Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul participated in a Concordia Summit Fireside Chat on Youth Mental Health in New York City.

Penny Abeywardena: Good afternoon. So, we're going to talk about something that really should be on the top of minds for all of us, and that is the many aspects of phones and schools to explore today. And there is no one better to reflect on this than our mom-Governor, Governor Hochul.

So there are two massive clusters of changing norms colliding over this past decade. Parents driven a lot by anxiety and concerns have been buying smartphones for their kids. How do I keep my kids safe in school? With mental health challenges and bullying, how can I make sure my kid is okay during the day?

And then, can I ensure my kid is keeping up with the technology? And then let's not forget that the smartphone and video game and social media industries have focused on maximizing and monetizing screen time. So now these trends are complex and interdependent, but there is leadership that is going to help address this. And so it is a pleasure to be in conversation with Governor Hochul on this.

Now, I want to know what your aha moment is, and I do think this is a moment to reflect on personal experience. We were just talking backstage, I have an eight-year-old in the public school system here in New York City. This became a big issue over the last few weeks. And I was properly shocked because he's eight. And so this is something that quite honestly all of us need to be thinking about. And so, Governor Hochul, through your personal experiences or insights, can you tell us what influenced you to really focus on this issue from a legislative perspective?

Governor Hochul: Thank you, Penny, and for Concordia for elevating this issue. I was here last year talking about climate change, and I'm always happy to talk about that. I can give you the speech I gave a few hours ago. But this is something a year ago I would not have thought we'd be talking about here. But I am so happy that this has finally taken hold because as a mom, a parent, you are hardwired to protect your children. Full stop. You wake up in the morning, start thinking about them when they're little, late at night when they're out with their friends you don't sleep until they're back home. That’s how we are. And as the Governor of New York, my number one job also has to be to protect all New Yorkers.

So, you asked what my aha moment was. About a year and a half ago, I started convening mental health roundtables because we knew we were starting to see the signs that young people in particular had not fully emerged from the pandemic. They are still stressed out. The statistics on suicide, especially for teenage girls contemplating suicide, the depression, the anxiety, it was off the charts. So, I started having meetings and gathering kids and talking all over the state, and there was one not that long ago where the young woman – we started talking about the impact of social media and how it really takes hold of them. They're held captive to these algorithms that are designed to bombard them with information that they will like because it's taking personal information about them and turning it around and pulling them in deeper and deeper.

And I said to this young woman – she was telling me how “I'm getting bullied during the day and all these social media and everybody's doing this and I'm missing out and I have FOMO,” I said, “What do you want us to do?” She goes, “You have to save us from ourselves.” And that was my aha moment, when I realized it's hard for parents to say you're going to be the only teenager in the school without a cell phone, it's hard for the school district to take it on and say, “We're going to be the heavies,” teachers have enough on their plates, they don't have to be the enforcers. And I realized this calls for government intervention, and I'm not afraid to take on the fights, especially when we're fighting for our kids' mental health.

That was when I said, “Let's find out what we can do to control these social media companies,” and we can talk about our nation-leading legislation, but also I'm right now developing a policy that's going to say, “Bell to bell, full school day, phones should not be in the hands of children because they're being denied the chance to learn, the teachers are frustrated that they're not paying attention anymore, but also it has taken them to negative places, and it's horrible for their mental health.”

Penny Abeywardena: It really is. And different levels at different ages and grades, the impact is even more optimized, right?” Now, it would be great if you could talk about the significance of the first-in-the-nation law you signed to combat addictive social media feeds. And I will say, I hope many of you realize this, Instagram changed their policy last week, and I'm assuming it's because they're seeing the serious movement that's coming from around the country, led by –

Governor Hochul: Well, that's true. In the era of – waiting for industries to self-regulate in the best interest of consumers is probably never going to happen. So, I'm not holding my breath. We encourage the tech companies, social media companies to work with us. Obviously, you're always threatened by lawsuits. And I said, first I have a lot of lawyers, I can hire any lawyer in the state I want so bring it on. But I'd rather not. I said, “Why don't you get out of the courtroom and come into my conference room and help devise solutions, because you know what you're doing. You know exactly what you're doing. You design these algorithms that'll capture all this personal data about any age, a 10-year-old, 12-year-old, 15-year-old,” and they're using it to structure messaging around your interests.

We worked with them, they resisted, they built a campaign against us, they spent a lot of money. And I was able to work with our Attorney General, Tish James, here in New York, and legislators, and work with a coalition of parents and Common Sense Media, and formed a coalition where we were able to fight back. And our legislation – which we encourage every other state to adopt, I hear California's looking at this now – it basically says a couple of things: one, is you cannot collect private data about anyone under the age of 18. You can't collect it, you can't sell it. You cannot monetize our children's mental health any longer, you're barred from that. Secondly, you are forbidden, barred from being able to target young people with algorithms designed based on their tastes.

Now, a young person is not prohibited from going to your sites. They can talk, they can go to all kinds of chat rooms, they can talk to their friends, they can do whatever they want. But you cannot target them. And that was a heavy lift for them, and it's a heavy lift to get through in legislation, but we did it. I just signed it into law a few months ago, and I'm really proud of it.

We're working on the regulations, but I always think about the fact that they told us, “Well, we have no capacity to identify who's under the age of 18. This is an impossibility.” It's like, “You're tech companies, you can do anything, figure it out.” And somehow, magically, Instagram announced last week, they figured it out. I have immense faith in their ability to solve problems even if it's against their self-interest.

Penny Abeywardena: And that's really bringing everybody to the table. When we think about the efficacy of what you've been able to do, it really came down to really strategic collaborations. Can you talk about how you worked not only with parents and teachers, but unions? We talked about authorities and the police; I’d just be curious how everybody's playing a part in all of this?

Governor Hochul: That's a great question because you can't go into these battles alone, right? You have to have allies as you march into war. And here's what we needed to have. First of all, many parents on their own have said they know how bad it is. They've seen their children, especially if they were able to get a cell phone at age 12, 13, 14, they turn into a different person. First of all, they lose the capacity over time to have real, genuine social interactions. They don't make eye contact. They don't talk to other students. In school, the cafeteria is silent. They're silent when they're in the schoolyard. They're silent in the halls. And the school districts that – on their own – were courageous enough to ban them said they now hear children laughing, talking, even arguing, they're communicating more.

And it was stopped. It was a dead silence. It was so unnatural. So, I had to get teachers on board, that was the easiest one. 72 percent of teachers across this country say that they are tired of the distractions and their inability to communicate with students or make connections in a way that are positive relationships.

This is, outside a parent, the most influential person in their lives is a teacher. And the teacher is trying to do the best they can, and they're being thwarted. They're not learning, but they're also not making connections.

They're stunted in their growth. They're not turning into young adults eventually, over time, and ultimately adults. And we needed teachers on board, principals on board, school districts on board, and I said in all my – I did roundtables all over the state with all these parties at the table. I said, “I'll be the heavy, just blame me, say, ‘that mean Governor made us do this,’ I mean I'll take that on.” Because as a mom, I know how important this is and it would have helped me enormously to tell my kids, “I would have let you have the cell phones in school, but hey, it's the law, I can't let you do that. I still love you and I'd let you do anything else.”

It's about relationships, the ability to say no, which I have no trouble saying to my kids, but some do. But I also need law enforcement, and this is interesting, because my kids were in middle school during Columbine, the very high-profile mass shooting, and you still say the word ‘Columbine,’ I get chills because I know what it did to my sense of security. And we have so many other cases since then, I just spoke about Uvalde at another forum.

So I thought, I have to think about how this affects parents' sense of security when they say goodbye to their most precious little child, whether it's kindergarten or 12th grade. I talked to law enforcement, what they said was so striking. If there is a crisis on campus or in the schoolyard, in the school, a mass shooting, worst case scenario, the last thing you want children to be doing, the last thing, is looking at their cell phone, texting mom and dad, sending messages, maybe videoing because they want to be the one who captures this. First of all, you're telegraphing where you are, okay? You'll hear this. Also, the police said to me the place their attention has to be is not on their smartphone, it has to be on the front of the classroom where the teacher is going to lead them to safety.

When I heard that, it was like the clouds parted. I said, that's the argument for parents. They need to hear that. So we're not through yet. I've proposed this and loosely I said I'm going to be developing a policy. I will be working with these same groups I just mentioned. Everybody to let them understand how important this is and it's also when I think about employers in my state, I want to be able to let them know that when young people emerge from their educational process, they'll be fully functioning adults who have social interaction skills, who'll be able to have the creative collisions and talk to someone else, a colleague, and work in teams and strategize together and really be more productive instead of someone who's, again, their existence for a number of years has just been with the virtual world.

And I can't control what happens after school. Like my nieces are on all night long. I said, who are they talking to all night long? Isn't anybody sleeping? And so they're not, because they're talking to kids on the other side of the world, literally. So we also say no notifications, and parents have the ability to turn it off. Sorry, kids, you can't have it on from midnight until 6 a.m. I think Instagram actually said 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., which I thought was extraordinary. So parents are being empowered. So now we have to educate the parents. This is what it looks like, this is how you handle it, and when your teenager gets, tries to get around it, this is how you undo what they did. We have to help the parents get through this as well, but ultimately, imagine a world where this never happened. We're not dealing with these high rates of depression and anxiety in young people and the bullying that goes on in schools.

One mom said her husband has to leave work every day to be there at the end of the day when the child comes home from school because he gets picked on so badly on his own cell phone, watching it all day long, people are saying that he's about to commit suicide and they want to keep an eye on him.

If that doesn't hit you as a parent – what is happening? But a world where we say, no cell phones, we just go back to the way it was when we were younger.

Penny Abeywardena: Yeah.

Governor Hochul: And if you need to – forget your lunch or you need to figure out how you're getting home at the end of the day, guess what? There's phones in the office. It's a radical idea. Go down the hall, talk to your counselor, talk to your principal, can I use the phone?

Penny Abeywardena: Talk to someone.

Governor Hochul: And maybe forget your lunch and you go hungry; you won't do it the next day. That's called learning about life, right? Consequences. So it's, that's how I was raised. I don't know. Maybe I'm old school, but I want to save our kids. It's this important. I have to work on this intensely to at least save our state's kids and hopefully other states will follow. And a number have, there have been other states that have done it.

Penny Abeywardena: I was curious what kind of advice you would give to other state lawmakers because we talk about these coalitions as groups, but they're important constituents who vote. So they're concerned about making parents angry and losing that support. And I'd be curious what strategies and ideas you would offer to other state lawmakers to take this on.

Governor Hochul: Just looking at it globally, the easiest thing in the world is to do nothing. Just wait for someone else. “It's too hard.” Believe me, there's a lot of challenges in New York to be a lot easier to pass on to somebody else. And that has happened. And I'm the cleanup Governor. I have a lot of work to do to try and invest, we never invested in mental health in the state.

For example, never, no one ever talked about mental health as if it was an issue at all. I invested a billion dollars in my first budgets and said, we have to deal with everything from the lack of training for more professionals to be in the field to school-based clinics, so we can treat the kids right in schools if they have challenges to the homeless on the subways, more beds in hospitals. We looked at it holistically and we're making real progress. So my advice to them is just show some profiles and courage once in a while. Shock everybody. Do something that's a little bit difficult on the front end, but we're in the world to make a difference.

And these positions are positions of great authority, but they also hold a lot of responsibility for us. If you're not making a difference every single day when you're in a position like I am, then just stay in bed. I mean just don't even bother because your job is to make a difference. Find problems – the easy problems my brilliant staff will solve, the hardest ones are on my desk and that's what a Governor is supposed to do. It's just, and if you're not going to fight for kids, who are you wanting to fight for? That's a statement about your values.

Penny Abeywardena: And building on that. So there's a middle ground, right? There are these bags you can have in school, so the kids get their phones, they get to show up at school with their phones, but then put them in. We had an interesting conversation backstage, and I was wondering if you can share, you know, our kids are smart.

Governor Hochul: Yeah, kids are very smart. There are a few school districts in New York, Schoharie School District, up near the Capitol. They went full board, they did it a couple years ago, they said it was hard, there was a lot of resistance, parents said no, teachers didn't want to be enforcers, and now they're so glad they didn't. And people now, and they had signs in front lawns, protesting taking cell phones away from kids.

Give me a break. So I know it's coming. I know it's coming. But, these, so they have these bags, and there's all sorts of ways to do this, but there's these bags that are magnetic. Teacher watches the children put them in the bag at the beginning of the school. Only the teacher can unlock it so at the end of the school day they'll get their phone back.

No one's going to steal it. It's safe. Some kids are showing up at school, the teachers told me, with two cell phones. They lock one up in front of the teacher. Okay, kids have burner phones now? Okay, or what parent is buying their kid two cell phones? Okay? And then they use the other one all day.

The other thing I think is important for parents to know. One of the teachers, she said, “We have to deal with the integrity issues.” I said, “What's that mean?” It's a nice way of saying they're cheating. The whole world, all the answers are sitting there on their lap, and they're not learning because they don't have to. Or they run off to the lavatory with their phone, even the schools that ban it but let you have it during lunchtime or during breaks. They're looking up information that they're never going to learn properly from. And people say they're not going to learn how to use technology. What do you think they're doing the second they get home?

They have all night long they're doing that. I can't control that. That's up to parents. The last thing I'll say on this is – parents, watch what you're doing too. Kids learn from you. If you won't put down the cell phone at the dinner table, or when you're talking to them after dinner, by the time they're mid-teenagers, they don't even want to see you, so work on them before that. I believe I speak from experience. But show the kids they matter. Go to one of your meetings and leave your cell phone on your desk. The world will not fall apart. Somehow, we got to this age of 2024, surprisingly, throughout most of history, without being able to be connected and scrolling while your boss is talking to you, or while your colleagues are trying to present something. Just show basic respect to each other. Let's not forget those skills. Respect each other, put down the phone.

Penny Abeywardena: Put down, and that they're paying attention to you and what you're doing. I want to, we're about to run out of time, but you mentioned, can we just talk about the investment that you made in mental health and other educational initiatives. Can you just share some of the programs and initiatives you have coming up that essentially reinforce this legislative –

Governor Hochul: Yes. Again, one of the most significant things we're doing is the mental health services in schools. Yeah. And so we've had to ensure that we're funding workforce training for a whole new generation of more people going into the mental health professions, because I can open up a clinic in every single school. I could never staff it. I have to work with the unions and the training programs and put money behind this and training in hospitals. And so part of ours is creating a whole new generation of more healthcare workers, especially focused in this area. So that's one big area, but I would say this, we also just need services, wraparound services from the get-go. My job is to make sure that our children emerge with healthy minds and not needing a lifetime of mental health services because we didn't do our jobs when we had them in school.

Penny Abeywardena: That is a perfect conclusion. Thank you so much, Governor Hochul.

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