Unashamed with the Robertson Family
Ep 1062 | Send Your Kids Outside Again: Free-Range Parent Like a Robertson
Mon, 24 Mar 2025
Jase, Al, and Zach are captivated and appalled by the shocking stats about the effect of social media, big tech, and today’s kids provided by Dr. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, author, and professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. Dr. Haidt exposes the strategies used by big tech corporations to hook kids on their apps, and Jase shares his own experiences as a father encountering these dangerous practices. But, Dr. Haidt proposes a four-step plan to win back the childhoods of kids all over the world. “Unashamed” Episode 1062 is sponsored by: https://cozyearth.com/unashamed — Get 40% off sheets, towels, and more when you use our link or use code UNASHAMED! https://vom.org/unashamed — Request your free copy of When Faith is Forbidden today by visiting the website or by calling 844-463-4059. https://meetfabric.com/unashamed — Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their family. Listen to Not Yet Now with Zach Dasher on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or anywhere you get podcasts. — Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What unique situation is discussed at the start of the podcast?
I am unashamed. What about you? Welcome to Unashamed. This is a very... It's a first. It's a first. It's a unique situation we have today as we start our podcast. Never done this. Because we've already had our podcast, but we're now starting the podcast.
Well, Zach, you know, yesterday, because he was in charge of this... He was like, I got a guest coming on. I'll give you all the details. I'll send you some questions. Last night at about 11 o'clock, I was like, what are you looking for? I was like, I'm looking for the details that Zach was going to send me.
It was literally the last thing he told us yesterday.
To be fair, to be fair, my wife's van literally broke.
kaput it's gone blew off engines so i've been i had to deal with some issues maddie can you send him a cheap violin and he can use it as a prop let's just play that violin so zach found a doctor who you know i i was i was saying oh you know is he a believer and zach started him hauling around i'm not sure about that you know he's like but we have a common interest and uh
And it was really about this epidemic, what I call the zombie apocalypse, with the cell phones.
This is something we've been talking about on this podcast since we started. For years.
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Chapter 2: What shocking statistics about kids and social media are revealed?
Cell phones with the kids, the damage to the society, the distractions, and the horrors of social media, and putting immature people in mature environments, and then shocked while they're disconnected, bullying. Yeah. no social skills, suicide going out the wazoo among teenagers. I mean, it's just an epidemic.
And you've got to look at it. I mean, I think people are like, this may be the most important discussion that we need to be having with our families and children right now. It's so big.
But what I feel that's powerful about the conversation we just had is here you have people just from the world saying, agreeing with Christianity of what is happening to our kids? Where are the parents? And so what I found fascinating was it really wasn't about cell phones, even though we talked about that a lot in the epidemic. It's about kids. It's about childhood.
Chapter 3: How do cell phones affect children's mental health?
It's the way he put it.
And ultimately families.
And just so you know, as we're going into it, we're setting you up to hear this podcast. This is Dr. Jonathan Haidt. He is a Jewish professor from New York, and he teaches at NYU School of Business. He could not be any more different than this podcast, than us. And yet we found a synergy with him and his book and his research that was fascinating.
I was like, I agree with everything this man is saying.
But you know what's incredible is he has all the data and research that that is just anybody should be able to look and say, okay, humanity, we have a problem that has emerged through this. And so I found it very powerful that even when the world is crying out, saying this won't work for society. We're breaking down society.
And so what's real funny, I think, and interesting as it went along, Zach, in his theological brain, brought up some real deep truths of the Bible, but he found them absolutely fascinating. He was taking notes, Zach. He was taking notes. Zach, good job on that.
That was impressive. That was a tip of the cap. I thought the same thing, Zach. You were definitely teasing this man to look into, because he's a Jewish man. And you were teasing him to look into the New Testament, some of the things we teach.
Well, I don't want to give it away. No, don't give it away. He threw a clue out. He threw something out there. I was like, that's interesting. So I went and looked up what he said. I was like, whoa, there's another piece of this that you might be interested in. But you definitely got to listen to the whole thing because I think it's towards the end of the podcast.
But I think the discussion here, there's not a family argument. that I know of that is immune from this discussion, not one, not mine and not Jace's, not Al's. And there's some raw conversations in this episode and what this conversation is about to be had.
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Chapter 4: What is Dr. Haidt's four-step plan for helping children?
And I noticed both of you guys being a little bit younger than me, You know, Jace, the tail end of your kids and Zach, kind of the middle back of his, have raised your kids through this generation he's talking about because he kind of zeroes into 2012, this rise of social media and technology. sort of addiction to smartphones.
But my constant fear, and I know this speaks, I know this speaks powerfully to our audience because I'm worried so much about my grandkids. We're now in 2025, so we're sort of 12 years removed from where he was doing this research. But I mean, I just I pray for him every day. And I'm like, what can I do to walk alongside my kids to help them?
So when I was reading this book, Jason, what you didn't get that I got was a copy of the book. Yeah. So I don't know if Zach thought you couldn't read or what.
It actually worked, though, because.
Yeah, because, you know, he said that.
I was asking the questions. It was my orientation to this.
Which would be all of our listeners that hadn't read his book. Yeah, I had no idea who he was. But I immediately started highlighting and taking pictures of this book. I was in and out of airports when I started reading this book and sending it to my kids. Because I was like, we must implement this now because my grandkids are the age that he's talking about.
Well, because I just went through this with all my kids. Right. And one story I've never shared, but one of my sons, he was spending a lot of time on his phone. It was quiet, which is... What are you doing? And so I would frequently get my kids' phones since I'm paying for it, which they didn't get one until they were pretty far in their teenage years.
And so I found this interesting text in that it wasn't a text thread, just hours of he's talking to this girl. But something didn't feel right. There were no, you know, no profanity. There was not one thing in there that was like inappropriate other than the fact of I was like, this is a, it's like a fantasy. Who is this person?
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Chapter 5: How do social media effects differ between boys and girls?
And why was there no sign of trouble before 2012? All the way up from the 90s through 2010, there's no sign of a mental health problem. And so what my book is about is about how this period, 2010 to 2015, was the great rewiring of childhood. If you were born in 1995, you're the last of the millennials, you went through puberty with a flip phone.
You didn't have a smartphone when you were in middle school, you had a flip phone. And a flip phone is good for talking to your friends and texting them. You're not talking to strangers, you're not on your phone 10 hours a day. But if you were born in the year 2000, You're Gen Z and you turn 15 in 2015 and you got a smartphone. If you're a girl, you probably had Instagram.
You're spending all this time posting pictures of yourself. People are commenting on it. It makes you anxious. And a whole bunch of ways, kids who went through puberty on a smartphone were kind of blocked. They didn't get to do the things that kids normally do. And that is the story that I'm telling in the book about why we see this very sudden
increase in depression and anxiety and self-harm and suicide right around 2012.
Well, and I thought, so you started and end the book with an analogy that I love. We love analogies on this podcast, John. So you talked about what it would look like to send your kids to Mars, right? That's right. That's how you open the book. And then you talk about the end. How do we bring them back to earth?
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Chapter 6: What risks do boys face in today's digital landscape?
So talk about that in terms of how foreign the idea is that we would turn over our children to an entity beyond our ability to impact and influence.
That's right. So I love metaphors. And I, you know, in my teaching and my writing, I always try to try to give people a kind of a feeling for the phenomena with a good metaphor. So the metaphor that I chose for this after working on this for years is. was what if your nine-year-old daughter comes to you and says, Mommy, Daddy, I've signed up for a trip to Mars.
Yeah.
You know, even if like, you know, I always wanted to be an astronaut when I was when I was a kid. So even imagine that, you know, I was willing to say, well, OK, let me hear you out. It turns out that the people running this space colony, they don't give a damn about kids. They didn't they have no idea if the kids are going to be OK. They didn't even ask the question. They didn't do any testing.
They just want to get as many kids as they can, bring them to Mars, let them grow up there. And then maybe they'll send them back when they're adults, maybe not. So this is a horrible situation. We'd never let that happen. But that's kind of what happened when we gave our kids smartphones and Instagram and all these other apps. And then those companies now own our children's lives.
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Chapter 7: What does Dr. Haidt say about overprotection of children?
Not for everybody, but half of all teenagers say they're online almost constantly. About half of them are basically on social media most of the time. So half of our kids, in a sense, have gone off to this different way of growing up. Now, you might have said back then, well, maybe it's okay. Maybe, you know, the technology would be good for them. Maybe they'll be super social.
And I thought that back in 2010, like maybe this is going to like stimulate brain development. But now it looks like it had a devastating effect, not just in the U.S. The reason I'm so passionate about this is that it's not just us. The exact same thing happened in Canada, the U.K., Australia, Scandinavia. We have good data from a lot of countries.
Something happened to kids around 2012 in so many different countries. So that's why I was trying to convey the sense of kids being taken away by a foreign – you know, company trying to make money off our kids. And they're coming, many of them are harmed or damaged or blocked.
Well, one of the things I love about your work, it's a scholarly work because it's full of data and charts and graphs that show just what John just talked about our dad used to be on our podcast, John, and he, you know, he never he's like, you know, he's almost 80 years old. And so he never understood cell phones. He never understood computers. He's famously, you know, says I've never owned one.
And so for years, anecdotally. He has said what you say with data and evidence that it just seemed to him like it was a bad idea to send your kids to Mars in this situation as you lay it out. I wanted to ask you, you make a distinction of difference between how it affects boys and girls. Obviously, our audience is a lot of young people, a lot of young men.
especially, but a lot of young people, a lot of people just starting families. So what did you notice about the difference between the breakdown and how this works between boys and girls in terms of that?
Yeah. So let me address this both to the young men and the young women who are listening, that is those who are in their 20s. Gen Z is turning 30 this year. So if you're in your 20s, you're Gen Z. And I also especially want to address everybody who has a son or a daughter. And so the girl's story and the boy's story are different. I didn't know this when I started writing the book.
I thought the story was going to be social media is really bad for kids' mental health. And it turns out that the connections between social media and depression and anxiety for girls is really strong. Girls who spend a lot of time on social media are two or three times more likely to be depressed or anxious. For boys, they're a little more likely, but not that much.
So it looked like social media is really particularly bad for girls. Why is it so bad for girls? If you want to trap a girl, if you're a company, you want to extract all the attention from a girl and sell her advertisements. How do you trap girls? You offer them bait. As you guys would know, how do you attract an animal? Well, a trap, you have to put bait that the animal finds attractive.
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Chapter 8: What practical steps can parents take to mitigate risks?
Zach, you've done quite a bit of work in apologetics in terms of looking at things that kind of point to our belief system. And one of those is the idea of martyrdom, which we talk a lot about sort of our founding fathers in the church and the fact they were martyred and persecuted. But It's not just an ancient thing, correct?
Yeah, I mean, for me, it's more than an apologetic. I think that we need to understand these stories now that are happening now. This is a real, this is the history of the church that continues into the future.
And what you're describing is a fantastic ministry called the Voice of the Martyrs. And Todd Nettleton, who is the Voice of the Martyrs radio host, has written a new book, and it's called When Faith is Forbidden, 40 Days on the Front Lines with Persecuted Christians.
And these are stories that Todd has written in 20 years of travel in these restricted nations, and he has met these courageous Christians and shows exactly how they continue to be martyred for their faith. They go to prison. There's amazing stories. There's one in there about an Iranian man, two different chapters dedicated to him and what he went through for the cause of the kingdom.
And it's very, very powerful, very encouraging. And so as you go in each step along his journey, you sort of reflect then on your own walk, which I find very powerful. The copy of the book is free, which you can't beat that when faith is forbidden. So here's what you do to request your free copy of When Faith is Forbidden. You call 844-463-4059. That's 844-463-4059.
Or visit vom.org slash unashamed. That's vom.org slash unashamed.
girls what you put in the trap is social information who said what about whom who's dating whom who's mad at whom and girls girls care more about social relationships they're more sensitive to it so the girls will go rushing onto instagram they're all talking about each other they're all talking to each other now they're trapped because any girl who says wait this is crazy this is terrible i want to be out playing that girl's now alone because everybody's on instagram
So the girls get trapped by social media, especially Instagram, but there's a few others. And then now they're not spending time with their friends as much. What girls need is a couple of close friends. If they have a few close friends to talk with, to gossip with, to comfort each other, they're probably gonna turn out fine.
But what social media does is says, how about you spend five hours a day on this platform interacting with hundreds of people so you don't have any time for your real friends and you're not going to see them much. You're not going to laugh with them much. You're just going to share emojis. So that's what it's doing to girls.
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