277: Raising Children in the Age of Social Media with “Anxious Generation” Researcher Zach Rausch

Conversations with Cam

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4.7 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, I sit down with Zach Rausch, lead researcher on the bestselling book “The Anxious Generation,” to discuss the impact social media is having on children, how we’re seeing social media affect mental health today, and what parents can do to create intentional relationships with social media and technology in households. Zach talks about the “great rewiring of childhood” that has occurred within the last decade, current trends in adolescent mental health, and why these trends aren’t just an American issue. He also explains the perfect storm of social media usage during “periods of particular vulnerability,” how boys and girls are targeted differently on social media, and why the introduction of the forward-facing camera was so significant for our culture. Finally, we talk about why millennial parents are the last generation that can create change for our kids, how social media can be positive, what phone-free schools can look like, and more.

Key Takeaway / Points:

On the “great rewiring of childhood”
Phone-based childhoods vs. community-based childhoods
On the trends we’re seeing in adolescent mental health
On the international parallels we’re seeing in depressive episode trends
On the perfect storm of social media during “periods of particular vulnerability”
Breaking down the data of daily social media usage vs. in-person socializing
Why millennial parents are the last generation that can create change for our kids
How boys and girls are targeted differently on social media platforms
How technology and social media influence each other
On the significance of the forward-facing camera
What can we do individually as parents?
On the future of phone-free schools
On the positives of social media
On the notion of fear-mongering around the dangers of social media
How Zach fills his cup and his recent technology Shabbat

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Creative Lead: Amelie Yeager

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The following podcast is a dear media production.
0:04.1	Hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Cam.
0:06.7	This week we are joined by Zach Roush, who is the Associate Research Scientists at NYU Stern School of Business and the lead researcher to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The
0:22.7	Anxious Generation. I feel if you are listening to this and a parent and even maybe not a parent,
0:28.5	then you've heard of The Anxious Generation. It was kind of everywhere. It was released and
0:34.3	it kind of blew up because this is a conversation that so many parents are having
0:39.1	of how do we monitor our children on social media and further what impact is social media
0:45.7	and also technology having on our children and their mental health. And what the book discovered
0:52.4	was that there is a large and negative impact of these things on the mental health. And what the book discovered was that there is a large and negative impact
0:56.5	of these things on the mental health of our children and this younger generation that they
1:02.0	coined the anxious generation. We get into a lot of the research of this book, a lot of the findings,
1:08.5	what we can do, because I think that's so important. Like, okay, so now we know
1:12.3	that there's a negative impact, but like, what do we actually do moving forward? Because myself,
1:16.6	and I know many of the listeners of the show, have younger children. So they haven't reached the age
1:21.7	of technology or social media. And how do we navigate this so that we aren't seeing the same data that we saw
1:29.8	with this generation. We also talk about, does technology have this impact or is it the social
1:36.9	media aspect, i.e. will we see certain things from, you know, I use the example of my kids
1:42.8	watching Miss Rachel or a blueie or something like that because screen time is something that exists in our house.
1:48.3	And also I just think in the world we live in, it's kind of impossible to ignore.
1:53.3	So what are the differences between something like that and a child being on Instagram?
1:58.0	I find this incredibly educational and more hopeful than I felt after reading
2:06.5	the book personally because I think he did give us some hope of like what we can do moving
	...

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