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

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.