A Mission for Businesses and Entrepreneurs: Help Bring Back Childhood

Market forces got us into this mess, and market forces can help us escape

Introduction from Jon Haidt:

When I moved from a psychology department (at the University of Virginia) to a business school (at NYU-Stern) in 2011, it felt like moving to another country, with different norms and values, and with a somewhat different language. One of the most common phrases I heard was “creating value.” It took me a while to realize that this was not just some business buzzword; it was the fundamental mission or “telos” of business, akin to “finding truth” in most other parts of the university. Two centuries of entrepreneurs “creating value” is what drives those graphs showing that human prosperity stagnated for thousands of years before suddenly shooting upward in the early 19th century. It is what has driven down global levels of extreme poverty into single digits, for the first time in human history. 

I quickly came to appreciate the way that entrepreneurs think. They’re forever scanning the world looking for holes, unmet needs, missing products and services. Successful entrepreneurs are the first people who can see what the world needs and then mobilize people, resources, and capital to meet those needs. 

Jess Butcher is a role model for young entrepreneurs. She has founded two successful tech companies and invested in many others. She blogs about a range of societal trends from modern feminism to tech-addiction and societal polarization She currently serves on the board of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (the government regulator for the UK Equality Act) and has been recognized on Fortune magazine’s list of Most Powerful Female Entrepreneurs.

I first connected with Jess when she reached out to me about my work on The Coddling of the American Mind in 2021. I finally got to meet her when I was in London in April. We had a quintessentially English breakfast while sharing concerns about what was happening to children (she has three young ones), and what needs to be done to change childhood on a mass scale (that is, to undo the mass-scale change that happened in the last 12 years… driven by other entrepreneurs). Jess amazed me with her projects, which include an IRL Pledge community for innovators and individuals and a book written with her son, for pre-teens about the risks of too much screen time and smartphones (tentatively titled ‘How to Avoid the Zombie Apocalypse). She also amazed me with her vision: she has also been thinking about what the world needs in order to roll back the phone based childhood. If tens of millions of parents around the world are not happy with the tech that their children are using, then there is a huge unmet need that entrepreneurs can address. If tens of millions of parents around the world agree that they should give their teens more independence, yet there is no place for the kids to go, then there is a huge need which entrepreneurs can address. 

Some already are. Jess showed me a video about The Den — a for-profit company in the UK that offers teens a safe and interesting place to hang out, with minimal adult supervision. She’ll say more about it below. We clearly need something like this in the U.S.. At the end of the breakfast I realized that we need to bring entrepreneurs into the movement, so I invited Jess to write a post for After Babel. 

Millions of parents around the world are joining the mission to roll back the phone-based childhood. So are teachers, school administrators, legislators, and many members of Gen Z. Everyone’s efforts will be multiplied if we join forces with entrepreneurs who bring the power and scale of business to help us solve our collective action problems. 

— Jon

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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 to this market, such as ‘The Den’— a membership-based, phone-free youth club brand launching in the UK that aims to scale nationally and then internationally, given the right medium- to long-term investors. These beautifully designed venues for 13- to 18-year-olds feature event calendars, open spaces, DJ decks, cafe-areas, games, shuffleboards, and critically… limited supervision. 

Video. Enjoy The Den’s fabulous vision.

Fabrik, though targeted at adults, is another simple example in the U.S. of creating IRL community hangout spaces.

Grassroots sports, drama, and hobby clubs provide fantastic opportunities for IRL play, socializing, and skills-building. There’s no happier sight for me than standing on the sidelines of my 8-year-old daughters’ Saturday morning football match, while another 10 fiercely competitive games rage noisily on the surrounding pitches, with girls aged 6 to 18 cheering each other on and erupting in delight at every goal. (Interestingly, it’s usually the parents who bring the tone down). 

Unfortunately, many of these organized clubs are struggling. They lack funding, the ability to professionalize, and the resources to scale. They often scrape by on local sponsorship and volunteer support. The Scout and Girl Guide movements—which provide a strong antidote to phone-based childhood—have also seen declining membership over recent decades. Boy Scout membership in the U.S., for instance, has dropped from 4 million in the 1980s to around 1 million today. More needs to be done to reinvigorate these movements and promote their huge, increasing value in modern society. Their resurgence and greater availability will help parents to slacken their reins on children, restore trust, and renormalize unsupervised neighborhood play.   

The lack of provision for community spaces and association rests also with government cuts to community spending (at least in the UK). For example, youth club funding in the UK has been cut by £1 billion (70%) over the last 10 years. However, the investment world is also culpable. Longer-term, slower-growth bricks-and-mortar investments don’t attract the same scale of funding as shiny, tech solutions that promise 100x returns and attract angel and venture capital. While the decline of the high street (or main street) isn’t entirely due to investor short-termism or greed (Amazon and China share much of the blame), it’s certainly a factor. Brands that sink millions into social media advertising are also exacerbating the problem, contributing to the addictiveness and resulting anxiety these platforms fuel while filling the social media companies’ coffers

Corporations and global consumer brands could step in here, offering both employee volunteers and branded sponsorship to fuel successful community initiatives. Burberry, Lego and UBS have done this with the growing chain of Onside Youth Zones in the UK—a sophisticated charity model that harnesses local, public and private sector partnerships to provide valuable youth spaces in underserved communities. With corporate investment and support to professionalize operations, these success stories could be scaled significantly. We don’t necessarily need to wait for governments to dip into overstretched tax revenues. These initiatives would also directly alleviate many of the social inequalities that DEI initiatives have sought (with limited success) to address. 

With so many retail units currently vacant and community facilities—from churches to community centers—underutilized, not to mention the school grounds that lie vacant after hours, are there franchising or ‘pop-up’ opportunities to be exploited? Spaces for dances, musical performances, art collaborations, comedy, theater, or debates? Opportunities for young people to ‘do’—to get together, play, and learn during their free time—rather than wasting hours watching what online strangers ‘do’.  Perhaps partnerships could be established between property owners and companies, local associations or parent groups to repurpose such spaces for youth initiatives? 

An ‘IRL Pledge’ from corporations to better support the in-real-life lives of employees and their communities could combine financial sponsorship for local projects with employee volunteer commitments. This would drive the replication and expansion of successful programs. ‘Big Brothers, Big Sisters’ is yet another example, providing not only strong role models for disadvantaged children, but also fostering valuable social mixing across our ever-widening societal divides. 

But as we improve our real world solutions, we also need to innovate around technology and online solutions.  

Opportunity 2: Healthier Tech Tools for the Young

Successful solutions will require a combination of hardware, software, product design, branding, and business-building expertise. Critically, these experts must not have a vested interest in recruiting young people into the ‘attention economy’ — a challenge in itself when Big Tech offers such deep incentives (free lunches and bean-bag filled offices) to attract the best of the best. 

The ‘opposition’ is powerful, with billions of dollars of attention economy revenue at risk from restricting social media access to the 95% of teens (40 million the U.S. alone) who currently have smartphones and spend an average of seven hours a day on social media platforms. The main stakeholders in the attention economy are some of the largest, most influential companies in the world, and they are investing millions in lobbying efforts to protect this revenue and their customer acquisition funnel.

But the plucky innovators persist. A growing selection of mobile technologies exists at the other end of the spectrum from the supercomputer ‘phones’—such as simple, non-internet-enabled phones (e.g. Nokia/ HMD), smartwatch trackers, and app blockers—but there are still too few options between these two. Restricting first phones to simple text/call devices, which are unfortunately labeled as ‘dumb’, risks being perceived as punishment to any tween or teen looking enviously at the smartphones in their peers’ hands. While the U.S. has seen the most innovation along the spectrum (with the welcome entry of companies like Light Phone, Gabb, Unpluq and Bark), much more is needed. (I maintain a list of  recommendations here)

Just as children develop rapidly with each year, we need a wider range of tech solutions that can adapt and evolve in healthy ways alongside them. These devices should gradually introduce useful “Swiss Army knife” functionalities—such as maps, payments, calendar-management, Wikipedia access and administrative support apps—while continuing to restrict open-access to the web, social-media, and fast-dopamine distractions for as long as possible, as young brains are maturing and wiring up.

While many big tech companies remain locked into ‘a race to the bottom of the brainstem,’ (as Tristan Harris points out,  in Chapter 10 of The Anxious Generation), some good work is being done. For example, Tristan Harris’s work with ‘The Center for Humane Technology’, the ‘Age Appropriate Design Code’ enacted in the UK in 2020, and increasing attention to raising the age of internet adulthood to 14 or 16, and then enforcing it (as several governments in Australia are now discussing). 

It’s all easier said than done. A phone with internet and data access—required for much of the ‘good’ Swiss-Army knife functionalities—is typically also a device with a browser, enabling access to infinite scroll applications, and there is little agreement as to where to draw the line. Maps? Yes. Payments? Yes. WhatsApp? Not sure. Even the addition of a front camera can be controversial in parenting discussion groups: disliked for the narcissistic ‘selfie’ culture it encourages, but valued for FaceTiming family members. Parental control functionalities would need to expand to include internet-wide age checks embedded within operating systems, applied across the entire web, not just to specific websites. (More modest device based verification methods are possible too.) Arguably, we should build ‘up’ from the simple text/call phones, allowing parents to opt into additional functionality carefully, rather than building ‘down’ from a smart device and requiring opt-outs from specific sites or services, which can feel like a game of whack-a-mole for even the most vigilant parents. 

I know of many exciting initiatives under development and would love to connect with all such innovators to bring together the best options as they come to market. 

Calling All Corporations, Entrepreneurs, Philanthropists and Investors

While some of these ideas might fall more under philanthropy than ‘investment,’ their impact could be both swift and significant. Yes, some stakeholders might see dollar signs (or reputational advantage), but so what if their ideas and initiatives provide healthier alternatives or make our lives easier, less stressful, or more delightful? If entrepreneurs are prepared to put in the work and take the risks inherent in new ventures, or if corporations are willing to invest their CSR budgets and manpower in local initiatives, then they deserve to reap the rewards. 

Let’s create new community-focused models for entrepreneurship and find new, thoughtful entrepreneurs for the young to look up to.  Role models who inspire the young to invent and create, and build a better future. 

Come on, business community. Come on, innovators. Let’s get to work. Entrepreneurship is the starter motor of economic growth, and corporate scale is the engine that drives new behavioral habits and norms. Those new habits and norms can be pernicious, or they can be helpful. It’s up to us.

Our failing communities—and our young people—need us. 

Please reach out if you have scaleable ideas or solutions you’d like to share or for the potential to connect with like-minded problem-solvers and backers. I am hoping to  create a network of innovators and capital to further the fortunes of the most promising innovations. hello@irlpledge.com