2024-12-15
1 小时 2 分钟Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet.
I'm producer Leila Ishmael.
Our third pick of the year is an event we staged in April with best selling author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.
He is the author of numerous books including the Righteous Mind and the Coddling of the American Mind.
He was live on stage earlier this year to talk about his latest book, the Anxious how the Great Rewir of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, which is an urgent investigation into the crisis of youth mental health today.
Joining him to discuss it all is BBC journalist and broadcaster Sarah Montagu.
Thank you so much and what a treat to be here now.
Almost everywhere you turn at the moment, you will see, hear, read discussions about whether we should be getting our children off social media and off phones.
Much of it of course, driven by this man.
His book the Anxious Generation has been on the New York Times best seller list for the past four weeks.
He argues that a whole generation has been damaged by growing up with unrestricted access to social media and to an adult online world, but also by being so overprotected and over parented that it's a generation of young adults unable to cope with the rigors of normal life.
His book, the Anxious how the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness may be doing so well because he is tapping into something in society, a concern, a very widely held belief among parents that there is something going wrong.
He is very much the man of the moment.
He is, of course, Jonathan Haidt.
And now listen, I should explain to both our online audience and to those of you here in the room, I'm hogging things for almost the next hour.
After that though, you will get your chance.
And I know if you're online you will be able to send some questions in which I'll get through here to here and we'll be able to get a discussion going in the room as well.
But as I say, I'm kicking things off now, Jonathan.
I mean, the response in the room when you walk on stage, it's just an illustration in a way of what you're tapping into.
But I was astonished to read that actually you didn't intend to read this book.