Chapter 2 Summary

• Human children grow fast up to the age of two, then slow, then fast again during puberty. By age 5, the human brain is almost full size, but it then needs a long time to configure so it’s ready for grown-up living. It does this through play.

• In recent years, play-based childhoods have been replaced by phone/ internet-based childhoods, yet ‘free play’ is imperative to develop social skills like conflict resolution, as well as physical skills.

• Through play, which is done for no other reason than play, children learn to connect and ‘synchronize’ (match) with others, and take turns. They enjoy ‘attunement’ (real-time empathy) and need huge amounts of it. Attunement and synchrony bond us with others. By contrast, social media is generally asynchronous and, while play is done purely for itself, social media is done for show. It inhibits attunement and can leave users starved of social connection. 

• Children are born with two innate learning programmes: ‘conformist bias’, (which motivates them to copy what is most common) and ‘prestige bias’, (which motivates them to copy whoever seems most accomplished). Social media platforms use this biological pre-disposition to lock children’s attention on so-called ‘influencers’, so as to maximise engagement on their platforms.

• Social learning occurs all throughout childhood, but ‘cultural’ learning occurs roughly between 9-15 years of age. Lessons learnt and identities formed in these years are likely to imprint more than at other ages. Unfortunately, these crucially important years are when most adolescents get their own mobile phone and move their social life online.   

What Children Need to Do in Childhood

Haidt asks whether the new phone-based childhood might block kids from doing some of the things they need to do in order to turn into healthy, happy, competent, and successful adults?

To answer these questions, Haidt looks at five important features of human childhood.

1) Slow-growth childhood

“When Homo sapiens emerged, its children were big-brained, small-bodied weaklings who ran around the forest practically begging predators to eat them.”

Why did we evolve to have this long and risky childhood?

While chimpanzees grow at a steady pace until they reach sexual maturity, human children grow fast for the first 2 years, then slow for the next 7 to 10 years, then they undergo a rapid growth spurt again during puberty.  

Haidt posits that the main reason for this is that we evolved into ‘cultural’ beings, of which tool-making was a part. This profoundly altered our evolutionary path.

As we began to use fire to cook, our jaws and guts reduced in size, cooked food being easier to chew and digest. Survival became less about being the fastest or strongest, and more about being adept at learning. And we learnt best in communities, tapping into the common knowledge pool of our ancestors and community. Chimpanzees do very little of this.

Haidt concludes, that human childhood was extended to give children time to learn these survival skills.  

Although the adolescent brain is not growing much size-wise (it’s 90% full size by age 5), it is busy growing new connections and pruning out old ones. As a child seeks out experiences and practises a range of skills, neurons and synapses that are used infrequently fade away, while frequent connections solidify and quicken. This is important; human children have a longer childhood, comparative to other animals, which is “a kind of cultural apprenticeship during adolescence, before one is seen and treated as an adult”.

So, evolution lengthened childhood to make learning possible, but it also installed three strong motivations that make learning easy and likely: namely for free play, attunement and social learning.

In the pre-mobile phone era, children would typically go out and play after school. Unsupervised. This allowed them to satisfy these motives. “But in the transition to phone-based childhood […] addictive technologies lured kids into the virtual world, where they no longer got the full benefit of acting on these three motivations.”  

2) Free play

“Play is the work of childhood" Haidt says, "and all young mammals have the same job: wire up your brain by playing vigorously and often.” Hundreds of studies show that young mammals deprived of play become socially, cognitively and emotionally impaired. The human child is no different.

It is through play that they learn skills necessary to be successful adults. The brain learns best through repeated activity with feedback from success and failure in a low-stakes environment.

Peter Gray, developmental psychologist says: “Toddlers clumsily run around and climb up, over or into anything they can, until they become skilled at moving around a complex natural environment. Once they’ve mastered the basic skills, they move on to multi-player predator-prey games like tag or hide-and-seek. Once those are mastered, they move onto verbal play, gossip, teasing and joking around, which helps them learn nuance, non-verbal cues, and instantaneous relationship repair when something they said fails to produce the desired response. Over time, they develop the social skills necessary for life in a democratic society, including self-governance, joint decision-making and accepting the outcome when you lose a contest. Play requires suppression of the drive to dominate and enables the formation of long-lasting co-operative bonds.”

According to Gray, physical play, freely-chosen and directed by the participants, which is outdoors and with other children of mixed ages is the healthiest, most natural and most beneficial sort of play.

Play with some degree of physical risk is essential because it teaches children how to look after themselves and each other. Children can only learn how not to get hurt in situations where it is possible to get hurt, such as wrestling with a friend, having a pretend sword-fight or negotiating with another child on what to play next. When adults get involved, it becomes less free, less playful and less beneficial.

Unfortunately, adults usually can’t stop themselves from meddling.

A key feature of free play is that mistakes are generally not very costly. Everyone makes mistakes at first. Gradually from trial and error and with direct feedback from playmates, primary school children become ready to take on the greater social complexities of junior and senior schools. It is not homework that gets them ready, nor classes on how to handle their emotions. Information doesn’t do much to shape a developing brain. The brain needs experience. It needs play. Specifically, unsupervised, child-led, where the child learns to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts and play fair.

Children are intrinsically motivated to acquire these skills because they want to be included in the playgroup and keep the fun going.

Human children evolved during a long period in which brain development ‘expected’ an enormous amount of ‘free play’, where children spend most of their free time playing with friends in the real world and where there is some cost to join or leave, so people invest in relationships.

The phone-based childhood does not provide this.

3) Attunement

Simply put, we’re talking about being ‘in tune’ with others. Able to read them, understand them, empathise. Human children are biologically wired to connect. Weeks’ old babies can mimic certain facial expressions and even before they can properly control their limbs they can engage adults in games of turn-taking and shared emotion.

Once language is mastered the possibilities for attunement sky-rocket as social connections with parents and caretakers deepen; “How long should I wait until I make the next funny face?” for instance. Haidt argues that attunement practice is “as essential for social development as movement and exercise are for physical development”.

According to the National Institute for Play (who knew such a thing existed!): “Children who are deprived of this joyful, mutually trusting social experience often face emotional difficulties and exhibit erratic behaviour in their later years. They can have difficulty forming healthy attachments as adolescents, and as adults they may be less able to cope with unexpected challenges, regulate emotions, [and] make sound decisions when risk is involved […]”.

As the child grows, they graduate from turn-taking to relishing finding synchrony (doing the same thing at the same time as their friend(s)). Singing songs together, skipping together, playing rhyming or clapping games together with perfectly-matched, high-speed, hand movements. There is no explicit goal to the game, other than to synchronize.

European explorers from the 16th and 17th centuries found that on every continent, communities have historically performed ‘bonding’ rituals in which they move, drum, or chant together. It fosters a sense of communion and belonging. And modern social experiments bear this out; where groups have performed a synchrony exercise, before engaging in a ‘trust’ game, there is more trust and cooperation amongst them, compared to a control group where no such exercise preceded the game.   

So synchronous, face-to-face, physical interactions and rituals are a deep and ancient part of human evolution. Adults enjoy them and children need them. Yet social media platforms draw children into endless hours of asynchronous interaction, using no muscles other than a finger to swipe here or there, and where their fundamental needs are not able to be met.

By 2014, nearly one third of teenage girls were spending over 20 hours a week creating social media content of their own and consuming that created by others. That’s equivalent to half a full-time job!

Haidt reflects: “We are physical, embodied creatures who evolved to use our hands, facial expressions and head movements as communication channels, responding in real time to similar movements of others. Gen Z is learning to pick emojis instead”.

4) Social learning

So, once our ancestors became ‘cultural’ creatures, a new evolutionary pressure arose that rewarded the best learners. We’re not talking academic learning but learning by copying the right people. For children, this is typically ‘older children’, as they need to learn how to become a successful older child themselves.  

Leading scholars on gene-culture co-evolution (bit of a mouthful) hold that two relevant strategies have emerged over thousands of years, those being ‘conformist bias’ and ‘prestige bias’.

Conformity i.e. doing what most others are doing is a safe strategy, especially if you are a newcomer to an existing society. If most of a child's classmates have an Instagram account, it’s best that they get one too. They then quickly learn how most of the people they follow use the platform, which makes them prone to using it that way also.

But in a real-life social setting, it can literally take weeks to get a good sense of what the most common behaviours are because you need to observe multiple groups in multiple settings and over time. On a social media platform, however, a child can scroll through 1,000 data points in an hour (that’s 3 seconds per data point), each one showing how successful it is by the presence or absence of ‘likes’, comments and shares.

Social media platforms are “the most efficient conformity engines ever invented. They can shape an adolescent's mental models of acceptable behaviour in a matter of hours, whereas parents can struggle unsuccessfully for years to get their children to sit up straight or stop whining.”

In terms of prestige bias, people can, of course, perceive excellence for themselves, but it's much easier to rely on the judgement of others. If most people say a particular person is the best in their field, we'll typically look up to that person, even if we've never seen them ‘perform’. It is thought the reason people become so star-struck towards prestigious people is that they are motivated to get close to prestigious people in order to maximise their own learning, and raise their own prestige, by association.

Prestige-based social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have latched onto one of the most important learning mechanisms for adolescents. By diverting their time, attention and copying behaviour away from a variety of real-life role models with whom they could develop a healthy mentoring relationship that would help them succeed in their real-world communities, they have instead made use of evolutionary biology to redirect young minds towards so-called ‘influencers’.

Beginning in the early 2010s, millions of Gen Z girls collectively aimed their most powerful learning systems at a small number of young women whose main excellence seemed to be amassing followers to influence.

At the same time, many Gen Z boys aimed their social learning systems at popular male influencers who offered them visions of masculinity that were also quite extreme and potentially inapplicable to their daily lives.

The result has been a generation of young people who have learnt ways of talking, behaving and emoting that may backfire horribly in an office, family or other real-world setting.

5) Expectant brains & sensitive periods

The final angle Haidt considers is this: Healthy brain development depends on getting the right experiences at the right age, and in the right order. 

There are windows of time in which a young animal must learn something, or it will be hard, if not impossible to learn later. Language learning is a good example: Children can learn multiple languages easily, but this ability drops off sharply during the first few years of puberty.

Humans also have a ‘sensitive period’ for cultural learning. Research has looked at how children have been affected by living a period of time outside of their own country and culture. Specifically with Japanese children moving to America. The findings were that between the ages of 9-14, Japanese children who moved to America came to ‘feel American’. If they returned home to Japan within this same age range, they generally had no difficulty feeling Japanese again. If they returned after the age of 15, they found it hard to readjust to feeling Japanese again. Also, Japanese children older than 15 when they moved to America never came to feel American. The research concluded: “during the sensitive period, a cultural meaning system for interpersonal relationships appears to become a salient part of self-identity, to which they are emotionally attached”.

It is easy to see how all this can have implications for children who generally get their first smartphone around the age of 11, and are then socialised into the cultures of Instagram, Tiktok, video games and online life for the rest of their teen years.

In a phone-based childhood, children are plunged into a whirlpool of adult content and experiences that arrive in no particular order. Identity, selfhood, emotions and relationships will all be different if they develop online rather than in real life. What gets rewarded or punished. How deep friendships become. And above all, what is desirable. All of these will be determined by the thousands of posts, comments and ratings that the child sees each week.

Any child who spends her sensitive period immersed in social media will be shaped by the cultures of those sites. This may explain why Gen Z's mental health outcomes are so much worse than those of the millennials. Gen Z was the first generation to go through puberty and the sensitive period for cultural learning hunched over smartphones, having fewer face to face conversations and shoulder to shoulder adventures with their friends.

Our children should be out playing, synchronising and hanging out with their friends in person, while leaving some input for social learning from their parents, teachers and other role models in their communities. Instead, however, free play, attunement and local models for social learning have been replaced by screen time, asynchronous interaction and influencers chosen by algorithms.

Our children have been deprived of the childhood they need and deserve.