♪♪
And so, our first speaker today
is gonna be Professor
Jonathan Haidt,
and he is gonna
talk a little bit
about maybe some of the
unintended consequences
of this technological change.
So just to get right
into the program,
a warm welcome for
Professor Jonathan Haidt.
(audience clapping)
- Thanks, Paul.
Well, good morning,
Stern alumni.
Welcome back.
I have three questions for
you, and if your answer is yes,
put your hand up
and hold it there.
First question, do
you have children?
Raise your hand.
Second question, do you
plan to have children?
Put your hand up,
and put your hand up
if you put it up for
the first one, too.
Okay?
(audience laughing)
And keep holding your hands up.
Third question, do
you work at a company
that ever plans to hire people
who are currently children?
Raise your hand.
(audience laughing)
Okay.
So it's just about all of you.
So this talk is for
just about all of you.
So as you may have noticed,
we are experiencing an epidemic
of teen anxiety and depression.
And we really began to
talk about this on campus
about 2014, 2015, we
started noticing it,
and by 2016, there
was a lot of coverage.
Now, also around this time,
a lot of strange stuff
started happening on campuses
that seems in some
ways related to this.
We began getting requests
for trigger warnings
if some book or
speaker was gonna come
that some students
would find upsetting.
There was many more
protests often said that,
students would say
that these speakers
will be traumatizing to
people who speak there.
Students began asking
for safe spaces
to protect themselves, not
from physical violence,
but from words, ideas, and books
that they thought would be
upsetting or traumatizing
to some of their
fellow students.
Now, the way to understand
what's happening here,
the key to all of
this is to realize
that there was a
change in generations.
Kids who were born in 1996 and
after are really different.
They grew up in a different
way from kids born before.
Millennials always
love this talk
because I'm basically
saying everything that's,
the weird stuff, it's not
you, it's the next generation.
So this generation
born in 1996 and after
is known as Gen Z.
And you can see the difference
behaviorally in this way,
nationally representative data
about how teenagers
use their time.
What we see is when Gen
Z enters the dataset,
the rate at which they get
driver's licenses drops.
It begins dropping with
the late millennials,
but it's really down for Gen Z.
They're not, I guess
they don't need a car,
'cause they're not
going out drinking
and going on dates or
even going to a job.
So for a lot of reasons,
what are they doing?
What are they doing
with all their time?
They're sitting at
home on their phones.
Now, they're different
behaviorally and
psychologically.
As soon as Gen Z enters the
dataset, look what happens.
This is the percentage
of American teens
who meet the criteria for having
a major depressive episode,
not felt blue, but had a
major depressive episode.
As soon as Gen Z
enters the picture,
the boys go up, the
girls go way up.
One in five American teenage
girls met the criteria
for a major depressive
episode in recent years.
Same thing, different dataset,
same thing for college students.
Back when college students
were all millennials,
the rates were relatively low.
A question, do you have
a psychological disorder?
As Gen Z replaces
the millennials,
the rates go up for boys
and way up for girls.
Now, it's not just that
they're comfortable
talking about it.
It's behavior, too.
This is the number out
of 100,000 American teens
who were admitted to
a hospital each year
because they deliberately
harmed themself,
mostly by cutting themselves.
And what you see is that there's
no trend up through 2009,
but once Gen Z enters the
picture, look what happens.
The older teen girl
rate is up 62%.
Now, importantly, the young
women who are millennials,
their rate isn't actually up.
The millennials did not get
social media until college,
and their mental
health was not damaged.
But the youngest teen
girls, the youngest girls,
10 to 14, they didn't
used to cut themselves.
But now that they're all on
social media, it's up 189%.
We see the same
thing for suicide.
The male rate is up 25%.
The female rate is up 70%.
And once again, for
the youngest girls
who have a very low
rate to begin with,
but the increase for
that youngest set
is up 150% increase
in suicide rates
for 10, 11, 12-year-olds
in this country.
We now have the highest rate
for teen girls ever recorded.
Now, why?
Why is this happening?
You have to trace it out
over just a few years.
In 2006, Facebook
opens up to the world,
but very few preteens have it.
The iPhone comes out in
2007, but it's expensive,
and very few teenagers have one.
2009 to 2011, that's
the transition time.
That's when we go
from most teenagers
are not on social media
to, by 2011, most are.
It becomes the center
of their interaction.
It changes the
fundamental nature
of how they interact
with each other.
Now, why is it so
much worse for girls?
Girls use social
media a lot more.
What I've learned in
doing this research
is it's not screen time per se,
it's specifically social media.
So girls use social
media a lot more.
They have higher
base rates of anxiety
and depression to begin with.
They're much more affected by
the chronic social comparison.
Just look how long they
spend composing their selfies
compared to boys, who
aren't even bothering
because they're on
Fortnite all day long.
Girls are far more affected
by the fear of missing out,
fear of being left out,
and really importantly,
girls and boys are
equally aggressive,
but boys' aggression
is physical.
And so when they're
all on phones,
they stop punching each other.
Whereas girls' aggression
has always been relational,
so when they're all
on social media,
now it's 10 times more frequent.
This is not just a
matter for students.
It's now coming out
into the work world.
Young employees are much
more depressed and anxious,
and this is affecting businesses
that are hiring
recent college grads.
Social media is one of the big
causes, but there's another.
I'm talking here
about research I did
in a book with Greg Lukianoff
called The Coddling
of the American Mind.
It's based on three
terrible ideas.
I'll just go
through one of them.
Here's a really,
really bad idea,
to believe that what doesn't
kill you makes you weaker.
Of course, you
recognize that this
is the opposite of
Nietzsche's dictum,
what doesn't kill you
makes you stronger.
The key idea here is
called anti-fragility.
Some things are fragile,
so you protect them.
But Taleb points out
that what we want in kids
is not just resilience, which
is they don't get damaged,
what kids are naturally
is anti-fragile.
That means that, oops, one
of my good laugh lines,
and I blew it!
(audience laughing)
There are certain systems
that actually get stronger
when you drop them or
challenge them or stress them.
So your bones get stronger
if you use them hard.
Your immune system
can only develop
if it's exposed to bacteria.
And if you protect
a kid too much,
you damage the immune system.
And the same is true
for the whole child.
Kids are fragile, and
we wanna protect them,
but if we protect them, if
we're always there to help them,
then they don't get a chance
to grow strong and
independent themselves.
We have to keep being there,
and if we are always
there for them,
well, then we kinda have
to keep being there.
And if they get a bad
performance review,
we have to kinda call
their boss and say,
why did you give my son
a bad performance review?
This really happens nowadays.
Now, the proof of this, of
how radically things changed
in the 1990s is this.
I wanna ask you all, at
what age were you let out?
At what age could you
go out of the home
and go to a friend's house,
and you and your friend
could go around somewhere?
So look at that.
What age was it for you?
Just call it out.
As I point to your
area, just call it out.
What age?
(audience chattering)
Okay, this is a mixed
age group, all right.
This is a, all right.
(audience laughing)
If I had more time, I'd
do it by generation.
What I always find is
that for Gen X and before,
it's age six.
And for Gen Z, the younger kids,
it is 10 to 12.
So we stopped letting
kids out in the '90s,
and I think we're
paying the price now.
We didn't give them the chance
to learn how to deal
with ordinary stress.
All stories about
childhood are like this,
but we said, no,
no more of that.
You need to take your
parents with you.
And when you deprive kids
of a lot of free play,
you actually increase
psychopathology.
There's research on this.
So what I'm saying is not
that we want playgrounds
like this, okay,
(audience laughing)
because what kills you,
what kills you does
not make you stronger.
What we want is
playgrounds like this,
because on this kind of
playground, you can get hurt.
And that's important
because if you can get hurt,
then every day, you
have dozens of chances
to learn how to not get hurt.
Whereas my kids grew up
on these playgrounds.
They don't get that chance.
The basic lesson is prepare
the child for the road,
not the road for the child.
Nassim Taleb's advice
to college students
is to notice that a flame,
a candle flame is fragile.
One puff of wind,
and it goes out.
But if it gets big
enough, it's anti-fragile.
The harder you blow on
it, the stronger it gets.
His advice is you wanna be the
fire and wish for the wind.
I'll end with just
two pieces of advice
for those of you who have
children, especially.
And I urge you to
visit letgrow.org.
It's a wonderful organization
run by Lenore Skenazy,
who wrote Free-Range Kids.
I'm on the board of it.
And we're trying to
help parents, families,
and neighborhoods and schools
give independence back to kids.
And I'll end with some
very specific advice
because a lot of
you are wrestling
with the same thing that I am.
We're all wrestling
with the same thing
if your kids are over five
years old, on screen time.
Three very simple rules.
Just get all screens out of
the bedroom by a certain time.
There's no reason they
should have it overnight.
No social media
until high school.
And agree on a time budget,
whether it's an hour a day
or more or less, but
have a time budget,
otherwise the tech companies
will suck up all
of your kids' time.
That's it.
For more information, please
visit thecoddling.com,
and welcome back to reunion.
It's great to see you all.
Buh-bye.
(audience clapping)
♪♪
