It Starts With Attraction
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It Starts With Attraction
Navigating Mental Health and Technology for the Next Generation with Zach Rausch
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Discover the hidden costs of our digital age as I sit down with Zach Rausch, the lead researcher behind "The Anxious Generation." Zach opens up about his personal journey with mental health challenges and how it fueled his passion to explore the complex relationship between technology and well-being. This episode peels back the layers on the disturbing rise in loneliness, anxiety, and depression among young people, especially adolescent girls, as they grapple with the very tools meant to connect them. We tackle the sobering reality of international trends affecting mental health and stress the urgency of addressing these issues for the sake of future generations.
Zach Rausch is Associate Research Scientist at NYU-Stern School of Business, lead researcher to Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt and the #1 New York Times best seller, The Anxious Generation. Zach previously worked at the Center for Humane Technology and as Communications Manager at Heterodox Academy. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in sociology and religious studies and a Master of Science in psychological science from SUNY New Paltz. Zach previously studied Buddhism in Bodh Gaya, India, worked in Wilderness Therapy, and was a direct care worker in two psychiatric group homes.
Zach’s research and writing have been featured internationally, in outlets such The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and more.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZachMRausch
Newsletter: After Babel
Website: https://zach-rausch.com/
Anxious Generation: https://anxiousgeneration.com
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What we're experiencing in today's world is a destruction of happiness. That's what we are diving into in today's episode. What we talk about with my guest, zach Rausch, who was the lead researcher for the book the Anxious Generation, which has been a phenomenon and has taken the world by storm it seems Everyone is talking about this book. What we talk about is how our phones are our greatest distractions, and the thing that has led us to become more connected than we've ever been before is leading us to be lonelier, more anxious and more depressed than ever before. And it's not just us as adults, it's our kids, and the effects are even more significant on our children.
Speaker 1:On today's episode, we talk about how girls are more susceptible to the effects of smartphones and social medias than boys are. We talk about all of the negative effects of these items on children and, most importantly, what we as parents and as adults can do differently for ourselves and to create a better future for the next generation. Let's dive in to today's episode. All right, zach, I am really excited to have you on today, and as a researcher, so I'm currently in the middle of my PhD. So, like researchers speaking to fellow researcher, I feel like we may geek out on a couple of things today, if that's okay with you.
Speaker 2:I'd love to Well, thank you so much for having me on and hello to your listeners. I'm very excited to talk about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you were the lead researcher for the book the Anxious Generation, and this book is has been really incredible. It's gotten a lot of attention in the media. Hopefully it's gotten a lot of people to begin to think differently about how they use and approach smartphones and social media. We'll we'll talk more about that, but why were you interested in doing research on this topic? What is it? What was your precipice into this field?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I have one of the weirdest journeys to get to where I am. I never thought that this would be the job that I would have. I was working in psychiatric group homes after I finished my bachelor's degree, which was in sociology and religious studies. I was planning to be a social worker and a therapist, but I had long struggled with my own mental illness, with depression and anxiety, and so I'd always been really interested in this kind of adolescent mental health in particular, because that's when it really started for me and I decided to volunteer at an evolutionary psychology research lab that was near my house where I was living at the time in New York, and my mentor there gave me the Coddling of the American Mind, which was John's John Haidt's 2018 book, and when I read it I was like, oh my God, he's talking about me.
Speaker 2:I just felt very resonant to the kinds of problems he was talking about, which was rising mental health issues on American college campuses in particular, and the changes in childhood that were going on over the last several decades, and I did some research on his book. He read my blog post that I wrote about my research, and then I started working with him, and over the last five, six years, I just slowly became more and more interested in this topic and I began to see just how profound the change of childhood has been over the last decade and how much of a problem that we're facing, both here in the United States but also in many countries around the world, of what has been happening to teens, and then I became really interested to try to understand what was driving that.
Speaker 1:That's right. So, if I remember correctly, you really led the charge in, not just looking at the change of childhood in America and how adolescents were affected by mental illness, but you did it over several different countries. Can you tell us more about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what I think is so the anxious generation was actually not supposed to be a book. We had one chapter written that was going to be about what's going on with teens, and then it was going to actually be a book about what technology is doing to society, to liberal democracies. That's where the book began. But as we were doing the research and we noticed that okay, so between 2010 and 2015, we see big spikes in anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide among teens, especially among girls here in the US, and then we noticed that this pattern was showing up in Australia, in New Zealand, in Canada, in the UK, and then very similar trends with anxiety and depression across the Nordic countries and most of Western Europe the anxiety and depression across the Nordic countries and most of Western Europe and we realized that this is a huge story, and so that was really kind of the impetus that led us to write this whole book, because it's not just an American phenomena. This is a multinational change that's been going on with young people.
Speaker 1:Now, did you just look at those countries or did you look at a lot of countries and realize that there was the correlation between those specific countries? Why those countries?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. There are a couple reasons for it. The first is really just practical in terms of my primary language is English, so that makes it easier for me to read those studies. The second is, where do we have the best available data? That tends to be in the more Western Europe Anglosphere, and also data that looks at trends over time that goes back I mean, ideally I like to look back into the 1900s and see changes over time. So a lot of the reason for the focus was just the availability of data, the quality of the data when that data was around and my ability to really read those papers.
Speaker 2:But we have done a lot of work more recently trying to expand that scope and we do see we do have some good international data that goes beyond and we've found, for example, with school loneliness, there's a study called the Program for International Student Assessment and that's done every three years and it's mostly about academic performance, but it has eight items around feeling alienated alone at school, and this is among 15-year-olds and what we found is that average scores were pretty steady up until 2012, all around the world, and then it starts to go up, and this is in Latin America, this is even in East Asia, even though the changes are smaller, and so we are starting to get a better sense of the changes.
Speaker 2:There's a great economist, danny Blanchflower, who's done some work, also looking really globally, and he's found that, you know, there used to be this U-shaped curve of happiness where young people tend to be happiest. Then it goes down and you down and life gets hard, we get kind of miserable and then the kids leave and then we get happy again. And he found that that U-shaped curve has really disappeared in most countries around the world where now young people consistently are the least happy. And so this is now there's a question about when that changed, and we just don't have the data to go far back enough in many of these countries to know. But what we're seeing is a true international, maybe global, phenomenon of kind of the destruction of human happiness when we're when we're young.
Speaker 1:I am taking notes because I'm sitting here like this is. This is a lot so to so for for the listeners. Maybe they haven't read the Anxious Generation. You know, we, we started talking about social media. So there's this book written it's called the Anxious Generation and clearly you were the lead researcher on it and really what y'all sought to do was was this like you took these? As you said, you started with this, this Anglosphere. You saw these rates begin to change and where did it come in Like? So where in the hypothesis was why are these things shifting and it linking to social media and smartphones?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. So I think that maybe the best way to illustrate this is to first lay out what our core thesis is and then I can talk about at what point did kind of. This is more of John's journey into this process because I came in a little bit later, but the core thesis of the Anxious Generation is that we've been over-protecting kids in the real world and under-protecting them online and it's a two. So it's a kind of a two-part theory that we're really pushing. And the time points of change for all of these things are happening at different times. So for what we call the loss of the play-based childhood, which has to do with the overprotection side, that begins most prominently in the 1980s, but we can go even further back to the 1960s, and it's a long, slow change in how we are raising kids, of what kids are able to do. And then the early 2010s, we have what we call the rise of the phone-based childhood.
Speaker 2:And so Coddling of the American Mind about the potential role of social media on youth mental health, and at that point he had said it might be contributing to it, but he didn't know and it was very unclear.
Speaker 2:And right after the Coddling was published there was a bunch of articles that came out, both like one in the New York Times that was challenging some of the assumptions about whether or not social media is contributing to it, but then a bunch of really important empirical articles and many of them showed completely different findings.
Speaker 2:And many of them showed completely different findings. And it was at that point he decided to team up with Gene Twenge to another psychologist who's written extensively on this to track all of the studies, all of the available studies on all sides of what's going on, and they started an open source Google document where it was broken down by getting all of the correlational evidence that's out there, all of the longitudinal experimental studies, and I came in later to really to help with this. But it was at that point that you know that he was starting to build a bigger and better sense of what's going on here with social media and over the course of a few years I think he became more confident that this was playing a substantial role in the mental health problems that we're also seeing, where do you think we would be if we didn't have social media today?
Speaker 1:Like, what do you think would be different today if we did not have social media?
Speaker 2:That's an interesting question, I think that you know, I think one. It's important that we have to define our terms here. So what would that mean? I mean, are we saying I think the world would be much better off without the major social media platforms that we're concerned about, which is TikTok, instagram, snapchat? I think that we would lose a lot if we lost things like YouTube.
Speaker 2:I think that there are and I love to talk about this that there's a wide array of benefits and risks and trade-offs to each of the social media platforms, but I think that if teens and young people were not able to spend almost all of their time on these platforms every single day, I think we wouldn't have seen such a dramatic change in youth mental health rates. Our concern is not with social media per se, but it's the combination of having a smartphone with social media that allows companies to hook you in and use business incentives, and there's a whole like attention economy being driving this device that's in our pocket all the time, and it's that combination of smartphones and these particular social media apps which consume so much time and bring so much harm to young people. So that's really what we're concerned about.
Speaker 1:Let's dive into more of that. So what are the ways, like what is the average age that kids are beginning to be on phones or on social media. Now how is that affecting them? Is that affecting their development, their social development? What all is it affecting and how is it playing out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the average age of getting a smartphone continues to get younger. So now in the US it's around, I believe, age 10. One of the most striking statistics I've heard on this comes actually from the UK. I haven't gotten the statistic here in the US, but it's just about 25% of five to seven-year-olds now have a smartphone, their own personal smartphone. So yeah, I know, I couldn't believe it. So what's happening is that we're getting these devices at younger and younger ages. I mean, that was just smartphones, but we also have tablets and iPads.
Speaker 2:Screens are saturating into early childhood and with social media now, ideally, I mean, the rule is set that you have to be 13, but nobody follows that rule. It takes two seconds to figure out how to get around that, and what we know from the company's own reports is that there are millions of kids under the age of 13 who are using it. Our sense is that it generally begins in early middle school. That's when teens really start to move their social lives onto these platforms. But I don't have the specifics that there. And so to the question of what is social media doing and what are the mechanisms through which it can cause harm or benefits, what we talk about in the book. So we have a chapter about how social media really impacts everybody everybody and then how it impacts girls in particular, because that's where we see the highest risk of harm from heavy use of social media is with young adolescent girls, and so just to lay them out, there is just an enormous opportunity cost. This is the most simple kind of harm, which is that the average teen is now spending five hours a day, every day, on social media just social media, not other entertainment. Screen use and entertainment screen use. The average is between eight to 10 hours a day, and it's even the average gets higher for black and Hispanic teens and low income teens as well. So there's some socioeconomic disparities here.
Speaker 2:And when you're spending this much time, where does everything else go? How do you fit all of this? Well, everything else gets pushed out, and so we've been seeing and we tracked this all in the book and also on our sub stack is time spent with friends in person huge declines over the last decade. Time spent sleeping gets pushed out. Time spent being outside, getting sunlight, having hobbies, reading books all of these things have been being pushed out, and all of that has huge implications on our ability to learn to connect to find meaning, to find meaning and so that one feature of this that we have products that are designed to be compulsive and to keep us on for longer and longer. That alone is a huge harm and a mechanism of harm.
Speaker 2:So related to this is social deprivation and sleep deprivation. So as those things get pushed out, kids are spending so much less time with each other in person and we see a huge rise in teenage loneliness. And adults too Adults are one of the report after report of finding that Americans are just incredibly lonely, and part of this is that we've shifted from having devices so telephones, flip phones that enable us to connect with each other, often with the goal of meeting up in person. Or if you're on a phone call, it's synchronous, it's with one other person, and then you shift that to a smartphone where the goal is no longer I'm going to connect with someone in order to meet with them in person or to have an extended conversation. It's about you use the platforms to stay on the platforms, and it's often with an audience of hundreds of people. It's more asynchronous and it's really that change in how social life was moved and it's not a sufficient replacement, and so there's a profound social deprivation happening, sleep deprivation.
Speaker 2:We know that sleep is just absolutely essential for child development, adolescent development. Kids already weren't getting enough sleep. The schools start really early. That was already a problem, and that's just an issue that's been exacerbated because the primary time that kids are spending a lot of time on their phones is in bed, and this is also when a lot of harms happen is while you're in bed late at night. That's a lot of cyberbullying happens then, and just quickly I'll just do two more is attention fragmentation, which is just the fact that I mean this is for all of us.
Speaker 2:We get hundreds of push notifications every single day, notifications from texting, from news sites, and what this does is it stops us from being able to have sustained attention on one thing. We're terrible multitaskers, and so we're constantly task switching attention on one thing. We're terrible multitaskers, and so we're constantly task switching. We're switching from one activity to the next, from our phone to trying to read a book, to looking at something else on the internet, and this makes it really hard for us to pay attention, to focus, and this is a lot of the problems that we believe are driving declines in student learning and school in particular.
Speaker 2:And then, finally, the fourth one is the problem of problematic use, compulsive use and behavioral addictions, and we could debate about whether that term should be used addiction should be used or not but what we know is that these platforms are designed in a way to hook users, and there's about 10% of young people where their use disrupts the function of their daily life, so it disrupts their family relationships, school and, in particular, they show symptoms that look very much like withdrawal. When you take the device away, they become very irritable, they isolate more, and so that is another area of harm that there is literally something happening to kids who are using it for many, many hours, and it's become something that they are truly dependent on it's become something that they are truly dependent on.
Speaker 1:I feel like I just escaped as a teenager, specifically like as an adolescent and teenager. I was just on the outskirt of this wave, so I was a little bit too old. I was like in middle school when AOL came out, like late elementary middle. I had a flip phone in middle school and in high school, but didn't have a smartphone, honestly, till I was in my twenties, cause I also thought it was weird to have a screen that you touch. It was like it's going to break and then it's never going to be able to be fixed, like I want buttons that I can actually press. So I was a little bit of a late adopter.
Speaker 2:I felt the same way. That's so funny, yeah, I totally did.
Speaker 1:So I was a bit of a late adopter and, like, facebook, became a thing when I was probably 18. And it was mainly for college students and I was able to get one because I went to a high school that was on a college campus. So you know, it wasn't really a thing I can't even imagine, and it's hard enough for me now, as a 35 year old, to regulate my relationship with my smartphone and to not get sucked into the algorithm of social media and to not be constantly feeling like, oh my gosh wheel in our heads. I can't imagine what it would be for a girl for me, you know, 16 years old, if all of this was true, if my current reality was true for me when I was 16, why are girls more susceptible?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, just to respond to two things that you said. One of the most common things we hear from young people and also adults is I meant to go on for five minutes. It's now three hours later. This is the most common thing that you hear, and it's designed to be that way. And another thing just to note is that the platforms are particularly so if that's what's happening to us asregulate and so one that's not fully developed.
Speaker 2:Two, the thing you care about most often not everybody, but in middle school is do I fit in? Do I fit into my friend group? Do I belong? You're so sensitive to social rewards you're trying to figure out where you fit in. It's a sinister way for middle schoolers, and the companies know this. When you look at their own internal reports, they talk about teens being the most susceptible to social rewards. They have bad compulsive use. They're the ones who are going to spend the most time on these platforms and they're a key audience for these companies. So I just think, beyond boys and girls, this is happening to everybody, especially during this early period.
Speaker 2:Now the question about with girls is a really interesting one. Social media tends to be worse for girls is just because girls spend so much more time than boys using social media. Girls have migrated their social lives more onto the visually oriented platforms like TikTok, instagram, and boys have moved much more of their lives onto multiplayer video games. There's some statistic like one in five boys are spending more than four hours a day playing video games, and so if we want to understand what's driving different, or just the context that kids are living in, for girls it's much more of TikTok, instagram. For boys it's more varied on different platforms, on different platforms, and then for girls, you know, for whatever is driving this, visual social comparison is something that is very, very uh, has a huge impact on girls self-esteem, self-image, and the companies themselves know this, and so they build all these beauty filter apps. You build a platform that is designed in a way that takes advantage of our kind of inherent insecurities and also desires, and so you have these platforms that are just primed for negative social comparison, and so that's just one mechanism through which harm is happening.
Speaker 2:Another mechanism of harm is that girls, unfortunately, are much more likely to be for predation, extortion, sexual harassment. These are things that happen to girls at extremely high rates on these platforms. There was a whistleblower report from this guy. His name's Arturo Bejar, and he found on Instagram that just about 15% so one in eight of 13 to 15-year-olds receive unwanted sexual solicitations every single week, every week, and he describes it as the largest scale case of sexual harassment to have ever happened. So there are dozens of mechanisms through which it's harming teens boys and girls and happening in different ways. The way that aggression plays out between boys and girls on average is different. Boys tend to be much more physical, using physical violence if you get into conflict. For girls, it's much more relational. It's about lowering one's status, one's reputation and one's friend group. A boys are more physical and so that the change in how bullying happens radically changed during this period, because now there's a whole new suite of ways that essentially girls can bully each other.
Speaker 1:Do you think that these social media companies are intentionally trying to prey on the vulnerabilities?
Speaker 2:So what we know from their own platforms is that they know that this harm is happening. I mean, it's very obvious and they're not doing much about it at all, not doing much about it at all. So, regardless of their intention, they are intentionally choosing not to fix their products in a way to make this safer, because it is possible, and there are many people even within the companies who have lots of great ideas about how to improve it, but down the line it's I mean, essentially it's the profit motive. It's just not going to sell. And I think the one important framework to think about, kind of the solutions, but also the problems that everybody is facing, is this concept of a collective action problem where, if you so, at the company level, if any individual company decides that they don't want to target teens in the way that teens have been targeted, they're going to be at a competitive disadvantage to all of the other companies that are out there. And so nobody does it because nobody wants to be the only one to do this.
Speaker 2:And essentially, there is a reason why we like social media. It's not just that it's all toxic and bad, but it's we like it because it gives us pleasure, it's fun, it's entertaining and there's all sorts of like with anything like soda things that are not great for us. We're drawn to it and it's essentially saying, like let's have 10 soda companies and one soda company is going to take away all the sugar. Well, what's going to happen is that company is going to lose out and the ones that put in more sugar is going to get more people to use it, and this is the problem that we're in. The companies don't want to change and users do migrate and use the platforms that are the most essentially addictive. Migrate and use the platforms that are the most essentially addictive, and this is the. This is really why government really needs to step in here.
Speaker 1:The more I hear you talk about it, the more infuriated I am. For one and then for second. Like can change really ever happen, or are we just going to continue like in 10 years from now? If it keeps going this way, what is the conversation going to be and what's the title of the next book, the yeah, well so.
Speaker 2:So here's the thing even though the trajectory we've been on has not been good, there is such a profound hunger for change here, and what's so positive about this problem, relative to some other problems, is that almost all legislators have children, tech company leaders and people within the companies. They have children, and so all of us have direct experience to the problems that are happening, and because of that, I think that there's an enormous potential for change to happen, and we're already seeing that now. So at the level of schools, it's been extraordinary, with schools going phone-free from bell to bell. This has enormous support from teachers, from administrators and even young people, and the thing to say here for just the phone-free school thing, is that kids have not experienced any other kind of way of living other than having their devices all the time, and so it's really challenging and scary to do something so different than you're used to.
Speaker 2:But what we've found in the schools that have done this you give kids just a couple weeks to readjust, to experience those awkward moments that we were able to avoid because we had our phones. There's more laughter in the hallways, the lunchrooms are much louder, teachers are having to tell kids to quiet down at the beginning of class. Literally, that's something a teacher has said, and they said that they haven't had to do that in the last 10 years. And they said that they haven't had to do that in the last 10 years. I mean, it's like so the thing is. My point is that people see the problem the kids, the parents, the teachers and there's so many people who care, and I think that there's a lot of potential for change.
Speaker 1:So how does change begin? What can we do with our kids, and then with ourselves, to help?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there are four foundational norms that we suggest in the book. All of them are about the collective action problem I was talking about. So just to go into that a little bit, more is I was talking about the what happens at the level of the companies, but we can take that same concept and do it for the, for the level of teens themselves. And so imagine well you know, if you are a teenager and you're in a class of 30 other kids, if 29 of them have a smartphone and social media, you not having it is going to be and this is a term many teens say social death. It feels like you are socially isolated, you are losing out of what everything is happening, and so it's super painful to have to make that decision and nobody wants to make that decision to be left out, especially again during that period where we're so cued in to where do we fit in? Now? Parents also recognize that, and so no parent wants to be like.
Speaker 2:It's such a difficult decision to make to have to hold back from giving these devices, to giving these platforms to your kid who says, if I don't have this, I'm going to be left out, and that's really difficult and hard. So now let's say let's cut. Let's say, a teen goes in to a seventh grade class and now 25 percent of the kids have a smartphone and social media. Well, now it's so much easier as a parent to say well, johnny and Maria and everybody else, they don't have it, and so it makes everything easier. So collective change allows individual change to be easier. So what we suggest is that we create a norm that families and communities do together, and so that's no smartphones until high school. Getting it out of middle school, because this is really where it's most toxic. Bullying is already worse at its worst in seventh grade. So let's just get the phones out of middle school. The next thing is no social media until 16. And this is a difficult thing to do now, but we're seeing and governments can really help here, and this is what Australia is actually doing they're setting a new minimum age at 16.
Speaker 2:Phone free schools from bell to bell. And at the same time you know I've talked a lot about the underprotection online, but not the overprotection side in the real world is that we need to give kids back more free play, independence and responsibility in the real world, and we could talk more about that as well. But just to make sure to beat a dead horse is like. The idea here is that you're not doing these things alone, that you would find other parents of your kids' friends and you would delay together. You ideally would have schools at an institutional level instituting this phone-free policy. So it's not one teacher does this, another teacher does that. It's happening collectively and when we do that it's easier for everyone.
Speaker 1:What do you say to the people who, may they hear you begin saying things like institute, legislate government and they're like, no, we should be able to make our choices, kind of, what is the, what is your? I mean? How would you respond to that? How would you respond to the people that would say government shouldn't, shouldn't get involved with this?
Speaker 2:Ideally, I think that I mean it would be great if we could do this on our own and I think that there is a lot that we can do. So again, what we're suggesting for delaying till 14, it's a norm. We're not talking about legislation here. This is something that parents can do, families can do, schools can do. But here's the problem Once a kid is given a phone, family life becomes a constant struggle over screen time.
Speaker 2:Once you give phones into a school, school becomes a constant struggle over screen time. Once you give phones into a school, school becomes a constant fight over screen time. Why? Because these products are designed particularly in a way to drive compulsive use and it's putting kids and parents and teachers into these collective action problems.
Speaker 2:And the number one, like one of the main reasons we have government, is to help solve these kinds of problems, because if you can get support to, you know to set up clear standards for the companies, so for I mean, what we need, these companies have shown repeatedly that they cannot self-regulate. So I think that's just point number one. And then the other thing is that you know schools and families need help Getting government funding for phone lockers or phone pouches. There's a lot that can be done and I think that you know it's totally reasonable and fair to have the debate around the role of government here. But I think there are some things that are just clearly needed to be done because we're just going to keep going down the same path if the whole thing is that we need help, same path if the whole thing is that we need help.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Do you ever think that it and I and I agree like it's the fact that 25% of five to seven year olds have a phone and you know, and the things that predators and how predators can like target these kids online, and a lot of times, parents don't think about it because they're like well, they're safe here in my home. They're you know, they're not out on the streets, they're not running in the road, they're not. You know, whatever, and we'll, we'll probably get more into that, but um, clearly something needs to change and it's so addicting that we can't stop it ourselves. My a question I wanted to ask with this as well, is so many schools, like my kid's school, has given them all Chromebooks. Now, this isn't a smartphone and they don't have social media, but I feel like a lot of the same struggles exist Because it's distracting. There's YouTube on it.
Speaker 1:My daughter is 10 and she cannot prioritize work. Like she's supposed to do her homework on this Chromebook, but she gets distracted with like accessibility settings, Like she just wants to play with stuff on it, Like the accessibility settings are going to YouTube and it's like 20 minutes before she even starts the homework. So how about? What about just that Like take away the smartphones? So how about what about just that like take away the smartphones? What about just screens in general? And should those also? Should parents and schools also be regulating that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really good question. This is an area that we didn't talk much about in the book, in part because at the the time we didn't know all that much about it. But this is an area that we've been really interested in and, if any of your listeners want to learn more, we have been publishing a bunch of essays on our sub stack, after Babbel, about educational technology and the pros and cons here. I think you hit the nail on the head with the key problem, which is distraction. So there's the question of the distraction effects and the learning benefits. Do the distraction effects overwhelm those learning benefits? And that, generally, is what seems to be happening is that there is a lot of potential that these things could be good. There is a lot of potential that these things could be good, but again, when you have kids who already probably don't want to pay that much attention in math class using a Chromebook, the distraction effects are so strong. Now there are a lot of schools that have implemented certain ways to kind of lock down the computers, but having the one-to-one iPads, especially in younger age groups, does not seem to be giving the kind of benefits that were promised here.
Speaker 2:The one other point I want to make is.
Speaker 2:This is something that a recent researcher wrote on our Substack, Dr Jared Hoover, and he explained something like what is the primary function of a tool, and he kind of defines it as what you do with 80% of your time with that thing.
Speaker 2:And so what you can do with a hammer, you can use it as a doorstopper, you can use it as all sorts of things, but the primary use is to nail things in. And he asked the same question about screens and devices. What do we typically use this for? Well, 80% of the time it's generally entertainment screen use, watching videos, social media, texting with our friends and if you're doing this and this is how you know this product so well and you put this into a classroom, the expectation that kids are just not going to move in that direction is completely unrealistic. And so it goes back into. There's potential, but the distraction effects and what kids are generally leaning towards doing with it pulls them away from the class. Now, there are cases where ed tech does seem to be really beneficial, but in general, the constant oversaturation of devices does not seem to be that helpful.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm. So let's end on, maybe, the happy note. We know what we can do in terms of not not giving smartphones until high school, not doing social media until at least the age of 16. I always like to say my kids are never going to have it, even when they're adults. But you mentioned play, so giving kids back a sense of independence and a sense of play. So what I mean? Maybe we've forgotten what this looks like. What's the best way for kids to play and have independence?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, thank you. Thank you for bringing this up, because this is part of the story that often gets left out just because there's so much to say. You know, just to lay it out there, humans are just like all other mammals and we need to play a ton, and especially during early childhood, playing is the vehicle through which we learn to be part of our social groups, to learn the skills that we need, and play is this natural, intuitive thing that kids do to navigate their social circles. You learn self-governance, you learn all of the skills that you want kids to learn through this natural evolutionary process that they just do on their own, and one of the things that happened is that over the last few decades, we've really pulled kids away through into highly structured activities that they're not kind of generating for themselves. School's gotten longer, and now we also have smartphones, and all of these things are blocking kids' abilities to have this kind of free play experience that so many people experienced growing up until the last few decades, and so we have a couple big suggestions here about what we can do about this.
Speaker 2:Just like with the problems with smartphones, there's also a collective action problem happening here, which is that okay, 30 years ago. You open the door, the kids go out and you say, come back when the streetlights come on. Well, that doesn't happen anymore. And if you were the only one only parent to do this, well one who's your kid going to play with? And this sounds just like a terrible idea. So what we need to do is how do we solve this collectively, and one of the best places to do this is at schools, and you just have one or two adults there as lifeguards, not referees, managing conflict, and you just let kids play and you have a bunch of loose parts, of jump ropes, things that are out there, and I mean it's extraordinary how beneficial these small things can do. So that's one thing. Another thing we would love to see is that schools expand recess. What we found is recess and lunch are like contracting together and you have 20 minutes. So if we want to teach kids social, emotional learning, bring back play in schools. So Let Grow Play Club expandingcess. And the third thing is what we call the Lekro Experience, and so Lekro is an organization, a nonprofit, that John had started with someone named Lenore Skenazy who wrote the book Free Range.
Speaker 2:Parenting is really difficult as well is giving kids independence.
Speaker 2:It's really hard to say, to tell kids, or really hard to trust kids to do things on their own because we're not as used to it. And so the LECRO experience, the LECRO project, is a homework assignment that schools give out to all the kids in the class and they have the kids go home and they have to do something they've never done before on their own, with their parents permission, and what this tends to look like is going to the store to buy ingredients to bake a cake or to walk the dog on their own or to walk the dog on their own, and these are just little things that kids do, and it's incredible how impactful this is, not just for the kid but also for the parents, to see just how much more capable our kids are than we often think. So those three things, we think, can go a really long way, and in part because it allows us to build that trust muscle, both in kids and in parents, of remembering how capable kids are and that, being independent out in the real world, they'll be okay.
Speaker 1:Now can parents access those items on the nonprofit you're talking about.
Speaker 2:Yes, great, great question. So the two places for your listeners if you want to learn more, finding resources on both the phone side and the play side, go to anxiousgenerationcom and go to our Take Action tab and you can find all sorts of resources there. And then for Let Grow, you go to letgroworg and they have resources for play clubs, the Let Grow Experience and everything else that you might want to learn about on that. And if you want to sign up for our newsletter and to kind of be part of this movement, at the bottom of the homepage on anxiousgenerationcom you can sign up and we send out emails with resources like the ones we've been talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's fantastic. You also mentioned that you and Jonathan have a sub stack, which we will put the link to in the show notes as well, and then, of course, by the book Anxious Generation, if you haven't yet. Yeah, did you think like, did you know the book was gonna take off as crazy as it did? Did y'all have a hunch, or was it just totally mind blowing?
Speaker 2:I think John was a little bit more confident than I was. It totally, totally took me by surprise. I mean, it has been quite a remarkable several months and what we really see is that the book was a catalyst for a lot of energy. That was already there. We really didn't add I don't think all that much that was so new as more of reassuring and reaffirming what so many people knew and were ready to act but just didn't know quite how?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's fantastic. Is there another one in the works?
Speaker 2:So right now, we are really focusing on what's going on with kids. There's going to be a teen version of the book coming out next year, and we've launched a three-year campaign where we're really trying to push these four norms, and so please join us.
Speaker 1:I love that. Zach Rausch, thank you so much for joining me today, love your work, love what you're doing and love the impact that you're making for kids and their futures everywhere. Thank you so much. We covered so much in this conversation and I could have asked him so many more questions, but it can feel overwhelming. It can feel overwhelming to me at least, because it feels like we are just stuck in this hamster wheel or this spider web that we as a whole society and as a whole globe, as a whole world, just can't seem to get out of, because social media has become so addictive and so sticky and so entangled into our lives and how we live and how we work and how we show up.
Speaker 1:I thought an interesting point that was made was how they're called social media platforms. Now, back when Facebook first started, it was called a networking, like social networking, like the show, the social network, where JT, justin Timberlake showed up to be an actor. That's why I loved the movie so much. But in that movie and in what social networks were at the time, it was a way originally to network, but now it's a platform. And what do you do on a platform? You perform. We're expecting our children and our teenagers, who have these social media platforms to manage a brand and to perform for likes and for engagement, and that's what we expect of ourselves too, and it's so draining the fact that kids now say that they want to be an influencer as a career goal when they grow up. I feel like we need some serious recalibration to reality and to what matters most in life. I won't get on my soapbox, although I could. Here are my key takeaways from today's episode Phone free. Phone free I spoke with a pastor on a previous episode where we talked about digital detox, and one of the things that he said was his.
Speaker 1:His girls are teenagers and he read this book, the anxious generation, and once he read it, they were not yet in high school, they were not yet 16. And so he had a conversation with them about it because they were old enough they were probably like 12 or 13. And so he had a conversation with what he now knew, based on what the research said, and he said now, being a loving father, if you were me, what would you do? And they said, dad, you have to take our phones away, because here's the thing the majority of you are thinking my kids already have phones. I can't take it away. You can take it away. You're their parent. You are the person who gets to decide what their future is going to look like, the person who gets to decide what their future is going to look like, and you have the responsibility to to ensure that your children are given the absolute best chance of success, and not just success being what they achieve, but the person they become.
Speaker 1:Social media isn't helping us become better people. It's just. It's just not, especially especially when you're an adolescent or a teenager. It's adding to anxiety. It's adding to depression. It's adding not especially when you're an adolescent or a teenager. It's adding to anxiety. It's adding to depression. It's adding to the suicide rates. It's even worse for girls, but it's still terrible for boys.
Speaker 1:As a parent me especially I have a responsibility to my kids to make sure they do not have a phone until they are at least 16. I keep saying to my husband it's like maybe when they go to college I will get them a phone and let them have social media, but in our house it's a big thing. Our kids have never had their own iPad. They've never had their own tablet. They're 10 and eight. It wasn't until they started going to this school where they were assigned a Chromebook. But even when they get home, they're not allowed on their Chromebook. And if they have homework on their Chromebook, I am right there, like right there Now they still watch TV, they still play video games. There are other areas that we still have to manage and regulate screen time, but I am very diligent about this and I am very passionate about this no phone, no social media. If your kids have it, delete it, take it from them. They will be really angry in the short term.
Speaker 1:I can't tell you, growing up, how many times my parents like, so my dad, had to approve what I wore until probably till I got married Not that I like asked him after I moved out of the house, but like when I bought. When my mom would take me to buy a new swimsuit, it was a rule in my house that it had to pass my dad's approval of being modest. So I was never wearing a two piece bikini, like I had, you know, a halter top and like boy shorts, it it was appropriate and I would get so mad at him. Or if I bought shorts that were too short, he would, he would throw them and I would get so mad at him. Or if I bought shorts that were too short, he would throw them away and I would get so mad at him. And I would say to him but my friends or the people at school or all these other people, they're allowed to do it. My dad would always say to me I am so sorry that their parents don't love them as much as I love you. Maybe that's what we should all cling to as parents. We make decisions on behalf of our children because we love them and we want them to have the best possible future outcome.
Speaker 1:What does that look like, specifically with screens and social media, for you and for your kids? And then, of course, the final takeaway is play. I am all for like kids being independent and having chores. In fact, like something I want to do. I might do it. Today, my daughter has basketball practice and she's 10. Um, I may like give her my debit card. Like play, like follow along and go to the grocery store after basketball and say hey, like go I'll. I'm going to stand at the front of the store. I want you to go and like find a couple of things that you want to buy in order to make dinner or something and then, like, come and check out and if you need help checking out, like I'll be up here.
Speaker 1:But I think that could be a cool experiment and help her gain some independence. You know, do some things on her own. How can we give back to our children independence and play in their lives? Because, overall, as a society, we have been over protecting our kids in the real world and not wanting them to go outside, not wanting them to go play and do things because they might get hurt or they might get taken, and of course we should be wise, but we've been over-protecting our children in the real world and under-protecting them with their access and their use of screens and onto the internet. Those are my key takeaways. What are some of your key takeaways from today's episode? Leave a comment on the YouTube video, share this with a friend and, as always, until next week, stay strong.
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