinning as to why someone at 15 can't do those things, but someone at 16 can. Someone at 16 can do plenty of those things, and someone at 18 can do even more. It just, it doesn't seem particularly well thought through. I would ask you what the alternative is. And I think, you know, go back to the alcohol without overlabouring the point. We don't think it's good for children, younger children to drink alcohol, but in fact, lots do.

4:39But we still have that restriction on purchase. Well, it seems to me that 16 or 17-year-olds have the option to keep the default settings, which apply the curfew and restrict access to those social media apps, Instagram and so on. But they can just switch those off. So in a way, what we're trying to do there is perhaps give them a nod in the right direction, help them to resist the temptation. In this respect, I think that's quite well thought through, that particular thing. If we were talking about them banning 16-, 17-year-olds from using those things completely, I would say that's a bit too old.

5:15They should, as you're more fitting with all the other things you say they can do at 16, like getting married. Yeah, that would be excessive. But because there's that opportunity to switch it off, I think that's psychologically quite subtle. I'm thinking back to when I was 16 and 17. And impulse control was perhaps one thing that I was not entirely possessed of. Because there were so many factors there. Desire for immediate gratification, peer pressure, the idea of just doing something for the sake of doing it. What are the factors that make 16 and 17-year-olds more prone to risky decision-making than someone of my age?

5:50I think the energy that comes with adulthood, the breaking through, you know, it's that plane-taking. Before I adolescence, the plane's on the ground. And after I adolescence, the plane's in the air. It's above the clouds. It's all sunny and fluffy white. And I think, you know, on that trajectory, the trajectory is always into the unknown, into the explore, breaking the barriers, challenging the world. You know, I'm going to change the world to suit me. And then you get up to that altitude. And it's a very powerful place to be. And you're probably at your fittest. You're probably, for many people, you're cognitively most efficient.

6:27Because declining cognitive function starts really quite young. After you're 20. We don't have the caution that comes with being a little bit older and realizing that sometimes our confidence is misplaced. You mentioned peer pressure. The group pressure is enormous. Human beings are incredibly vulnerable to any kind of group pressure. You must have been in meetings where somebody has said something and spoken as if they speak for the group. And you think, well, I can't challenge that because this is what the group thinks. But actually, that's just the power of the group setting. And I think that is one of the things about social media that makes human beings most vulnerable to harm from it.

7:07When you've got thousands of people looking at these posts, or we imagine there are thousands and hundreds of likes or people challenging us, we treat that as the group and succumb to the pressure of the group because conforming to the group is one of those evolutionarily very powerful and protective things. When Humming started living in groups, there were certain powerful cooperative dynamics which made the group strong. And while the group was cohesive and united, it was much more powerful than individuals who weren't in the group. And one of the things about groups being successful is conformity.

7:47Somebody leads, we all follow. And that makes a very powerful group. Remember, a lot of 17 and 18-year-olds or a lot of people in that 16 to 20 age bracket, they're still trying to find their peer group outside school. They're still looking for where they belong. They are more vulnerable than people who know where they belong. Let's focus then just for a second on parents, the role of parents, both in shaping a child's kind of ability to make decisions and also keeping an eye on what they are up to when they're on their phones. I mean, a theme that is often run through your work is that cooperation is kind of more effective when you're trying to impose some kind of behavioral control, you know, keeping your kids off their phones for a period of time.

8:27My personal view is that children shouldn't have any kind of smartphone or iPad or device like that until they're 11. If I had children now who were 11, I would say, you know, you can have a smartphone. It's my account. You're using my account. Remember, it's my account. so you're free to use it during these hours but that would all be done within a context of having already built trust and cooperative relationships with my child trust is something that grows as a result of agreements being made and kept and promises being kept and if you as a parent have that kind of relationship with your child where they can talk to you and you're teaching them cooperative skills and you're wherever possible getting them to cooperate with you rather than trying to control them, then you can apply that same kind of thinking to their use of a smartphone.

9:19But I would always think it's better to retain that degree of oversight as a parent. You do it in all other respects. Then doesn't the question become, should the government be regulating teenagers in the way in which they do? Or when it comes to social media, should they be regulating the social media companies themselves? My approach has always been what I call values-based pregnancies. So it's values-based. I ask myself what's right, what's ethical, what's most moral. And then I ask myself what works. And then I compromise between those two. So it's all very well saying, oh, these prescriptions, these limitations won't work.

10:00Children find ways to get around them and so on. That might be true, yeah. But will your trust model work? Will just educating children work? Or do we need a combination of the two? I think the combination of the two is right. So, you know, more parental responsibility. Let parents exercise their responsibility and their parental role and help their children by ensuring that they can see everything their child is doing online and act accordingly. Let's also have this support from the government. And let's just accept that, you know, that's not going to be perfect. It's the best we can do. Do you know what?

10:36I wonder if we perhaps have been a bit too negative on young people. I mean, And isn't it possible that actually some 16, 17-year-olds might be better placed to make a decision in certain circumstances because they don't come with the baggage, because they don't have decades of life experience, they don't have decades of getting wound up by the world out there, and they're not a miserly old curmudgeon like me? Absolutely. I talked about how we could be more granular about how we limited the social media company. We could also be more granular about identifying which children need support. I mean, 90 % of children, maybe 99 % of children, I don't know, don't have particular problems with social media.

11:14It's just part of the ups and downs of life. They make friends on it. They lose friends and get upset. They make new friends, and that's fine. Forget the old friends. That's what people do. Life goes on, and it's fine. For most of them, which are the ones who do really get trapped in the very negative cycles? Which are the children who are going to be most vulnerable? Because they're often hidden from us. One way I would trust children is that those who are not particularly vulnerable are able to make critical judgments for themselves, and they probably don't need the ban. But as I say, we're using a blunt instrument because we don't have enough information about it.

11:48And another brief point I make in closing is that children who do get in serious emotional, mental health difficulties as a result of social media, if there wasn't social media, would they still have got into those kinds of difficulties in a format that was non-social media? Because it takes a certain kind of person to get drawn into that sort of thing. Adam, it's been great to talk to you. Thanks so much for your time. And you. That's your lot for today. Do get in touch with your thoughts. I'm especially interested to hear if, like me, you're a parent, you've got kids around this age or on their way.

12:21Let me know what you plan to do. Why? At Sky.uk. We're back tomorrow.

12:45of humanity. I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.