- Gen Z, social media, and why we're raising an anxious generation, this week on "Firing Line."

- Five hours a day is what American teenagers spend just on social media.

I just can't believe that we've done this to our kids.

- [Margaret] Young people in the US and around the world have grappled with a surge in mental health challenges over the past 15 years.

- As soon as kids ditched their friends in the real world and had 500 friends online, they didn't get happier.

They got starved for social connection, depressed.

And the natural result is to think about suicide.

- [Margaret] Social psychologist, bestselling author, and NYU professor Jonathan Haidt is out with a new book, "The Anxious Generation," that sets out to explain why.

Haidt posits that the rise of the smartphone and social media, alongside shifting norms for parenting, have led to a dangerous rewiring of young people's brains.

- This is about the worst thing you can imagine to give kids at the beginning of puberty, - [Margaret] But given the ubiquity of smartphones, is there a way out?

- Everyone sees there's a problem.

I just have to give them hope that, if we act together at the same time, we can actually change things.

- [Margaret] What does bestselling author and professor Jonathan Haidt say now?

- [Narrator] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, and by the following.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. - Jonathan Haidt, welcome to "Firing Line."

- Margaret, what a pleasure.

- We've known each other for several years, and I have followed your work for many years.

You are out with a brand-new book, "The Anxious Generation: "How the Great Rewiring of Childhood "is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness."

What is the great rewiring?

- The great rewiring refers to a five-year period, an extraordinary five-year period, where the nature of life for adolescents changed radically, more than it ever has.

In 2010, adolescents had flip phones.

They had no, most did not have high-speed internet.

They had, did not have unlimited data plans.

They did not have Instagram.

They did not have front facing cameras.

Over the next five years, by 2015, most American teens have a smartphone with a front-facing camera, high-speed internet.

They have an Instagram account or other social media account, Snapchat, a bunch of other ones.

And now in 2015, it's possible to spend almost every waking hour online, and many do.

And so my argument in the book is that all of a sudden, boom, in the blink of an eye, childhood became about sitting down and looking at a screen hour after hour, year after year.

And that, I believe, is the major reason why rates of mental illness go skyrocketing around 2012, 2013.

- In your book and in your talks, you zero in on three specific dates: 2007, when the iPhone is introduced; 2010, when the first front-facing camera is introduced to the iPhone; and 2012, when Facebook acquires Instagram.

- Mhm, that's right.

- The internet had been around for more than a decade beforehand, and people were using it.

So, why is it that these developments were so significant?

- Yeah, I was born in 1963.

I remember the first day someone showed me a web browser.

And you know, it was like God came to earth and said, "Do you want unlimited knowledge?

"Here you go."

It was incredible.

And all of us adults, we thought, "Wow, look what it's doing for the world.

"Look what it's doing for democracy.

"It's gonna knock down dictators."

We were all very optimistic about the World Wide Web.

In 2009, Twitter invents the Retweet button, Facebook copies it with the Share button.

Facebook puts on the Like button, everybody copies it.

And so before then, social media was called Social Networking Systems, SNS.

You connect to people.

After then, it's called a social media platform.

You stand on it to perform at others, and you're desperately fighting for attention.

You're trying to be noted, you're trying to go viral.

So, the millennials were basically through puberty by the time this great rewiring happens.

That's why they're okay, I believe.

The definition of Gen Z is that they went through puberty on super viral social media, on a smartphone in their pocket that was giving them notifications and calling them away from whatever they were doing, calling them away from people, calling them away from their friends.

You can see them sitting in a lunchroom next to each other, each on their phone.

That is not a way that a human being can grow up.

And that all happened between 2010 and 2015.

- Why didn't we see this danger coming?

- So there's a couple of reasons.

A big one is that, back then, most of us were still techno-optimists.

But what we didn't realize is that, by 2012 or so, the technology was not something that taught the kids anything.

They don't learn how to program, they don't learn anything about computers.

They are, in a sense, the product.

They are just being sucked along on a conveyor belt.

Their attention, it's almost as though the companies are able to drill down into their brain and extract their attention, and they extract vast, vast quantities of attention from every child.

Five hours a day, the latest Gallup survey, five hours a day is what American teenagers spend just on social media, especially TikTok and YouTube.

And that's American childhood now.

- Why are young people's brains so vulnerable?

- Because human childhood is this amazing, unusual childhood in which we have these very large brains.

And the brain, you know, it has a certain form when you're a child, but then in puberty it kind of rewires and kind of locks down into a configuration, beginning from the back to the front.

The prefrontal cortex just behind the forehead is the last part of the brain to myelinate, to sort of lock down into an adult configuration.

And it's guided by local inputs.

And so all over the world, traditionally, adults would help children make the transition from child to adult, and they would bring them into local knowledge, and they would get them ready to make this role change.

We don't do that.

Instead, what we do is hand you this device.

So this is about the worst thing you can imagine to give kids at the beginning of puberty.

And the great rewiring radically altered the inputs to children, taking away most of what they used to do, most of their older inputs, including other people, and swapping in screens.

And, again, we didn't know that that was gonna be terrible in 2012.

We didn't know it.

Now we do.

- There's another trend that you write about in the book, which is the shift away from child-based play.

- Yes.

- What are the consequences of the shift?

- So we're mammals, all mammals play, and for human children, the best kind of play is a group, mixed stage group out in the neighborhood.

They make their own games, they make their own rules, they enforce their own rules.

That's how you basically mature for a democratic society.

But beginning in the 1980s, we began to get very afraid.

We begin to get the milk cartons with the missing child.

Even though true abduction is very rare, Americans get scared.

They begin to clamp down on free play and childhood independence, and they think that they're being good parents by always keeping them supervised; that's the safest thing to do.

Well, it is safe in the sense that external harm won't come to them.

But as rates of childhood death have gone down and down and down from all causes, they're now going up and up and up from suicide.

We're blocking our children's development.

So this is the other half of the story, the very sudden and complete replacement of a play-based childhood with the phone-based childhood.

And that's why all of a sudden in 2012, Gen Z gets anxious and depressed.

- So you write about this paradox that while at the same time parents were becoming wildly overprotective of children in the real world, they were simultaneously allowing their children to do anything online.

- That's right.

So first, yes, sometimes people accuse me of being hypocritical.

Here I am saying we need to give our kids more independence, but I'm saying that we should supervise them more and keep them away from the internet.

Well, yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying, that we have overprotected our children in the real world where they need a lot of varied experience.

We've underprotected them online where there are an extraordinary variety of harms and damages waiting that we didn't understand.

We thought maybe this was just, you know, "They're connecting with their friends online.

"They have 500 friends.

"Isn't that great to have 500 friends?"

It turns out it's not.

It turns out what adolescents need is one or two or three, a small group of very close friends, a small gang.

That is ideal.

That's a lot of fun.

And that is developmentally incredibly healthy.

So as soon as kids ditched their friends in the real world and had 500 friends online or on a multiplayer video game, they didn't get happier and better connected, they got starved for social connection, depressed.

And the natural result is to think about suicide.

It's now a normal part of being an American child, especially an American girl.

About 30% say that they sometimes or often think about suicide.

They have suicidal thoughts.

- You talk about this concept of anti-fragility, that children are naturally anti-fragile.

How do these concepts play in?

- So there are many things in the world that are fragile, like a glass.

And so we don't let toddlers play with a glass because they'll drop it and will break, and nothing good comes from that.

And there are a few things in the world that get better when you drop them, and you have to drop them periodically.

You have to challenge them.

They have to face obstacles.

So muscle and bone and the immune system are all anti-fragile.

If you take it easy on your muscles, take it easy on your bones, they get weak and brittle.

It's a principle of human psychology that we grow by being toughened, and so that's why kids seek out risk.

And the possibility of getting hurt is actually part of what makes it beneficial, because then they learn how to face risk and how to not get hurt.

And in the 90s when we said, "No more risk.

"You're not gonna do anything "that could possibly get you hurt," we blocked that process, and our kids began getting more fragile.

- Why is the risk and thrill-seeking and adventure in the digital space not the same?

- Let's look at boys playing video games.

So I didn't let my son play "Fortnite" in 6th grade, but we did let him in 8th grade when it was COVID, it's a good thing we did.

He was having a lot of fun.

I could hear him laughing.

It was the only way he could connect with other boys.

And I'd go in and I'd watch.

They're jumping outta planes, they're riding bombs down to earth, they're throwing hatchets at each other, they're shooting, there's teamwork.

It all looks like great fun for a boy.

But my guess is their heart's never raced the way it would in the real world.

If you're actually jumping out of a plane, your heart is going like crazy, you're incredibly scared.

And then when you do it, you're thrilled.

But in a video game, you know, that's just a routine.

You do it 100 times a day.

So I don't think there's any growth from that.

Boys aren't learning any skills that transfer to the real world.

Also, the most nutritious part of boys' play is the setting of the rules and the enforcing of them when there's a rule break.

And this is, you see boys come together, they yell, they work it out, but they reach a compromise.

With a video game, that can't happen.

There are no rule violations.

The company takes care of all the rulemaking, all the rule enforcement.

So they don't mature the way that they would from actual face-to-face play.

- When it comes to the mental health crisis, it's impacting girls far more than it's impacting boys, though it is impacting both.

Why has the spread of smartphones and social media led to the surge in depression, self-harm, and suicide amongst girls so dramatically?

- So the story for boys and girls is different.

Whenever you dig into the correlations, what you find is that the correlation between social media use and depression and anxiety is always higher for girls.

And it reaches levels that are pretty substantial.

Whereas you don't find that for boys.

For boys, the correlations are very low.

So at first, I thought the story was just gonna be about girls, that the book was gonna be about, what has social media done to girls?

It took me longer to figure out what happened for boys, but it's a very interesting and very sad story.

Boys, it turns out, have been withdrawing from the real world since the 70s and 80s.

Boys are less likely to graduate from high school, less likely to go to college, less likely to get master's degrees, PhDs, become doctors, lawyers.

Boys are dropping out of society.

And a big part of that, we believe, is that the virtual world has gotten so enticing.

Boys, adolescent boys, care a lot about sex.

They're really motivated to get sex, which is hard, very hard to do.

You have to learn all kinds of skills, and it's very scarce to get sex.

"Oh, but just go online.

"You have the most amazing, vivid pornography available to you."

And you know, boys love adventure.

They love teamwork, they love sports, they love competing.

You know, but it's hard to make a team.

And there's all kinds of challenges there.

"Oh, just turn on your Xbox, "and you've got a team versus team situation."

So we made life easier and easier for boys, which is a terrible thing to do to them.

So they don't exert themselves.

Boys are not doing the things that would turn them into men.

- What does the data tell us about exactly what happens to girls?

What happens that is deleterious to their development, that then causes depression?

- So there are many different pathways of harm for girls.

The loss of in-person times is the biggest single thing.

But then there's also the constant social comparison.

If you have an 11 or 12-year-old girl on Instagram several hours a day, on TikTok several hours a day, most of what she sees is happy girls living beautiful lives.

Is this gonna be good for her?

Hell no.

So kids shouldn't be, you know... Of course, social comparison is part of being young, but let it be within your small group of friends.

Don't let it be among a billion people, many of whom are gorgeous and fake.

- You write also there's a recent growth in diagnosis of gender dysphoria that could also be related in part to social media trends.

How do you define gender dysphoria for people who are unfamiliar with the term?

- Oh, well, gender dysphoria refers to people who are uncomfortable with their gender because they feel, they have a deep internal sense, that they're really the sex other than the biological sex that they were born in.

It's a real thing.

It's great that society is open to people changing, but it has to be done very carefully.

- Tell me more.

- So there's very important older research by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, where they looked at, they had gigantic health data sets, the Framingham Heart Study.

And they were able to see that, you know, if one person takes up smoking, then their friends are more likely to take up smoking.

But actually, so are their friends' friends, and even friends' friends' friends.

So the things we do spread out through social network.

We affect each other.

Now, it turns out, when you're looking at emotions, girls and women, in this study, women, when a woman is depressed, that spreads out to her network.

Whereas when a man is depressed, it doesn't.

Women talk about their feelings.

They're more connected in that way.

Girls are connecting on social media.

Where it just turns out in many communities, the more anxious and depressed you are, the more you get support.

The more extreme your symptoms, the more you get likes and followers.

You know, of course it's good to de-stigmatize mental illness.

We don't want people to be ashamed.

But boy, is it a terrible idea to valorize it, to tell young people, you know what, "The more you have this, the more popular you'll be, "the more support you'll get."

And so you get this explosion, not just of anxiety is in part, I think spread, socio-genetically it's called, from social causes, not from internal causes.

But we get it for dissociative identity disorder, and it seems to be the case for gender dysphoria as well.

- And you think that the data demonstrates that it is above and beyond just the phenomenon of coming out and an increased awareness?

- Yes, because it happens in clusters of girls.

It happens in clusters of girls who had no previous gender dysphoria when they were young.

So it's very different from the kinds of gender dysphoria cases that we've known about for decades.

I mean, it is a real thing.

But what happened, especially when girls got YouTube and Instagram early, but then especially TikTok, girls, just, you know, girls get sucked into these vortices and they take on each other's purported mental illnesses.

- So you write quote, "Most parents don't want their children "to have a phone-based childhood, "but somehow the world has reconfigured itself "so that any parent who resists "is condemning their children to social isolation."

What is a parent to do with a child who will be isolated if they're not participating online with their friend?

- That's right.

So what you're describing is a collective action problem.

It's a trap that we're all in.

It's a constant struggle over these devices that were created to grab our children's attention and never let go.

And so if one person tries to do it, it's very hard.

But if we do it in, even in small groups, it becomes much, much easier.

So don't, but what I'd say to parents whose kids are already on it, don't give up hope, don't be despairing.

It's hard to solve this on your own.

Reach out to the parents of your kids' friends.

And I guarantee you, most of them feel as you do.

And if you haven't got given your kids a smartphone yet, if you're, if you've got kids in first, second, third grade as, as you do, talk to the parents of your kids' friends and say, "We're gonna follow that recommendation "to have no smartphone till high school.

"Once we let her out, "once she's walking around outside on her own, "you know, I'd like her to have a phone.

"It'll be a flip phone.

"She can call me, she can text me.

"Would you do the same?

"If we all do it together, "then our kids won't feel like they're left out."

- We have seen evidence, like in the Facebook Files, that social media is intentionally designed to be addictive to teens.

In January, there were senate hearings with social media executives about the threats that their products pose to young users, to families.

And Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, apologized directly-- - Sort of.

- To the families.

That's my question.

Have you seen evidence that these companies are actually making changes?

- No, I have not.

Over and over again, we know from whistleblowers, people have raised concerns within Meta, and they have not been acted on.

I've spoken at Meta.

I know a bunch of people there.

They're good people.

They don't want to harm children.

But I think the leadership at Meta has always been firm that they will not do anything that will reduce the user base or slow growth.

What they will not do, what must be done, is age limit enforcement.

It is completely insane.

And here, we should get to Congress, 'cause while I can blame the platforms for not enforcing it, it's Congress who basically set them up so that as long as they don't know, they're fine.

So we need Congress to fix the problem that they created in the 90s, and then we can get age limits.

- You suggest that it's not just raising the age limit, it's enforcing the age limit.

What are the major reforms that could happen at a federal level that would be most urgent to protecting children?

- By far, the most urgent would be for Congress to enforce, for Congress to require the companies to enforce their age limits.

The situation we have now is as if Congress said, "The drinking age shall be 18, "but, you know what, it's the parents' job.

"It's the parents' duty to keep the kids out of bars "and casinos and brothels.

"How can we expect people to check IDs at the entrance?"

Same thing here.

Congress mandated in 1998, with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, at what age can the kid agree to give away data?

And Representative Ed Markey, now Senator Markey, came up with a bill, and he said 16.

He wasn't sure, but he thought 16 was a reasonable compromise.

Lobbyists pushed it down to 13 and gutted enforcement.

So the way the law is written, companies like Meta and Snap, as long as they don't know that the child is under 13, then they're not responsible.

So the companies are motivated to not know.

Congress set us up for this.

Not only did they say there'll be no age enforcement, but they said, "Oh, and by the way, "companies can do whatever they want to kids, "and they can't be sued.

"They can show them whatever they want, can't be sued."

And that's Section 230, the Communications Decency Act.

- That's what I was gonna ask you, is there, what other, what is the reform to Section 230 that would be relevant in protecting children?

- So, obviously you couldn't have an internet, you couldn't have social media if they could be sued for defamation every time someone defamed somebody.

So the original intent was reasonable.

Unfortunately, the way it's been, the way it's developed and the way the courts have interpreted it, is to say that the companies can't be sued basically for anything, even for the design features that they put into hook children.

And this, to me, is an outrage, that Congress set us up for this.

The only other industry that gets blanket protection from responsibility is the gun lobby.

So it's insane, it's corrupt.

I didn't used to think that Section 230 had to be repealed, because it's so important.

I now think, after seeing those Senate hearings, I now think it has to be repealed and replaced with something just targeted at the original intent of Section 230, which is a valid concern.

'Cause the situation as we have it now, it's, you know, the digital world is just shredding our kids.

There is no age-gating, nobody's responsible, and parents whose kids are hounded to death or, you know, buy drugs online, on Snapchat, whatever it is, they have no recourse.

- The House overwhelmingly passed legislation this month to ban TikTok or to, really, to force a sale of the Chinese-zoned app.

The bill's future is less certain in the Senate, but President Biden said he'd support it if it makes it to his desk.

What impact would banning TikTok have on an anxious generation?

- Oh my God, it would be so beneficial.

The short-form video is the most addictive.

It's not stories.

It gets them into a zone, a kind of narcotic zone.

TikTok is uniquely awful because of the national security risk.

The fact that the Chinese Communist Party has access to extraordinary data to microtarget Americans, they know exactly, you know, they know exactly what each American wants.

So TikTok is the ultimate collective action problem that exacts a horrible cost from our children and is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, or at least the Communist Party has access to it.

Now, it's, this is an untenable situation.

- The debate over internet regulation is not a new one.

In fact, William Frank Buckley, Jr., on the original "Firing Line," hosted a debate right after Congress passed the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

- Oh, great, tell me about it.

What did he say?

- So I'm gonna have you take a look at this exchange between none other than Arianna Huffington and Susan Estrich-- - Wow, a blast from the past.

- About the topic of internet regulation.

Take a look.

- Okay.

- I'm calling for a partnership.

I'm calling for a partnership of government, of the industry and of parents.

And the truth, Susan, is that, when you have a 12-year-old, as I have a 12-year-old goddaughter who is an expert in using the internet, she can get anywhere she wants.

And unless you're prepared to have somebody there with her the whole time to stop her from doing that, she will, no matter what ground rules you place as a mother, it is completely irresponsible for you to say that it's parents' rights and parents can decide what their children watch.

Even the word "Watch" shows that you have no idea what third wave technology can make available to children.

- Arianna, our kids can get in trouble if they choose to, if they choose to, if they want to, whether it's in front of a computer screen or at a friend's house, or, you know, at the corner buying drugs.

- Wow.

- 28 years later, who's right?

Is it Arianna Huffington, who says we need a whole-of-society approach, or is it Susan Estrich, who says kids will find a way around the safeguards?

- Yeah, so Arianna is 100% right.

We didn't know what the internet was gonna become back then.

Estrich's argument is logical.

But, again, back then, we thought the internet was amazing, and "Yeah, there's some bad neighborhoods, "and yeah, the kids need to learn, "but, you know, it's similar to the real world."

What we're finding is that it's not similar to the real world.

Now I think it's clear that if there are no restrictions on where kids can go on the internet, other than the parents looking over their shoulder watching them all the time, then children are going to be on PornHub, they are gonna be able to buy drugs, they are gonna be able to do all sorts of things that will lead to incredible levels of suffering, death, sextortion, as we saw in those Senate hearings.

So, no, I think now it's clear Huffington was exactly right.

- You say this is a collective action problem, that we need a whole-of-society approach to work together to make a positive difference.

And you identify four foundational reforms: no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.

- Yes.

- Achieving this is, really would require a mass mobilization of our civic culture and of parents.

You have a goal to achieve this in two years.

- Mhm, yep.

- How do you plan to do this?

- Yeah, now, I don't say we're gonna be done in two years.

What I'm saying is that my goal is that, by the end of 2025, our assumptions, our norms about childhood will be different, and it will come to be common sense that you just don't give a smartphone to a kid before high school.

Let's just only give our kids flip phones before high school.

- You are building a movement.

- Yes, yes, we are.

We're calling it "Free the Anxious Generation."

Because what I'm finding is I don't actually have to change people's minds.

I don't have to persuade people that there's a problem.

Everyone sees there's a problem.

I just have to give them hope that, if we act together at the same time, we can actually change things, and we can.

- Jonathan Haidt, for your contribution, for your work, thank you for joining me on "Firing Line."

- Margaret, thanks so much for giving me the time to really lay out the story and talk about it with you.

- [Narrator] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, and by the following.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat tune) (gentle music) - [Announcer] You're watching PBS.