Thank you. Thank you very much and welcome. In a moment I'll just trot you through the format of what we're going to do this evening. I have a long biography of Jonathan in front of me. I'm not going to read it out because if you don't know who he is, you're probably at the wrong event. Suffice to say, a social psychologist, an author, the author of The Anxious Generation, with its deeply disturbing subhead: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. If you haven't read the book, the good news is it is fantastically written and in various points uplifting as well as depressing and deeply worrying as well.
We will talk, he and I, for about an hour about the book and about his ideas and what drove him to write the book, and then we'll take Q&A from you for about half an hour. We have a lot of people not here but here watching on the live stream, huge numbers as well. You are very welcome to put your questions. I will get them here on the iPad in front of me. When it comes to questions, I hope that the lighting will change so I'll be able to see who's putting their hands up. I'm fantastic at misgendering people. I apologize now when I say sir and it's a madam, and madam when it's a sir. It's not a political moment by any means. And just to say that signed copies of the very, very fine book will be available after the program. Sadly, Jonathan has to leave rather swiftly afterwards, but signed copies are available for sale. So that all said, let's kick off with a fairly simple one, and that is, I guess, about what drove you to write the book. What was the inspiration and what took you through it?
Sure. Let me just first start by saying this is the fourth time I've done an IQ² event. I'm very grateful to IQ² for putting me in conversation with such interesting people in these beautiful, beautiful venues. And I was here a year ago when the book came out, and it was clear so much was happening here in Britain with regard to this, with regard to getting a handle on this. So I said a year ago in various settings, we're going to fix this, and we're going to fix it first in Britain, because there is a lot happening here. And now I come back a year later, and so much is happening in schools going phone-free, legislation that is working its way through. So it's thrilling to be back. I love coming to London. I love coming to IQ². And now I will answer your question.
So what drove me to write the book was almost an accident. I had a contract to write a book on capitalism and morality back in 2014, but the world around me kept falling apart at universities and then more broadly in my country. So I kept writing things about that. I wrote a book called The Coddling of the American Mind about the overprotection, some strange things happening on campus, and it's because of that that I began looking at teen mental health. Why are our students in 2015 suddenly so anxious and depressed? And part of the story is the overprotection that we've done, not just in the US. You did the same here in Britain and in Canada. And you don't have the same crime we did, but we all overprotected our kids, stopped letting them out in the '90s. So I wrote that book, put it out, and then I was going to go back and finally write the book on capitalism.
But things started getting weirder and weirder in American politics, and I kept thinking about how is the digital transformation, how is social media changing everything? You know, if democracy is a conversation, what happens if the conversation moves on to Twitter? Boom. It just blows up. So once again, I put off the book on capitalism and I planned to write a book on what social media is doing to democracy. The title, it's a very depressing title: Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share. Okay. So I start writing that book, and chapter one, I think, oh, I know, chapter one is going to be called 'Canaries in the Coal Mine' because I have all this data on what's happening to teen mental health, and I can show that as soon as the kids move their social lives onto Instagram in particular, but social media around 2012 is the big transition year. So I'll just start off, you know, we'll start chapter one with that, and then I'll say what happens to democracy when it moves on.
So I wrote that first chapter, which became chapter one of this book. But once I had all the graphs in place, once I could see it's not just America and the UK, it's also Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, Europe — we don't have data from much of the world — but something happened in the early 2010s in multiple countries at the same time, hitting girls harder. And this was like, I can't just drop this in chapter one. Now on to a regularly scheduled program about the decay of democracy. So I said, 'Okay, I need another chapter on childhood.' Like, how does this mess up childhood? So I wrote that. That became chapter two. And then, well, I have to have a chapter on girls because the girl story is very different from the boy story. And then by the time I got to four chapters, I realized I have to split this book in two. And so I called my editor and my agent and said, 'Can we break it in two?' And they said, 'Yes.' And so that became The Anxious Generation. So it was sort of an accident that I ended up writing this book, but it turns out to be by far the most important thing I've ever done in my life.
At the heart of the book is a kind of seesaw, isn't it? And you mentioned some of this, that what happens in the '80s and the '90s is what you describe as the sort of overprotection of children and their withdrawal from public spaces, communal spaces, and communal play. And on the other hand, on the other side of this seesaw, the introduction of phones and social media. Can you talk first of all about that withdrawal from public spaces and why you think that is so important to child's development or lack of it?
Yes. So I often describe the book as a tragedy in two acts. In act one, we lose the play-based childhood in the 1990s, and in act two, we gain the phone-based childhood between 2010 and 2015. It's a very narrow time window. So those are the two tragedies. But after the book, after we turned in the manuscript and we kept writing and thinking about this and writing Substack posts, there was always this nagging question: Why did we lose the play-based childhood? Why did we stop letting kids out in the '90s? In the US, life got so much safer. I grew up in the '70s. There were crazy people everywhere. There were drunk drivers, and some of them were us. So, you know, life was quite dangerous in the '70s and '80s. And then in the '90s, the crime rate plummets. And sociologists don't know why. I think it's because we banned leaded gas 15 years earlier. But for whatever reason, crime plummets in the '90s, and that's exactly when we stop letting our kids out. Why?
And what we've come to see since writing the book is that it's the collapse of adult trust in each other and in institutions, because if you trust other adults and institutions, you send your kids out. When I was a kid, if we wiped out on our bicycle and got hurt, you could knock on anyone's door: 'Can you call my mom?' But what happened? You have a great sociologist who wrote a book called Paranoid Parenting, and he has a phrase: the collapse of adult solidarity. Once we no longer trust other adults, it's every parent for herself, and it falls especially on the mothers. So a good mother is one who's always careful. Anything could happen. If you let your kid out, she could be abducted. How can you let your kid walk to school? So it really falls especially on the mothers. And this weird thing happens in the '90s that even though by the '90s we're having much smaller families and women are working a lot more compared to 20 years earlier, yet women are spending a lot more time mothering and fathers are spending a lot more time parenting. So things really change in the '90s. But it goes back to the loss of trust and social capital that hit both of our countries.
What I guess we didn't realize before we lost it was how important getting children out of the house was — not just to get them from under our feet, but also for their development. Can you tell me about that?
Sure. So I'm a social psychologist, but really I just love using lots of perspectives to look at everything. And so I do evolutionary psychology, cultural psychology, positive psychology, a little sociology. I love taking multiple perspectives. And it's always helpful to take an evolutionary perspective as part of it. And so I make a big deal in chapter two about the fact that we're mammals, and mammals have this long, long childhood. You know, we nurse our babies from skin that secretes milk. I mean, it's this incredible evolutionary adaptation. So we have this long childhood. Why? Well, it allows you to have a much larger brain and a lot more learning, and we are the champions of that. We have by far the largest brain for body size. We have a very long childhood, and we have this attachment system. And the attachment system, it doesn't just keep kids safe. The whole idea of it is that the child stays close to the parent and they're safe, but then they go out to explore because that's where the learning happens, and they practice the skills they'll use for adulthood. They don't learn that much at home with the mother or father. It's out there that you practice, and then if something goes wrong, you come running back, you check in, you go back out. So that's the normal process that's been going on for literally tens of millions of years until the 1990s.
In the 1990s, we kind of decided it's too dangerous to do the out thing. How about we just always stay together? You're always under the care of an adult. And so kids don't have that interplay with the world. They don't have the unsupervised play, which always involves conflicts, rulemaking, rule adjudication. That's the most nutritious part of unsupervised play. My kids grew up in New York City. They went to New York City public schools. There was always someone on the playground blowing the whistle. If there's any conflict, the adults come in. You know, they had the 17 rules, no running on the playground. Now, New York City has small playgrounds, but just like crazy overregulation of children's play. And it blocks development.
