So that's the deep dive we want to do today. Today's deep question is, are smartphones bad for kids? And if so, how do we know that? That's what I want to get into. So I have some of my slides here from my talk. So, you know, if you're listening, you might want to consider watching.

This is episode 246. You can find it at youtube.com/calnewportmedia or at thedeeplife.com if you don't like YouTube. Episode 246. I'll explain what I'm saying. You don't have to watch it, but I'm just saying, if you want to see some of these graphs I'm referencing, watching the video version of this might be suggested.

So as I looked into this question of when did researchers become concerned about kids and phones and why, the whole story seemed to break up into three acts. That's why I called this in my talk, a saga in three acts. The first act we can start, I'm gonna call it roughly 2012 to 2017.

That's the first act of the story. I call it an alarm is sounded. So this is the period where people first began to notice warning signs. This was actually the period in which the potential issues with smartphones and young people was first brought to my attention. So I remember as a young professor at Georgetown, this would have been in 2012, I was giving a talk somewhere on campus and I was walking to the talk with someone who was involved with the student mental health center at Dartmouth, it's called, or not Dartmouth, Georgetown.

It's called CAPS and if you're watching on the screen, you see a picture of the counseling center. And I remember smartphones and tech in general was not in my portfolio in 2012 as a writer. So we were just having conversation and this person mentioned to me, she said, "There's been a big change recently.

"The number of students that we are now treating "with mental health counseling here at Georgetown "has jumped up." And not only has it jumped up, but it has disproportionately jumped up to be anxiety or anxiety related disorders. So we're seeing a lot more overall students and a much bigger proportion of the students we see are here for anxiety.

I thought that was interesting. She said, "Oh, what's going on?" She didn't skip a beat. She said, "Smartphones." And that caught me off guard at the time. Smartphones, what do you mean? She said, "Oh, it's really clear to me anecdotally "that the first group of students to arrive on campus "having had smartphones during their adolescence "were showing up way more anxious "than we'd ever seen before." We can now look back retrospectively and see that this was not an isolated anecdote happening at just one university.

I have a chart on the screen here for those who are watching. This is from the American College Health Association annual survey. It's showing percentage of US undergraduates diagnosed with a mental illness. And what do we see? At 2012 forward, a very sharp uptick in anxiety and depression, which are of course quite interlinked by anxiety.

So the dark vertical line, if you're watching this online, is 2012. So what this one person at Georgetown was noticing was actually a nationwide trend, that something changed around 2012. Keep that date in mind. It's gonna come up again. I think the issue got brought to the public's attention writ large.

So it expanded from individual educators and mental health professionals being worried to the culture writ large being worried about maybe smartphones are causing an issue. I think Jean Twenge really helped make this a national issue in her 2017 cover article for The Atlantic that was titled, "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" Now the thing about Twenge is that her expertise is in studying differences between demographic generations.

That's what she does. How is this generation different than that generation? She's very good at teasing out what's real and what's not. And as she said in this article, and I have it on the screen as well, she'd been doing this for 25 years. And she says, "Typically the characteristics "that come to define a generation appear gradually "and along a continuum.

"But then I began studying Gen Z. "Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts "in teen behaviors and emotional states. "The gentle slopes of the line graphs "became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, "and many of the distinctive characteristics "of the millennial generation began to disappear. "In all of my analyses of generational data, "some reaching back to the 1930s, "I had never seen anything like it." So this demographer was thrown by how different Gen Z was, and not just Gen Z in general, but Gen Z starting in 2012.

She began to make the connection that I think this has to do with smartphones. Here's another, I think, culture-defining moment. This was also 2017. A big article in the New York Times Magazine written by Benoit-Denisette Luz. The article is titled, "Why are more American teenagers than ever "suffering from severe anxiety?" And it's important because Benoit goes into this article, it's clear from the tone of the article that he is not very hospitable to the technology hypothesis.

He was seeing this as a standard moral panic-type argument, the same thing we always say, rock and roll music is gonna corrupt the teens' brains, video games are gonna corrupt teens' brains, and he came into it with that frame. But there's a key point in this article where he talks to actual anxious teenagers.

And I'm quoting him here. "To my surprise, anxious teenagers tended to agree." They didn't say, "Hey, old man, leave our phones alone." They said, "Yeah, these things are a problem." So by 2017, we've gone from spot reports of, wait a second, something is changing here. These young people, there's something different going on.

And by 2017, we were openly debating, is it phones causing these issues? All right, this brings us to the second act, the data wars. This takes place roughly between 2017 and 2020. This is when researchers begin to seriously try to gather or study the data to get a stronger, more data-driven conclusion on this question of is smartphones somehow involved in these increases in anxiety that we're seeing?

This was a period of both proposals and critiques, which is good. This is how new sciences emerge, especially in social psychology, which is, by definition, a complicated field that rarely has super strong signals. There was proposals and critiques or responses to the critiques, and so that's why I call this the data wars.

This was the period in which almost any New York Times article on this issue would say with big caveats, there is some data, but it's contested. It's 'cause this data war period is when the science was actually happening. Let me talk about two troubling streams of data that came out of this period, the critiques and the responses to the critiques.

So the first bit of troubling evidence that emerged as we got more serious about this question was simply the timing, that 2012. That was a really, it's circumstantial evidence, but a really strong pointer towards smartphones at play, and here's why. There's lots of different reasons you could come up for, come up with for why young people, between 2012 and 2020, were becoming more anxious.

The world felt like an anxious place. We had the financial crisis, we had the financial insecurity that that caused, we had the extreme partisanship and unrest that followed in the Trump era, and so it did seem like a period of lots that were going on. The problem is none of this fit 2012 in particular.

The financial crisis was 2006 to 2009. The financial insecurity was felt strongly by the millennial generation, we were entering the job force then, not Gen Z. By the time Gen Z was entering the job force, that was largely in the rear view mirror. There was a lot of political partisanship and unrest that arose later in the 2010s, but that was after 2012.

2012 was the Barack Obama, Mitt Romney election. There was not an increase in partisanship there as compared to, let's say, even just a 2008 election in which we had Sarah Palin involved in that movement, compared to the Contract for America, Newt Gingrich in the Clinton era, that type of partisanship.

There wasn't something new that happened in 2012 that wasn't also there in 2009, wasn't also there in 1999. The populist revolutions of Trump, et cetera, that didn't really pick up speed until '15 or '16, so that explanation doesn't quite fit it. Also, as we got more data, we saw these anxiety rises among young people happening in many, many countries, so we could not pin this on particular American dynamics.

So what did fit this? Well, here's Gene, oh, let me just show, let me show a couple of graphs here. These are just a couple other graphs that are showing 2012 being a big deal. So we see female, especially with female reports of sadness and hopelessness between 2011 and 2021, we see a significant increase from 36% to 57%.

I'm also showing US teens with major depression, especially with girls, we see 145% increase as we move from 2012 to 2020. So these are just examples of lots of things were pivoting on 2012. Here's Gene Twenge. She said, okay, what does match 2012? It was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50%.

That's what's changed then. After that point, you were much more likely as an adolescent to have a smartphone. Before that point, it was much less likely. None of these other potentially anxiety-producing trends match that date nearly as well. All right, so this was the first bit of troubling evidence to emerge, right?

It's circumstantial. And there's critiques. I would say one of the big critiques, and I'm showing this on the screen in example now, was this idea that, no, no, no, we agree with you that there's not world events or cultural events that match the 2012 outside of smartphones, but the thing that really changed in 2012 was not smartphones, this critique says.

It was that this new generation was coming of age and they're more comfortable talking about mental health. They're like, "That's," so this was a big critique in the early part of the data wars. You see rises in depression and anxiety because more people are willing to say, "I'm anxious," or, "I have depression." This quote from the New York Times in 2018 is sort of typical of this period.

Here's Richard Friedman writing the Times. He says, "Look, there are a few surveys "reporting increased anxiety in adolescents, "but they're self-reported measures "from kids or their parents, "and they're overestimating rates of discords "because they're detecting mild symptoms, "not clinically significant syndromes. "This was claimed a lot during the early period "of the data wars." So as good science does, it said, "Well, how can we look into this counter hypothesis?" And the right way to look into this counter hypothesis is to say, "Let's find stronger proxies for anxiety "that have nothing to do with self-reporting." And in particular, I put two charts on the screen here, and these are both tragic, but they also give us deep insight.

The first chart is US teens admitted to hospitals for non-fatal self-harm, ages 10 to 14. This gets around the self-reporting process. These are people who tried to harm themselves due to anxiety, and these are from hospital records. Look at girls. 188% increase between 2010 to 2020, with the increase getting particularly stark around 2012.

Even more tragically, we look to the right, we see suicides among US teens. 2012 jumps up, 134% increase among girls starting around that 2012 point. So it was a reasonable hypothesis that, well, maybe around 2012, we just got more comfortable talking about anxiety, and we were just picking up mild self-reported symptoms.

Unfortunately, the hospital records show these indications rose at the exact same rate. So there really was an increase here. Kids are, and starting around this period, having worse mental health. The second strand of troubling evidence was the correlational studies. So social psychologists often will work with these giant data sets, these giant data sets where researchers will go out and talk to tens of thousands of people and ask them about everything.

And then after the fact, you can come back as a researcher and look for all sorts of connections within this data. If you wanna know if people who like the color red as their favorite color are more likely to have had back surgery in the last six months, you can just go and look at this data and find those things and look for correlations, et cetera.

So they did this. They said, "Let's start looking at this data. "We'll look at young people, "and we'll look at correlations "between these technologies and negative outcomes." And they began to find lots of strong connections. Here's just one of many, many graphs that were produced in this period. This particularly one looked at UK adolescents with clinically relevant depressive symptoms.

The X-axis is number of hours per weekday on social media. The Y-axis is percentage of teens who used that much social media that were diagnosed as depressed. And as you see, when you increase from no time on social media to five plus hours, you get a significant increase in percentage of teens that are depressed.

This is particularly high for girls, where you go from a 11% depression rate for girls who don't use social media to almost a 40% depression rate for girls who use four to five hours of social media. All right, so we saw a lot of studies of this type. This generated critiques.

So other researchers came along and said, "Yeah, you're finding these correlations, "but it's easy to find correlations between things. "The effect sizes are small." And perhaps the most famous of these papers was published in 2019 by Przybylski and Amy Orbin. This is known by researchers in the field colloquially as the Potato Study.

They went in and looked at one of these big datasets and said, and I'll read them here, the connection is negative but teeny, indicating a level of harmfulness so close to zero that it is roughly the same size as they find for the association of mental health with eating potatoes or wearing eyeglasses.

So they said, "Look, we looked and found "these, yeah, you use more digital technology, "you're less happy, but the effect is the same we found "for eating potatoes on your happiness "or wearing eyeglasses on your happiness." Their point being, these are so small that they're basically arbitrary. You're finding artifacts in the data.

This article, the potato article was cited a lot. Even until very recently, you would see major newspapers like the New York Times often saying, because this was very influential, studies show a potential connection between these technologies and negative mental health, but the effects are small. This is the type of paper that caused that.

So as good science does, we looked at this. Now here's a response to the potato paper co-authored by Gene Twenge and John Haidt. It was published in Nature, Human Behavior, and it was called Underestimating Digital Media Harm. In this article, Haidt looked at Przybylski and Orban and said, "Well, wait a second, wait a second," and I'm gonna read his words here.

"The first issue to note is that the potatoes comparison "was what they reported for all digital media use, "not for social media use specifically. "Digital media includes all screen-based activities, "including watching TV or Netflix videos with a sibling, "which are not harmful activities. "In their own published report, "when you zoom in on social media only, "the relationship is between two and six times larger "than for digital media.

"Also crucial is that Orban and Przybylski "lumped together all teens, boys and girls, "while many studies have found that the correlations "with harm are larger for girls." So Haidt is saying it's almost like you're intentionally trying to reduce the negative impact. You're only showing the connection between all possible digital media use and negative social harms, even though your dataset you were using had social media broken out, and all the discussion has been about social media.

And Haidt and Twenge said, "So we looked at your same dataset "and just looked at social media, "and you had a much, much bigger response, "a response that, especially if you break out girls, "was six times worse than eating potatoes, "a very significant response." So I say here on the slide, this is John Haidt being polite, because when you really read this critique, you're wondering how is there any other explanation for the potato paper other than a set of researchers who are saying, "We want to report "there's not really a difference here." It's otherwise hard to explain why they would choose what they chose and not talk about these other aspects to their paper if they were really just trying to understand is there harm here.

All right, so let's get to the third act of this story, this research story on smartphones and kids. I call this third act, "A Consensus Begins to Emerge." This covers the period of 2020 to 2023. So until today. Essentially what has happened in the past two or three years is the critiques have largely fallen away, and a consensus is emerging in the field that yes, especially for girls, there is a strong negative connection between these technologies and mental health.

The reason why this consensus emerges, first of all, the critiques as we talked about before, the main critiques during the data war were pretty thoroughly debunked. After the potato paper, it's not like there was a lot of more stronger papers that said, really made a strong case that there wasn't a strong connection there.

And the timing argument really seems to have been one for the people who are worried about smartphones. So that happened, but then what we began to get, and this is how a lot of emerging literatures begin to coalesce around a consensus, we began to get multiple other independent sources of investigation that pointed towards the same conclusion.

When you have multiple different types of threads that all begin to weave around the same answer, that's often what happens in complex literatures that points it towards a conclusion. And that really began to happen in the last couple of years. So one of the threads was natural experiments. Here's a cool paper written by an economist, Elaine Gu.

And she looked at, in Canada, I believe, the arrival of high-speed wireless internet in a given province from town to town. When high-speed wireless internet arrived, heavy social media use became possible. Then you could have a smartphone and you could use it on the app. And so she looked at, if we have nearby towns, demographically and culturally very similar, but we end up in this natural experiment situation where one town gets wireless high-speed internet before the other, can we compare what's happening with teenage mental health in these two towns and see if there's a change?

Yes, there was. Girl, teen girls, severe mental health diagnoses increased by 90% when the wireless internet arrived. So it was a nice, natural experiment. We also had some direct randomized control trials experiments. Here's a good paper by Melissa Hunt et al. They just took 143 undergraduates and randomly assigned them to either stop using social media or keep using it as normal.

So it's a randomized prospective control trial. What did they find? The group that was told to limit their social media use showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression as compared to the control groups. So that's interesting. I think maybe one of the strongest forces in helping a consensus come together was self-reporting.

Just talking to teenagers themselves. So when Francis Hagan leaked all of those data from Meta a couple years ago, what was known as the Facebook files, that's what the Wall Street Journal called it, one of the big interesting findings in these leaked documents from Meta was the fact that they had done survey on teens and had found, and I'm quoting here, "Teens blame Instagram for increases "in the rate of anxiety and depression.

"This reaction was unprompted "and consistent across all groups." So the teenagers themselves are saying, yeah, this is why we're more anxious and depressed. This app, these phones. Other data began to find the same thing. I put on the slide, put up here a slide from research out of Australia.

These are Australian teens. By far, the number one reason they give for why they think youth mental health is getting worse is social media. I think this was the final smoking gun is the teens themselves are saying, this is hurting me. This is causing a problem. It is really hard to be a potato study style skeptic in the face of the teens themselves saying, yes, this is causing me harm.

We're not teasing out subtle epidemiological effects, a slight increase in the background cancer rate for the towns that were using a different type of pipe in their water, or the individuals themselves have no way of detecting this change. This is not that. This is a huge, loud, self-observable macro signal.

This thing is making me uncomfortable. That ultimately is the big difference between this and past moral panics around youths and technologies. When my grandparents, let's say they were upset that my mom was listening to the Beatles in the late 1960s, if they went to my mom and said, stop listening to those Beatles, it's going to warp your mind, my mom would have said, get out of here.

What she would not have said is, I agree, these records are making me and my friends incredibly anxious. I wish I didn't have to listen to them. That would have been a very different situation. So this is why I think this analogy to past concerns about youth technology really begins to fall apart.

Data aside, the teens tell you, yeah, I know this is making me anxious. I don't like that I have to be on it. So why does it do this? So let's look in particular at social media first, and then we'll broaden out the smartphones. Why do researchers think social media is causing these negative impacts on mental health?

There's a few reasons to come up. One is loneliness. Now readers of my book, "Digital Minimalism," this will sound familiar because I talk about this in "Digital Minimalism." It's paradoxical at first, but using these social technologies more will actually lead you to feel less social. And what's going on here is young people replace in-person interaction with texting and social media back and forth.

But this purely linguistic communication, just sending texts back and forth to each other or commenting on each other's post is not interpreted by the social circuits of our brain as being all that social. There's no voice modulation. There's no body language. You're not in the presence of another person in the same room.

So you're in your room as a 14-year-old all day on text messages, and you tell yourself, wow, I'm so social because all I've been doing is talking to people. But as far as your brain is concerned, you're incredibly lonely because you haven't seen anyone all day. Social psychologists call this social snacking.

Lightweight, easy, digital socialization. We do that instead of having the real meal and we end up more lonely. We see this in the data. I have two charts up on the screen now. One shows loneliness among teenagers. And you see again, 2012, whoosh, goes right up. The other chart shows daily average time spent with friends starting in 2012 for the ages 15 to 24 goes straight down.

More time on the phone meant less time interacting in person, meant loneliness went up. There's an interesting observation, by the way, that John Haidt makes. This got underway around 2012, and it was so pronounced by the time the pandemic came along that change wasn't even that big. And we can see this on this chart.

I mean, certainly we continue to have a steep, we have a steep fall in 2020, but we were having a steep fall from 2018 to '19 as well. So he pointed this out in a newsletter article he wrote earlier this spring. These effects of isolation were already so pronounced because of smartphones among American teens that the difference of adding isolation through lockdowns actually didn't even make that big of a difference.

We were already on that trajectory. Another issue here is performativity, especially with social media, especially with girls. Let me read something here from Jean Twenge. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them.

Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. So you're constantly worried about what other people are doing and how people are perceiving you. Combine that with a teenage brain. Come on, no way that's gonna be positive.

The final thing I wanna mention here is the amplification of harmful behaviors. Online communities, for all their good, also have the dark side of it allows, especially vulnerable teenagers who are trying to find themselves and are open to suggestions and are feeling vulnerable and full of all these different chemicals.

It's very easy to get caught in online communities that will then amplify harmful behaviors that will directly reduce your mental health, and in a lot of cases, also your physical health. We're beginning to see more lawsuits along these lines. I have a headline up here right now about a family suing Meta 'cause they blame Instagram for encouraging their daughter's eating disorder and self-harm.

There's all sorts of cases like this. So this is another source of this connection between reduced mental health and social media use is there's a lot of traps on there. You end up in a community that is cheering on something that in the end is gonna make you feel much worse.

All right. Social media is not the whole story. A lot of this data is looking at social media. Some of it's looking at smartphones in general. I wanna just briefly mention that even if you aren't using social media on a smartphone, if you're a teenager, there's other harms we know are there.

Impeded thinking skills is critical. I talked about this in a somewhat recent episode of the podcast. It's talking about Marianne Wolfe's work on the development of young minds when they spend more time on screens. The short version of this is deep critical thinking skills require training. Training requires things like reading analog books that you struggle with.

You can take time to pause and make sense of what you just read before moving on. Training requires self-reflection, the ability to hold thoughts in your working memories and work on it, having that time alone and that familiarity with it. Smartphones get in the way of that training because it teaches your brain to instead move very quick.

Look like a L-shaped skim for things that are gonna give you in text a quick hit of dopamine or excitement. Flee boredom. If you have any moments of downtime, have something right on your screen. I was watching, Jesse, I was watching this on the flight. It's not my flight to San Francisco, it was my flight to Utah a few weeks ago.

I mean, like a 20 year old guy sitting a row up in the aisle. I was watching him use TikTok. I mean, it was crazy. It's like, 'cause he had his phone out. They'll just be like some weird video. He was watching on average six seconds and then he'd swipe and another video would come up.

Then he'd swipe and another video would come up. That's just all he was doing. - The whole time? - The whole time. Well, I don't know, the whole time for a while. - Yeah. - And I was watching over his shoulder. Like, man, glad I'm reading my Alan Lightman book about transcendentalism and the human brain made me feel good.

But you know, the point is, it's so rewarding in the moment that you don't do the activities that would otherwise give you critical thinking skills and so you're just not good at thinking deeply and that's a huge harm. Sleep deprivation is a big deal for teenagers and these smartphones.

Look, you give a 13 year old boy a smartphone, they're gonna YouTube until four in the morning. When I gave this talk, someone in the audience said, there was a lot of middle schoolers there and one of the middle schoolers was talking about how all of her friends who have these smartphones are on them all night.

And then they come in the class, they're completely tired. They can't function. They're doing really poorly on their tests, but they can't help themselves because if you have this, it's hard to turn it off. So teenagers are having a huge sleep deprivation issue. It's YouTube, video games and social media scrolling.

Solitude deprivation is another issue. I talked about this in digital minimalism as well. Our mind is not meant to constantly be processing information generated by another mind. We need time alone with our own thoughts to recharge and to make sense of our world. Smartphones can eliminate that entirely from your existence because any moment where before you might've just been alone with your own thoughts, you can now pull out the thing.

Over time that makes us anxious. It also harms self-development at an age where we need it. 14, you're trying to figure yourself out. You're 15, you're trying to figure yourself out. You need time alone with your own thoughts. Your brain needs it. And finally, we have this issue that smartphones in general minimize quality leisure.

So the thing you're doing on the phone gets in the way of the things you should be doing. It gets in way of the things that's gonna be more meaningful or quality or sustainable or connect you more to your friends or your community or build skills or give you confidence.

It's easier just to look at the phone and to watch Twitch. And so it gets in the way of something that could be better. This is often missed when we think about smartphones and teens will hone in on the exact activity and say, well, my son isn't on social media.

He's not doing performativity. He doesn't have to worry about online bullying. The thing he's looking at is really harmless. In fact, maybe there's like some science content in it. The issue there is not that what he's looking at is a problem, is that because he's looking at it all day, he's not doing the things to be good.

So we've got harms with unrestricted smartphone access for young people that go beyond just the specific stuff that social media can do. All right, so where is this all headed? At the national scale, it's an interesting question. Is there gonna be some sort of legislative shift that's gonna come out of this data now that the consensus has emerged?

It's clear that this consensus has been understood and intaked by legislative bodies and policy makers. I think it's now accepted that unrestricted smartphone use, especially for prepubescent kids, especially for prepubescent girls is very dangerous. I think this has all been accepted now. So where's this gonna head? I'm not quite sure, but here's one thing I would keep an eye on.

Here's the Surgeon General earlier this year. He said, "Wait until your kids are 16 "to let them use social media." This conclusion, I think, is something that a lot of researchers are coming to. I talked to John Haidt about this, and he agreed with that as well. If you've made it through puberty, the development as an individual, as well as the social development and everything that happens during that period, if you've made it through all of that before you then get unrestricted access to the internet and social media, you're in a much better position to succeed because you know who you are, who your friends are, what you're interested in, what you're about.

You've done all that work. And now if you get exposed to this, it's gonna have a much less negative impact than if you get it at 12 or you get it at 13. So if you can wait till 16, this seems to be an emerging consensus. This might possibly be made into legislation.

One of the relevant things to keep an eye on here is the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPA. This act implicitly already encodes 13 as the minimum age that you can sign up for a social media service. Now, of course, these social media services didn't exist in 1998.

The actual wording here is 13 is the minimum age at which you can consent to give up your data privacy, which of course you do when you sign up for an attention economy platform like social media. The original version of this act had 16 in there. Tech lobbyists in DC got that pushed down to 13.

There's calls now to amend it back to 16. So that could happen. There's other legislative avenues that are being pursued. It's tricky, but this is one to keep an eye on. What would happen if that law was changed? It's not that this would make it really hard for individual young people to get access to social media, right?

It's not super enforceable, but what it would give is a metaphorical chair to parents that are trying to tame this metaphorical lion. When you have your 13-year-old again and again saying, "All my friends have this. "I want this. "Why can't I have it? "All my friends have this. "I want it.

"Why can't I have it?" For the parent to be able to say, "Because it's illegal," is a very strong defense. And you're not putting these parents in a situation of having to be social psychology researchers and understand this literature. They can say, "It's against the law. "I'm not gonna break the law.

"You'll just have to learn not to have those friends, "I guess." I mean, it would be helpful. So something like that may happen. Now, what do I conclude from all of this? I mean, to me, I would say that 16 age limit is a smart one. I think this is good.

I think the data is pointing towards your safest bet, especially if we're talking about young girls, is 16 is the age below which you do not want to give a child unrestricted access to the internet. If you give a young person a smartphone, you are giving them unrestricted access to the internet.

You can do some parental controls, they'll get around them. They're better at it than you. This is the thing about kids, right? If we ever went to war, cyber war with China, and we needed in a sort of ender's game style, brilliant kids that like help save us, here's how we would win the cyber hacking war.

Just tell a bunch of 13 year olds that if you bring down China's whatever infrastructure, you will get unlimited access to Mr. Beast videos. Because these kids become Dennis Nidry style hackers when it comes to trying to get access to these things. The same kids that can't even motivate themselves to take the garbage out.

If they think they can access YouTube on their school's Chromebook, they're in there with soldering irons. You know, all right, I'm bypassing the main CPU logic here and I'm hacking the main security grid by getting right to the op code lookup table in the ROM. They become expert computer hackers if there's a video game they can access or Snapchat lays just beyond those protections.

So you give a smartphone to a kid, you're giving them unrestricted internet access. You give them unrestricted internet access, they can use social media. Even the definition of social media is getting a little bit hazy now. A lot of the actual performative socialization has shifted from social media onto group text messages.

So it gets a little bit, it gets a little bit hazy. And we have all these other harms that surround the smartphones, the sleep deprivation, the solitude deprivation. So it really seems like 16 is the safe time to say, okay, you can just have a phone and I'm not gonna care too much what you're doing anymore.

Does that mean that's the only age where you can have any type of device like this? Well, again, I actually asked John Heid about this as well. And his thought was, when you functionally need a phone, okay, because I don't know, I'm commuting to school on the city buses like a lot of kids do at my kid's school.

And you need an ability to maybe text your parents if there's an emergency or call your parents if the bus routes cancel or something like that. When they functionally need a phone, you can get them a phone that doesn't have internet. So when you get to an age where I'm independent enough that having communication ability with me is gonna enable this independence, then get them some sort of communication device, but one without internet.

16 is when you can give them a smartphone that has everything that seems to be the emerging consensus. I think five to 10 years from now, that will just be accepted. If you have a child right now and your oldest child is two, you're not gonna have to think about this when they become 12, the cultural have shifted.

You won't be giving an iPhone to your 12 year old, that will just be accepted. We're right now in this intermediate transition period where parents still have to make these decisions on their own. As far as I can tell, that's my best read of the literature. When it becomes, they're independent enough to functionally communication, give them a phone like a light phone, which looks great and can text well, but has no internet.

Wait till 16 to give them unrestricted access so you can't have your own iPad or your own smartphone till you're 16. They will yell and gnash their teeth, but come on. Everything in the history of the world that teenagers have wanted that their parents don't want, the teenagers have said, all my friends are doing it, you have to give it to me.

This is not necessarily different. So I think that's where we're heading. Obviously there's lots of caveats here. Some kids have a much easier experience with these technologies than others. Parents clearly know their own kids. The one thing I'll also point out is I've heard before when I've been on the road or talked about my book is often sort of socially elite people have the storyline that less socially elite or less economically elite people need these technologies and it's somehow classist to talk about this, that somehow having a 14 year old not use a smartphone is like a yoga thing.

It's like a luxury thing. And I can say, having worked with lots of different groups from lots of different backgrounds on this issue, they would say nonsense to that. Everyone is worried about the kids with this. Kids are worried about this in all sorts of different backgrounds, all sorts of different economic classes.

So I don't think this is a yoga issue. It's just like a teen smoking issue. No teen should smoke. So we said you should wait till you're 18 to do it. I think it's closer to that than it is to, it would be nice to do meditation if you have the time for it.

So we'll see. But Jesse, that seems to be where the data is right now. And it looks like the policy makers are trying to get behind that. So we're getting close to a point where parents aren't gonna have to figure this all out on their own anymore. There'll be some more of these consensuses.

But I think that like you're 12, here's your smartphone, give us another five years. That's gonna be considered something, ooh, wow, don't do that. - So will they still go on social media on their desktop? - Well, yeah, but desktops are controlled. Here's the family laptop, you use it in the kitchen, I can see what you're doing.

Much different situation. I mean, there's a lot of great stuff to do on the internet, but doing it through the family laptop, you know, like we know a kid who's really into sports. And so their family got them a subscription to the athletic. Like, this is great. Like if I was really into sports and I was 13, to be able to, one of the activities I was able to do was like to go on the family computer and get super in-depth sports coverage.

That's great. It's feeding an interest that the kid really has. You know, another kid who's really into chess and they can do, you know, these chess games online. All that's great. But if all that's done through the family computer, it's like watching TV. You can't watch TV all the time, right?

The parents say, no TV now, the TV is in the living room, they're in charge of it. But you're gonna watch a fair amount of TV and it's nice. And like, that's what the internet should be for a 13 year old. There's all these cool things on here that you can do, just like there's cool TV shows you could watch, but you can do them during times when it's appropriate on a machine where we kind of see what's going on.

- Yep. And even if they have school issued laptops that like some of the private schools around here, there's probably some controls on that as well. - Yeah, they all get around them. - Yeah. - They all get around them. Yeah, the school, it's funny. We had a six, one of the neighbors who's always over, one of the neighbors is I think seven, maybe eight, hacked into YouTube on the Chromebook.

I'm telling you, these kids that'll like stare at you for an hour if you ask them to do a fraction, if they could get access to YouTube, they are building a quantum processor to break the encryption based on whatever. But like good news, I have a 128 qubit quantum processor I packed together in the playground and we're able to break the public key encryption that was keeping us out of Mark Rober videos.

They become hackers. Anyways, all right. So that's some thoughts. That's where I think the research lies right now. I think that's where we're roughly heading. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)