'The Anxious Generation' analyzes the harmful effects of growing up online

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4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

While screens have become a totally normalized part of kids' development today, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the negative effects might outweigh the benefits. His new book, The Anxious Generation, details the correlation between an increasingly online social life and rising mental health concerns amongst young people. In today's episode, NPR's Steve Inskeep asks Haidt about how boys and girls experience socialization on the Internet, and how some of these behaviors might be curbed to get kids playing offline.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. As a new parent, the question about
0:07.6	screen time has been a concern, at least among the other parents of young kids that I hang out with.
0:13.8	And there's always this question of, listen, I can limit my own kid screen time. But what about
0:19.3	when the kid grows up a bit and is able to say, like, Dad, all the other kids have phones? Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written a book trying to convince all parents to hold off on giving kids phones for as long as possible, and it's got some data to back himself up. The book is called The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is
0:41.1	causing an epidemic of mental illness.
0:43.6	And he talked to NPR Steve Inskeep about why this is a problem that needs a collective
0:48.4	action solution from all of us.
0:51.4	That's after the break.
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1:02.3	On our new show, Sources and Methods.
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1:12.0	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:17.2	Before we get into the interview, I just want to set up really quick that Jonathan Haight isn't
1:21.4	just pro-baning phones for kids, and that's that.
1:24.8	He advocates for replacing phones with something that should be second
1:29.6	nature for kids. It's playtime. My daughter really wanted a puppy. We have a puppy now,
1:35.3	and she wants to play all the time. That's what puppies want to do. That's what young mammals want to do.
1:40.4	Predator pray games. I chase you, you chase me, hide and seek, tag, all those sorts of things.
1:46.1	We develop social skills, we overcome our fears, but we've taken most of it away. We don't trust our kids to be outside. We began basically bringing them indoors.
1:56.4	And we said, oh, you know what? You could be watching videos. You could be doing, you know, a math tutoring thing. And whatever problem screens have, the absence of play is a major, major obstacle to human
	...

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