Ep 6: Are Smartphones Stealing Childhood?

Summary

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Raising Parents with Emily Oster

Episode 6: Are Smartphones Stealing Childhood?
Date: October 23, 2024
Host: Emily Oster
Guests: Jonathan Haidt, Johann Hari, Ben Halpert, Hannah Ortel, and voices from teens and parents

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Episode Overview

This episode interrogates one of the most urgent parenting questions of our era: Are smartphones fundamentally harming children’s development, health, and happiness—and, if so, what can parents do? Emily Oster explores the evidence, draws on top experts, and features candid reflections from kids and parents themselves. The discussion pivots from the historical moment of smartphones’ emergence to the urgent realities of their consequences, and ends by considering practical, collective solutions for families and schools.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Transformation Brought by Smartphones

• The Tech Revolution: Oster opens by reflecting on how cell phones, once “bricks,” became indispensable appendages, culminating in the smartphone era, which debuted with the iPhone in 2007 ([01:02]-[02:35]).
• Personal and Societal Impact: Oster admits her own “disturbingly high” screen time and notes relief that she "got through her youth" without such powerful and addictive technology ([02:35]-[03:23]).

The Scale of the Problem

• Stunning Statistics ([07:45]-[08:54]):
  • By 10, 42% of US kids have a phone; by 12, 71%; by 14, 91%.
  • Teens use phones “almost constantly” (46%); 80% use phones before sleeping, worsening sleep deprivation.
  • Kids spend 7.5 hours/day on screens for entertainment; teens average 9 hours/day on their phones.
  • “Text neck” and other physical repercussions are on the rise even among young children.
• The Safety Paradox: Parents give kids phones for “independence” and “safety,” but this often serves adult convenience more than child development ([04:19]-[05:20]).

Are We in a Moral Panic—Or Not?

• Oster and guests question whether fears over smartphones echo past panics over TV, radio, and other new media—or represent a true threat ([14:01]-[14:24]).
• Jonathan Haidt: Mental health metrics were stable or improving for Millennials (on flip phones) but worsened in the early 2010s—precisely when smartphones and viral social media became dominant ([14:31]-[15:31]).

"Right exactly at 2012, 2013, that’s when so many of these graphs just begin to go up like a hockey stick."
—Jonathan Haidt, [15:31]

The Nature and Depth of Harm

Cognitive Harm:

• Attention Fragmentation:
  • Johann Hari links nearly all meaningful achievement in life to “sustained attention,” now under siege ([16:31]-[17:05]).
  • Teens like Bella (17, Ohio) and Vivi (15) echo this—describing a before-and-after loss of “deep focus” with the arrival of their phones ([17:19]-[18:14]).

“I used to devour like thousand page novels in like two or three days and I can’t do that anymore… my attention span is way different than it used to be.”
—Bella, age 17, [17:22]

Emotional and Social Harm:

• Loss of Real Connection:
  • Ruby LaBroca (18, never had a phone) mourns the loss of conversational depth and “eye contact” among peers who got phones ([10:43]-[11:52]).

“Conversation dissipated. The friends I had treasured...were suddenly not able to do that on a very basic level. We’re sort of operating with a different language.”
—Ruby LaBroca, [10:43]

• Experience Blocker:
  • Haidt calls the phone an “experience blocker,” occupying kids so fully it “blocks out almost all other experiences”—from hobbies, reading, outdoor play, “even just being present” ([21:18]-[21:50]).
  • Oster underscores this by drawing an analogy: “What if your kid told me, my plan is to sit in my room for nine hours a day and stare at the wall?” ([21:18]-[21:50])

Physical Health and Sleep

• Disrupted Sleep: 80% of teens use smartphones in place of sleep, with severe long-term consequences ([08:01]-[08:54]).
• Physical Ailments: The spread of “text neck” and similar syndromes.

Multitasking and “Switch Costs”

• False Multitasking: Hari cites neuroscientist Earl Miller: “You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time. That’s it” ([23:48]-[24:45]).
• Switch Cost Effect: Being interrupted or toggling tasks is “twice as bad for your intelligence as getting stoned” ([26:00]-[27:00]).

"We and our children are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted."
—Johann Hari, [27:00]

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Is the Future Inevitable? Pushing for Change

Overcoming Parent Helplessness and Peer Norms

• Collective Action Problem: Parents feel individually powerless—“Everyone else is doing it,” so they cave. Haidt identifies this as a classic “collective action problem” ([27:44]-[28:11]).
• Need for Collective Norms ([33:44]-[35:19]):
  1. No smartphones until high school.
  2. No social media until age 16.
  3. Phone-free schools.
  4. Restore independence, free play, and real-world responsibility.

“Once you give your kid a phone, it’s going to block out almost all other experiences. It’s the medium, not the content.”
—Jonathan Haidt, [21:18]-[21:50]

• Role Models: Families like Russell and Kourtney’s (95% non-digital household) report their children are “unsullied,” and still engage deeply with the physical world ([44:13]-[45:02]), but note occasional social exclusion.

Can Kids Self-Regulate?

• Ben Halpert (Savvy Cyber Kids): Kids know tech is addictive and want help with limits—“the majority of answers [for why they bring phones to bed] are because my parents don’t take it away” ([31:05]-[32:09]).
• Imposing restrictions is hard but necessary; “it takes about two weeks” for new rules to stick, and pushback is normal ([32:16]-[33:22]).

International and Schoolwide Movements

• Hannah Ortel (Delay Smartphones): UK parents are angry and pushing back, normalizing “dumb phones” as a first device ([35:55]-[38:48]).
• Oster’s Summary: School phone bans are gaining ground, e.g., LA Unified and New York City’s planned policies ([48:30]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On kids’ own views:

"Phones take away so much from kids… But reading is more important than they can know at a young age, and by having a phone in childhood, they're actually setting themselves up for a lifetime of having a short attention span."
—Ruby LaBroca, [46:55]-[48:30]

On the need for boundaries:

"Even if our children agree that in principle limits are good, they will resist them. It's their job to do that, and it's our job to say no."
—Emily Oster, [48:30]

On structural change:

“We have to do it collectively and we’re going to. We could get most schools phone-free this September 2024… If school principals would speak out, it would have a transformative effect.”
—Jonathan Haidt, [38:48]

On the broader spiritual cost:

“If you look at what the ancients said is the way to live your life, the phone-based life does exactly the opposite… Basically it’s spiritual degradation. And I mean that as an atheist.”
—Jonathan Haidt, [42:03]

On parent attitudes:

"They’re more worried if their child is liked than is healthy. And I’m like, why is it so important? Who cares? Left out of what?"
—Russell, parent, [45:57]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:02] Emily Oster’s personal smartphone history and reflection
• [03:23] Research evidence on phones, kids, and mental health
• [07:45] Sobering statistics on youth phone/screen use and impacts
• [09:18] Jonathan Haidt’s “Entertainment City” thought exercise
• [11:52] Ruby LaBroca on social consequences of being phoneless
• [12:05] Johann Hari on how the tech industry designs for addiction
• [14:31] Haidt: Data shows decline begins with smartphones & social media
• [17:19] Teens Bella and Vivi on lost attention spans post-phone
• [18:25] Amitai: The benefits of a weekly tech Sabbath (Shabbat)
• [21:18] Phones as "experience blockers"—the medium, not just the message
• [23:48] Hari on multitasking and cognitive “switch costs”
• [26:00] The British study: interruptions cut IQ more than weed
• [27:44] Haidt: It’s a collective action problem
• [33:44] Haidt’s four norms to fix smartphone childhoods
• [35:23] Are we at an inflection point? UK experience
• [36:06] Hannah Ortel on how UK parents organize
• [41:07] The challenge school administrators face against parental expectations
• [42:03] Haidt on “spiritual degradation” of the phone-based life
• [44:13] Russell and Kourtney describe their low-tech parenting
• [46:55] Kids and teens deliver verdicts on phones, reading, and attention

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Flow & Tone

Emily Oster brings her trademark mixture of sobriety, data-driven analysis, and empathetic engagement to the conversation. The tone throughout is urgent yet hopeful—framing the problem as massive but surmountable with collective willpower and boundary-setting. The inclusion of adolescent voices, frontline educators, and international parent activists makes the conversation vivid, and at times, emotional.

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Takeaways & Action Points

• Smartphones and social media have driven a sudden, measurable rise in distraction, social disengagement, and mental health crises among American youth starting around 2012.
• The problem is “the medium, not (just) the content”—phones crowd out experience, attention, and development.
• Solutions must be collective: change norms, create phone-free schools, delay smartphones/social media, and restore real-world independence and play.
• Though parental resistance and peer norms make change hard, growing grassroots organizing (especially from the UK) provide blueprints for hope.
• Strong boundaries, held firmly and kindly, are not just desirable but necessary for a healthy childhood in the smartphone era.

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This summary captures the core themes, evidence, and perspectives explored in this episode. It includes memorable quotes, timestamps, and addresses both the depth of the problem and the prospects for meaningful reform.

Transcript

[A]

Hi, everyone. Emily here. And you're listening to Raising Parents, my new podcast in partnership with the Free Press, where we interrogate all of the big and pressing and confusing questions facing parents today. Before we get to the show, I'm so excited to tell you that this season is in partnership with Airbnb. If you know anything about me, you know how much I love Airbnb. I think I'm currently holding like six Airbnb reservations in my account. Airbnb has provided incredible experiences for me, my family, and our friends across the country and the world time and time again. More on that and how you too can use Airbnb on your next family trip later in the episode. For now, onto the show.

[B]

Go where you wanna go.

[C]

Call when you wanna call.

[B]

Get the lowest price ever at Radio Shack on the most powerful transportable cellular phone system. Just $7.99 when you sign up with.

[D]

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[A]

At the risk of seriously dating myself, I was a college student when I got my very first cell phone.

[B]

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[A]

I owned what was colloquially known as a brick phone, a cumbersome, hefty device. Initially, I didn't think it was particularly useful. I only used it to call my boyfriend and it wasn't so different from a regular phone. But then came 3G technology and the age of the mobile Internet, and I was proven wrong.

[C]

Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.

[A]

In 2007, Steve Jobs made a historic announcement at Macworld in San Francisco.

[C]

Today we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen ipod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device. This is one device and we are calling it iPhone.

[D]

Today.

[C]

Apple is going to reinvent the phone.

[A]

Jobs was right. This was a revolutionary product and everything did change. I am a little ashamed to admit that today. I often find my phone is an extension of myself. Whether it's checking the weather, snapping a pic, checking email, tracking my daily runs, listening to podcasts, getting directions, needing a handy flashlight. I really could go on and on. I probably like you spend hours a day on my phone. I know this because every Sunday it tells me my disturbingly high average weekday screen time. And I often think, wow, I am so grateful that I got through my youth and especially those complicated teenage years without this very powerful and very addictive technology.

[B]

The disturbing new study about how your child's phone could be affecting their mood. The study's author found a link between.

[A]

Technology and depression, and everyday activities like social media consumption and excessive screen time have been linked to depression, anxiety, loneliness, and insomnia.

[B]

Cell phones in schools. They are devices we love to hate, right? In an emergency, parents want the ability to be in with their child. But there is another consideration as well, how those phones impact learning and concentration in the classroom.

[A]

Research shows the average teen checks their phone every 15 minutes.

[C]

They were texting, tweeting, you name it.

[D]

While classes were going on.

[C]

A University of Texas study found evidence that just having a phone nearby, like in a backpack, affected cognitive performance, even if the phone was switched off. Fear of missing out. They are afraid if they're not there hooked up all the time, they're going to miss out on something important.

[A]

As you might expect, teenagers will tell you, oh, what's the big deal? It just takes a second. But research shows the distraction lasts much longer than the peeing and the look. In today's world, many parents feel like we need our kids to have phones. We tell ourselves it's for their safety, like walking to a friend's house or going on a school field trip. But if something really bad happens to our kid, like getting hit by a car, they are not going to be texting us about it. We like to think giving kids a phone is making them more independent, but we're constantly tracking their location. We say it teaches them responsibility, yet we're the ones footing the bills. I think for many parents, the idea of not giving your kid a phone when everyone else has one just doesn't even seem like a possibility. The pressure to conform is just too great. And plus, the reality is that phones keep kids entertained, which gives us a break to cook dinner, to change the laundry, or to scroll through Instagram on our own phones. The problem is, most parents have no idea what the effect of all this phone time is. What are phones doing to our kids? Their development, their health, their mental health, their social lives to their physical selves? Is the panic around them like the panic that once met the invention of the radio or of tv? Is it a kind of hysteria? Or is it different? Are phones transforming the essence of what it means to be a kid? Are they stealing childhood? So what does the data say? By the age of 10, 42% of kids in the US have a phone. By 12, it's 71%. And by age 14, it's 91%. 46% of teens say they use their phones almost constantly. 80% of teens use smartphones instead of sleeping, leading to a 57% increase in sleep deprivation in 2015 compared to 1991. Even when they're not in use, smartphones reduce memory and recall accuracy. Text neck syndrome. That's become a very real diagnosis, and it's on the rise in kids of all ages. Among eight to 12 year olds, 38% of them have used social media, and nearly one in five say they use social media every day. Kids spend, on average 7.5 hours in front of a screen for entertainment every day. States like Florida have banned cell phone use in classrooms. Orange County, Florida, went so far as to prohibit phone use for the entire school day. Similar measures are being adopted by states like California, Indiana and New York and school districts in South Portland, Maine and Charlottesville, Virginia. But across the nation, these actions have been met with mixed reactions. A recent poll by the National Parents union revealed that parents favor setting restrictions on when kids can use their phones at school, but they oppose banning smartphones in school altogether. The survey also highlighted that although parents support their kids having phone access, they've remained worried about the impact of social media. So for today, are phones ruining kids childhoods? Should we leave phone regulations in the hands of schools, or should parents take the initiative to drive the change? Is there even a middle ground, or have we passed the point of no return with phones? I'm Emily Oster, and from the Free Press, this is Raising parents. Emily Oster, an economist by trade, has gathered the data, crunched the numbers, and is now debunking some of the most controversial myths about parenthood.

[E]

I think what everyone is most interested.

[A]

In, like, pregnant women, they're like, can I drink? You know, you shouldn't have, like, a lot.

[C]

Where is this data coming from?

[A]

The fundamental answer is we get data on people by asking people about their behaviors and what they do and by collecting information on how their kids do.

[B]

Oster doesn't shy away from other charged topics.

[A]

People are using your database as an.

[F]

Example as to why schools should reopen.

[A]

What kind of reaction did you get to that? I imagine that was a little controversial. It was a little controversial, yes.

[B]

You're an economist, you're not a doctor. I mean, what do you think people are going to take away from what.

[D]

You'Ve written in this book?

[A]

All that I'm trying to do here is really show women. Here is what the evidence is, and why don't you think about some of these decisions for yourself? Episode 6 Are smartphones stealing childhood?

[C]

So let's imagine there are two places you can go on vacation. One of them is designed with children in mind. So if there are fences here and there on the cliffside trail and kids have to have an adult with them if they want to rent a motorcycle. And it's like a normal world where we have normal restrictions for kids safety. Another place is a brand new place. It's a very exciting place. It was set up by some tech billionaires. Let's call it Entertainment City.

[A]

This is Jonathan Haidt who you heard from in earlier episodes. He's a social psychologist and a professor at New York University.

[C]

In Entertainment City, amazing things happen and there are no rules. There's no protections for children. So there's all kinds of movie theaters and shows and amazing spectacles. Kids can go anywhere. And then over time you get prostitution, you get porn places, you get gambling, you get cock fighting, you get bull fighting, you get boxing. It becomes brutal but entertaining. Really kind of savage. And there's 000 protections for kids. Oh, I forgot. Also in Entertainment City, the tech billionaires, they convinced, let's say this is done in Nevada. They convince of Nevada. They bribed them all so that they passed a law saying nobody can sue the tech billionaires. There is no liability. There are no protections for children. None whatsoever. And nobody can sue the people harming them. So those are your two choices. Where would you want to go for vacation? And nobody in their right mind would pick Entertainment City. But that's where our kids are hanging out.

[F]

By the time my friends started getting phones, I didn't want one because I had been noticing these gradual, perceptible changes to me in my friend's behavior.

[A]

This is Ruby LaBroca. She's 18 years old, goes to college in California and she has never been to Entertainment City. And by that I mean she has never owned a phone.

[F]

When I was about 12, the last of my holdout friends who didn't have phones started getting phones and suddenly conversation dissipated. And the friends I had treasured for their ability to converse and make eye contact, they were suddenly not able to do that on a very basic level. And now several years in, I think as an 18 year old with maturing friends, friends who are going off to college, I can't say that it's any better. I mean I've been to a few birthday parties recently where the pitch of conversation was so low level that I found myself unable to speak with them. As someone who wasn't raised with a phone, it's quite hard now to really interact with people who were because we're sort of operating with a different language. Even.

[D]

So, I spent a load of time in Silicon Valley interviewing the people who designed key aspects of the world in which we now live. And the thing that most struck me was how guilty and ashamed they feel about what they've done.

[A]

This is journalist Johann Hari. He's the author of the New York Times best selling book Stolen Focus, why you can't pay attention and how to think deeply.

[D]

Again, what they felt bad about was something quite specific and they kept explaining it to me and it took me quite a long time for me to understand it. So if you open your phone now and you start to scroll through Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, whatever, those companies begin to make money out of you immediately in two ways. The first way is really obvious. You see advertising, okay, we all know how that works. The second way is much more important. Everything you ever do on these apps is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out who you are and what makes you tick, what makes you happy, what makes you sad, what makes you horny, what makes you angry. So let's say you've ever indicated on any of these apps, including in your so called private messages, that you like, say Donald Trump, Dolly Parton, and you told your mom you just bought some diapers, okay? If you like Donald Trump, it's going to know that you're right wing. If you like Dolly Parton, it's going to know that you like country music. If you just bought diapers, it's going to know you've got a baby. They are harvesting tens of thousands of pieces of information like this about you. They know far more about you than your neighbor because your neighbor is not reading your private messages at 2 in the morning. And it's learning that information partly to target ads at you, but much more importantly, they're harvesting that information to figure out what to show you next to keep you scrolling. Every time you pick up the phone and start to scroll, they begin to make money. Because you see advertising, the longer you scroll, the more money they make. Every time your kid picks up the phone and starts to scroll, the longer they scroll, the more money these companies make. So all this genius in Silicon Valley, all this AI, all these algorithms, when they're applied to social media, are designed to do one thing and one thing only, figure out how do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible.

[A]

So you have kids roaming around in Entertainment City, no rules to protect them. And the tech billionaires, they have the smartest people at Their companies thinking about how to keep the kids there as long as possible. This seems quite bad, but I can't help but wonder, is this just a generational moral panic like we've seen a lot of times before?

[C]

So every generation thinks that the one behind them is lazy or soft and that they have all kinds of problems.

[A]

Again, John Haidt.

[C]

But the mental health data. While teens are getting more anxious and depressed since, like, say, World War II, there is a long term slow rise. But actually, the millennials were actually a little healthier than Gen X.

[A]

Roughly, Gen X are the people born between 1965 and 1980, and the millennials were born between 1981 and 1996.

[C]

Gen X actually had the highest rates of suicide depression. So from the 90s to 2010, which is really the Millennial era, we actually see almost everything is either level or it's actually going down. Like the anxiety, depression, sense of meaninglessness. So the Millennials are actually doing pretty well. And it's very important that they were on flip phones. Then all of a sudden, in the early 2010s, millennials changed from flip phones to smartphones. And a bunch of other things happen with the technological environment. Facebook buys Instagram and it becomes very popular in 2012. Tumblr, all sorts of things happen in the early 2010s. And right then, right exactly at 2012, 2013, that's when so many of these graphs just begin to go up like a hockey stick.

[A]

Can you just talk in a little bit more detail about this shift that you articulate between flip phones and regular phones and why you talk about that timing as being so critical?

[C]

You go from a stable environment where kids are on flip phones, and then all of a sudden you change over to a smartphone at the same time that the social media, they used to be called social networking systems to connect people, they become social media platforms. They become much more viral, much more about the newsfeed, not about connection. So social media is changing. The technology in your pocket is changing. And that's when we see all the measures of what kids are doing.

[A]

I think for people in our age range, it's a little hard for me to conceptualize how different the experience is going to be for my kids than it was for me. Because I got a smartphone when I was an adult, and when I was 12, I had no smartphone, and when I eventually got a cell phone when I was in college. But, you know, there's no Instagram. I mean, I was sort of fully formed before that came up. So in what way is this different for kids.

[D]

I think the heart of understanding the harm that's being caused to children, to understand it, I would say to any adult, think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of again.

[A]

Journalist Johann Hari Whether it's starting a.

[D]

Business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is, that thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of sustained attention. Right? You had to spend a lot of time doing one thing. And the evidence is very clear that young people are struggling profoundly to pay sustained attention.

[G]

I remember being younger in elementary and early middle school before I had my own phone and I used to devour like thousand page novels in like two or three days and I can't do that anymore. Like I'm physically unable to do it.

[A]

This is Bella. She's 17 years old and lives in Ohio.

[G]

I don't know if it would have been like that had I never had a phone, but I have noticed that my attention span is way different than it used to be. And when I do sit down with the intention to read a book, I have a hard time reading it all the way through without going and like, you know, spacing out or thinking about something or picking up my phone. It's way different than it used to be. And I find it way harder to get into the zone with certain things when my phone is nearby.

[A]

Her friend Vivi, who's 15, also recognizes the inability to focus.

[G]

I think the attention span is a big part of it for me too, like just not being able to complete a task without having like a second source of stimulation. And like, it's hard to like just do focus on one thing. But it's also hard because like, I'm so used to focusing on two things. When I'm focusing, I can't like focus at all. It's either too much or too little. And there's like, it's hard to find that in between.

[H]

Shabbat has been a very interesting experience for me because at the start I've truly resented it and I would always want to use my phone, but my parents never let me.

[A]

This is amitai. He's a 14 year old in Brooklyn and he has had a phone since he was 11. Amitai and his family keep Shabbat, which means no technology, no tv, no phones, no stoves, no lights from Friday evening at sundown to Saturday evening at sundown.

[H]

I feel like it's amazing that one day out of the seven days of the week you have like, I don't know how you explain it, it's like your brain is kind of like let go and you spend time doing what's really important, not just wasting your time scrolling. It's really something that I feel like every teenager should have because also it helps with your self control.

[A]

Interestingly, Jonathan Haidt's research has found that kids in religious families, politically conservative families who also tend to be more religious and otherwise more traditional families, have all fared better in the smartphone era, with smaller rises in mental illness. He believes it's primarily due to being anchored in real world communities with rituals and obligations. There are also some western countries, like Japan and Israel, that are saturated in smartphones, but their mental health is much better than our teens. All of which suggests that there are many cultural, social and environmental factors that play into how much kids are or are not affected by phones. And there are all kinds of creative ways we can protect our kids from the negative impacts. And that's why Amitai loves Shabbat.

[H]

Because when you lose something like that for one day out of the seven days of the week, you end up like, not being as attached to it. Like, I know some teenagers that don't keep Shabbat that are just like so much more attached to their phone than I am, like I'm able to put it down and just, you know, stop myself. But a lot of teenagers are just kind of stuck on their phone, if you know what I mean.

[A]

The average teen spends around nine hours a day on their phone. Nine hours. That's more than a full workday on your phone.

[C]

When kids are on nine hours a day, well, that pushes out everything else. And that's just the average. Almost half of all kids say they're online almost constantly, which means even if they're talking to you, they're actually thinking about what's going on online. They're never fully present. So for some kids, it's basically 18 hours a day, 16 hours a day that they're partially or fully online. What does that mean? It means there's no room for anything else. So book reading. Kids used to read a lot of books. Now it's been declining somewhat steadily for a long time, but it really plummets after 2012. Hobbies. Kids used to have hobbies. Not anymore. There's no time. When you have to consume thousands and thousands of pieces of content every day and rate them and respond to people and like this and comment on that. There's no time for anything else. I call the phone an experience blocker because once you give your kid a phone, it's going to block out almost all other experiences. So that's crucial.

[A]

Actually, I think this point is incredibly important because I think we get wrapped up in what people are doing on the phone as the kind of. If only it were a different thing. And I think the way I will often describe it to them is like, what if your kid told me, my plan is to sit in my room for nine hours a day and stare at the wall? Maybe if they wanted to do that for 20 minutes, you'd be like, oh, what a nice meditation activity. But for nine hours, you wouldn't think it was good. And so no matter what they're looking at on that phone, whether it's videos of volcanoes or even math problems, it's too much of one thing.

[C]

Well, crucial to what you just said is it's the medium, not the content. I want to encourage parents, don't focus so much on the content as if, oh, if we could just get her better content, it'll be okay. No, she needs to be out doing things, not staring at a screen all day.

[A]

What do you think is at stake for kids when you ask that?

[D]

I think a lot about my godson, who I really love. He's such a clever, lovely, good person. And I remember by the time he was in his late teens, he's 24 now. By the time he was in his late teens, I would sit with him, and he literally couldn't follow a train of conversation for more than a few minutes. And it was just heartbreaking. It was like seeing someone who almost had. This is a hyperbolic way of putting it, but not a crazy way of putting it, like early dementia, because he was so distracted all the time. Okay, he's an extreme example. Not everyone's going to become like he did, and he's actually much better now, but the future will look a lot more like that. We won't die. They'll still be humans. They'll be okay. They'll still love each other, but they'll have diminished lives. Because everyone listening knows every achievement you have in life comes from being able to pay deep and sustained attention. Doesn't matter if it's sporting achievement, musical achievement, being a good friend, whatever it is. Every achievement you have comes from attention. And when attention is diminished, the truth is you'll just have less of a good life. You'll achieve less. You won't be the best person you could have been. You won't be the best partner you could have been. You won't be the best worker you could have been. You won't be the best artist you could have been. You'll just be diminished. You won't die. You'll be all right. You'll have less of a life than you could have had.

[A]

Less of a life because of this experience blocker, which is built not only to be as addictive as possible, but also to make people believe they can multitask when they really can't.

[D]

That is the antithesis of sustained attention. And when you can't pay attention, you struggle to achieve your goals. You study to solve your problems. You feel worse about yourself because you actually are less competent. So their experience of the world is one where it's harder for them to do anything and harder for them to feel the pleasure of achievement that comes from doing things. And that's not their fault. That's not their fault at all. That's the fault of the people who are doing that to them and the fault of the rest of us that we are allowing this to be done to them. So I went to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, an amazing man named Professor Earl Miller. He's at mit. And I'll never forget this conversation. He. He said to me, you've got to understand one thing about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time. That's it. This is a fundamental limitation to the human brain. The human brain has not changed significantly in tens of thousands of years. It won't change on any time scale any of us are going to see. But what's happened is we've fallen for a kind of mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time, and the rest of us are not so far behind them. And so scientists like Professor Miller get people into labs, and they get them to think they do more than one thing at a time, and they monitor them to see what happens. And what they discover is always the same. You can't do more than one thing at a time. What you do is you juggle very rapidly between tasks. You're like, what is this video on TikTok? What does it say there on Facebook? What just happened on the tv? What did you just ask me, Emily? Oh, wait, what's this new video on TikTok? So we're constantly juggling, and it turns out that juggling comes with a really big cost. The technical term for it is the switch cost effect. This is a term every parent should know. Turns out when you are juggling between tasks, you do all the tasks you're trying to do much less competently. You make more mistakes, you remember less of what you do, you're much less creative. And I remember when I first learned this from Professor Miller and reading a huge amount of the science around switch cost effect thinking, okay, I get it, but this is a small effect. It's like a niggling irritation, right? When you look at some of the research, it's a really big effect.

[A]

Here's how big the effect turned out to be in an interesting British study conducted by University of London psychologist Dr. Glenn Wilson.

[D]

Hewlett Packard, the printer company, got a scientist in to study their workers and he split them into two groups. And the first group was told, just get on with your task, whatever it is, you're not going to be interrupted, just do what you got to do. And the second group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is. At the same time you got to answer a heavy load of email and phone calls. So pretty much how most of us live. And at the end of it, he tested the IQ of both groups. The group that had not been interrupted scored on average 10 IQ points higher than the group that had. To give you a sense of how big an effect that is. If you and me sat down together now and smoked a fat spliff together and got stoned, our IQs would go down in the short term by five points. So in the short term, being chronically interrupted in the way most of us are is twice as bad for your intelligence as getting stoned. You'd be better off sitting at your desk doing one thing at a time and smoking a spliff than you would sitting at your desk not smoking a spliff and being constantly interrupted. We and our children are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted.

[A]

Now most kids are probably not aware of the term cognitive degradation, but they do know that something's wrong.

[C]

So we have this bizarre situation where most kids don't like their phone based childhood.

[D]

You can try having self control, but every time you do, there are 10,000 really smart engineers on the other side of the screen working very hard to undermine your self control.

[C]

I cannot find any members of Gen Z who defend it. They all recognize it's destroying them. It's bad for them.

[D]

This didn't happen because you had bad habits or I had bad habits or our kids have bad habits. This happened because of some very big structural forces that are weighing down on us the whole time. There's nothing Wrong with your children. There's something wrong with the way we're living.

[C]

So why are you on it? I ask my students. Well, because everyone else is. Most of us don't want to give our kids a phone in fifth grade or sixth grade. Well, why do you do it? Well, because your kid comes and says, mom, I'm the only one. I'm left out. I'm excluded. So this is what social scientists call a collective action problem. And the way to solve a collective action problem is collectively, we all feel stuck. As individual parents, we feel like, this is terrible, but how can I change it? Well, by teaming up with others.

[A]

After the break, we'll talk about some of those collective action solutions. We'll be right back. This show is supported by Airbnb. Every year, I meet a group of friends for a weekend to reconnect. Over time, the group has grown. More spouses, more children. But we still want to stay in a single house so that we can make the most of our time together. Enter Airbnb. Every year, we've managed to find a new hidden gem through Airbnb. And best of all, we can specify ones with a crib so whoever has a baby can travel a little lighter. It's not just when traveling that Airbnb has come in handy. Recently, my in laws wanted to come visit us for a few weeks. We were thrilled. We were also delighted to find them in Airbnb, literally down the street. That way, we could have family time and family harmony, too. Because sometimes you just need a little more space. And here's the really cool thing. Your home could also become an Airbnb. Maybe you even have an in law suite that isn't being used that often. You could Airbnb the extra space and make some extra money. To learn more about how you can become a host on airbnb, go to airbnb.com host again. Thanks so much to Airbnb for supporting raising parents. And now back to the show.

[B]

So, kids are amazing. I always ask these questions. Doesn't matter. It's a large school, a small school, a private school, a public, urban, suburban. Doesn't matter. They all say the same things about their technology and their technology use. They wish their parents would not use technology so much.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

They think their parents are addicted to technology.

[A]

Have you been in my house talking to my child?

[B]

Then it's every. It's every child. And it's. And it's because big tech has purposely designed these phones that we cannot live without to be addictive.

[A]

This is Ben Halpert. The founder of Savvy Cyber Kids. This is a non profit that provides educational resources for educators, parents and school communities across the globe. He's been going to schools talking about cybersecurity since 2002, when things were slightly different from the way they are now.

[B]

It was, you know, everyone kind of had that big CRT monitor screen. It was one computer in the family, like probably in the kitchen or the family room or something, something like that. And it was like AOL chat rooms and Yahoo chat rooms. That was the thing.

[A]

Since then, a lot has changed. Those large CRT monitors have given way to personal devices such as tablets and laptops, which are now essential in many schools across the country. Students typically need a laptop by the time they reach middle school. Nowadays, Ben mostly goes to schools to talk to kids about online safety and about their phone use.

[B]

Some parents give their kids these devices and think, oh, they're going to be fine, they're going to make the right decision. No, they can't. They're like physically not capable to make the right decision. So we know that they're addicting kids. They don't understand why, but they always want to hold a device, they always want to play a game. They know the feeling, they know the draw. But we as adults have to kind of step in. So I'd say another question that I ask students is how many of you bring your devices to bed with you at night? And it doesn't matter, the age does. Same thing. And it's, it's, I'd say more than 50%, but it's, it's. Roughly about 75% of all kids bring their tech to bed at night. And that is the absolute worst place for technology. Then I ask a follow up question and I say, and tell me why, why is it that you bring your technology to bed at night? And you know, you'll get a couple people, you know, they'll say, well, because I want to listen to music or because I'm, you know, whatever. But the majority of the answers are because my parents don't take it away. The first time I heard that, I'm like, wait, are you serious? But that's what they all say. It's like they know they shouldn't bring the tech to bed, but they do.

[A]

Is your impression that the kids would be happier if their parents put more restrictions, if they were getting more external restrictions on this?

[B]

The answer is yes. But it is yes, the kids would be happier, but the parent needs to do it in the right way and parents need to understand that they will always get pushback. So like if you have been allowing your nine year old child to bring an iPad to bed with them at night, or maybe they even have a phone at that young age, right, to bring it to bed with them at night, or an ipod or something like that, when you put the restriction in place, no, you're going to get huge pushback. But it's the same pushback you're going to get when you give your child a scoop of chocolate ice cream and they come back and they ask for another one or they ask for more syrup on top even though you just gave them chocolate syrup on top. Right. Like kids just want more. It's, it's human instinct, it's natural. Right. It's just how it is. So it takes about two weeks to go from allowing your child to have their technology in the room at night to not. And during that two weeks, you just got to hold strong. You got to say, you know what? We're going to do what's best for you, best for your growth, best for your long term success as a human. We want to make you as successful as possible. We, as your parents made a mistake by letting you do this, but now we know better and so we're going to fix it.

[A]

But exactly how are we to fix it?

[C]

Look, I'm an American. I expect nothing from my Congress. I do not expect Congress to ever help us on anything. The EU is way ahead of us, the UK especially. But I'm going to assume that we never get any help. Can we do this ourselves? But in America we do. We come together and we figure out how to solve it and that's what we can do.

[A]

Here again, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

[C]

So since everything is a collective action problem, I'm proposing four norms that solve four collective action problems. And they're very simple. I'll just list them. Norm number one, no smartphone till high school. Just give your kid a flip phone when you send them out. Norm number two, no social media till 16. Social media is completely inappropriate for children and we need a national age, even if it's not by law, just by norm, that we don't let our kids on until they're 16. Some kids will get on, but as long as it's not most, then we can tell our kids, no, you're not going to be one of the kids who's on third. Norm phone. Free schools. There's absolutely nothing good that comes from kids having this distraction device in their pockets. They're not paying attention to their teachers, they're not paying attention to each other. Learning is literally going down around the world. Human children are Getting stupider since 2012 because they're not paying attention in school anymore. If anyone is texting during the day, they all have to check their text, otherwise they're going to be left out at lunch. They'll look foolish if they don't know what was going on during third period. So phone free schools. And then the fourth norm is more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world because we can't just delay and keep them off the screens. We can't just reduce their screen time by 90% and then have them sit and look at a wall and say, you know, go read a book, go learn guitar. We have to give them back each other, we have to give them back other kids and we have to give them back a play based childhood. If we just do the phone stuff, it'll help. But if we do both parts, roll back the phone based childhood and restore the play based childhood, we will largely solve this problem. And I think we're going to do it in the next year or two.

[A]

You, you're optimistic. You think we're at a point where people are tired of this?

[C]

Oh, we are totally at an inflection point. And I'm getting much more, you know, overconfident, I suppose, in my pronouncements here. Because. Because the revolution just started in Britain last month. So in February, there were a couple of events in Britain where it's clear parents are sick and tired of this. They are up in arms. So they have a national revulsion for what's happening. Parents are starting various groups, they're starting a movement and parents are rallying to it.

[I]

Last year and the summer, I quit my job to go full time with this.

[A]

This is Hannah Ortel. She's one of those up in arms British parents. So up in arms, in fact, that she quit her job as a therapist to start an organization called Delay Smartphones.

[I]

Really just sort of did a deep dive into what makes people change their minds, both at an individual level and collectively. I looked at, you know, political campaigns, Brexit, looked at how hostage negotiators work, how they sort of get bank robbers out without killing anyone or taking any money. And what I realized was that it's no big surprise, but people really hate being told what to do.

[A]

After Hannah did some preliminary research, she went to talk to other parents and she tried to understand why were they so eager to give their kids a phone at such an early age.

[I]

This is the first time that we're all dealing with this, both, you know, as parents and as children. And so I contacted all the parents in my daughter's class and just said to them, look, I'm doing a bit of research just to see where, where everyone's at with smartphones. Just want to hear what your thoughts are on this. A lot of data's come out in the last year, especially that I would love to share with you, add alternative devices. And really just said if there was a time that I could pop up to see them in their homes to talk about this. And I went and met 51 sets of parents doing this. Everyone said the same thing, that they were going to get their child a smartphone around the age of 10, because that's when everyone else seemed to be getting them.

[A]

And what Hannah would then tell them is, hey, you don't have to do that. You want to be able to contact them when they're not with you, fine, get them an alternative phone. Get them a dumb phone.

[I]

Every child should have friends that don't have smartphones. And every parent should know other parents who are delaying. I know that without real strong government policy and regulation, it's going to be, you're never going to get everyone. But we just want it to be more normalized for these dumb phones to be in kids hands as the first device. And so that's the thing I say even as a parent, if you decide I'm not going to delay until at least the age of 14, I'm going to get my 12 year old an iPhone or whatever. I would just ask them if they would buy that first device a dumb or basic phone so that these are just more normalized, that kids are seeing these more. What we have an issue with is that a lot of parents have old iPhones in jaws at home. And so kids end up using these sort of almost by accident at home as mini iPads and then they end up getting a SIM card and that becomes their phone. So I always say that parents do more research on buying their next toaster than they do on their child's first phone. And you know, this is one of, if not the most important parent parenting decision that will ever make. And yet it's just not even one we think about intentionally at all.

[C]

I think it's going to start now, this year in America because we're all fed up. Hardly any parents defend this. We're all sick of it. But we have to do it collectively and we're going to. We could get most schools phone free this September 2024. If your school principal sends home a note, sends a message explaining the phone free policy and saying, the research is really clear that these things are taking our kids away. They're distracting them. They're causing all kinds of drama and conflict. Especially say the principal of an elementary school saying, I urge you to delay giving your kid a smartphone at least until high school. If you got that message when your kid is in second or third grade and all the parents got that message, well, now that's the new norm. I mean, you might disobey it, but that would have a transformative effect if school principals would speak out because they're all facing this problem, they all hate the phones. So if they would start to speak out, yes, some parents will get angry at them, but the great majority of parents who have been silent will stand up and applaud.

[B]

You know, you're going to get pushback from parents because parents have this expectation that they will always be able to reach their children. 24, 7.

[A]

Ben Halpert thinks that the possible parental pushback to banning phones in school might be a bit bigger than Jonathan expects.

[B]

So when a school says, we're gonna implement this, and the parent pushes back and says, well, I need to be able to reach her or him or wherever or, or them, because X, Y or Z, whatever the excuse is. And then the parents push this need for instant communication to their kids. And parents say to their kids, I texted you an hour ago. Why didn't you text me back? So parents are kind of making the situation work and making the kids needy, like emotionally needy, to actually have the device because they don't want to get in trouble with their parents when they text and they have to reply.

[A]

So would you predict that children, I mean, my daughter's 12, but the children of the kids who are now 17, you think they're not going to have phones when they're 12?

[C]

I think they're not going to have smartphones. I think that's going to change very quickly. Now. Again, we're a big complicated country. It's not like there's one norm for the nation. So I'm not saying it's going to be 100%, but I think especially for parents who are really trying, for parents who are making an effort, I think the norm is going to be that you don't give your kid a phone until high school. And we can make it that. I mean, we really can make it that right away.

[B]

That's really a hard thing to do. And that's, by the way, why A lot of schools bring me in because they need me to say it, because they can't because the parents paying them 30, $40,000 a year to educate their kids, so. But they need an independent third party to say this is what is most beneficial for the long term benefit of your child.

[A]

Is that what you tell the parents?

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And I give them strategies on what to do and how to do this and how to go from, you know, having every meal where everyone is on their phones, parents and kids, you know, included, and how to go away from that because that is extremely detrimental for teaching the next generation, teaching our kids how to communicate. Because kids do not learn how to communicate with other humans by hearing their parents voices while the parent is staring at a phone. They learn how to communicate with other humans by watching facial expressions. There are zero facial impressions to watch if the child is staring at a screen and the parent is staring at a screen. So you just can't teach proper communication.

[C]

So after writing this whole book on kids, I felt like, you know, I haven't even touched what it's doing to the rest of us to what it's doing to adults. And I just started organizing my thoughts about the many effects. And my first book, the Happiness Hypothesis was about ancient wisdom. And it's like if you look at what the ancients said is the way to live your life, the phone based life does exactly the opposite. So for example, the ancients tell us, be slow to judge, quick to forgive. And what does social media do? It's the opposite. Be instant to judge, with no context, no real information. And never forgive because you'll be crucified by your team if you forgive. The ancients say slow down, sit in silence, meditate, clear your mind. But once you hook yourself up to a phone, you've got your AirPods in. There is no more silence, ever. The ancient civilizations have a lot of structure to the week and the year. There's a calendar, there are daily rituals. Life has a structure and an order. And there are age gradations. People grow, they have different responsibilities at different ages. But once we move online, everything's the same, everyone's the same age. There's never an age at which you can do more. As soon as you have a phone, you can go anywhere and there's no structure to the day, the week or the year. So this is part of why once you go into that world, it just feels to me like I'm just in a whirlpool, like things don't make sense anymore. Everything is fragmented and Scattered, basically it's spiritual degradation. And I mean that as an atheist. I mean, you know, I'm not. I'm just saying take whatever you think the word spiritual means. A phone based life is going to really set you back on that.

[J]

So we run like, I would say like a 95% non digital household where there is some TV like every other day, like 30 minutes of specific shows we let them watch. And they also go to a school that doesn't do digital, where they learn handwriting and cursive. They don't get computers in that school until they're almost like 13, which we wanted specifically. But you know, when you come into our house, the kids are playing. They come in, they're excited to see their toys and their books.

[A]

This is Russell. He and his wife Courtney have two sons, 5 and 7, and live in LA. And they're trying to do things with their kids differently.

[J]

We're not sheltering them from the world. They see iPads, they go to people's houses, they play video games. We don't like hide them in a bubble. They see everything. And I do notice the difference in our children. I wouldn't call it an innocence, but there's a glint in their eye. They look at things differently. They look at the ground, they look at ants moving around like I did as a child and think it's interesting. And there's a special quality about them that I don't see in other kids. It's like unsullied. There's an unsullied spirit or soul that's just beautiful to look at. And they are themselves. They have their own thoughts, they make up their own games and they have their own feelings and it's not influenced by the world around them and they really get to be them.

[E]

I do see sometimes in our boys that they're left out a little bit sometimes. So for instance, we were chaperoning a field trip and although our school is non digital, some of the families at home have video games and digital things. So our boy was talking to one of the other boys in the car and the other boy was talking about all his video games. And I could see in my son, he was trying to join in in the conversation, but he didn't know anything of what the other boy was talking about. I could see that it was an awkward interaction, but I was proud of him because he pivoted. But there have been times when I worry that the boys are left out. Sometimes when they're interacting with other kids, I can see that that's hurtful to them sometimes because we don't isolate them from the world. We're just trying to raise them in our own way.

[J]

Yeah. And then, like, you know, one of the things related to that that I see a lot is often a parent's like, well, I don't want them to be the only one without a phone. I don't want them to feel different. And I'm like, I don't care. Like, I don't. Why is it so important? Like, they're more worried if their child is liked than is healthy. And I'm like, I don't understand that. Like, we don't understand. They're like, oh, no. I don't want them to feel left out. I'm like, who cares? Left out of what?

[A]

Russell and Kourtney's kids had a few things to add about people using smartphones. I think they should throw their phone in the trash. I don't think they should, but I don't think they should do it a lot. I should think they throw their phone in the trash because they're addicted. I think they just could get a.

[F]

Flip phone without any, like, things, like.

[A]

To watch that get them addicted. Like, I would want a flip phone because I never wanted an iPhone then. You can't look up stuff. You can't look up anything.

[F]

You could ask Alexa themselves.

[A]

Again. 18 year old Ruby LaRocca.

[F]

Phones take away so much from kids. Kids think of not having a phone as a deprivation. They think, all my friends have phones, why don't I have a phone? This is a deprivation. I think it's actually a huge gift every day. I thank my parents. Thank you so much for not giving me a phone. Because phones are these short attention span devices, right? They're machines that award distraction. They ping when you look at them, they send you little notifications. You can respond immediately in the moment. They reward multitasking. And the thing you lose when you are raised on a phone, when you're continually distracted is actually the thing that's most important to me, which is reading. And this sounds unpopular, but a lot of what I'm gonna say is unpopular. But reading is more important to kids than they can know at that young age. And by having a phone in childhood, they're actually setting themselves up for a lifetime of having a short attention Spanish. And that affects everything from reading great literature to having a conversation to being able to converse with adults, to watch a movie straight through.

[A]

It hasn't even been two decades since the first smartphone and they've already fundamentally changed our world. The promise of smartphones was constant connection to facts and to people at all times. What we didn't predict is that these devices would make many of our kids feel more isolated, not more connected. There is a mental health crisis in kids, and while we can argue about the size of the role phones play, it seems hard to ignore their importance. Listening to everyone today, I have two big takeaways. The first is that phones should be banned in schools. This policy suggestion, made most directly by John Haidt, is one I have been hard pressed to find any expert disagreement with Children do not need phones in third period school is for focus to go back to Johann Hari we wouldn't encourage kids to smoke a joint during math class, and we shouldn't let them scroll TikTok either. By the way, this isn't a crazy idea. In addition to the uk, the nation's second largest school district, the Los Angeles Unified School District in California just this summer passed a complete cell phone ban during the entire school day. And New York City is planning a school cell phone ban that is set to be implemented in February. The second and much harder takeaway is that we as parents need to set and hold boundaries and limits. This is hard because even if our children agree and principal limits are good, they will resist them. It's their job to do that, and it's our job to say no. There are a lot of limits we could set. No smartphones until high school. No social media, no phones in the bedroom. Every parent will have a different set of boundaries, but once you decide on yours, hold them. It is hard, but it's necessary. These are things every parent listening should be invested in because this isn't just some small parenting choice like do I let my kid have apple juice or can my kid have a sleepover? Phones have fundamentally rewired our lives and our experience of the world. I'm sure every person listening right now agrees with that. And moreover, I'd say that every person listening also probably has some complicated relationship with their own phone. The same goes for our children. What's at stake in this conversation is huge. Our children's lives and their experience of the world. What do we want that to look like? Thanks for listening. Raising Parents Is it Production and partnership with the Free Press. It was produced by Liz Smith and Sabine Jansen. Thanks as well to producer Tamar Avishai for additional production support. The executive producer is Candace Kahn. Last thanks to my guests today, Jonathan Haidt and Johann Hari, Ben Halpert and Hannah Ortel. I'm Emily Oster. See you Next time on Raising Parents.