Assembly Select Committee on Happiness and Public Policy Outcomes

Good afternoon. Welcome to the to this hearing of the Select Committee on happiness and public policy outcomes. Thank you all for being here today, especially our panelists, many of whom drew for hours or even even flew to be here. Others are joining us virtually from thousands of miles away.

The goal of this Committee's hearing is to take a closer look at factors influencing happiness across different age demographics in California and explore different public policy recommendations designed to address barriers to happiness. For years, experts, some of whom will be testifying here today, have identified that happiness levels vary widely across different age demographics.

Their research showed that youth and seniors seemed happier than folks who are middle aged. But today, experts have noted an alarming and dramatic drop in youth happiness, one we, as legislators should be aware of and taking seriously. This is a drop that has a potential to impact other age groups as well.

Today we will hear from a very impressive group of panelists working in academia, research, advocacy and public policy. Before turning this over to my colleague, I want to go over some rules for this hearing. We will have three panelists, with each panelist allotted about five minutes for their presentations. Please try to stay within your time limit.

After each presenter is finished with their presentation, the Committee Members may ask questions. After our third panel concludes, we will provide opportunity for public comment. For those interested in public comment, please note that each person will have two minutes for their remarks. All public comment will be in person.

Now I'd like to give my colleagues an opportunity to say a few words from Santa Clarita. Santa Clarita Valley Assemblymember Schiavo.

Hello. Thank you. I know it's always a mystery, so I'm very, very happy to be here at our second Select Committee hearing, and I don't.

This is an issue that is particularly very close to my heart and something that I've talked with my daughter a lot, who's 11 and in 6th grade, about how she's seen the impacts of mental health in her class amongst students.

And I think I mentioned at the last hearing that I asked her how many kids that she thought were kind of struggling with mental health in her class, and she went down a very long list of kids who were depressed, suicidal, cutting themselves, and it was really heartbreaking. And so I'm doing a little bit in this space.

I have a homework Bill that we're trying to take some of that stress off kids lives as a part of the solution.

But very excited to hear from panelists today and appreciate everyone traveling to be here to share what you've learned what you see, and hopefully some clear solutions that we can start really moving at the policy level in Sacramento to make a difference in kids and youth lives, because we know this is a crisis that is not necessarily new, but newly getting the attention that it deserves, I think, and hopefully something that we can make a significant impact on and really make change.

So thank you for leading this charge of this Committee, which has been phenomenal, and I look forward to hearing the testimony today. Thank you.

Thanks so much. Appreciate it. And as other Members come in, we'll ask them if they'd like to say a few words as well. So let's get started with our first panel, which will be taking a look at happiness in youth and young adults.

Our first panelist is Jan de Neve, Professor of economics and Director of Wellbeing Research Center at the University of Oxford. He is also an editor of the World Happiness Report and co founder of the World Well Being Movement. Doctor Nave, thank you for joining us today.

Can you all hear me? Perfect. Well, first of all, thank you for the kind invitation, but especially I want to applaud Speaker Emeritus Rendon and Members of the Committee for, first of all, setting up this Committee and putting a focus on wellbeing and how wellbeing measures can perhaps be put at the heart of public policy.

The United States is lagging on this front relative to some other countries, and it's wonderful and heartening to see this pioneering example of this Committee, which will then hopefully inspire other states and, who knows, even the Federal Government.

If I, if we can have the next slide, please, in the space of a handful of minutes, what I'm hoping to do is to first of all remind us of how we very briefly define well being and how we measure it, which will then underpin also the data, the descriptive data I'll be sharing around California that we've done for you, which we'll be building on Gallup surveys that were done, and a very rich data set indeed.

And then finally conclude with recent trends in youth wellbeing, as we've reported on them in the World Happiness report. And deep dive a little bit for you today. Next slide, please. So, first of all, what is well being? Well, it is certainly not a new concept.

Happiness, well being and what constitutes a good life is something that is very old indeed.

The first formal studies were probably Aristotle, well over 2000 years ago, and philosophers ever since have been debating this summum bonum, the ultimate good, as it's often called, I think, one definition that we can probably rely on, especially for policy purposes is it's ultimately about how we are doing as individuals and communities and critically how that makes us feel about the way our lives are going.

So, in essence, it's quality of life as people experience it.

What's really exciting is that in the last two decades, so, well, since Aristotle, or even the pursuit of happiness and the declaration of Independence, there's now an abundance and explosion of data around the data, over the last 23 decades have developed an entire empirical science of well being.

So I again applaud all of you, because your time might be the right time to start thinking about this properly, because we could well be the right time to start thinking about these wellbeing metrics and applying well being science to policy, the outcome that the founders and many others have ultimately envisioned as the KPI, if you will, for policymakers or its North Star.

And it goes without saying that all policy areas, whether it's schooling, education, mobility, policing, you name it, all of these traditional domains, ultimately feed into quality of life as people experience it. So these data that you're about to see, serve this purpose of a North Star, a KPI for policy? Very well, I think so. Thank you.

How do we measure wellbeing? Well, there's no way around it. Ultimately, you do have to ask people whether they're large or good, and that's exactly what we do in the world happiness report. And also the data you're about to see rely on all one single question. And it's something very basic. We call it our workhorse.

It's essentially life satisfaction, or satisfaction with life as people rate it on a scale from zero to 10. In particular, the data you're about to see for California rely on a variant which is called the cantor letter of life.

For the aficionados in the room, it's essentially asking, imagine the ladder where the best possible life for you is a 10 and the worst possible life is zero. Where do you think you stand today? It's essentially life satisfaction or life evaluation on a scale from zero to 10. Thank you.

What you're seeing on the screen right now is the actual distribution to that answer. Sorry, the answer, the distribution of the answers to that question, pulsed by Gallup as part of the US poll, or known and academic world as a daily poll for over 215,000 Californians. This is your distribution. So while the average is sort of 7.9.

Sorry, 7.09 out of 10, which is slightly above the US average, the average hides a wide distribution. So, yes, there's about 20% of people who will rate their quality, sorry, nine or 10. There will also be about 20% of people who rate the quality of their lives as 543210 out of 10.

When we dig into who sits within this long tail of ill being, unhappiness, it's mostly mental health concerns, abject poverty, and those kind of situations that obviously need much more attention.

If you can just go back to the slide I was on, I do want to point out that the Gallup data of the US poll is likely the, as far as I can tell, the richest data set, but it did stop in 2018. There are more recent data sets.

They're less rich in nature, so they don't allow the slicing and dicing and the mapping that you're about to see. But every indication is that the average well being California today will be slightly lower and probably just below seven out of 10 as the US as a whole has moved in that direction.

So one obvious recommendation to this Committee that I'm hoping will be taken on or an output, would be to invest in metrics of wellbeing. And it sort of speaks for itself. And that can be done as part of official statistics or by partnering with Gallup, for example, and building on their wonderful data.

What you're seeing now is not just the distribution, but the distribution spread around California as measured by county.

So I think, and I hope this is exciting to you because you know these places better than anyone, what you're seeing here is the geographical mapping and the average level of wellbeing per county mapped in the heat map, with darker colors being higher levels of licensure and lighter less.

First thing to note is there's a lot of variation between counties in California and it runs from 6.5 to 7.9.

Just as a point of reference, the happiest county in California would essentially sit at the very top of the world happiness report, next to Finland and Denmark, whereas the lowest well being county would be placed 30 or 35th. So huge variation within the State of California, but you'll see there's also variation within cities.

If I can go to the next slide, please. Here is, if you can read and I'm happy to share and distribute is the actual ranking, if you will, a world happiness report for California alone, where the one caveat to note is that alpine county needs to be discounted because there were only 12 respondents.

It's a very sparsely populated place, but the 12 respondents do seem to be very happy. But if you take that out of contest, then you find essentially Marin county at the very top and a number of the others that you would have probably expected to be there as well, and likewise at the bottom.

So this begs the question, okay, so quality of life as people experience it around these counties is very different. Why might that be the case? And you can probably think of a number of good reasons why that are all policy relevant.

So, again, if I may emphasize, what you're seeing here is essentially the number that should be your KPI or North Star, and then reverse engineer from there to see which departments need to kick into action, whether it's housing, health, education, mobility, etcetera, that could be driving up the overall quality of life.

So this is why this Committee is so important. Next slide, please, for the aficionados in the room, and really.

Cause I have to, is while our workhorse is life satisfaction, really, you could also measure well being through actual affective measures like happiness, the title of this Committee, or enjoyment, or also the absence of, or experience of negative emotions like stress and worry. And I'll show you some data on that later on.

What's nice for us, that there's a robustness here, just sort of external validity in the sense that the map is very similar, whether you're looking at life evaluations or affective measures. So, for example, in Marin County, you will also experience most. You'll see people experience most positive emotions and vice versa, obviously, on the negative emotion side.

Next slide, please. Thanks to a partnership between blue zones and Gallup, we've been able to work and analyze data at the zip code level. So I've just shown off the data at county level. We can dig deeper. Thanks to Gallup's richness and vastness of the data set they've compiled, it allows us to dig deeper.

What you're seeing here, San Jose City by zip code, and somewhat surprisingly, perhaps to most, is that the well being and equalities you're seeing there are as vast as you have across the entire state. So within this space, like San Jose, and it's not just limited to San Jose, you'll see it in other major cities as well.

You'll see differences of more than a point on a scale from zero to 10, which is a lot.

So here again, you'll see sort of six and a half, the seven and a half average life satisfaction between zip codes with the inner city, lower happy, less happy, and the leafy, more wealthy suburbs on the higher end of life satisfaction.

So these data can really serve and inform evidence based policymaking at city level, at state level, at federal level, and if the data is rich enough, you can really work on even geographical pain points, even if you will. All right, next slide, please, onto the final element of the presentation. I think really the topic of today.

And I hope that this will then also help introduce the other experts that will join us today as the World Happiness report in its 12th edition. Focus in on age cohorts and in particular, my team at Oxford and myself, we worked on youth and adolescent wellbeing, trying to get the best data out there on it.

First of all, you should note there's very little data on youth and adolescence. Most of the data sets start 18 plus, including the General US General social survey and others. So there's a lack of data. But whatever data we did have, it wasn't looking pretty.

And so the US got a starring role in this year's World Happiness Report for bad reasons, is because it's really the youth in America that is off a cliff and that's driven down the overall ranking of the United States in terms of wellbeing in a global context. Next slide, please. Next slide. Thank you.

So what you're seeing here, for the first time, what we've done is looking at the best places to live in terms of the experience of quality of life. People tell us, but split by age. And so here, the best places to live, if you're below 30, are not in the United States.

I'm afraid the US has dropped to place 60 seconds, I think, between Peru and Guatemala. If you look at average life satisfaction below 30. Now, that is not a universal trend in the United States, because if you look, for example, at people age 60 and above, the US still very much ranks high.

The US is very much at the top, in fact, as number 10 in terms of life satisfaction when you consider people that are 60 and above. And so it's really interesting to see that. I've shown you distributional heterogeneity, I've shown you geographical disparities, but there is also an intergenerational disparity growing in the United States. Next slide, please.

If we look just at the California data, which is these 215,000 plus survey respondents that we have data, survey responses from, thanks to Gallup, and we then split them by age cohorts, what you find is what you're seeing on the screen. And this may not strike normal people as odd, but it certainly does experts.

And that is because normally you'd expect a U shape. So around the world, one of the most robust replicated studies in terms of well being science, is a traditional U shaped relationship between age and wellbeing.

Well, that U shape the first leg of it, at least, has disappeared in the context of North America, and you can tell it in the California data as well. Not only has it disappeared, but I think you're going to be hearing from my colleague Danny Blanchflower, who's worked on more recent data.

I think at this point, the first two bars that you're seeing there are actually below the midlife crisis. So it's not that youth are experiencing midlife crisis today, they're below the midlife point at this point. And so it's a very awkward situation.

And as you'll see on the next slide, it's a gradual decline that's been happening for over a decade and a half, where all Americans have seen a gradual decline, but youth have started declining at an accelerating pace. And so really around 201617.

What is, academically speaking, very odd is that crossover, where youth now start lower than adults, so people above 25 are happier than people below 25, and that is not meant to be from historical data. And this is awkward and obviously begs explanation and action. Next slide, please, to provide some more context to this trend.

And I think it is important to know that what you're seeing in the United States is not necessarily a universal given. It could also be seen as a hopeful message there in the sense that, yes, in western Europe and Britain, you also see a gradual decline in youth well being, although less. Less fast, less accelerated.

But you see other places around the world, and in particular central and eastern Europe, where it's been going up, but important to remember, of course, they start from much lower. So essentially, this is a global convergence, if you will, in youth wellbeing.

But strikingly, this year and the past, American youth is lower than is western Europe or even central and eastern European youth, and that is likely to continue unless something happens. Next slide.

If we look at it from different angles of wellbeing, just to make sure that what we're showing is not just limited to life satisfaction, I'm showing you now worry, which has, no pun intended, a worrying trend in that North America.

The level of worry now rises to, I think, well over 50, around 50% of youth being worried on a day to day basis. That trend has been increasing and increasing at a faster pace than elsewhere in the world. Next slide.

If you look at stress, even more worryingly perhaps, has been rising even faster and is now at even higher levels for youth in America than it is elsewhere, and relatively speaking, to the past. Next slide. If you look at sadness, which is particularly sad, is that now youth in America, about 20 or 30%.

If I read correctly from a distance, I think it's 30%. And now feel sad on a day to day basis. Again, a big increase over the last 34 years, picked up in part by or exacerbated in part by Covid. But people haven't come back to the levels they were before.

COVID unlike in other places around the world, finally rested yesterday is a measure of, if you will, more physical wellbeing and an indicator or a proxy for it. And what you see here is particularly disturbing, which is why I really wanted to include it.

It might link to social media, which is unlike other places, western Europe and central and eastern Europe. You see that only in 50% of cases, youth describe themselves as essentially fatigued, not rested. And that is particularly disturbing as well, because that has immediate health consequences. Next slide.

So all of these things matter in and of themselves, because well being is an ultimate outcome. So the fact that they're feeling unhappy is something that needs action. But for people that are more instrumentalist in nature, it also matters because a decline in wellbeing amongst youth, or generally has behavioral outcomes as a result.

And we have a lot of evidence on this front around these downstream consequences. And they have to do with health and longevity, they have to with financial decision making. They have to do with pro social behaviors.

And on the next slide, please, I'm showing you one study, and I'll conclude with that, where we also show that levels of well being, whether measured through life satisfaction or affective measures, are predictive of later labor market outcomes and even income. In other words, productivity is measured through income. Next slide, please.

This study was very well received in academia, was published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, and is a study that essentially shows, using 15,000 American youth, part of the national longitudinal study of adolescent health run out of UNC Chapel Hill.

What you're seeing here is a panel study where we have youth's well being at, say, in this case, 19 or 20 or 22 years of age, and then their earnings of the same youth about a decade later. So a classic panel study where we follow and track people over time.

What you're seeing here is that Low levels of well being, or variation in well being at age 20, late adolescence, is highly predictive of their earnings, if you will, labor market outcomes and productivity about a decade later. This is in the thousands and thousands of dollars.

Despite this being a very old study, the data is about 15 years old, if not more. And what you're seeing here is already about 10, $12,000 difference in terms of predictive power now, and I'll finish on this. Striking and relevant to the declining trend in wellbeing for youth, the effect is mostly driven by ill being.

So its people that are not feeling good as youth and adolescents, they are the ones who end up doing the worst later on in terms of later earnings, obviously as a proxy for labour market outcomes.

So this is very powerful and it shows that there are real economic consequences to a reduction in wellbeing and all the more alarm bells going off and calls for action. Thank you. Next slide.

Thank you. Thanks very much. Ask my colleagues. I asked them first. Ask my colleagues if they have any questions.

I know you mentioned on one of the slides that you could look for, like where housing needs are and things like that. Are there studies that kind of help with the overlap of happiness levels, income levels, housing insecurity, food insecurity, all of the things that add to the stress of life?

Absolutely. It's a really good question and an essential one to then actually drive policy based off these data.

So, for example, your state official statistics, but especially this rich Gallup survey, they didn't just ask the life satisfaction question of these 250,000 Californians, they asked about 304050 other questions that relate to housing, income and a whole host of other things that could be, that are really part and parcel of the different traditional policy areas.

So, yes, essentially you start from asking people how they feel about their life and then look for differences or what might help explain differences by looking at traditional policy levers, whether it's housing, mobility, education, health, etcetera. And so the data are there.

And so in partnership with bellusions, we've actually done this for San Jose City and a few other places. And then you see what tends to explain variation in a place like San Jose health and health status. So do you feel like your health is in a good place for your age level?

Or it could be housing, access to housing, quality housing. And are you proud of the community you're part of. So these kind of elements start playing a big role in explaining variation between license actions.

So what's really nice is we essentially start from asking people whether they're happy and then try and reverse engineer, put the science to work and make it relevant to policy and policy actionable.

And what are some of the. Those I think can be seen as more adult type issues. What are some of the trends in terms of what seem to be causing this for youth or younger people?

So people will immediately start thinking social media, smartphones. But I think it's important to note that as you saw from the world of happiness Report data, there's a gradual decline for all of Americans. So that's driven by polarization, income inequalities, difficulty with access to healthcare, et cetera, housing, the usual.

But you also see an acceleration of the drop for youth. So in addition to the aforementioned, I think for youth, you now also have student debt, insecurity, or uncertainty about the future labor market.

For example, if I were to now have to choose my studies, it's very worrying in the sense that chat GPT may well have caught up in two or three years, and my skill set might well be obsolete by the time I finish school.

And then there is indeed social media, something that youth take a lot more part in. Had the great privilege of interacting with the US surgeon General recently. He noted that on average, youth now spend four and a half hours a day on social media.

From what you've seen, from the distribution, that's the average that probably hides people from almost nothing to maybe 6789 hours. Probably plays into the fatigue as well. So social media certainly does have an important role to play.

I know my colleagues, and in particular Jonathan Haidt, with the anxious generation, that book is obviously doing very well. So there's definitely something about that acceleration that might have something to do with scores correlated with social media.

But I also want to push back a little bit on the more draconian type of interventions that somebody like Jonathan Haidt is suggesting, because they would suggest no social media below 16, no smartphones on the school, et cetera.

I think there might be ways of harnessing social media in a way that one puts the social back into social media by harnessing these algorithms to nudge towards actual social connections and people that you actually have that are in your vicinity and environment, and then connect on social media also with those people that are social.

The other thing that I think would be really important to look at in terms of social media as sort of an intermediate step is essentially go against doom scrolling, as kids would call it.

And so, for example, the algorithms are designed to, before you even have the fastness of pace, to swap to something else already, feed you with a different video. So clearly there might be ways of putting guardrails in place where after the hundredth video that you've watched, you're being asked, do you really want to still continue?

Or if so, yes, by all means, but if not, no to giving kids an opportunity to get off of the otherwise very cleverly designed algorithms. So that's important. So I think there's intermediate steps that are in collaboration with social media providers before maybe the more draconian interventions need to take place.

Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon General, made an extraordinary analogy here. Social media is here to stay. It's a bit like cars. When they were introduced, when cars were introduced, there were no airbags, there were no seat belts, and it's a bit the same right now with social media.

So it's about working with these companies and making sure the right guardrails are in place. At the moment, it's a bit like driving without seat belts and airbags.

Thank you.

Question.

Yeah, and apologies. I arrived a little late. So if I missed this, does your data, are we seeing, like, the effects of COVID on youth, and is this part or a factor, the isolation, maybe a higher level of anxiety in children or kids that never had this before?

Yeah, it's a very good question. And so, first of all, the gradual decline in wellbeing for Americans more generally and for youth predates COVID. So it's very clear that we're talking 2015, '16, '17 when the acceleration decline started.

Now, this is exacerbated by COVID, but strikingly, as you will have seen in some of the graphs, it hasn't recovered, not even half to where it was pre COVID in American context. So, for example, rested yesterday.

The fatigue question, or the one around sadness and worry, you see, is nowhere near where it was at the start of COVID. So it has exacerbated a certain decline, and people, youth especially, have not recovered from it.

And I feel, you know, when you think about youth not feeling rested, I feel like, I think back about my own children. They were very busy, and I'm sometimes even wondering if maybe I over scheduled them with things that they wanted to do.

And I wonder if parents being busier, being able to work from home at night, just maybe not as much social interaction as a family union because everybody's so busy. If that's a small component.

It's a very good observation, and I should have perhaps added into the mix. So while there's a number of general causes, perhaps for why there's a gradual decline for Americans, for youth, there's a number of additional elements: student debt, uncertainty about the future, social media.

The one I should have added is exactly the one you're highlighting, as there's perhaps also more expectations on them than there are for others. That being said, as you highlight yourself, it might be an element, maybe not the most important, but certainly one that matters.

Thank you.

Thank you. Just a couple questions before we go to our next panelists. You talked about investing in metrics, the State doing that. What does that look like? What should we be doing?

Well, it's very simple, either in partnership with Gallup or another provider, but Gallup has certainly the most credibility on this front and the most historical data, or as part of your official statistics, which I'm sure you have, just like in the United Kingdom, we've got the Office for National Statistics.

It would be virtually costless to, at the very least, integrate the workhorse in the field of wellbeing science, which would be on scale from zero to 10, how satisfied are you with your life these days? And make that more of a KPI alongside GDP or income or whatever is typically used.

So that would be virtually costless and should be in there.

You have nationally, a number of data sets, the U.S. General Social Survey, but that's just a U.S. representative survey that's really small, only happens once a year and has the life satisfaction question, but it's only a few thousand Americans on a yearly basis, so it's good for

U.S. statistic generally compared to the rest of the world, but wouldn't do anything for you in terms of underpinning policy in the State of California. So there is, I think there's one other by the CDC. There's the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey, BRFSS, as we call it, BRFSS.

And they have also a large sample, but they now have, in 2022, they now have also measured life satisfaction across the United States. So there might be data for, provided they give you sort of location elements in the data, there might be data for California there too, but again, I would own up to it.

So for me, it's clear the most obvious outcome of this Committee would first and foremost be measure what you treasure, because what you measure then ultimately gets treasured.

And so that would be, I think an obvious outcome of this Committee is to make sure, as part of the Office for National Statistics that you have here that gets in either outsourced or in house. Just for your information, the UK Office for National Statistics since 2012, David Cameron, put that to work.

They've got four items, which we call the ONS four. One is life satisfaction, you will have guessed it. Then also measure how happy were you yesterday, which is what you can do. The reason, by the way, why we say talk about yesterday, is to try and get rid of the day effect of morning, midday, evening effect.

They also ask about worry, and they ask about purpose, actually, to be more precise, do you find life worthwhile? And so it's those four items. So those capture your evaluative well being, life satisfaction. It measures affective well being, happiness and worry, and it measures Aristotle's eudaimonic well being, finding life worthwhile, purpose and meaning.

And those four together would be brilliant. So the OECD actually pushes this to all of your statistical agencies. This would be coming in, that recommendation would be coming at the federal level, not the state level.

So my recommendation to you would be very simple, essentially co-opt the ONS four, supported by which the OECD also promotes, and make sure that gets part of the national statistics and then things will flow from there.

Helpful. One last question, and I know you're a social scientist and you deal with data, sample sizes and all those types of things, so I hate to ask you an anecdotal question, but on the walk over here, you talked about, you teach at Oxford, but you've been at UCLA, living in Venice for the past term.

What have you seen? What observations have you had of sort of American life that have an impact on maybe are reflected in the data?

Sorry.

Yeah. How much time do we have? There's one that stands out. There's the obvious ones that you can talk about in the American context, I'm sorry to say, which obviously, healthcare, health access. This morning, the Uber ride across to the LAX airport, lady was unhappy in her job, had to stay because otherwise she'd be out of healthcare.

So those are your traditional ones. Income inequality is huge, especially in the context of LA. Racial segregation, huge, also something I've observed. But the thing that I think you may not have been thinking of is sort of social capital. Trust.

I find that when you drive around here with every marketing advertisement is about had an accident, call my lawyer. And so, that element of essentially undermining trust means that if you interact with other people, the slightest thing that could go wrong, it could end up in quagmire and the end of life as you know it.

And so that, I think, is starting to that legalistic element to it, which you have much less in continental Europe, especially, let alone Latin America and other places. That, I think, has slowly been eroding the social capital you've got in society. So measures around social support, trusting each other, trusting in institutions. That has been eroding.

And I think it's hard to put your fingers on this, but I think you all feel it. The polarization is an element of it, but I sense it when interacting with people or when I see people interacting, that they're sort of like each to his own type element.

And that is really a sorry state of affairs, especially because, I'm happy to finish on this, the world happiness report shows very clearly over and over again, yes, GDP per capita matters in explaining variation of wellbeing across the world. Yes, healthy life expectancy matters. But the third big thing up there with the first two is social support.

Do you have friends to rely on? Do you give? Do you volunteer? Do you trust others? And do you trust the state?

And we mentioned right at the end of the press briefing, and again, I'll finish on this, there's a very quirky little study that's been replicated over and over in social sciences, which captures this better than anything else. It's called the wallet drop experiment. You may or may not have heard of it.

It's essentially an actual experiment and also one that's done in a sort of virtual sense, but the actual experiment is dropping wallets with money and ID cards somewhere and then seeing how many out of 100 actually come back.

And it's a wonderful proxy to get a sense for do people believe and trust each other, and do they trust the state in this case, often police officers, to actually then also return the wallet to the rightful owner?

What you're finding is there's almost a one for one match between the country ranking in the world happiness report, which is based off these life satisfactions, and essentially the degree to which there's that sort of social trust, that social capital in society, that when a wallet gets lost, people are keen and eager to return it and believe that the police officers will actually do it.

So that social support, like that is so precious, it's easy to lose, hard to regain, and that I sense, having done a big chunk of my grad studies on the East Coast of the United States, there's less of it today than there was 15, 20 years ago when I did my grad studies.

Thank you so much. Thanks for being here. And also, I've been admiring your work for a long time, so I really appreciate you being here. Thank you all you do.

Thank you Speaker Rendon.

Our next panelist, Dr. Martha Dominguez-Brinkley, Deputy Director of Program Innovation Evaluation of First 5 California. Dr. Dominguez-Brinkley, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you. Buenas tardes. Good afternoon. Thank you for having me here. There we go. We can skip that slide because a little bit of my credentials, certified lactation consultant and a certified educator as well, just so for reference, just a point of reference. I just wanted to give you context.

We do know that in California, First 5 focuses on stronger start from zero to five specifically, but we have also been recognizing that Californians with reproductive health, education and public health's work, people have been having babies less, and that has been declining over time. Next slide.

Another point of reference is just the number of children here in California. Zero to five, specifically, zero to two, three to five, and the different race and ethnicity breakdowns. More and more, we are getting more culturally aware and congruent and allowing folks to self identify so we will be having better data as we progress.

That was some work that we got here in California through our census work, that people are self identifying, and two or more races are being self identified. So just to give a context of how many children we have here in California. Next slide. This slide is also really important, and it's interesting.

Mainly it comes from our partners at UCLA, the California Health Interview survey, who multiple state agencies fund across different funding sources. But the reason why I wanted to bring it to your attention is pregnancy planning has also gotten better, so that means that women are becoming more self aware of reproductive health.

But also prenatal care and stressors are really important. We're learning that African American women, Asian women and Latino women are planning their pregnancies more in tune to their timing of age, and just with family environment. With white women, it's been a little steady, as you can see on the data.

Sorry for those data to be pretty short, but hopefully Katie can share that deck with you all. Next slide. Couple of just research points that I think it's really important when we talk about why we are focusing so much on early childhood development and why it predicts lifelong health, health and wellbeing.

As we were talking a few minutes ago about wellbeing with the different factors, right. But the reason is there's so many powerful predictors. Non cognitive skills are a measure of childhood behavior and emotional problems. We also know that social maladjustment are also powerful predictors that lead to unsatisfied adults or satisfied adults.

So that's why we are heavily focused on early childhood development. We also know that structural equation and the models that received children's perceptions of family during childhood and adolescent predicts on their satisfaction at the age of 38. That is very telling because that's not even 40.

As I indicated earlier, prenatal stressful events are really important, as we all know that when women carry a child, they're already carrying their grandchildren, right? So that's just something for us to be in mind.

We also think about a lifelong, but we have to think about the intergenerational after just not just the child that is being beared, but the child that is coming thereafter. The pervasive and persistent adverse effects of child maltreatment, both within and across domains are really, really important.

There's been some studies about the level of anger in adults, and it really has indicated that some of the predictors have been maltreatment, levels of self esteem, autonomy, purpose in life, perceived constraints. The more that people feel that they're happy and satisfied, they become more productive adults.

And that also has an economic factor, as our previous colleague was sharing. Next slide. ACEs. I'm sure you guys have heard at adverse childhood experiences. At first five, we are heavily focused on this. Why? Because there are factors that have risks, but also they can become protective factors later in life.

We are looking at abuse, neglect, household challenges, and other forms of adversity. We're trying to really understand, to ensure that children have a safe, safe, stable and nurturing environments and relationships within their home and within their community. Next slide. This is just another context from the office of Surgeon General Hill in California.

They've done a great job in collecting some data on race and ethnicity. But as you can see, a lot of the ACE scores that are higher have a higher risk of ACEs and therefore are more predictors that we have to mitigate the risk factors but also increase their protective factors. Next slide.

First 5 California is focused on the first two bubbles, and particularly mainly on the, because we do know there's been a lot of research on aces, that there has long term effects, but also we want to make sure that we strengthen those safe and nurturing environments so we can mitigate those risks.

So that is really an important part of the work that we do.

And ultimately to have optimal developmental experiences, whether if it's through reading, through father involvement, through nurturing of a mother, really to ensure that they have access to resources, CalWORKS or even WIC or even MediCal, making sure that we do those warm referrals so people can feel more comfort and they have that nurturing experience along the way.

And nurturing can be defined in different ways by people, but that's why we're trying to be as culturally competent to them, because ultimately what we want is happy kids and happy adults, which equals productive communities and really are contributors to society. And I think collectively, everyone wants to contribute to society in one shape or another. Next slide.

This is more of the impacts of the early childhood investments. Essentially, what we're saying here is prevention efforts work. For every ounce of prevention, there's some cost savings on the return on investment. Whether we're looking at higher quality early childhood education, we're also looking at prenatal home visiting.

We're looking at smoking cessation, enhanced prenatal care through MediCal. We're realizing that there is some true cost effective and there's, it's really saving tax dollars along the way.

So it's really to give that lasting effects of lifelong intergenerational impacts, but also the health and wellbeing of individuals and families and communities, and proven policies and programs and services we know that could be very effective. Next slide. I had a video here, but I will let Katie share that with you.

It's really one of our ads that really just talks about how we can arm children at a very young age and really embrace them with all the different resources and services.

And the more that we embrace them and really nurture them, the better they will become as they become adults and then for their generations to come as well. Next slide. And this is really more of just a refocus in terms of what First 5 is doing.

Our North Star statement is somewhat challenging, and it's really, we also have this audacious goal that in a generation that all children, zero to five, will have safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments necessary to achieve healthy development.

And we're doing that through trauma informed healing center, culturally responsive systems to promote the factors that I just outlined shortly ago. That is all I have today. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you. That's a lot. That's great. Questions?

So thank you so much for your work. I actually got my start in early childhood education, just as the Speaker Emeritus did, and really learned, at the time there was a lot of new brain research coming out talking about the different factors that impact early childhood brain development.

And it really imprinted very early in my career how important support in early childhood years is so critical. And I guess I'm curious, are there things that you've seen?

I know we talked about a little bit about the impacts of COVID and, you know, I'm still trying to figure out, because some of what I hear is that a lot of what we're seeing around our mental health crisis is a result of COVID. But then, also I've been hearing more recently that it's,

that there was really a decline before COVID and COVID exacerbated it or illuminated it more, but it's something that we were seeing that trend start even before COVID happened.

And so I'm curious what you have been seeing in early childhood, either pre COVID or as a result of COVID, and how that's been impacting kids, because I know those younger years. I mean, luckily, my daughter was old enough to kind of understand what was going on.

I don't know how many kids or any of us could really understand the impact of a global pandemic, but I could not imagine. I tried to think about the kindergarten kids on Zoom. Trying to go through school on Zoom as a kindergartner just seemed wild to me.

And so, you know, I would be curious to hear what you've seen and learned from that.

Yeah, based on the data that we have seen, it's a little bit of both, but we do know that COVID just magnified to a different level, especially from zero to five, because social and emotional development is so critical. They do need that social interaction.

There was a lot of some in specific counties, childcare centers were closed and as a result of that they had to stay at home. Parents had to adjust to that work schedule and that new normalization within COVID. And we also know that that happened in phases right from the beginning to the end.

But the socialization, we did see a decline on that, so that is something that has been impactful, especially for the babies. And you probably have heard some of our advocates or partners call them COVID babies because some of those COVID babies didn't have those opportunities to have that socialization and that emotional support along the way.

And also parents too, right? The parents need the break, or caregivers need that break from the child or just to interact. I know myself as a working mother and in my household I have an 11 year old. She adjusted too, and I also realized that the teachers had to adjust.

So I think it is a trauma period and we can't ignore it, but there's opportunities for us to take some learnings from that and make those improvements. I think California is pretty resilient in terms of the resources and services they have, especially when it comes to early childhood development.

And that's an area that we definitely need to continue to support.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate that. You're right. We have been resilient at other times. I ran for office because of cuts to early childhood education in 2010-2011. We may be at a time in our state's history where we see those same dynamics happening again. Any advice for those working on the budget? Cautionary tales.

It's hard to prioritize different ECE programs or different components of ECE, but do you have any thoughts on what we should be looking at?

I think it's really important for all of us to be mindful that even though we're focusing on zero to five, we have to understand the intersectionalities of the different areas and the topics and the investments that we do and the intergenerational impacts that will have not just for, for the immediate child, but for their children as well.

With trauma, with ACEs, we're learning that that has not, is not just a lifelong, but it's intergenerational.

So anything that we can do to, you know, protect and provide those safeguards for that early childhood development, it's really critical, you know, the more that we can provide those safety nets to ensure that those resources are intact or are protected, I think that's the area where we would want to be a champion at.

Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate you being here.

I will say, as Miss Schiavo was talking about our common background in early childhood education, when what was interesting about ECE, particularly some of the more comprehensive programs like federally funded Head Start, for example, you get here and you start seeing gaps in programs and services, whether it's mental health or we were just talking about healthcare for all, it felt like when I was in Head Start, we had that.

When you're in mental health, we have that dental, we have that. What was interesting about coming here was a lot of my Republican colleagues who have military backgrounds were very used to that as well.

I remember my early ECE programs or my early ECE bills getting support of Republicans because they had been, because they had seen on military bases the impact of ECE programs, not only ECE programs, but the comprehensive services that we provide.

So obviously, thank you for all your efforts at first five, and we will remember this in the next month or so while we're working on the budget. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our final panelist for panel one is Doctor Amanda Geyer, Associate Director for the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain. Doctor Geyer, thank you for joining us today.

So thank you so much. Good afternoon. It's great to be here. It's actually quite interesting to hear. I also got my start in early childhood sort of education, working with Ed Zeigler back, who was one of the founding people of Hudstart. So it's fun to be in this company.

So I'm a developmental psychologist, and so I've worked for initial part of my training in early childhood, and in the last 20 years, I've been focusing on adolescence. I'm both a developmental psychologist as well as a cognitive neuroscientist.

So I have been able to kind of marry my background in understanding children's contexts with how children's biology kind of interacts with those settings. And a lot of my work has been focused on how brain development and social experiences are linked with mental health issues and well being, particularly in youth.

And across the work I've seen and other work out there, one of the most fundamental things we see is what we've been talking about. That social connection is a fundamental human need. So when threatened due to loneliness or social rejection, youth are at risk for poor mental health indicators.

Youth who have social connection we see show less distress, better well being, and social connection is therefore critically important to foster. Also, because the brain, we have now learned, continues to develop into early adulthood, right? So for a very long time, we thought everything kind of ended developing in the inside our heads by the age of five.

We now have seen adolescence as a second period of growth, right? Second to that of early development. And so because of that feature of human development, we also have learned that that's another time when the system, the developing person, is open to the influences of external experiences, right?

So critically important to have those initial caregiver supports and experiences early on, we have another opportunity where we also need to be investing in those kinds of social supports for youth. So findings from my research have shown that adolescents are very much oriented towards social interactions with their peers. This is developmentally salient and relevant.

This is one of the sort of social demands that becomes placed on adolescents. One of the early social demands is the caregiver relationship that never goes away. That still is really important in adolescence, but peers become more magnified at that time.

Adolescents and youth are also very much sensitive because of that sort of developmentally almost programmed shift to social feedback, to peer opinions.

And I have actually found associations with brain sensitivities to those kinds of cues in the environment, information that kids are responding to in relationship, to how their brains are processing that information in relationship to mental health indicators and family factors.

So, for example, youth without mental health issues in some of my work have shown heightened brain responses in a region that processes rewards. So, like a smiling face, acceptance from peers. So I find support for engagement of that brain area when I tell kids in my lab that peers have picked them, that they like them.

I've also found that kids with anxiety disorders show heightened response in a brain region that processes threats, so when they think that they might be rejected. So that is a very important aspect of anxiety, especially social anxiety. You think that this might happen?

We see this engagement of the amygdala, that threat, part of the processing part of the brain. We also see heightened engagement of that area when kids also are told, these kids are not interested in interacting with you, they haven't picked you, things like that. Third, I have found support for supportive parenting.

Feeling connected to one's family are very much found to also affect youth's brain sensitivities to peer rejection. So finding support for buffering associations between these kinds of social stressors and something like depression in kids.

And so I see this work as very relevant for social media insofar as our measures that I can do in our lab, you know, trying to simulate social connection, social rejection, they kind of serve as this proxy for kids experiences with social media. Right.

However, it's extraordinarily difficult to directly assess how kids brains are responding to social media in real time, using actual content and how that might then be linked to their mental health and well being. So much more research is needed on that, and there are some roadblocks in terms of that area, which I'll share in a minute.

So this then brings me to another component. So I shared a little bit of what I've found in my research recently. I served as a Member of the National Academies of Science Consensus Committee report on the effects of social media and adolescent health. I brought a copy of it here if you would like a physical copy.

And based on that report, I'd like to bring attention to issues that could be addressed in the pursuit of supporting happiness in youth in the context of their social media use. So we know, clearly, child and adolescent mental health is suffering. We also know social media is entrenched in their daily lives. Both things are true. Right.

And what has been suggested, really, is that there's this causal link. However, after our very thorough report of the literature and so on and so forth, we don't find overwhelming evidence for that causal link. And part of that relates to the type of research that's been conducted to date and what kind of data we have access to.

To.

So with that, I think that we are now, at this point where we want to start thinking about, you know, what have we learned from the existing literature on the way that there is a connection between social media use and children's well being, that we can then translate into some actionable kinds of strategies to better support kids and support evidence based types of policies.

So first, one of our main takeaways is that we really do need some sustained investment in research infrastructure to be able to determine what is it that youth are doing with their social media and these platforms, and not simply through indicators such as how much time, how much time they're just generally on their phone, but more details about how they're using it, why they're using it, what they're using it for.

Right. As a parent, I certainly get a lot of satisfaction just being able to text and communicate with my children, with my own adolescents. And so how can we kind of think through what are these kinds of positive things and what are they using them for that are benefiting them in terms of their, their mental health?

One of the issues that we come across is that companies that provide social media platforms have volumes and volumes and volumes of data on user interactions, user platform interactions, but that's not shared with the public generally. Right?

So we, as researchers, have a huge difficulty trying to access this kind of information that would be very difficult for me to just do within my own kind of lab.

So I think some focus and investment on ways in which we can perhaps access some of that really important data to help us draw better links is going to be really critical. We also need, as another takeaway from our report, regulation, monitoring, reporting of the industry, standards of product safety.

And so just as done with other products and contacts, you know, that are in youths lives, vehicles, childcare, schools, we need those same kinds of systems in place to better monitor what's going on and enforce rules.

So we really need some objective and robust kinds of rules that are going to help enforce those industry standards and objective rules that really help to prohibit the most dangerous kinds of activities that we're seeing some kids getting involved in.

And then finally, I would just close with, we need to consider what are the activities and context that we can provide to youth that will support their happiness, especially when addictive use or harmful content are sort of displayed, placing their time away from these other important behaviors and activities that we know benefit youth, right?

So rather than orienting it towards, you know, having, informing kids, don't do this, don't do that, let's figure out ways to sort of shift their time and attention and focus into things that are going to support them in really productive kinds of ways.

So I think it'll be very important to figure out ways in which we can draw youth towards these happiness promoting kinds of and developmentally relevant types of activities, which may include social media, insofar as it does provide a vehicle for social connection and contribution to others and so forth.

Some of the ways in which we might also think about doing that relate to supporting that access that kids need to mental health. And then finally thinking about, particularly in adolescence, how can we engage or leverage the power that peers actually have on their lives for good?

What can we do to help create environments within schools and so forth where peers are kind of setting the norms, peers are, you know, kind of saying, hey, let's not engage in this kind of use. Oh, let's not focus on this kind of context.

We really want to think about ways in which we can appeal to where adolescents are developmentally. You know, they have strong need for respect and contribution and autonomy in their lives. And so they're also, as I said, very sensitive to their peers.

So what could we do about leveraging those around them that they are particularly in tune with to help support that goal of happiness? So I'm going to end there and open for questions. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. Questions.

Thank you so much. And I really appreciate kind of separating out childhood and acknowledging that adolescence extends for a little while and still needs some support.

And I think, you know, one of the things that when I worked for a tribal Head Start program, that blew me away, and I was just out of college, so I not had a kid yet, but all of the support that it provided parents around parenting strategies and helping parents to understand kind of developmental stages and what's appropriate and what's not.

And all of those pieces, I think, is really, really lacking for parents. And I just, at that time in my life, I was like, we should just require parenting classes for every parent because. Because this is information that everybody needs.

And as my daughter is transitioning into adolescence, I've gotten some recent advice and just little things of thinking of yourself as a coach, right? That they need coaching at this stage and age and you're trying to support and educate them was really helpful.

But I wonder if you have any feedback on kind of like, where are things like this happening, right, where there are these kinds of supports or are we doing it right anywhere?

I want to hear your answer, but that's another great example of me being a Head Start and saying, why doesn't everybody have this? We had parenting classes. Yeah, that was a huge part of the program.

Right, right. I think that we need, perhaps we need to revisit this during the adolescent period. Right. There's not as much available in terms of supports for parenting adolescents. And I think one of the things that the State of the Science has evolved and changed dramatically with the advent of looking at the brain. Right.

So we now understand a new component that's shaping development and outcomes. So we both have to consider these sort of biological changes, but not just does that change, but those social demands change. Right. And so the peer context changes.

And I think that what can happen is we have important, critical, necessary training in early childhood, and then the child grows up and changes, their context changes, and we need to also address that. Right.

I also think we can learn from, you know, somewhat from what we've been studying in adolescence and almost bring it back a bit to say, like, Oh hey, we've been seeing that there are these patterns in adolescence that if we were to look at those things earlier that we never knew about, we could also find some new targets of intervention early on that might actually help us offset those later manifestations of them in adolescence.

So I see these periods of development as. As mutually informing each other with this recognition that I think we do need to invest some focus in supporting parents in that period of time.

Adolescents, you go through those well visits up to a certain age, and then you might not necessarily interface with a pediatrician's office unless there's a problem. So that's what we have to try to think about is where are kids?

Where are the kids and how can we and their parents, and how can we deliver information with them or engage them in different kinds of activities? So whether it's through medical offices, what could we do there? Screen for social media use, possibly that could be a quick thing.

And then kind of we screen for depression and suicidality in medical visits. Right. So we could do something similar with something like social media use just to get kind of a global picture of it. The other huge context, obviously, is school.

So kids are at schools, and we have a number of recommendations here about teacher training, offering supports from schools and so forth. Schools, though, are very burdened with a lot of things. And so I think we also have to think very creatively. You know, what things can we dovetail with each other?

What things can maybe have a dual purpose within schools? I recently saw some news articles on pouches that have been purchased in school districts in other states where kids come in and put their phones in and then they can't access. This is a very sort of divisive kind of position.

And I like to think instead about like, well, what would it take for children to kind of not perhaps use their phones in school and so forth? Self regulation. Right.

Self regulation is one of those critical, key things that children need in order to stay focused on the goals in front of them that they have to, that they have to get through. So schools, I think, is an area where we could think through some new policy changes around the issues of social media.

And it's tricky because things are going on in schools that the adults in the room are not seeing. Right. And they're affecting kids very intensely. And so thinking about that, but again, I would, I think, I want to challenge us to think about, like, what could we do with that power of peers, right.

How can we create norms in schools that don't allow this? There's a very fascinating randomized control trial about using the power of peers to mitigate and reduce bullying in schools. So that could be a very similar kind of model that we could think about as a way to work within the school setting as well.

Yeah, I mean, my daughter's school, actually, I can't remember. I think it was at the PTA meetings. They had the school mental health worker come and do some kind of parenting classes, lessons as part of the PTA meeting.

And I thought that was really smart to meet parents where they're at, provide a resource that a lot of people could benefit from. And is existing school staff that's going to be there anyway? Certainly it's taking up some of their time and preparation and all of that, but really more manageable approach, I think, than some.

Of the other ones where you have to really wrangle people in and find funding and programs for it. So maybe some creative things that could be done there. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Great questions, great feedback. I appreciate it. Number of thoughts, no further questions, but number of thoughts. When I was working in the nonprofit sector, I always felt like I was running early childhood education and programs and senior programs, and there was this vast void in between that's doing a disservice to our community.

I remember another instance when I had a friend in grad school who studied, she studied the content of something like 5000 films to find out, sort of. She was trying to get a sense of popular culture, impressions of generations. And I remember her, I said, what was your conclusion?

And she summed it up in a sentence. She said, we adore babies, we revere old people, and we hate teenagers. And I think as a society, I think we've either vacillate between hating teenagers to ignoring them to a large extent. And I think we have. We're paying the price to a large extent.

Yeah. I think that it's worth rethinking our mindset about that and, you know, sort of thinking about what is it that adolescents respond really well to? What do they need? Because we're actually missing out on a very important contribution to society.

They can, there's so much that they can do and contribute, and then that's just a great feedback cycle because if we engage, you know, that, that body of youth in prosocial kinds of behaviors, community service things, things where they're feeling like they're contributing something to others, that then makes them feel better. Right.

And so I think building that in somehow, because that's the thing, is we really want to focus on what are their developmental needs, what resonates for them where they're at and who they kind of are watching and taking cues from to leverage those contacts as well, to shape what they're engaging in.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks so much. Now moving on to panel two, we're going to move on to our second panel, which is only one person focusing on happiness in midlife. Our panelist for this portion is Doctor David Banchflower, Professor of economics at Dartmouth University. Professor Bantflower, thank you for joining us today. And he is remote.

And he is Ramon, can you hear me?

So we're very much trying to think about community and what we can do. An example. We were going to build a set of dorms way away from the campus.

Yes.

Good. Thank you very much for that. I'm going to broaden the discussion and depress you more. I think I'm going to start with three thoughts.

The first is that I'm a Professor at Dartmouth, we have a new President who has actually declared in her inaugural address, what we need to worry about is the well being of our students. And I'm going to talk more about that, because, in a sense, the discussion here has been about school kids.

But I'm going to broaden it and talk about the fact that it's not just school kids. The group that I particularly care about are Dartmouth undergraduates. In fact, if I was to worry about one particular group right now, it would be 22 year old women. And we'll get to that in a second. So that's the first thing.

The second thing is that it seems to me, I'm a labour economist, and one of the major issues we're going to have here is what to do about this issue, which I'm going to talk about, which is about the young. And I'm just going to hold up a book. I first, as an academic.

Doctor Blanchflower, I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but you are really Low volume here, and it sounds like it needs to be turned up on your end. If you're able to turn up your volume a little bit. I don't know, because we want to. Hear everything that you have to say.

Okay, I will try.

Okay.

Can you do it at your end? Can you. I don't know how to do that. Can you hear me if I shout loudly?

That's a little better. It may look like.

Does that work?

No, that's, I think, worse.

I don't have a means of turning up your volume. I don't think. I'm afraid. I mean, I'll try my sound. Is that any better?

That is better.

Okay, let's try that. Okay.

Okay. Thank you.

Sure. So I'm going to set this all in context. So I started out thinking about this in the early 1980s, which was actually a thing called the youth labor market problem. And in a way, it's about a nature of that problem. And I particularly am concerned about what's going to happen to this group of young.

I mean, obviously, we care about their psychology, but the background to this as well is that I'm now the advisor to the United Nations, who's actually trying to think about exactly this issue across every country in the world. And we're going to get to talk about that in a minute.

And we had thought that what we were going to see across countries around the world was something very different to what we've seen in the United States. And that turns out to be untrue. And it actually contradicts quite a lot of things that Professor Deneuve has said, and you'll see why I think that.

So the question we're going to get to is, what's going on, why? And particularly, and I thought it was very interesting, Amanda Guyer, what she was talking about, and I thought the whole thing about the research was really interesting.

But the bottom line of all of this and why I held my book up is we have a huge problem that I'm going to talk to you all about, and we need to think about what to do about it.

So we're having, actually, we're having a big conference at Dartmouth in the fall, funded by the United Nations, trying to think about, you might think, California being part of this.

What are we going to do about this problem that I'm going to talk to you about, which is a problem of a problem that really has come to the fore very recently. And I can set this up. So there's a dozen papers here. It's not that I'm trying to advertise.

I've worked on these things for a really long time. In some sense, I want to talk about what we've missed and what we've seen and what we've missed. So I've written endless papers about a well-being crisis, about the fact that, you see, even in 2004, I wrote about it.

In 2008, I wrote about it, about the well-being is U-shaped. So it means that the young are especially happy, the middle age are unhappy, and then happiness rises from fear 50. So that's a U-shape in age.

And that's existed really in the data from the seventies, really, to about 2015 or so, and then the world changed, I'm going to talk about that. The second thing is that you can see data that's U-shaped in happiness and it's hump shaped in unhappiness. So you can think of a hump shape in unhappiness.

The least happy people are in their fifties. The happiest people. Sorry, the least happy in their fifties. Again, everything pretty much goes through. Unemployed people have low levels. They particularly have low levels of happiness, and they have high levels of unhappiness. And so there's been quite a debate about that.

And I've written quite a lot of papers, as you see here, papers about, in fact, a paper called U-shaped everywhere. I find happiness is U-shaped in 145 countries. I have a paper about the unhappiness function that shows that that's pretty much present everywhere. And then, things change, and we're going to talk about that in a minute.

The reason that everybody was. There was two things people were focused on. They were focused on this hump shape in age, particularly because Case and Deaton talked about what they called deaths of despair. And what you saw in these data. I'm going to talk about it more in a second.

What you saw in these data was especially the unhappiness of prime age, less educated whites. You might even think groups of people around the world who've been left behind, perhaps in Britain, voting for Brexit, in the US, voted for Trump, this group of people whose well being deteriorated.

And we see physical manifestations of that in deaths from opioid overdoses, suicide, cocaine overdoses, heroin overdoses, deaths from drinking. And so that data, that really was a sort of preeminent thing that we were looking at through around 2015 or so.

I also spent some time, there's a paper with Donna Fair where I started to think about, well, this was a phenomenon people talked about, about whites, but actually there was another group that we really shouldn't have ignored, and that was a group of Native Americans.

And I've so written about that, and we're going to show you that in a second. So that in a sense, that the eyes of researchers was focused on this hump shape, was focused on this group of disadvantaged folks. And then what happened is we got deflected again, because Covid came along.

And the assumption in all of this was there was something special about Covid and we should focus on Covid and see patterns in the data relating to Covid. And in a sense, that was our focus.

But I heard a little earlier, I think a couple of people said that actually, that distracted us from what was actually happening out there in the world. And I've written a whole series of papers. Now, you can see one with one bunched out this week about global decline in the mental health of the young.

A paper out a couple of weeks earlier about the fact the global disappearance of the hump shape. And perhaps I should quickly just talk about that second paper there and we'll talk more about it.

But I try to think about if this is about people being bullied, and we've had conversations here with people on this Committee. Well, what if there was cyberbullying going on? What would the consequences be? So, actually, I went and wrote a paper about that.

I mean, I've worked forever in the UK on a set of data called the National Child Development Study. We've followed people for 65 years, and this paper's about, what would happen, perhaps if there was bullying. And so this paper looks at data when children were seven and their parents reported that they were bullied at seven.

I'm happy to talk about it more later, but what I can show you is that has effects on everything 50 years later, even including whether the respondent's actually alive or not, and we can talk about the potential consequences. So this is kind of where I'm going to get to, and I'm going to start to sort of move forward and suggest you perhaps bring it to the next slide, please.

So the next slide, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it, but I, so I have now been working with Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge about this issue, which is about the global loss of the U-shaped curve of happiness and what's happened. So for people, please, this is out yesterday.

It's on John Haidt's website, and with the three of us are very much formulating a team to try and think about this issue and be actually really, one of the big issues you're going to see me say is this appears unlike we thought with the U.N., because we thought in the UN we were going to look around the world, see structures that called us how to avoid this declining wellbeing of the young, and we were going to find ways to think about sort of solving it.

And basically, we've had to have a complete rethink because everywhere in the world we look and everywhere in the world the U.N. looks, we basically have the same thing. So I'm going to, if we could please go to the next, to the next slide.

I've not got a lot of slides, but I've got a lot to talk about. So this so I actually, I don't believe, I actually don't think that the global, that the, that the Gallup world poll actually tells us much of anything because it contradicts almost everything that we know in other sets of data.

So the first thing that we know is actually in the U.S., there's a lot of really good data of recent times and including a lot of data on California. So I'm going to give you data on California.

And the great benefit, unlike the data that was shown earlier for the United States up to 2018, this is data up to 2023, and some of it's even for 2024.

I'm going to show you data for California and show you that basically the patterns that you observe for the U.S. and California are exactly the same as I see in Yemen, Peru, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. So let me just explain this to folks, and then we can think about.

And I especially want to worry about what to do about this. I don't want to worry about causality. I don't think that's relevant at this moment. We need to worry about what to do about this, because whatever the causality is, we have a problem. So let me show you where we were.

So, we're looking at 10 million people taken from a thing called the BRFSS that Professor Diner talked about. And these are things that I've worked on, which is actually not just about the well being of people. It's actually about the ill being of the few.

It's about what happens to people who are the most vulnerable. So let me just get people to have it in their heads. I've written a series of papers about it. And here's the question. The question let's ask is now thinking about your past mental health, which includes stress and depression and problems of emotions.

For how many of the last 30 days was your mental health not good? This is the people who say all 30 of the last 30 days of my life were bad mental health days. So say it again. Every day of my life is a bad mental health day. This is a very serious problem.

So if you look here, this is the story that everybody had focused on. So the purple line is what happened to the ill being of prime age, less educated whites. It turns out that that death of despair that basically Case and Deaton talked about was about whites, principally.

So you see that line, that purple line rises since 1993, and, in fact, in the United States as a whole, and in California, despair, by my measure, despair rises. The green line is actually native. So you can see this is so at the beginning.

You see around 5% of natives say that they're in despair every day of their lives. By 2022, we're looking at numbers of the orders of 10 or 11%. But here's the big story. And the blue line is other minorities. So blacks, Hispanics, Asians. It's not true for them.

But here's the two lines that I want folks to care about. The orange line is young people is young men under 25, and the blue line is young women under 25. And here's basically the phenomenon that we have talked about that Haidt and Twenge and I have been battering on about.

So we look here, you can see that from around 2014 or so and height and 20th, you've talked a lot about cell phones and Internet usage and so on really, starting around 2011. So what you see here in these data is that the ill being of young women starts to rise here dramatically.

Not true of other groups, it's true of young men. But by 2023, just everyone have it in their heads. By 2023, 11 percent of women, young women between the ages they're 18 and 24 say that every day of their lives is a bad mental health day. About 7% of young men.

So to have in your head, this is a really big deal. And obviously, I was trying to think about, well, what are the consequences of this? So could I go to the next slide? And this is really, in a sense, how my talk fits in to everybody. So let me just.

This is a bit noisy, but ignore the noise. And then there was a question asked, and I can answer this question. I can ask you a question about Covid. So the red line, this is take this BRFSS measure, take distress and despair and just plot the red line by age.

And what you see is it rises the tradition. This is from 2014 to 16, and it's true earlier. This thing rises, it peaks around 51 and then declines down in the seventies, there's the hump shape in age. Well, what I missed and what everybody else missed was actually the move amongst the young is dramatically upwards.

So, first of all, let's focus on the right hand side part of it. The right hand side part hasn't really moved from 50 down to 75. That function is basically as it was. The prime age clearly have high levels of distress. And as people get older, then it declines.

But what we see is that this left hand side has simply lifted. The left hand side of the function has lifted up as the ill being of the young increases. I put two lines in there to answer the question, is this about Covid? And the answer is, it isn't.

So the green line here, this green line is based. So I just merged some years together. So this is about a million observations in the green line. So this green line is 2017 to 2019, and then the blue line is 2020 to 2022.

So, indubitably, the move of this function, the change in the, if you like, the removing the collapse of the hump shape, has actually preceded Covid. There's actually quite a lot we've written about, if you think of things like PISA test scores and so on. Actually, the decline in those test scores. Predated Covid.

Can we go to the next slide? So then the question I want to try and think a bit more about, and I've already got a couple of slides, but I've got a lot more to talk about. So there is actually. I mean, I would recommend not going to the Gallup daily tracker, which stopped in 2018.

I would recommend you looked at two sets of data. The first is actually from BRFSS, where we have 250,000 people from California in the data file. And obviously we can do more work and haven't done it. I just did this pretty quickly, just to see.

So I have enough data to show you this, but here's the data for California. This is 1993 to 2012, which is the blue line and shows exactly consistent with what you have in the U.S. as a whole. You have that hump shape function. And we can show you. Actually, we'll get to in a second.

I can show you identically in happiness, but let's keep going. So then, obviously what you see is this function lifts. And in fact, the more, if I go more recently, the function lifts up.

And more or less, in the end, what you're going to see in a second is that this function more or less now, from 2020 onwards, mental illness, mental ill health, declines in age, with a slight hump at the beginning and particularly around age 22. But this function has now, has now lifted upwards in the data.

We actually have written quite a lot about this. The data, in fact, also includes life satisfaction. And you can show exactly the same patterns happening, happiness. The U.S. is good on measures like this, which are measures of despair, but not so good on happening.

But we do have measures, and in fact, I show in various of my papers that actually that exactly the same pattern occurs. Can everyone hear me still? We could hear me, right?

Yes, we can hear you.

Okay. So there's the first pattern. And so this pattern, I show you a pattern here for the United States. I've shown you a pattern for California. So then we thought, my goodness, what are we? No, let's go back to that. I don't want that one yet. Can you go back?

So what we thought was, well, is that special to the United States? We can show it for California, can show it for some other big states. Is that special to the United States? So we went and started to work on the UK, and we have data exactly like this for the UK.

I can show you an identical pattern for the UK. And researchers around the world have now started to work on these kinds of data. And now in various of my papers, I can show you exactly the same pattern of these data in New Zealand, the same pattern in the Netherlands. There's papers now showing it for Australia.

And so the question, so these are, if you like, we've seen it especially for English speaking countries. And so now we've started to try and think about, I mean, what does it look like in the rest of the world? So just have in your mind.

So a lot of the countries, and obviously I've shown you in papers that I had before that I had it for 150 countries, so we can still work on it. But we forgot over 150 countries. We had that U-shape and hump shape. So now we've started to see that this thing has really disappeared.

This is about the midlife crisis being replaced by a youth crisis. And obviously the plea I'm going to have is what in goodness only's name are we going to do? But we can go study it for our hearts of content. But we've now got this incredible phenomenon around the world. But let me keep going.

Thank you, Doctor Blassfire. We want to make sure we have time for questions.

I need to do one more thing though. Can I do one quick thing?

Thank you.

So basically around the world, I'll stop. But around the world, we've now gone and looked at what's happened since 2020. So the next slide. Next slide. Basically this is for the US and California now from 2020 on, ill being declines in age. That's exactly, literally 1 minute. There's 300,000 data points.

And I would recommend you actually go and work on the Census Bureau household pulse surveys. There's 300,000 observations for California. Last point, next slide. And I'm done. If we could just go there.

So now we've been doing work for the United Nations and now that pattern I show you for California I can show you, exists in now in 90 countries around the world.

So this looks like a global phenomenon collapsing well being of the young, all very well to go and study it, we need to know what to do about it right now. So at Dartmouth we have basically probably 11% of our young female students are in despair. What do we do?

As I think you will see also you have in California, what are we going to do about it? Sorry, I hope I didn't go on for too long.

Thank you, that was great. We'll do questions.

Well, what do you propose we do about it?

Well, I think at the very least we have to go and think about what works. And obviously there are issues within schools and some of you have obviously thought about that and height and others have thought about it, but it's much harder, I think, at Dartmouth.

So we've been trying to think about what are we going to do about our students? We certainly can't remove cell phones. We certainly can't do anything like that. So what we are trying to do is we've decided we're going to try and think about a sense of community.

We're going to try and think about people bonding together, but try and study what it is that has an impact. Give you an example of what we found. So at Dartmouth, there are fraternities and sororities, and we've discovered that young women especially have very. It has a really bad impact on their mental health.

Applying for us to get into a sorority turns out to be much more exclusive than to get into a fraternity. And basically, you don't get in. It turns out that has a very big impact. But in a sense, I'm a labor economist, I'm a data guy.

And in a way, I was wanting Amanda to talk a bit more about what are we going to do. I mean, I think we have to sort of think about that.

I mean, in a sense, I want to say to you, I think what you should take from this, from this hearing is not, we need to go study it. I think we know the answer to it. I think we need to go and think about what works.

And so Professor Guyer talking about, you know, the things they understand, what are we going to do about the fact that one in 10 of these youngsters, and obviously we can separate from the schools, it's even worse, it actually turns out, amongst 22 year olds and it is amongst 15 year olds.

I'm not an expert on it, but this is what we did in this youth labor market volume. Everyone in the world, the economists got together in the world and basically said, let's go think about what works. So I think you have, you should be funding all sorts of schemes and try and think about what works.

Thank you. More questions. Thank you. It's interesting that you talk about school because that's a place that's structured. Once you get out of school, there are less formal avenues for structure, sort of in society itself. Do you have a sense of. I mean, do you think that's problematic?

And is that place we can I just raise something? I mean, we are trying to think about certainly a dark with a sense of community. But in a sense, let me just throw a problem to you. Supposing so. I've done a lot of work on school children and so on, but supposing this was true.

I mean, one possibility is what's happening at Dartmouth is a problem, and the sororities and the fraternities and all the interaction that goes on at Dartmouth is a problem. We need to fix that. Another possibility is that this actually occurred at high school. The bullying, the cyberbullying, whatever it was occurred at high school and Dartmouth inherited it.

I don't know whether that's true or not, but obviously the fix is going to be somewhat. It's going to be somewhat different. Right. So if the fix was already in high school, we could start to think about doing things to get cell phones. But now my 22 year olds at Dartmouth are facing this issue.

And the President, within three weeks of being, had cancelled that and said, we're going to bring everybody to the campus, we're going to think about community and we're going to think about. We are basically studying all kinds of things, including digital things, trying to think about what will work for our students.

That's, in a sense, we put $500 million into just bringing things to the campus. But I just don't think we know enough about that. Obviously, Haidt talked about engaging children, engaging people, taking a cellphone away, but we haven't really. And even today, we didn't really have much of a debate.

What are you going to do on the California State campuses? What are you going to do at Berkeley? What are you going to do in these places? Because for me, there are going to be mental health consequences, clearly likely to be suicide consequences.

But for a labour economist, these folks are going to make it very difficult. A, to make the transition from school to work, but also to establish, you know, to establish relationships and move away from home and all of that stuff. And so we're in a sense, we're 10 years in and we're behind the game.

Thank you very much, Doctor Blanchflower, thanks for being here. Thanks for your work. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Okay, let's have our entire, we're running a little late, so I wanted to see if we can get our entire last panel to all come up together, and then we could do just one round of questions at the end.

Our next panelist our next panel will be comprised of Doctor Susan Charles, Professor of Psychological Science at UC Irvine. It'll also be comprised of Susan Demorris, Director of the California Department of Aging, and Carol Larson, Senior Research Scholar at the Stanford Center on Longevity. Thanks to all three of you for joining us. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you for having us here today to discuss happiness among older adults. We all want to be happy and for really good reason. So, happiness and I study happiness by the emotions they experience and not so much the cognitive life satisfaction to a lesser extent.

But happiness is an indicator of our mental health and is fundamentally tied to our physical health. Among older adults it predicts rates of our chronic illness, how quickly our diseases progress, the rates of our functional disability, and the rate of our cognitive decline. It even predicts how long we live.

Increasing the happiness of older adults and by doing so, delaying cognitive and physical declines will increase the quality of life for the individual, for their family, and for society as a whole. Happiness is key to healthy aging, and three keys to happiness that we have found in the research are purpose. So, maintaining a purpose in life and a meaning for your life.

Social connection, maintaining close social ties and feeling socially integrated into your community, and maintaining your physical health. We know several of these indicators are working well. Many older adults report high levels of well-being and are very satisfied with their close social partners. And Social Security and Medicare are so important and help maintain health.

But we can do more. Regarding increasing purpose and meaning in life, we need to address ageism. Ageism starting around age 50, work, both paid and volunteer, is sought after and desired by many adults 50 years and older.

It provides many with necessary income, and both paid and unpaid labor are often associated with a greater sense of purpose and meaning. Age is a protected class in the United States, but further incentives for increasing representation of older employees could enhance job security, a sense of control, and a sense of purpose.

Regarding enhancing social integration, we need to create more activities and spaces where people of differing ages come together. Our society is age segregated, and segregation instills stereotypes and an us versus them mentality, and you will hear about some exciting work at Stanford addressing this issue.

In addition to activities, shared spaces designed for all ages are necessary and should be considered when designing public spaces in the State of California. For example, parks designed for both the health and exercise of children and adults would create a more socially integrated and less age segregated world.

And speaking of physical spaces, the ability to age in place is important. Casual conversations at your local grocery stores, your coffee shops, your religious communities are part of the social network that enhances social integration. Moving away can cause significant disruption and loss of sense of self.

Providing grading housing stability so older adults can age in the communities where they grew up will help them maintain social ties and sense of meaning. A very important article on homelessness and older adults in California just came out yesterday in LA. Times worth reading. Regarding and maintaining physical health.

Even with Medicare, existing challenges include high medication costs and complexity of medical systems. The system itself can be difficult to navigate when signing up for care and coordinating different types of treatment.

There's a lack of coordination of care often that's very necessary for older adults and should be the standard of care for older adults and not necessarily for those younger. For example, cancer treatment can increase the risk of falls and poor nutrition for older adults. So, the treatment of cancer can cause problems unrelated to the cancer itself.

And without coordinated care, we will miss this. And when health does decline in late life, we turn to family. Family informal caregivers are increasing in numbers like never before with our aging population. And the average caregiver is 62 years old. And they need, as you will probably hear later, they need our help.

The State of California has more older adults than any other state in the union. In seven years, one out of five Californians will be 65 and older. Societies have always been designed for children and for younger middle-aged adults.

If we were able to design a society that's amenable to people of all ages, designed for people of all ages, both younger growing into this world and the older people continuing to grow older in this world will benefit and be happier for it. Thank you.

Good afternoon. Thank you, Mister Chair and Select Committee, for the opportunity to address older adult isolation and loneliness, its impact, and the path forward through California's Master Plan for Aging. This hearing is especially timely, as May is Older Californians Month, and this year's theme, fittingly, is powered by connection.

The Select Committee's efforts to elevate the issues of older adult well-being come at a critical time. As you just heard, soon one in four Californians will be aged 60 or older. We're proud of California's national leadership with Governor Newsom's Master Plan for Aging and its focus on goal number three, inclusion and equity, not isolation.

We've adopted a whole of government approach to ensure older adults have a sense of purpose, meaning, and belonging in our state.

Examples include promoting intergenerational programming, access to fresh food and farmers markets, volunteerism, work opportunities, and nation-leading initiatives like joining AARP's network of age-friendly states with over 80 California cities participating, establishing a blue zone focused on dementia in Sacramento County, expanding access to nature in California State Parks with Golden Bear passes, and lifelong learning at public universities such as Sac State's Renaissance Society right here in the capital city.

The issue of older adult behavioral health has long been sidelined in policy discussions. Today's hearing puts a welcome spotlight on issues that impact individuals, families, communities and all of society. A significant driver in the epidemic of older adult behavioral health is isolation and loneliness.

Loneliness has such far-reaching consequences that the health impact is comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Our state's Master Plan for Aging is centered in equity, uplifting the experiences of immigrants, people of color, and the LGBTQ-plus community.

We're proud to have just concluded a statewide survey of LGBTQ-plus older adults, with 4,700 respondents sharing their experience, preferences, and hopes as they age in California. Last year, CDA held a series of older adult behavioral health roundtables with strong turnout in the Inland Empire, Central Valley, far northern, rural Northern California, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

During these listening sessions with over 150 participants, two strong themes emerged. The first is isolation. The prolonged COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated feelings of grief, loss, despair, loneliness, depression, and anxiety for many older adults, and we know that this didn't start with the pandemic. The second theme that emerged was stigma.

A growing number of older Californians encounter multiple intersectional stigmas, including ageism, ableism, and discrimination based on race, ethnicity, language, culture, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Negative and often prejudicial, stereotypes are frequently used by media to portray older adults that overly emphasize their physical, mental, and cognitive deficits. There are solutions.

What we heard loud and clear in these forums is that we need both community-based and clinical interventions. CDA was proud to partner with the state's Mental Health Services Oversight and Accountability Commission to launch a $20 million initiative to advance two community-based programs specifically tailored to older adults.

Just over a year ago, the Commission awarded 11 grants to community-based organizations throughout our state. Last spring, Governor Newsom led efforts to secure resources for older adult behavioral health through the budget process. With support from the Legislature, thank you, we're able to continue operation of the statewide Friendship Line for older adults.

Through this impactful warmline program, specially trained staff and volunteers field over 350,000 calls from older adults each year, and just recently, Proposition One was passed by California's voters. This measure addresses remaining gaps in the continuum of care for the most vulnerable Californians, including older adults, through investing in funding for housing, community-based residential care settings, prevention, and the behavioral health workforce.

As part of the implementation of Prop. One, Governor Newsom recently announced mentalhealth.ca.gov, a new website offering lifesaving resources, links to mental health support, hotlines such as the statewide Friendship Line for older adults, and resources for all Californians, from youth and young adults to older Californians, parents and families, veterans, and everyone in between.

In closing, we believe there is much cause for hope. The Master Plan for Aging is reimagining how we serve and support older adults in our state, people with disabilities, and family caregivers.

With continued leadership in the Legislature, the state, and from our stakeholders, together we can change attitudes and perceptions and embrace aging with equity and inclusion for all Californians. Thank you.

Thank you. You're still with me. I'm going to be very brief. I'm going to cut my notes because you've heard so much, you've heard so much good testimony about the research and the importance of early childhood, the research about social connection, and the fear of loneliness in older people.

And what I want to talk to you two experts in ECE is that we have a chance in California for a win-win. As we just heard from Director DeMarois, there is growing number of aging older people over 50 years old in California, and that is a resource, that is an asset.

The New Map of Life at Stanford, developed by the Stanford Center on Longevity, talks about age diversity and transitions in life as an asset and a resource. On the other hand, you know very well the progress, and slow sometimes, that we've made in the state around early childhood. I was President of the Packard Foundation for 16 years.

And so, Speaker Emeritus Rendon, I know from a distance that of your leadership in this area with the Blue Ribbon Commission and the people. Yes, yes. And also, Assembly Woman Schiavo, I just been hearing in the first hearing and hearing you today about your close connection with early childhood. So, we have a chance for a win-win.

We have a growing natural resource of older people over 50 with assets to give both experience wise, mentally, emotionally, and time to give it fifties, sixties, seventies.

And we have this dire workforce shortage everywhere in early childhood, whether it's Head Start, community-based organizations running child development centers, which I know you're very familiar with, or elementary schools implementing UPK. So in the paper that we submitted, the learning Policy Institute has really studied those shortages.

And I think the dynamics are changing a bit, but they're still really there.

So, at Stanford with the Center on Longevity, I worked with two researchers, and we talked to over 100 people who run child development centers, are principals of elementary schools, trying to implement these programs to see if they had thought about this older, the older people in their community as a resource, someone they could call on who might want to be involved in ECE settings.

And we only talked to people in about 10 counties, so it's not statewide. But, you know, we talked to over 100 people.

And while we heard people say, oh, yeah, my mom or dad would have really been interested in that, but we hadn't heard of anyone who was intentionally in their HR departments or in their outreach reaching out to older people right there in their community. So, we did focus groups, a lot in Southern California.

Assembly Woman Schiavo, I know you're in Santa Clarita, but we went to LA Mission College in Sylmar, beautiful child development center. We did focus groups of community college students who were over the age of 50. Did you know there are over 100,000 community colleges, students over the age of 50 in the state right now? And Speaker Emeritus Rendon.

We did a lot in Los Angeles, in East LA. We're working in a close partnership with the LA Mayor's Office on economic development. They've got a great initiative going there. But, so we hadn't found anyone who had been resourced to actually recruit older people and reach out to them.

So, we were able to cobble together some small resources, and we started some small pilots with Fresno County Office of Education, with the LA Mayor's Office, and with Santa Cruz, a small community, and reaching out right into the neighborhood of an elementary school there that's very well respected. The focus groups were terrifically inspiring.

We summarized a bit of it in the paper that we submitted to you. But I want to give the older people a chance to connect and benefit the youngest children and their families, share their cultural competency as well as their life experience.

We heard from an African American woman who'd raised three sons on her own, working two jobs. She's now wanting in later life to actually still make some money, but she needs money because of financial insecurity.

But she wants to do it in a way that she can do what she always wanted to do and never had a chance, and that was to spend time with young children. We heard from a bilingual immigrant woman who had worked a lot of overtime in trying to raise enough resources to raise her kids.

There too she is coming to look for opportunities in the community in which she lives. So bilingual, cultural competency. She still needs to make some money. People in their fifties and sixties still need to make some money. And then we heard from a woman who was an art teacher for 30 years.

She didn't want to work full time, but she wants to have a chance to make a little extra money and work as a substitute teacher assistant for an extended day for 4- and 5-year-olds. We'll have results from these pilots and summaries of the analysis of the focus groups by the early fall.

I'm fortunate to be working with a wonderful postdoc at Stanford and a research assistant. I hope we can stay in touch. So, what can we do now? First thing I wanted to do was ask for a $15 million innovation fund, but everyone I talked to, other than academics, said, don't ask for that.

Everyone's asking them to cut right now. So, what I really think, though, a strong statement of reframing this, that age is an asset, that older people are an asset, that early childhood needs older people to be involved in it. A strong statement would help. Innovation money down the line would be great.

Second of all, I think that across agency review about apprenticeship, work training programs, pathways to work programs would be great because when I've talked to people in these counties, they don't know where to start.

You hear about a program over here, you hear one over here, Department of Labor, Department of Ed, Department of Social Services, Department of Aging. But they're, you know, it's hard to find out about them. So cross agency review, what's there? And then are they being used for older people or could they be?

In LA, the cohorts that are being funded stop at age 30. They only recruit up to the age 30 because the focus is on young people. So cross-agency review.

And then I'm so pleased to sit next to Director DeMarois because I think that as I've talked to people in these counties, when I talk to the early childhood people and I talk to the area agencies on aging, it's only like 10 counties, not a lot of contact, not seeing each other as resources or possibilities.

So those are the three recommendations. And I would really love to be in touch with your offices, but it's wonderful to be with two leaders who have done so much for early childhood in California. So, please keep up the good work. Thank you.

Thank you. And we will keep in touch. Questions?

Thank you so much and appreciate the research and recommendations. You know, it's, I just heard. I think it was on NPR they were talking about, I feel like it was in North Carolina. I can't remember exactly where it was, but it was housing that was both seniors and college students.

And the college students were able to work at the senior center to take some money off of their rent and be able to, you know, go to school. And they were, you know, some of them were studying geriatrics or, you know, or health or things, so they were getting some kind of credits through that, too.

But it seemed like such a great model of really, we've been talking about people need to have a purpose, be contributing, and so helping the kind of middle generation or younger middle generation, and also creating that connection with seniors as well.

And I think I've heard of some examples about this or kind of group living for seniors, more mobile seniors that create that kind of community and connection that's so important to keep people happy, to help people be happy.

And I wondered if you had any other examples of things like that, too, that could be models for us to look at here in California.

Well, I think proximity really matters and cohousing opportunities, neighborhood blocks. Like, I'm thinking about the work in Santa Cruz. The people that are working at that school live within blocks of that school, you know, and it just takes some connection and some invitation.

There is a growing body of academic research about the positive effects of having older people, older people in senior centers or assisted living centers be visited by preschools. But we need a lot more.

And I think that actually, the community that serves older people and thinks of options for them should start thinking about intergenerational connections rather than the segregation that you talked about, Susan.

Yeah, I just want to say there's been a lot more research on mixed-age housing for mice than it has been for humans. I do know about just talking to centers in aging, about very small groups of people in Alabama and Penn State and different places around the United States that do this.

I think one limitation has been it's very expensive for these different multi-tiered housing for older adults. And so often when they do have a spot for younger adults, they kind of supplement. It's a financial loss for the senior housing.

And so, I think if there was a way to structure this so it's affordable, I think it would be a fantastic idea. I think it was limiting in the cost structure.

I would just add a couple of examples. We're seeing more community centers develop in cities instead of a senior center or a youth center. So, they're more of a multipurpose site. And I can think of Choice in Aging. One of our key Master Plan partners, Debbie Toth.

In the Pleasant Hill area, there's a Montessori school on the campus of an adult day healthcare center, and there's. Fantastic. And they're building affordable senior housing on the property now. So, examples like that. Also, shared housing is on the rise. So many older.

Many older adults own their homes, and they find they can't afford to move the costs of selling and relocating. So taking in, you know, shared housing has been a great solution for people of all ages and older adults who own their homes.

Thank you.

Thank you. We're well over. I just want to ask one question, because the. The budget has come up and thank you for not asking for the 15 million. Miss Schiavo will take care of that for you.

But things being what they are, I was just curious about what sort of low-cost solutions you've seen out there that may exist that we might be wanting to look at.

The theme of integration has come up, and that is something with fewer resources to hear that people in the community aren't familiar with the area agencies on aging. So, I think there's a lot we can do around partnership and collaboration.

Health systems, community-based organizations, caregiver resource centers, area agencies on aging and disability, resource connections, housing, continuums of care, lots of opportunities to cross pollinate with existing programs and to build relationships.

Yeah, I've just. I mean, one of the great things about being invited here is I got a chance to talk to people in the Department of Labor, Department of Ed, Department of Social Services, and, you know, there really are a lot of these programs, apprenticeship programs, pathway to work, training programs.

And so, I think just knowing about them and really asking whether older people are included or could be included or why not would be a good low-cost start.

Yeah, I just want. There's certain philosophies that universities are now taking. So, for example, knowing that over 50% of our undergraduates are experiencing high rates of distress, we try to approach every policy that we have by thinking, how does this help mental health?

I mean, even if it's like a food policy or a parking policy or every single one. And if people started thinking about, how does this help people of every age just to.

Just when we zone, is there a place for older people so they can maybe move out of their huge house and live in a smaller house, but have the same neighborhood or these community centers or even shopping centers that have places for older people and younger people to be drawn to?

So just keep that in mind when making all the policies.

Great. Thank you so much. That concludes our final panel. I want to thank all our panelists for their presentations. It's extremely informative. Much appreciated. We will now move to the public comment portion of our hearing. For those in the audience, please step up to the microphone if you'd like to provide a comment. Each person has two minutes.

Please be sure to share your name and affiliation, if any. Great. This concludes our hearing of the Select Committee on Happiness and Public Policy Outcomes. Thank you all for joining us today.