October 20, 2026 - Unrest Setting Europe's Streets Ablaze

Yesterday on SiriusXM I spoke with Peter Gray, the Boston College research psychologist whose new book is Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety. I want to explain why that conversation matters to me.

For years I have given a speech around the country about what I call the Mingle Project. My argument is that we’ve lost our shared experiences. We sort ourselves by technology, we spend less time with one another, and polarization is a symptom of that disconnect, not its cause. The smartphone has always been a central part of that speech, and much of my thinking on it came from Jean Twenge. Her book iGen was among the first to document what was happening to kids born after the mid-1990s: they spent less time with friends in person, got driver’s licenses later, and stayed home. Her data on the turn around 2012 is hard to ignore. She has been a clear, early and courageous voice on this subject, and I’ve quoted her often.

Then I read Gray’s book, and it has opened my mind. Gray agrees that kids are in trouble. He argues the decline started long before the iPhone. Starting in the 1950s, children steadily lost free play and independence, and teen distress rose decade after decade. He says the early internet actually gave kids a space adults didn’t control, and things improved for a time. The more recent decline, in his view, tracks a school regime of more testing, less recess and more pressure.

His most provocative evidence: emergency-room visits by young people for suicidal thoughts drop sharply in summer and spike when school is in session. Kids have their phones in July too.

I’m not ready to tell you the phones don’t matter. Twenge’s evidence is substantial, and Gray’s case has gaps of its own. But I’ve come to think it may not be the smartphones and social media alone. And whichever it is, the remedy points toward what I’ve been preaching: kids, like the rest of us, need more time together, unsupervised and face to face. They need to mingle.

I’ll be pairing Gray and Twenge for an upcoming episode of Can We Agree? For now, I want your view.

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