School Stresses Kids More Than Social Media Does - Eli Stark Elster

Eli discusses the rush to ban social media for under-16s and examines stronger evidence that school structures and heavy homework drive youth distress. Eli Stark Elster makes the case for autonomy, free play, and targeted fixes over blanket bans and digital IDs.

• correlation versus causation in mental health research
• consistent seasonal suicide patterns tied to school terms
• shortcomings of screen‑time metrics and “true‑ish” narratives
• Haidt’s claims, wins on free play, and policy contradictions
• autonomy as a developmental need across human societies
• moral panics, helicopter norms, and shrinking kid freedom
• targeted regulation of algorithms over platform bans
• 2012 shifts: Common Core, homework spikes, and stress
• reforms: less homework, more recess, later start times
• alternatives like Sudbury‑style learner‑led environments
• why evidence, not vibes, should guide child policy

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Transcript

Opening And Ban Announcement

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Free to Speak, the New Zealand Free Speech Union podcast. If you enjoy the show, subscribe for uncensored conversations and free speech news from New Zealand and beyond.

Why We Oppose Under-16 Social Media Bans

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Welcome to Free to Speak. I am your host, Dane Giro. We have been told by our government that the under 16 social media ban is on its way. Now, the Free Speech Union has um uh opposes this. We oppose it for for many different reasons. Um the fact that they say that it's gonna happen makes it a little tougher for us, but um uh we are gonna be looking at, you know, is this a backdoor for e-regulators? Is this gonna mean digital IDs and all these things? Like all other censorship issues, or most censorship issues, uh uh it's one of those uh it's one of those policies where I don't believe the pol the the evidence is really there. It doesn't feel like there's any evidence to really back this up. There's some, but it's ropey. And uh, you know, uh this has sent me to Substack and all these other places. And I found a fantastic piece by our guest today, um, Eli Stark Alston, who is an evolutionary anthropologist, or have I got that wrong?

Guest Intro And Research Focus

SPEAKER_01 1:20

I'm a PhD candidate in evolutionary anthropology at UC Davis. Uh so that's a university in California, in Northern California. My research focuses on the evolution of uh human societies and human life history. So trying to understand why human societies tend to be structured the way they are and why the uh human life course uh tends to be structured the way it is. So I take an evolutionary perspective on that, trying to understand the different forces that push our societies and our life histories in the particular directions that they've taken. So this piece you wrote is called Called School is probably much worse for kids than social media.

True Versus True‑Ish Evidence

SPEAKER_02 2:03

Okay, well, see, that's it. I mean, straight away the title, I'm hooked. So what is your thesis? Like just take us through all of that. Sure.

Correlation Is Not Causation

SPEAKER_01 2:11

So maybe to back up a little bit, one phenomenon I'm quite interested in, and that I try to write about a lot, quite a bit on my Substack, is the difference between beliefs that are true as in backed up by evidence, and therefore that we should be acting upon versus beliefs that are true-ish. So by true-ish, I mean beliefs that feel true, they seem like they should be true, um regardless of whether the evidence actually backs them up. In the case of these social media bands, this is a policy that is being instituted very rapidly around the world. And you'll find in policy debates around this the way people talk about it, they talk as if the evidence is entirely settled that social media is clearly and technically all available data bad for the mental health of children. And if that is true, if the evidence does substantiate that, then there actually might be good motivation for instituting these bans, even if they are pretty censorious and coercive. If it is that bad for kids, then perhaps we we should do it. What you find when you look at the data, though, is that much of the data that is cited is correlational. So it'll say something like if you look at reported depression symptoms among 16-year-olds, let's say, and reported frequency of social media use, that those things tend to correlate together. And that is sort of treated as a strong evidence base. But as a you know scientist, as someone who's you know, hopefully, I think well versed in what good data looks like, I want to know if there's any kind of causal link, if you can see that a change in one thing, the frequency of social media use or something with that effect, then leads to increased uh depression symptoms, suicidal radiation.

SPEAKER_02 3:51

Aaron Powell Well, can I just jump in here? Like um reading your blog took me to another um uh doctor, I believe, uh, or professor, um, Peter Gray. Peter Gray. Peter Gray. Um, and his stuff is really good too. Yeah. And uh he was talking about in one of his pieces, he was talking about some research that sort of suggested what it wasn't really clear that whether people, you know, who who may be suicidal or depressed were becoming depressed from posting or they were depressed, so started posting.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:26

So that's a it's very different. And if we can't establish that, it it we shouldn't really be making policy based on that.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Certainly, yeah. And so the point I try to make in the in the piece is twofold. One is that the that kind of evidence, the causal evidence, is just not there for the link between social media and mental health, but that it is there for other domains of uh social life and of childhood that just don't get talked about very much anymore. So I use as a contrast with social media, the evidence linking school and particularly uh amount of homework with very severe mental health issues. There's a huge amount of evidence substantiating that link. One I talk about pretty in-depth is the uh variations in suicide rates that you see at different points in the year. So during the summers, suicide rates among uh adolescents and kids tend to plummet. People are uh kids are generally not killing themselves quite as often. And as soon as school starts back up, the rates rocket back up. And this pattern has been quite consistent for three decades across multiple locations. And this is the kind of evidence that you just don't see for social media, and yet these bands are talked about as if it's a given that the data backs it up, even though there are plenty of other issues that are probably much more important with stronger evidence bases that just don't get discussed in the same way.

Haidt’s Claims And Contradictions

SPEAKER_02 5:43

But I guess going after school would just be just too big. It's too established, it's too much. I mean, it would be such a taboo for any government to just turn around and say it's gonna do something like that. To be as radical as you propose. We'll get to to what you propose, because I think that's really interesting too. Um, but so let's start with Jonathan Haidt. Now, uh he wouldn't be the only person um who is claiming that that you know this is an ill that needs to be addressed. He's very I mean, he's been down here, he's done lots of interviews all around the world um promoting this. Uh like I say, there would be others like him, but he's become the storyteller, hasn't he? He's become the the the storyteller who's who's really been promoting this. So let's talk a bit about him and and and why you think uh he's he's not correct. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Well, I should say there are things I disagree with him about strongly, as evidenced by this piece, but other things I think he's quite right about. So he's become best known for a book called The Anxious Generation. And in that book, he lays out the case that the advent of social media in particular, so not digital technologies in particular in general, social media specifically, led to an unprecedented mental health crisis among young people. And so the book argues for this point. And in the end of the book, he then provides these four principles that he thinks need to be instituted uh to recover the uh mental health and the and the well-being of children. Several of those are, or a couple of those are about digital technologies, and I can come back to that. Uh, some points he makes that I agree with, though, are about the uh degree of freedom and autonomy that kids did. So for this, I'm speaking more to the US. I don't know much about the context in New Zealand. In the United States, you see that the amount of freedom afforded to children, meaning freedom to go places by themselves, to play with their friends freely, time outside of school, this sort of thing, has just been gradually declining in the last 50 years. And there's strong evidence that this has had really bad uh consequences on their mental health. And so he advocates for the institution of more free play, more uh autonomy for kids to roam around neighborhoods.

SPEAKER_02 8:03

That that's happened to me. I agree with all of them. Yeah, that this definitely happened here. I mean, we've hit uh uh I think you even had it in this it's amazing how the stuff just travels around the world, doesn't it? Because there was a bit of a pedophile panic in the late 80s, early 90s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and you guys had that too, didn't you?

SPEAKER_01 8:21

Oh yeah, yeah. Um, I think administration it became a pretty big phenomenon.

SPEAKER_02 8:26

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, uh these things sort of I mean, this social media ban feels like another one of those, actually. I mean, I lived through, you know, we got to ban heavy metal.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:38

You know, it's had different sort of masks over the years of sort of hysteria.

Autonomy, Free Play, And Risk

SPEAKER_01 8:43

And so, uh, yeah, I and I think Hait's overall argument is that kids should be free to do whatever they want. They should not be uh coerced into doing things that are not amenable to their development. And I completely agree with that in general. Where I disagree with him is he sees, I think, digital technology in general, but specifically social media, as being fundamentally opposed to the freedom and autonomy of kids. He calls phones experience blockers, for example, with the idea being that once kids are using these technologies, these platforms, their freedom is automatically reduced because they're being coerced by these big corporations. My perspective, though, is that if we're trying to reinstitute freedom and autonomy in the lives of young people, it doesn't make sense to restrict at this point the main way that they communicate and engage with the world. It's shutting off the main outlet through which they uh engage with the uh social and informational world around uh them now. So to follow the bans that he's advocated for actually I think goes against his main thesis that we should be letting kids exert more freedom. This is a ban, uh a series of policies that restricts their freedom uh further. And so I think there's a bit of uh contradiction in his argument, even putting aside the data. Um it's not clear to me how preventing young people from accessing the main form of communication and information acquisition, how that makes them more free. I don't quite follow the logic there.

SPEAKER_02 10:10

No, it it feels it's a very unnuanced view of social media, which is gonna have good and it's gonna have bad. Like I mean you wouldn't remember this, but we had pen pals when we were like very young. We'd write to to you know children in career, and you know, three months later they'd write something back. Uh we're talking to people all around the world now. Young people are making, you know, connections all around the world. Um and you know, I mean, if someone is depressed, I mean this becomes their circle, doesn't it? That's their circle. So that there's there's a concern that we're depriving them o of friendship circles and all sorts of things like that. That and it he doesn't factor that in. Has it has he addressed that? Does he try to address that?

Hunter‑Gatherer Lessons On Risk

SPEAKER_01 11:00

It's not something he talks about much, and I'll say not to any fault of his own. The research that he's collating is not necessarily research that he's done himself, just as the research I'm collating is not research I've done myself. These are other people drawing conclusions from. But one problem with most of the data that's available is much of it is focused on uh very general metrics. So something like screen time, how much time is a kid spending on a screen? Or a little more specifically, social media frequency, how often are they going on Instagram, let's say. And at first you can say, oh, well, that's a pretty good measure if we're able to look at how screen time affects this, then that tells us something. But screen time can mean almost anything, right? There's an infinite number of things you can do on a phone. Um, if I'm reading a Wikipedia article about the evolution of zebras or watching, I don't know, you know, snuff videos from the Middle East or something. Like those are both screen time. They're presumably they have very different effects on my mental health. And the same goes for a social media platform. There are terrible things in Instagram. There are also really productive things in Instagram. And to treat social media frequency or screen time as this just single block uh doesn't really work, it's really difficult to get more nuanced than that in research. But the reality is the research we have is mainly about these really general variables. It would be like if all our uh nutritional data was about the effect of food on the human body, right? There are lots of different kinds of the effect of books. You could be reading uh, I don't know, the decline and fall of the Empire of Rome, or you could be reading Minecraft. Those are both books, but presumably it's being differently valuable for some.

SPEAKER_02 12:41

Hey, um, this might sound like a bit of a detour, but um I I think a lot about and I've read studies on this too, about the the resilience that children need to develop over time. I think this is something Jordan Peterson talks about a lot as well. Like you need to expose uh people to to uh to things that may make them anxious, uh you know, that's what that used to be practice, and it's not so much practice anymore. Like that's that's the the critique against the safe space, really. Um I I'm working on a piece from my substack about Labyrinth, the uh the David Bowie um uh Jim Henson thing. And there's a scene in that film, and it's a kid's film, where this young Jennifer Connolly is being seduced by David Bowie, an adult, right? And then it ends with her saying, You don't have control over me, or something like that, and it all, you know, he sort of, you know, are you taking your mind back there to the film? Have you seen that? I think it's upset.

SPEAKER_01 13:39

I love David Bowie, so oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:42

Well, the film, it's a big film, it's a big film for young people. I mean, that's that's a borderline scene, you know, when you watch it again. Uh, but it's a rehearsal. That's the way I look at it. Like horror films, these things are almost rehearsals, they are a way to vicariously experience something without experiencing it and make moral and ethical decisions about these things. I I think there tends to be a bit of that. There was an interesting study in Australia that I found too about uh done with some uh Indigenous Australians, Aboriginal kids, about experiencing racism and how m many of them said that they like standing up for themselves in encounters. Like they take a lot from that, they take a lot of strength from that. That's not a narrative we get sold a lot either. But for these kids, they really were saying in the research that I'm may I'm becoming stronger by facing it. And do you think there is an an aspect of social media that whole concept of rehearsal that I'm sort of getting at? Do you think there could be a bit of that in there, even if there was small harms or some harms? Certainly.

Helicopter Parenting And Moral Panics

SPEAKER_01 14:53

Yeah. I think it's useful sometimes to look at how children are raised in other contexts, and particularly in societies that are similar to the kinds that we would have evolved to live in. So when we think about the uh the evolution of human beings, something that anthropologists will do is look at hunter-gatherer groups. So groups that are pretty much subsisting purely off of hunting game, gathering fruit, tubers, other things from the environment, maybe a little bit of cultivation. Um, and we look at these groups and how they live because that is the kind of social context that all humans uh evolved to live in originally. These environments that we're in now are rather different, and to some degree, they're probably mismatched for the way that we actually evolved to live. So we can look at how kids are raised in these hunter-gatherer groups. And what you find universally is one that their kids are afforded almost total freedom to do whatever they want throughout the day. They spend most of their time in uh small peer groups of mixed age, running around, forging, playing, doing whatever they want. But you also find that parents have a very, very different assessment of risk than parents do in most Western countries. Uh, there's a lot of great work on a group called the uh Bayaka that live in the Congo Basin that's been done by people like Guldani Salali um and Nishina Lu Levi, among others. And they've made this fantastic documentary that people can find um online. I think it's called Growing in the Forest. And in this documentary, you see how kids are being brought up. And one of the first shots is a one-year-old, maybe one and a half, holding a full machete, just kind of hitting it against the ground. And the rest of the documentary is these young kids, you know, as young as one or two, with machetes, fishing rods, going off with their friends, building fires, fishing all day by themselves, climbing trees, and so on. And I think in other contexts, parents are asked, you know, why do you let kids do these things? They're going to cut a finger off, they're going to fall out of a tree. And the response is often something to the effect of, well, you can't, you know, ever learn how to use a machete if you don't use a machete, right? So this exposure to these potentially risky behaviors, even though it may sometimes lead to harm, in general, you need to learn how to navigate the world around you, and the world is not always a safe place. And so being exposed to some of the things that you'll have to deal with as an adult, as a kid, is potentially quite important. If those kids in the Congo were not allowed to touch machetes until they were 15, they'd probably have a pretty hard time using machetes safely when they're adults. So I say all of this because I think there is potentially something we can learn from these contexts when we are so wary of kids being exposed to anything that seems even remotely dangerous or harmful, it's worth asking if we are uh promoting their short-term safety over their long-term ability to deal with dangerous things in the world. Because in these other contexts, it seems that uh people make very different trade-offs and are quite successful in raising their kids that way.

SPEAKER_02 17:46

Do you have any um theories or have you read any interesting theories about what drove us to be a bit more helicopter-y? Because I mean, I have I have my moments as a dad. And my my um not my younger son, but my second younger son, um, has pushed back and said, you know, you're doing it all for me. You know, come yeah, come on, dad, you know, just back up a bit. Um and and I'm doing that now, and he's off working and he's moved to another city and everything, so he's he got rid of me. But um uh I I did feel, yeah, I I did feel the urge. And I'm I'm a pretty sort of robust character who likes a bit of risk myself. So so where where has this culturally sort of come from, do you believe?

Legal Precedent And Creep Of Censorship

SPEAKER_01 18:36

Yeah, there are several factors. I think it's a complicated story. Um, at least in the US, I I can speak to that that development. Up until and kind of going off what Peter Gray said here, but until the you know 50s, 60s, kids actually did have quite a bit of freedom, and you hear these sort of um they sound cliche, but I think the real story is about kids off on their bikes, you know, going around until sunset with their friends, and that was the norm. There's a huge amount of autonomy afforded to children. Around the early 1970s, you see pretty quickly these big shifts in the amount of mobility that kids are afforded, the degree to which they're allowed to move out of neighborhoods by themselves, and this sort of thing. And there are maybe three factors that that sort of help to explain why that happened. One is the just changing physical landscape of the neighborhoods that kids were living in. Um, as the US became much more car dependent, kids were simply just farther away from their friends and living in places that now have cars going all over the place. So it actually is a little less safe to wander around. They're farther away from there are fewer open spaces, and so they just there's less freedom to exert because there's no free places to run around in anymore. So that's one thing. Uh you also have changing social norms, I think in part inspired, as you alluded to, to the kind of pedophile kidnapping panic that happened in the, I think maybe early 80s here, maybe a little bit earlier, where you know, one-off, terrible, but really one-off stories of someone getting uh kidnapped and killed became these huge um news stories and created a giant moral panic that then pushed people to keep their kids inside, protect them from dangers and this sort of thing. And so because there was so much fixation on these one-off stories, because they're so sensationalized, you had entire social norms that shifted because people were worried that the same thing understandably was going to happen to their kid. It's a you know understandable concern. But that's now led to a situation where people are afraid of a danger that fundamentally doesn't exist, this danger of a kid getting snatched up off the off the street and this sort of thing. Um in the US, I I think the consequence now has been that it's not so much that there are any legal restrictions that prevent kids from exerting their autonomy. There are some, but much of it is just a social construct. There's an interesting poll from this conducted by um The Argument, which is a a publication I'm a fan of, uh, asking parents uh if they would call child protective services if they saw two kids playing by themselves in the parking lot for three hours or more. And I think a third of parents said they would call child protective services on those kids. So, you know, that's not because there's any real danger posed by those kids being out by themselves. It's because we have very different social norms now, um, in part inspired by moral panics around pedophilia and kidnapping and this sort of thing. It's a complicated story. I think that the big takeaway, though, is that uh much of the system that's built up around our protection of children is social inform, not legal. What these social media bands do, though, I think is begin to kind of build out a legal edifice that supports these harmful social norms that we've developed. And so pushing back against these laws now, I think, is important, in part not just because they they're bad laws, but because they set a bit of a precedent for how we might be willing to hem in and coerce the freedom of our kids in the future, not just socially, but legally.

What Counts As Social Media

SPEAKER_02 22:00

Iran getting nukes of preventing kids from ever having autonomy again. You know what I mean? It's like it's entrenching something, isn't it? It really is. It's um the the the the regime of child safety will be harder to shift because laws like this uh don't really reverse, you know. That's the thing. Once and censorship is greedy, you know, like it's a hungry beast, you know. Once you feed it a little, it wants to go a little further. So if things don't work, the instinct is, oh, we didn't ban enough, we'll go a little further, you know. That tends to be what happens. Like I can see more um uh, you know, there'll be social media. And then I I think even Substack has been put on a couple of lists. Um maybe in Australia, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

Yeah, and that's part of the complex. I mean, something Jonathan Haidt will often say is that he's not against the internet, he's against social media. The problem is at this point, social media is the internet. The social media is how you know available information on the internet is uh digested and then you know given out to us. So if you ban people from social media platforms, that is in effect banning them from much of the internet, really. And then there's the further complexity of deciding well what counts as social media. And part of the issue there is we don't have a good sense of what specifically, if anything, is harmful about social media. Again, like Substack and X, let's say, uh could both be categorized as social media platforms. Presumably they have very different harms and dangers. But because we don't have a clear sense of what is actually dangerous on these platforms, they in some cases at least get lumped into the same umbrella. Um the lack of nuance around this term social media uh has led to, yeah, uh a fairly problematic push to just ban it all uh without thinking about the consequences.

Algorithms, Harms, And Targeted Fixes

SPEAKER_02 23:56

Yeah, yeah. I mean, uh a few weeks ago, Keir Starmer wanted to ban X and Grok, and he wanted to uh, you know, they were talking about banning it, and and it was a bit of a nervous week, I think, because um uh Anthony Albanese and in Australia and maybe um Emmanuel Macron were were like, yeah, yeah, this isn't a bad idea at all. Uh the the only reason we knew about the Iranian protests really was from X. For for all the really rough material that that you know uh you can be exposed to um on that platform, uh the dissenters in Iran were using it and getting that message out there. So it's not that you're not throwing a baby out with the bath water, you're throwing uh a whole maternity ward out when when you when you you know when you ban any of this stuff. And and I worry about that. Like if Substack is on the list, there could be, you know, savvy kids that just get, you know, that find their career by reading an interesting post and then going down that rabbit hole. Uh the fact that we're not even considering that or we're thinking, well, well, here's the thing, it's back to our central question, isn't it? It's like if the evidence was that compelling, okay. But the trade-offs here, the uh I don't think you can justify it at all with what we have.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

Yeah. Yeah. It's my my perspective on limiting any freedom really is that you need uh necessary reason to limit it. Right. If I if I have a two-year-old kid and the kid wants to run into the street and I grab their hand to let them run, I'm restricting their freedom. That's okay because there's such a clear and obvious harm that might come from them running into the street. And so there are policies around uh childhood that I think have that kind of evidence base behind it. Like um, I don't know, uh kids under a certain age can't buy alcohol. I think you can make at least some argument that that's uh acceptable given the potential harms. But for this, the evidence is mixed and beyond height, and I think this is something that the public doesn't see, the academic consensus is not behind him at this point. Um he's such a prominent name, and so his work dominates the conversation. He's been very savvy about putting forth his He's the storyteller, like I said, you know? Yeah. And this is, I think, a problem sometimes in in academia is that the people who are actually best equipped and most knowledgeable about the evidence are not always the ones who are best equipped to go on a podcast for three hours or give a really compelling TED talk or this sort of thing. And so the more nuanced, accurate interpretations don't get out there. And instead you get the true-ish version that gets, you know, blasted around the world.

Are Politics Driving The Panic

SPEAKER_02 26:44

It's interesting, you know, um, because we uh the free speech union in in New Zealand uh were very, very active against the hate speech laws that they tried bringing here. We're a bit of an outlier in the West now. We don't have uh hate speech laws the way Australia does or or the UK or the EU, you know. So we're closer to to you guys and in the US, which has been great. And we did a lot of work to to sort of you know keep them out um after the you know the atrocity, which was really tough. Um it was a pretty fraught battle, but again, there just wasn't really evidence. Uh but people will call them protections. Why can't this group have protections? And it's like, well, uh, where's the evidence? And we, I mean, uh Nadine Strossen, who was the head of the ACLU for many years, she's like a bit of a mentor to us. Um, I I've gone back to her a lot and said, you know, what do we got? You know, so so I'm prepared, I'm armed for battle, you know, against people that really want these things. There's there's no compelling evidence that hate speech laws reduce racism or or uh or make communities safer. And even when you look at like the the Australian X since the Bondi massacre, I would say that the censorship they've proposed has unleashed a wave of anti-Semitism, which uh is pretty, you know, um really put me on my heels, actually, because it seems to be quite a middle uh upper middle class sort of uh set that are pushing it too, which is a a real concern. Um so it had a negative effect. The other thing about kids too, and I mean, you know, I've been this kid where we wanted uh the Donna Summer edition of Playboy and it was in the wardrobe, and there was a drunk snoring father on the bed, and we had to get in and get it. We would do it, we would risk that. So kids are going to find ways around it, I think.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

Um actually you already have interesting in interesting cases around that. I mean, uh in many school districts in the US, at least in in Los Angeles, um, many schools now require kids to put their phones in these things called yonder pouches that magnetically seal. And all the news stories you hear about them is like, oh, the kids are off their phones, everything's awesome. But I have, you know, younger uh cousins who are in in this high school system, and they say uh kids are buying fake phones to put in the yonder pouches. They found ways to break open the pouches, they uh put something else, you know, some little like Indiana Jones decoy into the thing. Um, they have backup phones, yeah. They're already finding all ways to find it, which you know is is all speaks to the lack of efficacy of these programs. But beyond that, if you've if there's something that kids are compelled to do, I think it's worth asking, well, like why? What do they find valuable about it? And this often gets left out of these conversations is what do kids think about social media? What do they think the role of it should be in their lives? The kind of big cultural assumption we have in the West is that kids are these incompetent, passive little things that need to be coerced and controlled and can't make any decisions for themselves. And that's harmful for all kinds of reasons. It also has led to the situation where all of the debate around this uh like central part of their communication and information information acquisition, their opinions about it are completely ignored for the most part.

Is School Worse Than Social Media

SPEAKER_02 30:14

Yeah, yeah. It's it's the um It's the idea may come from social constructivism. You know what I mean? The the idea that kids are sponges. Well, they sort of believe that even, you know, I I guess the hate speech, you know, the proponent, the person that'll the advocate that will want that, probably thinks we're we're all sponges. Really, and and can be influenced by political opinions and but we're all soaking up all these bad uh views and everything. But um I I know there was a bit of a yeah, because as a free speech union, we have to defend and we would defend things like um you know contemporary sex education and stuff, which can be very controversial. But um one of my children was at school and and this program was happening. I didn't know it was happening. And and I said, Oh, what do you think about it? And he says, Ah, they say some weird things and we all joke about it afterwards. And then I thought, well, yeah, well, that's kind of like religion in schools. Like we didn't all walk out Christian, we sort of joked about it afterwards, you know what I mean? I think we sort of egged each other on, and um, you know what I mean? Because kids are actually I think Christopher Hitchin said this. Like when it comes to you know, the the kid asking the question to the rabbi, he's gonna stump the rabbi, isn't it? It's not gonna be an adult, it's not a question from an adult that's gonna stump the rabbi, it's gonna be like a six-year-old is gonna go, what about this? And the rabbi's oh, I couldn't answer. That that's that's where those questions come from. So I yeah, I think we need to give kids more credit, um, really. Um, I think they are way more discerning and they're very, very sneaky and inventive. And yeah, they're gonna find their way around this stuff. And you know, I kind of I'm kind of glad. I I I think that I think that's developed that that's a skill as well.

SPEAKER_01 32:08

Really. Yes, it's what it's what they've always done. In any, you know, you can you there's you know monographs written about uh I assume hundreds of societies, and they all have little sections about the the lives of children in these places in hunter-gatherer groups or small pastoralist groups or this kind of thing. And every single time you hear about these uh groups of little kids in mixed age running around uh doing whatever they want with very little control from their parents. And in fact, the parents, even if they wanted to, don't seem like they uh could exert any control over the movements of the kids. And the fact that you, from what I can tell, still see kids pushing to form, I call them from Dorsa Amir, to form these independent pure cultures, that they're still trying to do that even now suggests that this is a pretty fundamental impulse and something that we should be giving, providing a lot of space for. I actually think much of their interest in in social media and in their in the internet is fueled by the fact that in physical and social space, they are not allowed very much autonomy to form these independent peer groups to run around to do what they want to do throughout the day. And so the digital landscape is kind of the last frontier for building those independent peer cultures, the last place that they can kind of exist without adults. And now we're taking these steps to lock that down too and to close off this frontier that's opened up in the last couple of decades for them to uh kind of give more room for their evolutionary impulses.

SPEAKER_02 33:37

That that that's really interesting. Yeah. It's a it's an evolutionary impulse. They need it. And and social media was providing it, and now that's gonna be gone too. Yeah. I mean, that yeah, that that's that's very unfortunate when you put it that way and it makes total sense.

Common Core, Homework, And Stress

SPEAKER_01 33:52

Yeah. Um about social media. I think part of the you don't want to go all the way in the other direction and say social media is universally beneficial and everything about it is great. I think the reality is there are probably particular pieces of it that are harmful, but you can look at them through the through this framework of what is increasing or decreasing their autonomy. So things like the um the attention-grabbing algorithms that at this point everyone knows are used by these these platforms, the fact that they generate these infinite feeds of content that are meant to hold their eyes. I'm guessing that's probably negative. Again, that we don't have good research because it's hard to get nuanced data on how that particular bit harms kit as opposed to other things.

SPEAKER_02 34:33

But I'm and how transparent is big tech about these algorithms as well.

SPEAKER_01 34:37

I guess there's a bit of the Trevor Burrus, so it's very hard to know what the algorithms do are doing. It's hard to know their specific contribution to the you know harms or benefits to the mental health of children. But my get my if I'm guessing, I would say those are probably harmful. Let's say that's true. The response would not be to ban the platforms completely. It would be to demand regulation of the structure of those algorithms. Um and in the case of uh X is another interesting example, you know, there is a huge amount of rightful controversy around the fact that Grok, their AI bot, is apparently fully willing to make non-consensual porn of anyone, including children. Um but it's strange that the response to that is, well, it's ban X as opposed to let's demand regulation of Grok or demand that it be trained in a different way.

SPEAKER_02 35:22

You would think that Well, that says to me that there's other things going on, you know. Like it's it's a it's a very uh power gets critiqued a lot on X. I think that I think that's why a lot of people don't like it. I mean, we've just had a bit of a minor scandal here where the clerk of parliament has said, oh, we're not no longer going to be updating what's happening in Parliament on X. And his and he he used Groc as a reason why they're not addressing that. He had no place to do that. He's a bureaucrat. I mean, he's he shouldn't have, you know, it'll be on Facebook and but apparently like Facebook and and Instagram statistically have had more child like minor abuse sort of imagery and stuff over time. Um like where if that yeah, so yeah, I mean I think there's always a there's always a double motive when it comes to like X. X is just in the cross, there's an X on it, you know, like they Yeah, it's in the cross ears of a lot of uh powerful people, you know. Yeah, and that's not a conspiracy. I mean, it's a lot, you know, people don't like being critiqued when you're in power because you get thrown out of power.

SPEAKER_01 36:32

Yeah. But you can make the same point about uh any platform, I think. Uh if there are specific things about a platform that might be harmful, then you want to address those specific things, not the platform itself. In the same way that if um I wouldn't I wouldn't support this. Let's say there was some really harmful uh book and people wanted the the book banned. I wouldn't be in favor of that, but I don't know, people might make an argument. Um, the argument would not be let's ban the printing press, right? You'd say, well, this particular book shouldn't be in libraries or something. Um but I think for this particular issue, it it's maybe difficult to uh advocate for nuanced policies around social media. And so the much easier policy to pitch is just ban it completely. Um as evidenced by by Heights' success. It's much harder to make a kind of TED talky soundbite argument for uh less regulate the like algorithmic structure of Instagram, let's say.

SPEAKER_02 37:23

Um that's well, um on politics, do you think I I think in in our pre-interview you you did suggest that you know height may be a little bit worried about political ideas, um kids being exposed to some political ideas, which probably shouldn't really be as concerned. Um yeah.

Listening To What Kids Report

SPEAKER_01 37:51

I mean, uh so I'll say on that, that's not from so it's not a specific motive he cited, so it's it's speculative, and I I do want that as a several grains of salt. But it is something that comes up when you hear him and other people in this movement do interviews. Um, often they will talk about uh kids being polarized into political camps that they disagree with. So when he was on uh Joe Rogan, I think a couple of years ago, talking about the effects of social media, and initially it focused on health effects, but then within a fairly short period of time, they're talking about how kids end up with political beliefs that they thought were uh really silly and just kids trying to sort of gain social clout through these platforms. Um so it became a conversation about uh, well, these algorithms you know leading young people to believe things that they shouldn't believe. And that an incentive is not an acceptable incentive, right? Um, you can't regulate the kind of beliefs that uh young people acquire. Um, I don't think that's his central incentive by any means. I think generally he's probably pretty well-intentioned, albeit in my view, wrong. Um, but it is something that seems to come up from at least some people in this corner, that they're not just worried about the mental health, about depression and and so on. They're worried because these platforms, for whatever reason, often lead kids to hold political views that they disagree with or or find um yeah, not efficacious for for their own um platforms. Yeah, interesting.

SPEAKER_02 39:20

Well, um, so let's get to the to the uh heart of your your your thesis, and that is that school is uh way more harmful than than social media. So what's interesting is that there were changes uh in the American school system in 212, which is where this mental health what would you call it, like a contagion or something took off. Um and but that yeah, and this is the year that height would identify is when smartphones came out or when kids started getting them. So do you want to just talk us through into your thesis?

SPEAKER_01 40:07

And social media platforms became commonly used by young people around that time. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 40:13

And and and so so so what what what's your thesis from there? So like take us, take us, you know, to walk us through your your piece and your thoughts on that.

Practical Reforms For Schools

SPEAKER_01 40:23

Sure. So the the school part of this starts with the really, really good data showing that school in general seems quite bad for the mental health of young people. So I mentioned this uh a bit earlier, but you have really good data showing that suicide rates among young people tend to plummet during uh vacation, during holiday breaks, and then skyrocket during school. In the UK UK, you can even see the rates of uh mental health-related ER visits shifting with uh breaks in the calendar. Um, so that's one uh just a piece of evidence. Regarding 2012 and this big shift that happened around then, uh height's argument is that it can only be explained by the you know widespread adoption of social media by young people. So it's a correlational argument. You see mental health getting worse and you identify something else that changed rapidly around then that might explain it. So that's one possibility. A kind of argument that's been made, mainly by Peter Gray, and I find it potentially convincing, is that you also see major changes in uh the educational system, at least in the United States, around that time. Um so this is the institution of a program called Common Core that sought to standardize education um around the US to really focus on uh learning outcomes. And it was, I think, widely viewed as being quite difficult to teach and to implement. And one consequence of it was that in general, school became much more stressful. But in particular, the amount of time kids had to spend on homework just rocketed up a whole bunch. Um, and in contrast, the amount of time that they had to spend with that they had available to spend with their friends uh dropped. There's good data on this from the from the Pew Research Center. And so Peter Gray's argument is that what actually happened around this time is that kids were forced even more into this already uh fairly oppressive system, the system that already harms their mental health and forced to dedicate even more of their free time outside of school to it and more generally to partake in a system that was now even more intensely focused on performance-based outcomes. And so the consequence is a very rapid uh shift in uh mental health symptoms. I think this is further validated by asking kids themselves. So you don't just have to look, you don't just have to look at sort of this broad uh data. Um there's surveys asking kids about their main sources of stress um in a in a given year. And you see the reported sources changing really quickly after 2012. Um so after 2012, I'm forgetting the exact numbers, but I think something close to 80% of kids cite school and particularly homework as the like main source of stress that they face. Um, things like social media and social problems in general are way below on that span. And that's pretty been pretty consistent until um recent years, where by far school is the major source of stress that they report. So we can make a kind of speculative argument that social media is the culprit here, or we can look at another change that happened at the same time, a really major change, and then ask kids themselves, what are you so stressed out about? And perhaps their answer is something that we should take seriously. If they're saying that the answer is school and not social media, maybe the answer is school.

unknown 43:29

Right?

SPEAKER_01 43:29

That the best people were on this.

SPEAKER_02 43:32

Well, in terms of like the homework, I know that my son would get absolutely frazzled by it. He's a smart kid. When he got home, he just wanted to chill. You know, he had done a day. Why did he have to work for another two hours? I mean, uh so so that the load really leapt at it in terms of like uh the homework load in the States.

SPEAKER_01 43:55

Yeah, quite an amount. And there's also so this is more suggestive or um more speculative. Data, but there's some research showing that uh the effect on mental health. So the relationship between amount of homework and declines in mental health is not linear. So it's not like if you add 10 more homework, people are too depressed or something. That you actually have these exponential effects where once homework time crosses a certain threshold, um, mental health just plummets very suddenly, right? So it's like a nonlinear effect that happens once a certain amount. I think one possibility is that Common Core actually took homework time over that threshold. Um, and at that point, mental health just plummeted precipitously. It wasn't just some some linear drop. Um, so those it's undeniable that there are major changes in the amount of uh free time that kids had available on their own to chill to be with their friends. Um, that really just kind of vanished. But again, like there's survey data asking kids what they're stressed about, and they say homework in school. They don't say social media, they don't say social comparisons, whatever, they say school. Um, and we should be taking that very seriously. If there's a mental health crisis among young people, which there is, and the young people are saying our mental health crisis is caused by school, maybe we shouldn't treat them like uh, you know, little incompetents who have nothing to say about their their own.

SPEAKER_02 45:13

Now they kids, what do they know?

SPEAKER_01 45:15

Yeah. Um exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:19

So you've got some uh solutions. So what are your solutions?

SPEAKER_01 45:24

Yeah. Um there are, let's see, uh three that I mentioned. One is just reducing homework time in general. Um I think some schools have have taken uh steps to put those policies in in place, which is great. Uh, but generally there's really, I think, no reason that uh kids should have homework prior to secondary school, even. And just generally the amounts should be uh much, much lower. Um one consequence of that, I should say, is learning outcomes might not be as good. You might see small drops in literacy and mercy after people graduate. Um, because the fact is if you force someone to sit down and do something for eight hours a day, they'll probably get a bit better at it than if they're doing it for six hours a day. Even if that is true though, the trade-offs with mental health, I think, are so huge that it just doesn't particularly matter. I'm much more interested in my, you know, future children being uh happy and feeling good about themselves than having marginally better litters or something.

SPEAKER_02 46:17

I I've made choices like that for my children. Yeah. I I've already done that in in in my life. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:24

Yeah. The second one is much more uh time for free play and recess and breaks from school. This actually, there's data showing that when you have more time for recess and lunch breaks, and I think in schools, that learning outcomes actually go up. So there's really no reason not to do this. But also kids just like it, they report being happier, they feel better, everything is better when they are allowed time to run around and uh be kids. So that really should be in place. There are mandatory minimums in some US states, but they are quite small. It'll be something like 30 minutes a day in California, even for elementary schoolers, which is shockingly low if you think of an eight-year-old and what they want to be doing throughout the um I should say for for that policy, and I I would imagine for the homework one, I think Jonathan Height would agree with both of those things. I think he's very much in of more recess time or uh lessening the effects of school. That's something he's very much advocated for. And so I I do commend him for that. Um that um what was the third one?

SPEAKER_02 47:25

Shorter school time? Was it the one? Like longer recesses.

SPEAKER_01 47:30

Yes, was it yeah? Um I'd say pushing back the uh the start of the school day. Um, there's been some interventions. I think there's a school district in Seattle that uh tried pushing back the start of the school day later just so kids could sleep more, more or less. Um and I think shortening the school day, perhaps. Well, I'm not positive, that was part of the intervention. And you see, learning outcomes increase, mental health is better, kids, they're sleeping more, um, more sleep is uh important. Um, so that's the third intervention. One issue, though, with all three of these, I think, are great policies to institute. I think school itself as a system is probably quite problematic for the development of kids. If I were redesigning the world, I would want a system that uh requires virtually no time where they're sort of sitting in rows and listening to someone talk to them and almost an infinite amount of time for them to run around and do kind of whatever they want. Um, that isn't going to happen, right? The degrees of change that can happen in the world at this point are limited. So I've identified these three, I think, more easily implemented policies that that could actually be put in place. But really, it's the the broader system itself that isn't an issue. The system of uh putting kids in these uh single age groups, sitting them down, making them listen to adults for hours and hours is fundamentally not well suited for how kids are supposed to grow up. Um, whether that can change on a large scale, I don't know. I would like it to. Um, but these, I think, three suggestions are a place to start.

SPEAKER_02 49:01

Well, see, there's a tension here, isn't there? Because school is a babysitting service as well for working parents.

SPEAKER_01 49:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:12

That's that's the challenge. That's why people probably don't want to touch it, because you know, a lot of work lives would collapse. You know, the the the both parents are working these days. That wasn't the case. You know, it's I mean, it probably in the 60s it sort of ramped up, but uh both the parents have to work to be able to afford a house today. Um, and that's in most western countries. Uh the start time's got to be early. And you know, three o'clock or three thirty. Man, if he can make a five, that'll be great, you know. Um it's it it's really tough. It's tough now. There was this um reporter in our um uh main newspaper, he's a columnist, and he was talking about how great it is that um the mayor at the time had really pushed uh public parking up in price to encourage people onto buses because he was worried about climate change and you know less cars and all this kind of stuff. But I made the point that to him that um uh well, what about the mother that that has to pick up a kid? You know? So these are the can you she can't do it on a bus. You know, oh I gotta quickly pop out. Lots of parents have arrangements where they pop out, get the kid, take it to a to another you know, parent or do something. And you wouldn't be able to do that. So these are the considerations that parents have all day because they have to work. So that this is really what makes some of these ideas, which are fantastic ideas, um uh close to impossible to implement in the economic you know situation we we're all in.

SPEAKER_01 50:55

I even had parents uh actually in the comments this piece responding about the start time thing saying this would be very nice, but I have to get to work and I need to drop off my kids, right? So they can't be 9 30 because I have to get to work, which is totally, you know, that's not their fault. What are they supposed to do?

SPEAKER_02 51:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Final Takeaways And Where To Learn More

SPEAKER_01 51:12

I think it's worth saying though that I I don't think the alternative is let's say homeschooling or kids are at home being watched by their parents all day. I think we I we can picture systems that provide the same um utility to parents that like let kids be in their little you know groups off in daycare so the kids don't so the parents don't have to watch them. But without the kind of oppressive constraints, without the you know performance-based outcomes and this sort of thing that makes school really quite hellish for a lot of kids. Kids are very happy hanging out with other kids. It's their favorite thing to do. Um, but I think we can have a system where that is maintained without the other stuff. Um, there have even been you know alternatives that have been tried. Um, they're hard to scale, but I think they they have interesting results. So Peter Gray, this developmental psychologist, who I'd recommend anyone checking out his work, he's he's really fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 52:03

Yeah, he's good. I've been reading a bit of his stuff. He's he he could be someone for me to talk to as well, actually. Yeah. Like I think he's yeah, fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 52:10

Yeah, he he wrote a book called Free to Learn where he talks a lot about these issues. In one of the later sections of the book, he writes about uh the system called the Suberi schools, which is found in in various places around the US. In these school systems, uh, kids are given a lot of open space. The schools are you know a few acres that they can kind of run around on. Uh, there are, you know, sports equipment, there's computers, there's books, there's coloring stuff, whatever. And there are adults present, not to teach them anything or even really to prevent them from doing anything, but just in case someone gets hurt. They're basically around. Beyond that, there are no real restrictions. Kids just do what they want. Um, and if they want to learn about something, if they want a class to be taught, they go to adults and say, hey, I'd like to learn about this, I'd like to learn how to do this, and so on. And the outcomes of it are incredible. It's a you know, huge amount of a huge proportion of kids that go on to attend university, to have jobs they like, to make good money, that sort of thing. So it's very suggestive, at least, that in these cases, you can have schools where there are no classes, right? There's no instituted standards, there are no tests, and kids still come out of it not just as successful as their peers that are in regular schools, but much happier and much more pleased with the experience they had. Um, when you look at reports from people who attended these schools, you don't have these traumatic testimonies about how they felt horribly stressed about their dyslexia or about how they were bullied constantly or any of it. Uh they just seem kind of happy to have uh had a free space to roam. So that kind of thing, difficult to scale, right? These are private schools, they're expensive and they're expensive for a reason. But I think it's suggestive. Like there are alternatives that are not, you know, putting kids at home all day. Um, it doesn't have to be school as we know it now, but you can still have a system that gets kids away from their you know, parents, the parents can go do what they need to do without being so oppressive to the uh well-being of kids.

SPEAKER_02 54:06

I mean, it's got me thinking, like if if if if you if you only did learning for two hours, it would still be beneficial. May even be more beneficial. Because as you said about the homework, you know, you go over a certain time, uh diminishing returns. It's like I'm a I'm a screenwriter. Um if I write for like eight hours, it's you know what I mean? I mean, I want to stop at around four or I'm I can write four or six, which is a lot of people can't. Like there's a lot of people that do three and that's it. Because they they believe that it it just it doesn't get better after that, you know. Like there's a peak to this stuff, and school, I don't think well, you know, I mean it was developed in a time when they wouldn't have been thinking about that at all. But we're uh we are stuck in quite a uh you know, very archaic model, aren't we? Um but I mean, you know, critics Nietzsche wasn't a big fan of the school system, he had quite a bit to say, uh, you know, back in the day. Um, but has had his critics, you know, even way back. Um it's funny, like on the on the starting later thing. My son would just get up and go at 10. And I'd be just ballowing in the hallway, and I could not get him up. But he'd get there at 10. And and he was fine when he got there. But of course, it was always, doesn't he like it here? Is are things happening? Is he getting a hard time? What's going on? It's like he just didn't want to get up at 7:30. He didn't want to get up at 7:30, you know. Um, but so yeah, and he's got a good job now and everything's cool, you know. But um, yeah, so well, you know, we've been going an hour now, so that's cool. I I think we can wrap it up. But um, so any final thoughts on the uh on the betting of the under 16 bill? Because I mean, I this has been a great interview and like very compelling what I'm hearing here um from you. So yeah, any any any closing thoughts on it all?

SPEAKER_01 56:04

Yeah, well, here's what I would say. I've you know written this piece. I hope it's compelling, and I've summarized some of the evidence in it. So I'd encourage people to go read it if they want to look at the specific studies. But I'd also encourage people to go engage with writing by people other than Jonathan Haidt. He is one perspective, and I think he is a valuable perspective. But people like I'd mentioned Adam Hunt or Tanai Katiar as two people, um, about uh Alberto Acerbi is another. Uh, those three people have also written about social media more from the perspective I'm advocating for, and their research touches on it more directly. So I'd encourage people to uh take a look at that. More generally, though, what I would say is I think there's a kind of mismatch we have in in policy debates between how we should be approaching the implementation of different policies and how we actually think about them. Because we are, you know, humans with brains that are evolved for this kind of complex thing. Our intuition is just to kind of go off whatever vibes feel right. It feels true that social media should be really bad for kids, and so we assume it must be true. Um, we it feels true that uh AI must use a huge amount of water in its data centers, and so we assume that's true and talk as if it's true. But we don't want to approach these things based on what is true-ish or what feels true. You want to go based on the evidence. Um, and so before advocating for something as intense, as harsh as banning social media completely for people under 16, you want to be really sure that the evidence supports that view. There's a good reason to do it. Um, and so you can take my word for it, but I'd encourage people to go actually look at the studies themselves, engage with multiple perspectives, and see what the actual data has to offer. Um, and there might be some surprises in there if you're not convinced already.

SPEAKER_02 57:48

Great, great. And your Substack is called?

SPEAKER_01 57:51

Uh Unpublishable Papers is the Sub Stack.

SPEAKER_02 57:53

Yeah, and it's fantastic. And there's a bit of music in there too, which is always a bonus. It's always always awesome. Hey, well, thanks, Eli. This has been fantastic. It's uh been great connecting with you. And, you know, hopefully we can even do it again. Um uh, you know, voices, you're right. Like in terms of evidence and everything, I think we have a responsibility to um to yeah, to let people know that uh it's very easy to get caught up in emotions um around things like, you know, uh harm, racism, welfare of children, things like that. You know, that this is where the the heart can really does take over the head. But we got to be sober about it because, like I said, we we you know there are babies that get tossed out in the bathwater here. And and and our kids may not get any well, you know, more well, and that's a concern. Um, you know, we uh if we want to take that seriously, and and if we're not being driven by clear evidence and pot you know in our policy, then we're not taking it seriously, no matter what people try to tell you. Um so thank you very much, um, Eli. And um uh for all of you who have listened to this fantastic episode, um, you can ask questions of us on uh uh podcast. Podcast. See, I told you. I make I told him before we started I make a mess of my intros and my outros. It's a tough trend. Yeah. Oh man. Anyway, uh podcast at fsu.nz. Podcast at fsu.nz. Do send your questions through. Um uh we'd we'd uh love to um we will answer them. We answer all our correspondents, so um we look forward to them. So yeah, thanks for joining us on Free2Speak. Thank you, Eli, and um we'll see you again real soon.

Outro And How To Contact Us

SPEAKER_00 59:43

Thank you for listening to Free to Speak. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and consider sharing the podcast with others. We release new episodes regularly, and subscribing is the easiest way to stay up to date. If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions, you can contact us at podcast at fsu.nz. If you want to find out more about the New Zealand Free Speech Union, visit fs.nz.