Habits and Hustle
Episode 447: Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones and the Anxious Generation - What Parents Need to Know
Tue, 06 May 2025
What if smartphones are causing the youth mental health crisis? In this episode of the Habits and Hustle podcast, I talk with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as he reveals how the "great rewiring of childhood" between 2010-2015 led to alarming increases in anxiety and depression among children and teens. We discuss how we've created a contradictory world of overprotection in real life but underprotection online, leaving children vulnerable to predators and mental health challenges. We also dive into why play is essential (he calls it "Vitamin P"), how technology fragments attention spans, and why collective action is our best hope for change. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist, Professor at NYU, and co-founder of Let Grow, an organization dedicated to promoting childhood independence. His books include "The Anxious Generation" and "The Coddling of the American Mind." What We Discuss: 04:59 The Anxious Generation: Understanding the Rise of Anxiety 10:00 Social Media's Impact on Girls vs. Boys 14:46 The Importance of Play in Child Development 25:04 The Concept of Anti-Fragility in Children 27:56 The Importance of Risk in Child Development 32:18 The Case for Phone-Free Schools 33:55 The Impact of Technology on Education 36:08 Declining Test Scores and Educational Equity 39:46 The Dangers of Multitasking 41:12 Screen Time: Good vs. Bad Uses 43:17 Social Skills and Mental Health Crisis 44:43 The Challenges Boys Face Today 58:56 The Dangers of Social Media Platforms 01:00:49 Resources for Parents and Educators …and more! Thank you to our sponsors: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com and use code Be Bold for 15% off TruNiagen: Head over to truniagen.com and use code HUSTLE20 to get $20 off any purchase over $100. Magic Mind: Head over to www.magicmind.com/jen and use code Jen at checkout. Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Bio.me: Link to daily prebiotic fiber here, code Jennifer20 for 20% off. Momentous: Shop this link and use code Jen for 20% off Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement Find more from Jonathan Haidt: Website: https://jonathanhaidt.com/ https://www.afterbabel.com/ https://letgrow.org/ https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonathanhaidt/
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle. Crush it.
In this episode of Habits & Hustle, I'm joined by Dr. Jonathan Haidt. He's an NYU professor and the best-selling author of the book, Anxious Generation. We explore how smartphones and social media are reshaping childhood and not for the better.
We dive into the alarming rise in depression, anxiety, and suicide among young people and how screen time disrupt critical psychological development from resilience to conflict resolution. Dr. Haidt also shares why phones affect boys and girls differently, the science behind how screens rewire the brain, and his four key recommendations for healthier tech use.
Whether you're a parent, teacher, or just someone who cares about mental health, this conversation is a must listen. Before we dive into today's episode, I first want to thank our sponsor, Therasage. Their tri-light panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go.
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All right, so today on the podcast, we have Jonathan Haidt, who is the author of The Anxious Generation, probably, in my opinion, and I think almost every parent I know's opinion, one of the best books of, I think, of our decade. It is so timely, and I am just honored to have you on this podcast. Well, thank you.
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Chapter 2: How did smartphones contribute to the rise of anxiety in children?
It's a pleasure to be here.
It's really a pleasure to have you. I don't even know where to begin with you because you talk so much about the rise of anxiety and depression in our youth and social media, but it's not even that. I mean, I think I want to start by asking you, what was the tipping point for you in why you even wrote the book?
Well, it was actually a kind of a sidetrack originally. I'd written, my previous book was The Coddling of the American Mind. And it was about how overprotection is really weakening our kids. And we saw the students who arrived on campus around 2014, 2015. I teach at NYU, but all of us have seen this. The students arriving in 2014 or so, which is very different.
They were much more fragile, much higher rates of anxiety, much more upset by things they saw or heard or read. And so I wrote a whole book on that with my friend Greg Lukianoff, and we focused on overprotection. And that's a part of the story, very important part of the story. But at the time, we were writing this in 2017 mostly, the evidence wasn't clear that social media was harming kids.
There were people writing about it. There were a few experiments. It wasn't really clear. So we just had a couple paragraphs in the book saying, well, maybe social media is part of this. But then the mental health stats kept getting worse and worse and worse. And this is all before COVID. COVID made it worse still, but all of this was baked in before, by 2019.
And so then I then got a contract to write a book closer to my own center of research. I study moral and political psychology. So I was gonna write a book on what social media is doing to democracy, that democracy is a conversation. And when the conversation happens on Twitter, what the hell happens to us? So I started writing that book and I thought, well, let me start the book.
I have all this data left over on teen mental health. Let me start the book with one chapter on what happened to teenagers when they moved their social lives onto Instagram and a few other platforms around 2012. That's when Facebook buys Instagram. That's when it becomes very popular. So once they all get smartphones, which again is around 2012, their mental health plummets immediately.
So I wrote the first chapter of that book, laying out all the graphs, like, look what happened. And then once I saw just how vast it was and that it wasn't just the US, that this was happening, not in every country, we don't have data from every country, but almost all the Western countries and certainly all of the English speaking countries, the identical pattern.
So once I saw that chapter, I said, whoa, I can't just leave this in chapter one and go write a book about democracy. I've got to follow this out. And that's what became The Anxious Generation. I split the book in two. My editors were happy with that. And I ended up writing as fast as I could The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
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Chapter 3: What are the key differences in social media's impact on girls vs. boys?
So think about it this way. You're a company whose business model is based on monetizing children's attention. You've got to grab their eyeballs and keep them as long as you possibly can. What is the bait that you want to use in your trap? And the way a trap works is you have to have bait that appeals to the animal. You're not going to catch, you know, catch a dog using grapes.
I mean, they don't like grapes or whatever. Some dogs do, but you know.
Most don't, right? Most don't.
So you need bait. And what's the bait for girls? If you want to get teenage girls in, what are you gonna show them? Who said what about whom? Who's friends with whom? What people said about you? Girls and women have a more developed mental map of social space. This is a common joke in every family. My wife remembers, knows all sorts of things about my friends that I've forgotten.
So girls and women are much more sociable in their social cognition. Boys and men are literally a bit more autistic. That is literally the difference. Males are sort of shifted over a bit on the spectrum. Not that they're autistic, but like towards that. High systemizer, low empathizer, not as socially skilled. So social media offers to girls what everyone is saying about everyone.
And once the girls go in, they cannot leave. They're trapped. Because since that's where all the girls are, they're not in the hallway talking anymore. They're not going over to each other's house and talking anymore. Everything is happening on Instagram and a few other platforms. So the girls are trapped. And many girls are on there every waking moment. So that's how you trap a girl.
And then what are the effects of that? Well, the sheer waste of time, so many young women, that's basically all they do. If you're on social media five hours a day, which is the average, actually for girls it's a little higher than that, that's pretty much your life. And all the things that you and I remember from childhood, knock all those out.
Hanging out with friends, laughing with friends, reduce all that by 70, 80%. Being out in the sunshine, reduce it by reading books, having hot, everything. Everything in childhood, take out 70% or 80%. Oh, reduce your sleep, too. Lose about a half hour of sleep a night for your entire adolescence. So it just really does a number on girls. And that's not even talking about the predation.
There are so many men that want to have sex with young girls and young boys. And they used to have to go to a playground where they would be creepy men, and then we locked them up in the 90s. Well, we didn't lock them all up. They're not on the playgrounds anymore. They're on Instagram. They're on Snapchat. That's the way it's so easy to meet children anonymously.
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Chapter 4: Why is play essential for child development?
Right. That's right.
And so they're using social media as the avenue to meet these people in real time. It's not happening in real time.
Exactly. That's right. That's right. So for all these reasons, it just crept up on us that, you know, because it started in the 90s when the Internet came in and we all thought this is amazing. And it really was amazing. And the millennial generation, those born 1981 to 1995, roughly. Mm-hmm. They grew up with the internet, and some bad stuff definitely happened on the internet.
But back then, it wasn't monetized. There weren't companies that had perfected locking you in and addicting you. So some bad stuff happened, but it was mostly very exciting, and the millennials turned out fine. And so we all kind of thought, oh, computers are... They're kind of good for kids and this is the future.
And so we didn't realize, we didn't realize that everything changed between 2010 and 2015. And this is the heart of my book. It's the great rewiring of childhood. So imagine that you are, let's say you're a girl born in 1995. So this is the last year of the millennial generation. So you turn 15 in 2010.
And what that means that you went through puberty with a flip phone because there was no smartphone until 2007. Teenage teens don't really dive into the smartphone. It's really 2011, 2012, the big transition years from flip phone to smartphone.
So you're born in 1995, you're a millennial, you're most of the way done or halfway done really with puberty, but you're through early puberty, which is the most sensitive period. You probably had Facebook at some point, but Facebook wasn't super viral at the beginning. It was just like, hey, here's my page, where's your page?
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Chapter 5: What does anti-fragility mean for children?
But then you get the newsfeed, you get algorithms, Facebook is able to monetize time. They didn't have a monetary strategy early on. It's really in the early 2010s that they perfect it. And then they buy Instagram, which all the girls go on to. There's a lot of publicity.
And so as kids are trading in their flip phones, they're getting a smartphone with a front-facing camera and Instagram and other platforms and Tumblr and Pinterest and other things. And they're getting high-speed internet. So now you can do photographs and video. But if you're... born in 1995, you made it through. You get this stuff in late teens, but that's not as bad.
Your brain is most of the way done rewiring. Okay, now what happens if you're born five years later? What happens to a girl born in the year 2000? So she's Gen Z. Gen Z begins birth year in 1996, but let's look at a girl born in 2000. So she turns 15 in 2015. What that means is that she probably got her first phone, it was probably an iPhone, say in 2012 when she was 12.
Back then, it might have been more 13, 14, but now it's 10. Kids are getting iPhones at 10 plus or minus. So her first phone is an iPhone. She just lies about her age when she's 12, opens an Instagram account because they welcome you. They're glad to have you. As far as I can tell, they certainly don't try to keep kids off. She has a front facing camera. All her friends are on Instagram.
And so now she's going through puberty, taking pictures of herself and putting them up there and trying to get followers. So, you know, the platforms are introducing you to people. Hey, you might want to follow this person. Hey. So she grows up basically on a stage showing off her body, showing off her face, having strangers comment on her body and her face.
And the sexier she poses, the more positive reinforcement she gets. That's why all the girls look the same on Instagram. They're all doing the same sort of poses that come ultimately some of them from pornography. So again, it's just, it's unbelievable that we let this happen to childhood.
We have, and we've actually like eliminated the idea of play. Like play doesn't even happen anymore. It's so sad. It's really sad. Can you talk about the importance of play? Why it is so important? And because of what's happened and without it, what happens? Mm-hmm.
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Chapter 6: What are the dangers of multitasking with technology?
Yes. So I have a whole chapter, really two chapters that focus on play in the book. It's really important to understand our evolutionary story. So we're mammals. And what mammals are is mammals is a way of having huge investment in a child. So the female literally makes milk from her skin. I mean, it's a miracle, but that's what evolution figured out how to do.
Right.
So you've got these long childhoods where the female is literally producing food for the child. It goes on a long time. Mammals are very smart. We have large brains. And the smarter a mammal is, or the larger brains it is, the more sociable it is. So the really sociable animals, so humans, dogs, chimpanzees, they have big brains, very, very social. How do you wire up that brain?
The genes don't tell it how to grow. The genes just start the ball rolling. The brain gets wired up in play. Mammal babies, mammal children practice the things they're going to need as adults. We have a puppy now. Well, she's two, but puppyish. They practice the, I'm going to grab the bone and run away with it. You have to chase me.
It's a game, but it lets her practice her grab the meat and run strategy. It's great fun. So we all play. And if you were, and study, research has, they've done this. You take rhesus monkeys and you don't let them play. You raise them without play. They come out socially deformed. They're anxious. You put them in a new environment. They're very fearful.
They're kind of like those college students who showed up on campus in 2014, 2015. Much more fearful, much more anxious, much poorer social skills. So play is an absolute essential. If you think your kid needs vitamin C, of course he does. If you don't give your kid vitamin C, he's gonna develop rickets and have all kinds of deformities.
We need vitamin C. Play is vitamin P. If you don't give your kids play, they're gonna come out anxious and socially stunted. And so the best kind of play is not with an adult, It's with other kids, ideally mixed ages, because then the older kids have to look out for the younger kids. The younger kids are trying to look mature for the older kids. They're not going to want to cry and be a baby.
So when kids are playing in a group, that is the most nutritious thing that they can do. And most of us, you know, I'm older than you. I was born in 1963. But, you know, those of us born in the 60s and 70s or so in the 50s, you know, we all grew up outside playing with other kids. And there was a crime wave. I mean, it's not as though the world was perfectly safe back then.
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Chapter 7: How can parents protect children from online dangers?
It was actually more dangerous. A lot safer now, very little crime now compared to when I was a kid. But kids need that play. And so my book is actually a tragedy in two acts. In act one, We eliminate the play-based childhood in the 1990s. We freak out about child abduction. We think if I ever let my kid out, he'll be abducted. There'll be a man in a white van.
If I let my kid go get milk in two aisles over in the supermarket, someone will say, hey, little kid, do you want some candy? Come into my car. Like that never, okay. It did happen once in Florida. That's actually the thing. It happened once in Florida in 1980. But it's extremely, extremely unlikely. Yeah. So we freaked out over child abduction in the 90s. We didn't stop letting our kids out.
So act one of the tragedy is we lose the play-based childhood, which is a biological necessity. But their mental health doesn't drop right then. The millennials, as I said, the millennials' mental health was a little better, actually, than that of Gen X. There's not really a difference. So in the 90s, there's no big change in their mental health.
And then in act two of the tragedy is the great rewiring, which I just told you about. We take away the flip phones. A flip phone is a tool, you can call your friends, you can text them. You're not communicating with a hundred strange men around the world on a flip phone. So take away the flip phone, give them a smartphone. So this is what I call the arrival of the phone-based childhood.
And giving a kid a phone-based childhood, it's like raising a kid on Mars. It's an alien environment. It's not good for human development. And that's what we did. So it's a two-act tragedy. And that's why I believe rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide surged in the early 2010s.
And have you seen since 2010s to now, right, in the last 15 years, what has been the surge? What percentage have you seen increase?
So it depends on the exact survey and which subpopulation you're looking at. But as a general rule, the numbers are pretty much always between 50 and 150%. So I'll just give you a couple. If we look at the overall suicide rate for teenagers, that is up 50% between 2010 and... I forget if it's 2019 or 2022, 23, whatever, it's up 50%.
But whenever we zoom in on preteen girls, we get much higher percentage changes. Now they have a very low suicide rate, but it's up 150%, 150% increase in younger teen girls' suicide. It used to be very rare. Now it's more common. Now boys' rates are even higher. They go up a lot too. But the percentage increases are always gigantic for the 10 to 14-year-old girls, often well over 100%.
But we're talking about increases of anxiety, depression, 50 to 150% is the general rule.
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Chapter 8: What collective actions can parents take for healthier childhoods?
Latchkey Kids. Yeah. Exactly. But it served me well in life, right? Because I became more resourceful. I can, I have coping skills. I know how to like take care of, you know, like you learn to take care of yourself as a human being.
What's happening now over, I'm noticing just within like the social groups I'm looking at around here where I live, that this idea of this gentle parenting, these trigger warnings, these safe spaces have really damaged our children.
That's right. Those are all harmful things. That's right.
And I guess my first question to you, how did that begin? And the interesting thing is, how did this even happen when the kids are actually on a computer or a phone more anywhere else? So how did the parents even become such helicopter parents if there was nothing to helicopter? Yeah. You know what I mean?
That's right. But there are a lot of social changes happening at the same time. And so, you know, when I was a kid, mothers generally didn't work. Most families had three or four kids. People were out playing and parents weren't spending a lot of time parenting. It was this, you know, the mom's taking care of the house, kids are out playing.
And what happens in the 80s as women begin entering the workforce, as everyone's getting more educated, and people with college degrees tend to have fewer children, as college admissions are getting more competitive. So we get this transformation where families now are smaller and more focused on getting the kid into college, which is very much like what they do in East Asia, like in Korea.
You know, there's no childhood in Korea. All of childhood is preparation to take an exam to try to get into one of three schools. It's really tragic what they've done in Korea. But we're on the road to doing that ourselves here in America. So you get a bunch of social change, but you get more high impact.
The fear that comes in in the 1990s of abduction now makes us think that a good mother is one who protects her child. And a lot of the burden of this really falls on mothers. The criticism, I mean, the mommy wars, you know, anything a mother does, someone's gonna criticize it as being the wrong thing. Fathers, we're kind of let off the hook there.
You know, if I let my son take risks, people are gonna say, oh, he's teaching him to be tough. You know, whereas mothers, it's much riskier because someone's gonna judge you. And so once you get all this criticism, a lot of women, I think, are sort of pressured into overprotecting, hovering, always being there. So I think that's part of it.
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