In March of last year, Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, published a book called “The Anxious Generation,” which caused, let’s call it, a stir.
I always found the conversation over this book to be a little annoying because it got at one of the difficulties we’re having in parenting and in society: a tendency to instrumentalize everything into social science. Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it’s bad.
This phenomenon is, to me, a collapse in our sense of what a good life is and what it means to flourish as a human being.
But a year later, two things have happened. One: Haidt’s book has never left the best-seller list. That is rare. It has struck a chord.
Two: Policy is moving in Haidt’s direction. We are seeing a genuine policy revolution, happening in places governed by both Republicans and Democrats, in how we treat children in this era of social media. And I feel a lot more confident, as a parent, that we’re going to figure this out by the time my kids are old enough for it to matter.
But then, of course, the truck of artificial intelligence is about to T-bone whatever consensus we come to socially — which, to be quite honest, scares the hell out of me. (...)
Ezra Klein: Jon Haidt, welcome to the show.
Jonathan Haidt: Ezra, it’s great to be back with you.
I want to begin with the big question: What is childhood for?
Childhood is evolution’s answer to: How do you have a big-brained cultural creature?
You have to play a lot. You have to practice all sorts of things — all sorts of maneuvers and social skills — in order to tell your brain how to wire up to have the adult form.
If you focus on brain development, especially for a big-brained cultural species like ours, there’s a plastic period where stuff comes in and shapes who you are. And once you’ve got that, you’re ready to convert to the adult form — be reproductive, have a baby.
But if you don’t have play in childhood, you’re not going to reach adulthood properly.
You had one statistic in the book that I think I’ve actually read before, but every time I read it, it shocks me anew, maybe now because I have a 5-year-old who just turned 6: At 5 years old, the human brain is 90 percent of its adult size, and it has more neurons than it will when you’re an adult.
That’s right. We’re used to thinking of bodily growth as just: Time equals bigger. But the brain is this amazing thing that has all these neurons, which have the potential to connect in all kinds of ways. And as neuroscientists say, neurons that fire together wire together.
So if you repeatedly climb trees or do archery, systems will form in your brain that make you really good at that. Whereas if you repeatedly swipe and tap, swipe and tap, and just respond to emotional stimuli, your brain is going to wire to do that.
I guess you’re an older millennial. How did you grow up?
I am among the eldest of millennials.
The millennial elders. Tell me: At what age could you go out on your bicycle with your friends and go around the neighborhood?
I don’t remember exactly, but I lived on a cul-de-sac in a suburb, and I do remember I spent a lot of time as part of a roaming pack of kids who lived on my street. We would be playing kickball on somebody’s garage door. The other thing I remember about it that I feel like I see less of now is that it was highly age diverse.
Exactly. So this is what human childhood has always been. There are periods, like the Industrial Revolution, where maybe kids didn’t have a childhood. But Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist who co-founded Let Grow with me, has some writing on hunter-gatherers. And hunter-gatherers raise their kids in that way. There’s no thought that the mother has to be supervising the 4-, 5-, 6-, 7-, 9-year-olds. They’re all off playing with the other kids.
And there are 9- and 10-year-olds there. So they learn to look out for each other. The older kids learn to care for the younger kids. And remember, the younger kids are trying to wire up their brain to: What is a functional member of this society? And the best role models for them are not kids their age — it’s kids a few years older.
In America, in the West, we’ve got these factory kinds of schools where we put all the 8-year-olds together and then all the 9-year-olds together. But the healthiest is what you just said.
So my point is: Everyone before the millennials had this childhood. Millennials are the transitional generation. So you were on the elder side — you got it. Even though the rates are microscopic in this country, and even though crime was plummeting in this country in the ’90s — you can see it in the charts — that’s the decade when we really pulled our kids in.
We thought: They’ll get abducted. We can’t let them go in a different aisle of a supermarket. Or a man with a white van — all this crazy stuff comes in in the ’90s.
Something you mentioned about the ’90s in the book: I am familiar with this statistic that, despite working two jobs much more often than they did in the past, despite fathers being more involved, both parents spend much more time with their kids than they did before.
But I hadn’t realized that was not a steady increase over the decades. It sharply increased in the ’90s.
That’s right. There’s this weird graph that I have in the book that shows the number of hours that women spend parenting — what you would consider time with your kid doing something.
And the astonishing thing is that in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, women were not spending five hours a day parenting because the kids were raised the way that you just said.
It’s not the parent’s job to socialize the child all along. It’s the parent’s job to provide the right environment to provide certain kinds of moral frameworks.
But the real work of brain development doesn’t happen when you’re with your parents. Your parents are home base — they’re your attachment figure. When you feel securely attached, then you go off and explore. That’s what other mammals do. You go off progressively farther from your home base, and that’s where the learning happens.
It’s playing kickball. It’s trying to decide: What do we do today? Or: Oh, he broke the rules. No, he didn’t.
I want to get at a tension in there, at least with the culture of modern parenting. I think a lot of parents believe that the simplest way to ask whether you were a good parent this week is how much time you spent with your children.
Yes. Quality time.
Quality time. I feel that. And you’re saying here that’s not true?
It’s definitely not true. You want to give your kids a quality childhood. You want to be a quality parent. But that doesn’t mean that you have to spend a lot of quality time with your kid.
You need a warm, trusting, loving relationship. You need to provide structure and order and discipline. But this is what changed in the ’90s, and it’s in part because we stopped trusting our neighbors.
If you think of all the Robert Putnam stuff about “Bowling Alone” and the loss of social capital, we used to at least trust that if our kids were out playing without us, other adults would look out for them. If something really went wrong, they could knock on a door, and someone would help. But we begin losing that trust.
This is really bad for the kids because they don’t grow as much if their attachment figure is there. And it’s really bad for the adults — especially women. Mothers pick up a lot of this, even though they’re working outside the home.
So yes, modern parenting is not good for the kids — and certainly not good for the adults.
If you’re tracking dynamics here: In the ’90s, we’re getting more afraid of danger. You’re having this deterioration in social trust, this deterioration of the idea that the whole is community parenting your kid.
And it’s right about now that you begin having an explosion in screen possibilities. When I was younger, I remember Nickelodeon emerging. Before then, there wasn’t a TV channel that was programming for children at all times. There were kids’ shows, but not all the time. And obviously from there, you get an explosion of cable channels. And then, eventually, the internet, iPads, iPhones and video game consoles and all the rest of it. So talk about the handoff.
It’s the conversion over to this smartphone-based, tablet-based childhood. That’s when all the indicators of mental illness start rising, around 2012, 2013.
Now, I focused on the 2010 to 2015 period. But I think your question points out something I hadn’t really thought much about, which is cable TV.
I was born in 1963, so I grew up in the late ’60s and early ’70s on “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Gilligan’s Island.” And I showed those shows to my kids, and I said: This is so stupid. They were really simple plots. But that’s all we had.
Whereas you had cable, which was more engaging. (...)
When you look at old movies from the ’30s and ’40s, there was a really tight moral order. It would be dramatic whether a woman could go into a man’s apartment. So there was a really intense moral order around gender, around all sorts of things.
And that, of course, begins to loosen up in the ’60s. And there are many good things that happened because of that. But one of the concerns about modern secular society has been that you gradually lose this moral framework within which to raise children.
I’m really aware now of how we’re all influenced by our parents and just maybe a little bit by our grandparents. Culture has always come down vertically through generations. But that link is getting weakened.
So I think there is a progressive weakening of a sense of a moral order, which affects how you parent. And then we end up with an amoral focus on grades and, I guess, be nice and a few other things. But it’s a very thin moral gruel, I’d say.
by Ezra Klein, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ezra Klein podcast, NY Times
Image: Ezra Klein podcast, NY Times
