The REAL thing leading to mental disorders in kids and teens (not technology) with Dr. Peter Gray #91

In this conversation with Dr. Peter Gray, we unpack what may actually be driving the mental health crisis in kids—and why so many parents still feel overwhelmed trying to help.

If you’ve ever wondered whether technology is really the problem, why your child seems more stressed than you remember being as a kid, or how modern parenting and schooling may be affecting emotional regulation, independence, and resilience… this episode will challenge a lot of assumptions in the best way. We talk about toddler and preschool behavior, autonomy, anxiety, school stress, emotional health, and what kids actually need to thrive.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why many researchers don’t believe screens are the main cause of rising anxiety in kids

• The hidden ways stress, pressure, and over-structured childhoods affect behavior

• Why autonomy, free play, and independence matter for emotional regulation

• What overwhelmed parents can do to reduce power struggles and raise more resilient kids

• How to think critically about parenting trends without fear or guilt

This channel is built around practical, evidence-based parenting that helps you understand what’s happening underneath your child’s behavior—not just react to it in the moment. Every episode is designed to help you stay calmer, feel more confident, and make parenting feel a little less overwhelming.

If you’re tired of second-guessing yourself during tantrums, meltdowns, bedtime battles, or emotional outbursts, subscribe and follow along. The goal here isn’t perfect parenting—it’s helping you understand your child well enough that hard moments start feeling easier to navigate.

📚 Check out Peter Gray's book “Restoring Childhood”: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/784213/restoring-childhood-by-peter-gray/

Transcript

Why The Interview Is Split

Jon @WholeParent 0:00

Hey, a quick note before we jump into the episode today. My guest today is Dr. Peter Graham, who has a book coming out in September, which really is going to fundamentally challenge a lot of the wisdom and thinking around technology and kids, and specifically a lot of what he deems to be fear-mongering, not based in evidence. And a lot of this interview takes a specific aim at things that I have endorsed on the podcast. He takes aim at a book that I have recommended to many people, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. He uh kind of calls into question things that previous guests have said. And it the interview was going in such a way that I really couldn't cut it off. And so you'll notice if you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast audio only, you see that it's it's about the length of a normal episode. But uh if you go over to YouTube, you can actually watch the full unabridged interview. That includes the first 20-ish minutes of the interview where we don't talk about his new book, where we're just focused primarily on his thoughts about education and other things like that. So if you want the full, full episode, it's over an hour, you can go over to YouTube and watch there. But if you just want to hear his thoughts specifically on technology and kids, then this you can just listen right here wherever you're listening. It feels like an exclusive. It feels like I've never heard anybody say the things that he is saying. It makes so much sense. And I'm just gonna turn it back over to him. It's gonna say, I'm back with Dr. Peter Gray. Just know that the first half of that or the first 20 minutes of the episode is over on YouTube if you want to find it. But let's jump in with Dr. Peter Gray and his absolute bombshell thoughts on technology and kids.

The Case Against Tech Panic

Jon @WholeParent 2:01

I'm back with Dr. Peter Gray. We are talking about education, we're talking about society, we're talking about AI, we're talking about all of these different things. But I want to bring the topic to uh your book. You have a new book coming out in September. And when I read the press kit for that book, I've not read the book yet, I was startled that in in many ways you are taking aim at one of the kind of best-selling, most popular uh books, the central thesis of the book The Anxious Generation, which says that technology is what's leading to the rise in anxiety among children and teens, but you don't think so. Can you tell us about that?

SPEAKER_01 2:44

Yeah, first of all, let me say that it's not just me who uh doesn't think so. Um I would say that essentially everybody who actually does research in this area, who has actually has done research and done reviews of research, the meta-analyses of the research that has to do with teens and technology and mental health, I have found nobody who actually is deep into that research who agrees with Jonathan Haidt's uh thesis. In fact, there's considerable anger among them that why is the world paying attention to this book? Jonathan Haid is by no means an expert on this. He hired an assistant to do his research for him. He's got he refers to maybe 20 studies in that book, cherry picked studies, out of literally hundreds of studies that have been conducted. He doesn't even mention the fact that there are numerous review articles on these studies, there's numerous meta-analyses, all of which come to basically the same conclusion, which is that this technology can have both beneficial and negative influences on different individuals, that they tend to cancel one another out, that there's no evidence at all that the there are negative effects that could possibly account for the large increase in anxiety, depression, and suicide that occurred between 2010 and 2018, which is the spike of increase in mental disorder that Jonathan Haid is talking about. Even the correlation, even the there's not even correlational evidence. There's no significant correlation between the amount of time a kid is spending on social media and their mental health. It just blanks out. There's no, there's essentially zero correlation. At best, sometimes people find a small correlation, and sometimes it's in the direction of better mental health for those who are on social media more, and sometimes it's in the other direction, but it's always small and uh over studies, it it cancels out. So even correlational, if there was a correlation, that wouldn't prove cause and effect. It wouldn't be too surprising if people who are anxious and depressed go on social media as a way of dealing with their anxiety and depression, and so the correlation could be, the causation could be the opposite direction from what Jonathan Haidt talks about. To me, what so the lack of correlation, the lack of, but there's an even stronger argument than that.

Why The Spike Looks American

SPEAKER_01 5:25

This increase that Jonathan Haidt is talking about in that book, the increase in anxiety, depression, suicide among teenagers between 2010 and 2018 is an American phenomenon. The internet is not an American phenomenon, it's a world phenomenon. Social media is a world phenomenon. This increase did not occur other places except in certain other places, and I'll tell you where it occurred and why it occurred in those other places. But if if you look at the entire European Union, and I've done this during this period where anxiety, depression, suicide was going like this, going up in America, it was going like this, down in Europe among teens. Why? Teens are on social teens in Europe are not being deprived of social media. They're on social media just like our teens are. They're not being deprived of smartphones, they're on it just like our teens are. So why would it cause this terrible effect in America, but not cause this terrible effect in all of Europe? There are other studies in in the other areas of the world. There's no correlation, there's no relationship between when social media became available and teens started using it and increases in mental disorder. So this is an American phenomenon. So we have to talk about something that happened in America, but did not happen in the rest of the world. Jonathan Hyde does not acknowledge that. So I looked and at are there other countries that have shown this and such an increase, similar to ours? And there are two or three other countries. One of them is the UK, or more specifically, England, because this was something that happened in England. And another is Sweden. And believe it or not, Sweden also showed an increase. It was the one country in the European Union that showed an increase in anxiety depression over approximately the same period that our teens did. What is similar between the United States, England, and Sweden? All of those places underwent government enforced so-called reforms in schooling. For us, it was common core. In England, it was a national reform similar to our common core, and in Sweden also a national reform similar to our common core. My argument is what happened here that didn't happen in most of the world, and what happened is we made a dramatic change for the worse in how we're doing schooling. School has, which nobody wants to acknowledge this, because school has a halo around it. School has always been the biggest source of anxiety and depression for kids. Every single study that I've been able to find where kids are asked, what is the source of your anxiety and depression? Far and away the leading cause that they cite is school. Nothing else came close. All the things that we want to say are stressing kids out are way down the list. This is true whether you're looking at younger children or whether you're looking at teenagers. We just don't want to acknowledge that. Every summer, the suicide rate among teenagers plummets, it goes way down. The rates of admissions to mental hospitals plummet every every summer for pediatric admissions to psychiatric hospitals. It should be obvious that school is the most uh the the biggest source of anxiety and depression for kids. And if we're going to change schools in a way to make it even more stressful, even give them less autonomy in school, make even the teachers stressed because they're all now worried about their being evaluated based on test scores, of course school is going to be more stressful than it was before, and of course we're going to see a spike in anxiety and depression. This should be obvious, but nobody wants to look at that. We bury our heads in the sand about this. We want to blame, we want to blame those evil social media companies. I don't want to defend the social media companies, but this is capitalism. This has been going on all the time. This is going to continue to go on, but this is not the cause of the increased rates of anxiety and depression. It clearly is not the cause.

How Policy Made School More Stressful

Jon @WholeParent 9:57

So just to be, I I want to just make sure that I'm understanding your point. Your research has concluded that if there is a an underlying cause, because we're seeing this only in places that have experienced the same types of educational reforms, the way in which we are doing school is what is causing the increased rates of suicidality, anxiety, depression among young people. Right, exactly. So who is I I I don't want to I am I come from a restorative perspective. I don't like blame. But who can we look to? Is this a teacher problem? Is this a parent problem? What's happening at home? The the stress that the parents are putting on kids these days? Is this an institutional problem at the national level, at the state level? Where can we uh who's who are we writing letters to? Like if this is so the underlying culprit.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

So Common Core is the end result of a chain of events initiated really way back in the Reagan administration, uh that stemmed from the view that once we had international tests, the PISA tests, and American school children were p performing more poorly on those tasks than Chinese children were. And some of the other East Asian children were. So that was the initial thing. So this led ultimately to uh federal legislation called No Child Left Behind, which led to some changes, but kind of mixed changes, and it was somewhat vague what schools were supposed to do. But of course, the the carrot that the government had, the federal government had, was money. So, you know, we were already at the point where schools are kind of dependent on a certain amount of federal money as well as state money going to the schools. And so there was this sort of threat that federal money is going to be held back if schools don't reform in such a way, and the state can't prove that the schools re have reformed in such a way the test scores are going up. Now, this didn't have a lot of teeth initially. It had some and it made some changes, made schools worse, uh, but it was not until um until uh into the 21st century that um that the the that the that the teeth began to t to take effect in this. So it became more and more clear the federal government really was going to hold money back uh if schools couldn't prove. And so the result of that was that a lot of states, something like 43 or 44 states out of the whole set of states of the United States, uh, created uh commissions who then met with one another to create what they called a common core. So this would be a common core across states. We will all do the same thing. We'll all have a common core, we'll have us, we'll have tests, we'll have common core tests at the end of the year, and this is what we'll use to prove ultimately to the federal government that we're improving academic learning because kids will be doing better on these tests.

Jon @WholeParent 14:23

As if like as if it's not bad enough that we have taken 20 kids and assigned all of them to learn at the exact same pace. And now we take and now we take 200 students at the whole school to learn at the exact same pace. Well, 2,000 students in the school district learn at the exact same pace. Now we're taking kids from the entire country. Yeah, and no matter what all no matter what background, no matter whether you're urban or rural or um low income or high income, we we erase all nuance and context, and we say all of you must learn at exactly age six this. All of you must learn at exactly age eight this.

Common Core And Teacher Disempowerment

SPEAKER_01 15:08

I I think the I think the worst thing that this did is it disempowered teachers. So teachers, of course, you you as you pointed out with the example of your neighbor, a lot depends on the teacher. Teachers uh are gener generally they're people who love kids. That's why they went into teaching. And many of them are very wise, many of them are responsive to the kids. But basically, what happened with Common Core is you now had administrators telling teachers they were not free to use their own judgment, they were not free to change the curriculum to fit the kids, they were not free to use their own wisdom, so teachers were were dismissed as uh serious contributors to the educational process. Teachers now are just supposed to be the people conveying the curriculum that's already determined. And so teachers were disempowered. Well, I'll tell you a quick story just to give an example of this. I have a half-sister who grew up in a different family from me, but we've been very close as adults, who has always not shared my radical views about education. She was uh teaching in middle school, very happily teaching for 22 years, loved the kids, the kids loved her. Uh in 2010, as that school uh was gearing up for Common Core, suddenly there was an assistant principal circulating from class to class every day, coming into the class to make sure that every teacher was on the same page as every other teacher who was teaching that course. On the same page, on the same exactly literally on the I I don't know exactly how literally we mean, but on at the same lesson, presumably the same, this is the lesson we do today. And she would be reprimanded. Now, what the reason she was a good teacher, see, I I think that even within the standard educational system, you can you can be a good teacher to the degree that you can engage the kids intellectually. If there's anything that promotes learning, it's intellectual engagement. Now, kids can engage themselves intellectually, they naturally do, but if you're in a class and you're studying some particular thing, the skilled teacher is the one who knows how to talk with the kids, draw out from them their thoughts and ideas, and get them intellectually engaged in whatever it is that you're talking about. That's the challenge of good teaching. You can't do that if you're following page by page a curriculum. So she might be on the particular day that the assistant administrator is coming in, she might be talking about this really interesting thing we were all talking about yesterday, and I've got some new ideas about it, and maybe you've got some new ideas. This is real education going on, right? But no, the the assistant principal who's younger than her, and this is my word, obviously stupider than her, is saying that you what you've got to do is you've got to be teaching these things. These are the things that you've got to teach, and these are the test questions they've got to be able to answer at the end of what you're teaching now. So, what happened with her? She tried to do it. She says she honestly tried to do what she was being told to do, and uh she got less and she got more and more depressed. She saw the kids were unhappy. She took a leave of absence for depression, and she said at the end of that, there's no way I can go back. No way I can go back to this. I'm not going to be in a school where I feel I'm doing more harm to the kids than good. And and she resigned. We she was not, you know, if she could stick it out for three or four more years, she would be eligible for a full pension. But she said, I can't stick it out for that. I can't do it. I've heard from lots of other teachers the same story. They the best teachers left because they were not being respected for who they are. They were being told you're you're just a cog in this system that comes from higher up than you.

Jon @WholeParent 19:30

Yeah. And that's I think that's the nuance that I always want to add to this conversation is whenever I have criticisms of the school system, whenever I have criticisms of the curriculum systems that we're offering, those are fundamentally not uh c criticisms of teachers.

SPEAKER_02 19:47

Right.

Jon @WholeParent 19:47

Those are criticisms, and in fact, teachers are the until recently, and I have also experienced that many of the best teachers have walked away to homeschool their own kids and uh and often in certain cases. Many of the best teachers were the ones who were able to go beyond the curriculum in my own public school education, K through 12 public school education, which by the way, I graduated in 2010 from high school, which surprises many of my listeners because I'm pretty young. But that means that I also was, I am in the target demographic in many ways that that Jonathan was talking about in his book about the anxious generation. I I was raised in that. I graduated in the in the in the year, like I overlapped my whole college education was during the time that he's talking about. The teachers that I experienced and the positive experience that I had in public school education was when teachers put down the curriculum and said, let's let's go on this journey together. And as I've gone on to then get my master's degree and my PhD, I have found that the the less curriculum is involved in the whatever discipline I'm I'm working in, the higher my grades are. So if I am a very intellectually, you know, stim I I I am individually intellectually stimulated. And many of much of this is that I had essentially a homeschool teacher who lived next door to me who was helping to raise me with my parents, but uh who who inspired my curiosity and if I ever had a question, dragged me to the library. Um but the you know, in many ways, the it is uh interesting that in my own experience, the harder the academics have gotten, the better I've done. And it's not because I was you know smarter, it was uh because I was not being taught the common core version of that. Uh

Let Grow Tensions And Brain Claims

Jon @WholeParent 21:37

I at risk of of stirring the pot too much, you mentioned uh in the past, in the earlier in the conversation, about all of these positive associations with Lenore Scenezi and how she's helped you in the school reform movement. Lenore Scanese, for people who may not be aware, was a co author effectively on The Anxious Generation. So how do you square that where you have this? Person who's really working with you a lot, but who also is deeply involved, wrote the foreword for, and then helped write the the latter chapters of uh the a book that you are now uh criticizing in many ways.

SPEAKER_01 22:13

Yeah, this is uh this is a problem. I f I feel awkward about this. Um I was uh I I'm still a very good friend of Lenore. I was on the I was one of the founding members with her and with Jonathan Haid of the Let Grow Organization. I was on the board of directors with them. When the Anxious Generation came out, and I was very clear uh about why I believed that what Jonathan Hyde was presenting is the opposite of the let grow uh philosophy. This is he's talking there about children's brains not being capable of making reasonable decisions. Uh somehow he thinks they're capable of making reasonable decisions outdoors, but they're not capable online of doing it. And and he even talks about they don't have mature enough brains. And I this uh this boils my blood when people do this. They used to do this about women, they used to do this about African Americans. Any group you want to discriminate against, you point to some brain difference as the reason for doing so. So I was angry about the book. I expressed my anger about the book. I I expressed this to Jonathan Hyde. I said, there's no way I can support this before he published the book. He shared the manuscript, hoping I would endorse it, and I told him why I wouldn't, couldn't possibly. So Lenore, frankly, is caught in the middle between us. Uh she likes both of us. She did write that. She, like most people who haven't delved into the research, which she hasn't, most like most people, you know, you look around, you see all these kids looking down on their smartphones, just like you see adults looking down on their smartphones, and you think, well, that can't be good. You know, so you just think that can't be good. That must be inhibiting their real-world interactions and so on and so forth. So you have this intuitive belief in that. Jonathan Haidt had that intuitive belief, and then he hired somebody to try to find some data that seemed to support that intuitive belief, and wrote a book based on that. Lenore has never looked into the literature on it. You know, she tells me that when I talk to her, when I explain what I like what I explain to you, she's agrees with me, but then she still is not willing to say she she kind of justifies it in one way or another, like it can't hurt for kids to get off of social media. And I think it can hurt. But uh so we disagree on this. I still have a lot of respect for Lenore. We're still friends, and I still work for those I still work for the Let Grow. I think that I've prevented Let Grow as an organization from putting on their website a sort of anti technology message. Um yeah.

Jon @WholeParent 25:24

So just to play devil's advocate for a moment, I think if there's ever a case where I find myself, I've been critical I in many ways I find myself stuck in the middle on that book too. Not that I have any relationship with the people who wrote it or or uh, you know, I was I I reached out to interview Jonathan um when when he the before the book came out. Uh uh and and I had heard an interview with him and I said, you know, would you like to do this? And he said he had his assistant email back and say, no thanks. So I have no relationship whatsoever. But uh the thing that I will say is that that I found myself stuck in the middle on that book because so much of the stuff that he's talking about with free and independent and autonomous play I agree with. And then he goes into technology stuff, which I had not delved into the research, but the research was not was not convincing to me as a person who understands how to research. So even though I hadn't gone through the the process of trying to disprove it, I just said this does not you you've presented two fundamental claims. Kids need more free and freedom and autonomy and time outside, to which I firmly agree. Um then your technology claims were not, in my view, very supported by any empirical data. The thing that I would play devil's advocate on is if I do see a fundamental harm in technology, it is an opportunity cost. Kids tend to spend so much time online, we have seen, that they don't spend as much time doing many of the things that you and I are advocating for. Freedom, uh group dynamic play, going to the park and and playing with friends. And the i it is not that technology has to do that, but um that technology stands a chance at being in the way of that. Would you what would you say to that when when there is a criticism of the opportunity cost?

SPEAKER_01 27:16

So what people don't realize is that when you actually do the studies, the kids who are on social media and who have smartphones controlling for other factors are also out in the real world, have more real world friends than those who have been deprived of those things. This is the this is the empirical observation. The reason that kids are not outdoors playing with one another, bonding with one another, is because they're not allowed to be. They're on the smartphones and on social media more than they might want to be because that's the only way they can get together with their friends. This was shown some years ago in a study uh uh in a s in a study, I'm trying to think of the name. Uh last name is Boyd. A woman who did this initially as a doctor dissertation, then wrote a book on it. She interviewed um teenagers across the country about why they're on social media so much. And the answer is as opposed to why aren't you just getting together in reality and pr in the physical world. And the answer she got over and over and over again is we would much prefer to get together in the physical world, but we can't. Either I'm not allowed outside, uh or my friend is not allowed outside. Or our schedules are so busy that we can't find any opportunity. We're all being so plugged into so many uh adult-directed

Opportunity Cost And The Social Lifeline

SPEAKER_01 28:55

activities, you know. So we don't have the freedom to get together. To the degree that we do get together, we use our phones to make appointments to get together, you know. This is why kids who are on it are getting together in reality more than those who are not. So we had already stopped children. This is not this is what Jonathan Hyde doesn't acknowledge. We had already largely prevented kids from playing independently of adults in the physical world. Teenagers in particular need, want, and need to get together with one another without parents in their face. You know, that's part of being a teenager. Teenagers have always hung out together, but now we're not allowing them to do so. Even if parents are allowing them out, there's almost no place they can go anymore. They used to hang out in shopping malls. Now the shopping mall security guards are not allowing them there to hang out there, right? They're being a driven.

Jon @WholeParent 29:54

My local mall just banned all kids under the age of 18 on supervised.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

And you know, imagine if they did that with any other demographic group. How would we feel about that? You know, so we are purely as a society discriminating against them. So they found this other way that they can get together, and now we want to take that away from them too. You know, this is cruel. This is absolutely cruel, the what how we're depriving teenagers. To believe that by taking those phones away and social media, that that's somehow going to enable them to get outdoors and really play without adults in their face all the time. No, it's not going to solve that problem. That problem was already present before we had that technology.

Jon @WholeParent 30:40

What is your hope as we conclude? This is my last question for you for restoring childhood. If you can look forward into the future and a year after the book is published, what's what's your goal? Obviously, uh the many of the conclusions, it's it's going the the ball has already started to s to roll on many of the things that you're trying to blow the whistle on. What what do you want for this book?

SPEAKER_01 31:05

So there's so there's no way I can answer this in a minute or two, but let me say that the last and by far the largest chapter of the new book is about all of the things that we need to do to restore childhood, to restore normal childhood, which means an a childhood where children are free to play and explore without adults controlling them all the time, where child children can learn to be independent, can learn to solve their own problems, can learn how to get along with peers without adults um managing them. This is what the purpose of childhood is, really. The purpose of juvenile period for all mammals is to learn how to become independent of parents. And we're not allowing children to do that. So in that chapter, I have I have sections on what every what parents can do, what schools can do, what the medical establishment can do, what libraries can do, what town city planners can do, uh, what recreation uh uh committees in in towns can do. Uh all s sorts of things that can be done to renew the possibility for children to get together with other children to play and explore without being managed by adults. And there's just a lot of things that all of us can do. At the very end of the book, I I I I put uh a link to my website where there'll be a page where I'll be asking readers to tell me what they're doing to help restore childhood at whatever level they're talking about, whether they're doing it as a parent, whether they're doing it as a teacher, whether they're doing it as a librarian, a town planner, whatever. Whatever, what are you doing to make it more possible for children to be free to do what children are biologically designed to do?

Jon @WholeParent 33:11

I love that. I love it. What can we do? For those uh looking to find more, what is your website? Where can we get in touch with you? Tell us about your Substack before we are uh out of time.

SPEAKER_01 33:24

It's easy, it's easy to find my website, just petergray.org. And um I do a substack called uh Playmakes is Human, and you can easily find that. You can just Google Playmakes is Human. I've got now by now about 140 letters on that that I call them, which are essays kind of on all of the themes that we've been talking about here, plus many more. Um, so I welcome people to come to that.

Jon @WholeParent 33:50

Awesome. Links to those will be down below in the show notes or description, depending on whether you're watching or listening to this, as well as a link to pre-order restoring childhood. Thank you so much for being on the Whole Parent Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 34:03

Thank you, John. It's been a pleasure.

A Practical Plan To Restore Childhood

Jon @WholeParent 34:11

Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Whole Parent Podcast. I hope it was worth the time that you gave it today. I hope you learned something or were challenged, or maybe it just made you smile. If it did, there's a couple of things that you can do that would really, really help me out. The first one is to go right now and subscribe to my channel at Whole Parent on YouTube. YouTube is getting full, unabridged versions of every podcast episode ad-free right now. I am really trying to get people over there because I have so much awesome YouTube content planned and I have such a small following over there. So if you want to get the best of Whole Parent, hop over to YouTube. There's awesome stuff there, it's going to absolutely change your life. The second thing that you can do is actually go to the link in the description. You can find YouTube there as well, but find the link for the Parent Lab. It's my exclusive community where I do group coaching. I have a whole course library there full of amazing educational resources for parents. It is a subscription model where you gain access for a low monthly fee. Go ahead, check out the Parent Lab. There are so many amazing things in the Parent Lab. And if you want to grow in your parenting, it's the best way to do that. The third thing that you can do, and it probably costs you the most because it costs you vulnerability, is to share this episode or this podcast in general with people in your life. There are parents in your life who are struggling. There are parents in your life who could use this in their life. And we know that the number one way that we can get more people to listen and walk and follow along with the podcast is by personal referral. People want to know what you're listening to. They want to know what's helping you to parent more effectively. And so if you can do that, find somebody in your life who needs this podcast and send it to them. I would be so, so, so appreciative. Thank you again so much for your time. You can find links to everything that we talked about in the episode, including my books, Punishment Free Parenting, and Set My Feelings Free down below. And I'll see you next time.