Social psychologists urge ending cellphone childhoods NOW

[thewayne]

This is a really ugly article, ugly in a way that it paints our culture and what's to become of it if we don't make changes.

Four suggestions are made, and I can agree with them all:
No smartphones before high school
No social media before 16
No phones in school (also to stop helicopter parents)
More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

I read a truly horrible article last week that one year olds today are exposed to one thousand fewer spoken words at home today because of other people being addicted to their tablets! That's just... SMH, words fail me.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-terrible-costs-of-a-phone-based-childhood/ar-BB1jONI0

https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/24/03/16/2238228/social-psychologist-urges-end-the-phone-based-childhood-now

Comments

[arpad]

I honestly wish these "psychologists" to burn in hell.

My childhood was a nightmare due to Soviet Union censorship and lack of any means to connect with people of my choosing. I was caged in their fucking "real world" and all roads out of it were barred. I had nightmares of it for ten years after immigration.

By the way - do these guys realize that all contemporary crisis with wars and lies all around is commanded by people whose childhood was not graced by presence of social networks?

[thewayne]

It's a tough line.  Too much social media can be crushing, placing too much value into influencer trends, etc., but the news access can be invaluable.  I work at a university library, and it's weird to me how people interact.  Maybe it's a generational thing, I don't know.  There's also the problem of social media and news of the "if it bleeds, it leads".  Always leading with the worst of things that are going on.

[ndrosen]

Well said, Arpad. One can grant that there real problems with people being glued to their cellphones, and be skeptical both of coercive remedies, and of the assertion that phones and media are behind all sorts of problems with, for example, teenage girls being depressed. I have seen the argument that it isn’t so much that kids these days are spending too much time on their phones, as that they are not doing other things, like walking or biking places on their own, or engaging in free play with other children, without constantly being watched by helicoptering adults. This may be why they fail to acquire self-regulation and resilience.

[disneydream06]

Paula Poundstone would be really happy to hear this.
She is a firm believer of no electronics for kids.
I would agree. When I ever I see my younger brother's kids, which isn't very often, they are glued to phones or tablets. :o
So are most of my coworkers. :o
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

I use my electronics quite a lot: mainly for reading books, getting the news, and playing Sudoku with my wife when we're at restaurants.  We also talk.  That's it.  When I drive alone, or we're cruising on a trip, we're listening to music or podcasts.  DW is my main social media tool.  I simply don't engage with these things the way that most people do: it's a tool and it does what I want, not me doing what they want.

[disneydream06]

I use my computer a lot more then any other electronics.
My phone usually sits in my backpack turned off unless I plan to use it.
I did keep it with me and turned on when dad went into the nursing home, but now that he's gone, it's back to not needing it on most of the time.
Of course I still have a house phone, but at some point and time I will get rid of that, and then I suppose I will have to keep my cell phone available more often.
I haven't used my nook in awhile, simply because I don't have anything new on it to read. lol...

[thewayne]

I've been home sick for a week+, been burning through a new (to me) series of books and quite enjoying it.  Finishing a seven book fantasy series.  Absolutely love my iPad!

[disneydream06]

WOWZA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sadly, I haven't picked up my book once this week. :(

[fairy69]

this is INDEED horrible and parents need to stop this shit from happening....

[white_aster]

Interesting! I remember reading one of Haidt's books (The Righteous Mind) and thinking he had some good points. (I remember looking more askance at some of his other recent work, as it seemed like it could easily feed into the kneejerk anti-woke agenda, though I'm not sure if that's his intent.) I might pick up his new book, see what he has to say. I default to thinking that he's right, that the human brain is not made to deal with a firehose of information divorced from the nuances of real-life interaction. I'm not surprised that subjecting developing minds to that sort of thing molds their view of reality as a scary and depressing place.

I guess I'd be interested in how nuanced his argument is. Gen Z has been subjected to a lot, phones or no phones. If I were them, I'd be depressed and anxious, too, because I'd see my life being probably materially worse than both my parents' and grandparents'. I'd be working longer hours for fewer benefits and less pay, with many jobs that seem designed to exploit me. US politics has become a minefield where no matter what side you're on, you feel under siege by the other side. There is a LOT to be anxious and depressed over in the world. Yes, the internet makes it easy to know all of that and to lose a sense of scale. But...the internet and smartphone use is not the reason that people can't find good jobs and earn enough to buy a house and start a family.

I guess my question for him is: are phones/screens causing anxiety/depression, or are they just making it easier for Gen Z to see how screwed they are and thus it is the "I'm screwed" that's causing the anxiety/depression? Maybe he clarifies. I hope so, because otherwise, I feel like I need to go find the "old man yells at cloud" gif. ;P

[thewayne]

I think there's probably several factors coalescing, perhaps with smartphones/SM acting as a concentrator/distillator?  I read an interesting piece today about how American workers are treated as cogs in the machine of capitalism to extract value from on a fairly consistent basis, something that I've recognized for some time.  If the Z+ generation are recognizing this now and saying 'WTF?!  THAT is my FUTURE!' then yeah, can't hardly blame 'em.  It is a really shitty system.

[gingeriana]

Just as with anything else really, i am hoping we can find a golden middle here.

Social media -- definitely yes for ban. All those 7-year olds on Youtube Shorts and Instagram, generating tons of trashy, useless content for mutual likes. All those idiotic dances, etc. Super annoying and a huge time waste.

On the other hand, i can't help but noting that, with the right guidance, kids are already developing simply mobile apps way before they reach high-school age. Which is cool and super useful for their further education and career choices.
Others also learn foreign language through cartoons and YouTubers.

There are some healthy choices in there really. But time limit is definitely needed too.

[thewayne]

One of the big problems, as I said/alluded to, is parents also suffering from addiction and tuning out of their kids development.  If the alleged adults are going to allow their kids to do what they will, and shove iPads at infants, then nothing is going to change.  Gotta figure out how to get adults off their addiction first.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I agree that smartphones are destructive. I wish people would use them less.

However, so much of society has moved online, and communication takes place through smartphones and social media, that shutting young people out of it will cause a different set of serious problems. Especially if it's made illegal and used as another excuse to jail children of color, which seems a predictable angle of progression. Alternatively, do we find these things harmful enough that we want to kill them off? Look at what happened to malls, people banned youth from them, kids quit growing up in them ... and then didn't acquire the habit as adults, one factor in the decline of malls.

And of course, trying to control how other people raise their kids has consistently poor results.

[silveradept]

This seems likely to be a baby and bathwater problem, and as much as the writer would like us to believe it's the always-connected world that's driving this problem, there's a little too much of "the new technology is to blame for the problems" there than I would normally accept. Mostly because I see "Gen Z is always on their phones!" and "Boomers are repeating the latest Fox News nonsense!" as two sides of the same general coin, a situation where media companies, both social and broadcast, have been doing their best to tailor their messages to a receptive audience, usually in the service of selling ads to them. And then those messages get spread by the people who are receptive to them over their chosen media platforms. So bad rumors get spread and you learn more about the people who are supposedly your friends by the messages they spread as well as the posts they make. (It used to take a little while for the milkshake duck to be found out as a racist. Now, it doesn't take all that long at all.)

With all of the possible places that rumors could be spread (and their consequences enforced in the schoolyard) that are outside the control of the school or the parents, because any half-decent child knows how to create an account that is away from prying eyes and where the real socialization happens, I could certainly see why someone might spend a lot of time checking their feeds. Banning the apps and the devices seems like an easy and quick fix to the problem, but it's not actually fixing the underlying problem, which is that students need a safe environment to do things like learning in, and generally, the only people who feel safe in a school environment are the kids who don't appear to have anything that someone else could use to improve their own social standing.

The part I will agree with is that there needs to be more places where kids and teens can hang out and have minimal adult supervision. If access to space requires purchase, that excludes a lot, and even then, plenty of those places are more than happy to kick someone out if an adult complains that teens are behaving like teens in there. Between the increased belief that childhood and adolescence are no longer time to explore, play, and otherwise develop a sense of self and are instead the training grounds by which someone either becomes fabulously wealthy and famous or languishes as a homeless, drug-addicted person and the decisions to close off more and more public spaces to the public or to make them private and require admissions fees, it's no wonder that what happens on the Internet seems like the most important, most real thing to a lot of kids and teens. It's generally the only space they have to themselves that isn't being surveilled with hostile intent, "only" the algorithms and marketing folks.

So, yes, more play spaces. More spaces without obvious adult surveillance. More engaged parenting, though, so that there's an understanding that if stuff starts getting weird in their spaces, kids feel comfortable talking with grownups about what's going on. Play games with the kids, show them your own social feeds and how you manage them. Have discussions with your kids about what to do when someone is wrong on the Internet, and take the kids' suggestions into account. Find other grownups for your kids to talk to, so if there's something they don't feel comfortable with talking to you about, they still have a trusted grownup to go to.

And, just maybe, if you're concerned about "addiction," remember the rat experiments. When given the choice between the addictive substance and a palace to be social and play and otherwise do something else, the rats did the other things. Concerns about addiction should always take stock of what the social situation around them is, and what the world around them is like, and perhaps consider that there may be changes that would make the phones and social media less "addictive." Like some real social safety net provisions, for example, or finding ways to spread the wealth or make sure that all the power and money isn't concentrated in the hands of a specific few. Maybe even let some younger people into the halls of government, instead of giving us the choices between this boomer and that boomer.

[thewayne]

Lots of good points. I am always mindful of the saying that a library is one of the few places where people can come with no expectation that they have to spend money. Now, at my library, non-students/staff/faculty have to pay $5 a semester for a public patron card, but that's pretty nominal as we a university, not a public, library. They can read inside for free and use the public WiFi and lots of people take advantage of that.

We're near having a gaming room set up, waiting on IT getting some network issues sorted. Next up is podcast equipment and a lab for that.