A reading of my recent blog post on 'After Babel' - Jonathn Haidt's team's publication sharing resaerch and data around his book 'The Anxious Generation'.

Entitled: A Mission for Businesses and Entrepreneurs: Help Bring Back Childhood

When entrepreneurs hear about problems, they see opportunities. This is what I love about the entrepreneurial sectors I’ve spent my career in—the optimism, energy, problem-solving, and value-creation that abound. At the other end of the business spectrum, corporations are increasingly recognizing their societal responsibilities (CSR) and embracing sustainability and social purpose (albeit with ideological tripwires everywhere).

Given the huge challenges described in The Anxious Generation—the multi-national youth mental health crisis, a generation of kids deprived of real-world independence, and an oversaturation of screens and personal devices—we need both this creative optimism and corporate conscience channeled towards solutions.

My goal in this essay is to encourage entrepreneurs—both social and for-profit—to see this challenge as a meaningful market opportunity. Millions of parents around the world are mobilizing and clamoring for solutions as their concerns for their children grow. They’re increasingly recognizing the emptiness and negativity of their own digital habits, too. There is a nostalgic hunger in the air for less frenetic, polarized, and superficial times, which means that there's a market for in-real-life (‘IRL’) memory-making and businesses to be built around it.

The two biggest entrepreneurial gaps are in developing IRL solutions to tackle norm #4 from The Anxious Generation––more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world––and in creating safer technology tools for young people. In other words, we need more places for young people to practice and enjoy independence, and we need better technology that will let young people use their devices as tools (like a Swiss army knife), without getting exploited through those devices by companies that are trying to control and addict them.

Let’s zoom in on some of the opportunities:

Opportunity 1: IRL Solutions

To remind kids that the physical world is more meaningful and thrilling than the virtual one, we need to create more compelling spaces and opportunities that encourage independence. Only with greater access to these spaces will cultural norms shift, prompting parents to give their children more independence.

Teens these days are sadly ‘non-grata’ in many public spaces. With downtown shopping areas and malls in decline across many Western nations, ‘teenism’ (my term) has emerged as a phenomenon. Teens are often unwelcome, barred from entering stores or shopping areas in groups, and left to mill around in dingy parks or communal street areas. Interestingly, McDonald’s has capitalized on this trend with a clever ad campaign in the UK that shows how it has become the teen meeting place of choice. But surely fast-food joints can’t be the only safe public spaces for teens? It certainly doesn’t bode well for their health if so.

Video. McDonald’s ‘Make it Yours’ teenager ad campaign.

There’s a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to create and expand spaces and organized opportunities for IRL hangouts, entertainment, skills-building, and memory-making.

There are ambitious commercial entrants to this market, such as ‘The Den’— a membership-based, phone-free youth club brand launching in the UK that aims to scale nationally and then internationally, given the right medium- to long-term investors. These beautifully designed venues for 13- to 18-year-olds feature event calendars, open spaces, DJ decks, cafe-areas, games, shuffleboards, and critically… limited supervision.

Video. Enjoy The Den’s fabulous vision.

Fabrik, though targeted at adults, is another simple example in the U.S. of creating IRL community hangout spaces.

Grassroots sports, drama, and hobby clubs provide fantastic opportunities for IRL play, socializing, and skills-building. There’s no happier sight for me than standing on the sidelines of my 8-year-old daughters’ Saturday morning football match, while another 10 fiercely competitive games rage noisily on the surrounding pitches, with girls aged 6 to 18 cheering each other on and erupting in delight at every goal. (Interestingly, it’s usually the parents who bring the tone down).

Unfortunately, many of these organized clubs are struggling. They lack funding, the ability to professionalize, and the resources to scale. They often scrape by on local sponsorship and volunteer support. The Scout and Girl Guide movements—which provide a strong antidote to phone-based childhood—have also seen declining membership over recent decades. Boy Scout membership in the U.S., for instance, has dropped from 4 million in the 1980s to around 1 million today. More needs to be done to reinvigorate these movements and promote their huge, increasing value in modern society. Their resurgence and greater availability will help parents to slacken their reins on children, restore trust, and renormalize unsupervised neighborhood play.

The lack of provision for community spaces and association rests also with government cuts to community spending (at least in the UK). For example, youth club funding in the UK has been cut by £1 billion (70%) over the last 10 years. However, the investment world is also culpable. Longer-term, slower-growth bricks-and-mortar investments don’t attract the same scale of funding as shiny, tech solutions that promise 100x returns and attract angel and venture capital. While the decline of the high street (or main street) isn’t entirely due to investor short-termism or greed (Amazon and China share much of the blame), it’s certainly a factor. Brands that sink millions into social media advertising are also exacerbating the problem, contributing to the addictiveness and resulting anxiety these platforms fuel while filling the social media companies’ coffers

Corporations and global consumer brands could step in here, offering both employee volunteers and branded sponsorship to fuel successful community initiatives. Burberry, Lego and UBS have done this with the growing chain of Onside Youth Zones in the UK—a sophisticated charity model that harnesses local, public and private sector partnerships to provide valuable youth spaces in underserved communities. With corporate investment and support to professionalize operations, these success stories could be scaled significantly. We don’t necessarily need to wait for governments to dip into overstretched tax revenues. These initiatives would also directly alleviate many of the social inequalities that DEI initiatives have sought (with limited success) to address.

With so many retail units currently vacant and community facilities—from churches to community centers—underutilized, not to mention the school grounds that lie vacant after hours, are there franchising or ‘pop-up’ opportunities to be exploited? Spaces for dances, musical performances, art collaborations, comedy, theater, or debates? Opportunities for young people to ‘do’—to get together, play, and learn during their free time—rather than wasting hours watching what online strangers ‘do’. Perhaps partnerships could be established between property owners and companies, local associations or parent groups to repurpose such spaces for youth initiatives?

An ‘IRL Pledge’ from corporations to better support the in-real-life lives of employees and their communities could combine financial sponsorship for local projects with employee volunteer commitments. This would drive the replication and expansion of successful programs. ‘Big Brothers, Big Sisters’ is yet another example, providing not only strong role models for disadvantaged children, but also fostering valuable social mixing across our ever-widening societal divides.

But as we improve our real world solutions, we also need to innovate around technology and online solutions.