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End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

Started by Tom62, March 17, 2024, 07:27:08 PM

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Tom62

"The environment in which kids grow up today is "is hostile to human development"," argues Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and business school ethics professor, saying that since the early 2010s, "something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents."

The Atlantic recently published an excerpt from his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness:
QuoteBy a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data... I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online — particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity — all were affected...

There's an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world. My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now...

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting "safe spaces" and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to "microaggressions" and sometimes claimed that words were "violence." These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

The article argues educational scores also began dropping around 2012, while citing estimates that America's average teenager spends seven to nine hours a day on screen-based activities. "Everything else in an adolescent's day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed... The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else." (For example, there's "the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face.")

The article warns of fragmented attention, disrupted learning, social withdrawal, and "the decay of wisdom and the loss of meaning." ("This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life.") Its proposed solution?

  • No smartphones before high school
  • No social media before 16
  • Phone free schools
  • More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

"We didn't know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It's time to end the phone-based childhood."
The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.
Robert A. Heinlein

Icarus

I hasten to agree that phones are, while highly useful, they are the source of much developmental difficulty. I have thought about this subject in the past.

I am not sure that the phone is entirely responsible for the ultra sensitivity that is present in some of the younger psyches. There are other influences too. A gradual change of the manner in which parents discipline their children has something to do with the child's or adolescent's ability to cope with reality. 

As an old guy who grew up in a world with a far tougher set of social norms, I can have no patience with the implementation of "safe zones".


 

 

Asmodean

I tend to think that the problem with the kids is the adults.

I don't think phone-free-this or no-social-media-before-that is the correct approach. I think the adults should be available, present and wise enough to matter in their kids' digital life.

I see far too many kids left almost completely to their own devices - either by parents "my age," who graw up together with the Internet, or a generation younger than me, who were left to their own devices by the generation before me, who to a larger degree lacked the "digital street smarts," and so could not pass it along, and having made it OK "in a different world," they may assume that their kids will too. Some will. Most even, I think, but that's not the point.

It's difficult enough not to be manipulated, propagandised to, scammed or have your dick pics stolen out in the world wild web as an adult - kids should learn to navigate it within as well as without. Is it appropriate to use your phone in the classroom? It might be. You can, if you know what you are doing, "trivially" verify or debunk claims, look up definitions and data and so forth. In order to do that properly, however, you have to have some understanding of source management, search engine biases, misinformation and so forth. Yeah, eventually, "you" will learn as "I" did, but remember, when I was 12, "so was the Internet." We were on much equal footing, "I" and "it." It's a different many-headed hydra today.

Then of course there is an aspect of digital bullying, extortion and other such (semi-)criminal nonsense. I think that to the degree it can be stopped, it can be so most effectively by using those same "street smarts" I mentioned earlier, rather than legislation and prohibition.

A third aspect of it is that when you as a parent complain that your kids spend "all their time" online, what have you done to meaningfully engage with them? It's not that some parents don't try, but a lot really do not, or they go about it in confrontational, authoritative manner, thus removing any potential for fun from the equation.
Quote from: Ecurb Noselrub on July 25, 2013, 08:18:52 PM
In Asmo's grey lump,
wrath and dark clouds gather force.
Luxembourg trembles.

Icarus

We have a recent case in which a kid shot and killed some people. His parents are being indicted and face s prison time for not having supervised the kid sufficiently. In this case, the parent was negligent, according to the prosecutor.

I will go out on a limb and posit that the Asmo has no pre teen or teen agers to deal with. I agree with his premise,above, but it will not work for some of the kids.

I raised two kids with what I believed to be the best of my ability. One of them was rational, would listen to my advice, and behave accordingly. She was and is quite creative and she could have gotten into a mess of trouble. She did not get into trouble and only did a few stupid things.. The other one was an all out rebellious individual. He would not pay any attention to parental advice and would comply with demands only grudgingly, all the while plotting against the family system. He did stay out of big time trouble although he spent a couple of nights in the drunk tank at the county jail. 

Asmodean

You are correct in that the otherwise-inscrutable The Asmo is not responsible for the day-to-day raising of kids.

I'm not proposing a blanket solution - merely a good start. If you as a parent being available with all your hard-knock baggage, "on your kid's level," and still all your efforts slide off like water off an proverbial duck, then what will a law saying; "You shall not do thus, or PRISON!1!1!!1!" accomplish? When your kid does not listen to you with regard to, say, smoking pot, they are likely already not listening to the law, as the extention of the wider society, either.

In such cases, I think it's still on the parents to do the leg work, so to speak. There are ways to be sneaky about it. If you have given up trying to earn (or enforce, if that's what floats your dinghy) your kid's respect, work through a third party that has it and is on friendly footing with you. Not necessarily - for example. A ban is a one-size-fits-all soluition, that doesn't necessarily fit "anybody" all that well.

Also, to tie in with the broader theme of what I was saying, there is no reason for a thirteen year old to understand "anything" better than their parents. In the case of social media and digital life, however, quite often, they simply do. If I were one of them kids, why would I weigh an opinion of someone who does not understand something to the degree I do above my own? Add some teenaged master-of-the-world psyche on top of that, and you have lost "before the battle begun."

The Crumbley(?) State v. Parents cases were a fascinating watch. Both were found guilty. I'm not yet sure what side of that fence I sit on - if any. Hours of footage to process and hours more of intellectual self-pleasuring to follow. Might make a thread on it later.
Quote from: Ecurb Noselrub on July 25, 2013, 08:18:52 PM
In Asmo's grey lump,
wrath and dark clouds gather force.
Luxembourg trembles.

zorkan

Phones save on play areas for kids.
In consequence, my local park was part swallowed up for housing.
Phones help keep kids quiet.
It's a Chinese conspiracy.

Recusant

The basic idea of sheltering young children from the corrosive aspects of online life is not in itself bad, I think. Completely unrealistic, however. If an attempt were made to implement it, all that would be accomplished would be to create a "forbidden fruit."

The paradigms by which the author judges current society (and the ways of people who've grown up online) as dysfunctional are already in the rear view mirror. Either humans will adapt and grow as a species in this environment or things will fall apart, but the genie will not be forced back into the bottle. At some point a new equilibrium will arise. I don't know that it will be one that I find salutary, but I don't object to being along for the ride.
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


billy rubin

my kids were raised without access to television programming. we didnt own a television set

still dont

so the only times tbey were exposed to one was while we were travelling.

i think a harmful social influence is bad for adults, not just kids. i havent had a television set for over tbirty years, and these days i am not capable of processing the informaion on them. its too fast and disjointed. i once counted how many scene cuts occurred within a 60 second automobile commercial. there were 102. clearly the advertizing was not aimed at my thinking brain.

if i am watching a tele ision program somewhere, i turn it off as soon as i see someone killed. usually less than five minutes or so.

but other people find value in them. to each his own.


"I cannot understand the popularity of that kind of music, which is based on repetition. In a civilized society, things don't need to be said more than three times."