Cheating on my Readers

A reading of my recent blog post on 'After Babel' - Jonathn Haidt's team's publication sharing resaerch and data around his book 'The Anxious Generation'.

Entitled: A Mission for Businesses and Entrepreneurs: Help Bring Back Childhood

When entrepreneurs hear about problems, they see opportunities. This is what I love about the entrepreneurial sectors I’ve spent my career in—the optimism, energy, problem-solving, and value-creation that abound. At the other end of the business spectrum, corporations are increasingly recognizing their societal responsibilities (CSR) and embracing sustainability and social purpose (albeit with ideological tripwires everywhere). 

Given the huge challenges described in The Anxious Generation—the multi-national youth mental health crisis, a generation of kids deprived of real-world independence, and an oversaturation of screens and personal devices—we need both this creative optimism and corporate conscience channeled towards solutions.  

My goal in this essay is to encourage entrepreneurs—both social and for-profit—to see this challenge as a meaningful market opportunity. Millions of parents around the world are mobilizing and clamoring for solutions as their concerns for their children grow. They’re increasingly recognizing the emptiness and negativity of their own digital habits, too. There is a nostalgic hunger in the air for less frenetic, polarized, and superficial times, which means that there's a market for in-real-life (‘IRL’) memory-making and businesses to be built around it. 

The two biggest entrepreneurial gaps are in developing IRL solutions to tackle norm #4 from The Anxious Generation––more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world––and in creating safer technology tools for young people.  In other words, we need more places for young people to practice and enjoy independence, and we need better  technology that will let young people use their devices as tools (like a Swiss army knife), without getting exploited through those devices by companies that are trying to control and addict them. 

Let’s zoom in on some of the opportunities: 

Opportunity 1: IRL Solutions

To remind kids that the physical world is more meaningful and thrilling than the virtual one, we need to create more compelling spaces and opportunities that encourage independence.  Only with greater access to these spaces will cultural norms shift, prompting parents to give their children more independence.

Teens these days are sadly ‘non-grata’ in many public spaces. With downtown shopping areas and malls in decline across many Western nations, ‘teenism’ (my term) has emerged as a phenomenon. Teens are often unwelcome, barred from entering stores or shopping areas in groups, and left to mill around in dingy parks or communal street areas. Interestingly, McDonald’s has capitalized on this trend with a clever ad campaign in the UK that shows how it has become the teen meeting place of choice. But surely fast-food joints can’t be the only safe public spaces for teens? It certainly doesn’t bode well for their health if so.

Video. McDonald’s ‘Make it Yours’ teenager ad campaign.

There’s a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to create and expand spaces and organized opportunities for IRL hangouts, entertainment, skills-building, and memory-making.  

There are ambitious commercial entrants