And that’s why my retirement plan includes collecting useful recipes.
Something strange is happening with teenagers’ mental health. In the US, Britain, Australia and beyond, the same trend can be seen: around the middle of the last decade, the number of young people with anxiety, depression and even suicidal tendencies started to rise sharply. Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, noticed a change when students who were brought up with smartphones started to arrive on campus. They were angrier. More fragile. More likely to take offense.[…]
“It’s what I’ve been calling the phone-based child,” he says. “For all human history, millions of years, all mammals play. Anyone who has had a puppy knows it’s all about play. So we had play dates in childhood, up until around 2010.” In Britain, he says, the number of children who went on real-life playdates then fell sharply. Lockdown, needless to say, didn’t help.
“I’m calling it the great rewiring of childhood… It hit the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand in exactly the same way.” Social media is a bit of a misnomer, he says. It’s no longer about connecting people, but “performing on a platform.” Perhaps this is fine for grown-ups, but not for children, “where they can say things in public, including to strangers, and then be publicly shamed by potentially millions of people… Children should not be on social networks. They should be playing in person. Social media platforms should never be accessed by children until they’re eighteen. It’s just insane that we let kids do these things.”
I hear about and also see exactly as described in the article all around me. Society is becoming increasingly a mess. Shoot me (babyboomer) now.
Jeepers, I can’t imagine why. Life doesn’t hand out participation trophies nor does the world give a crap about your feelings.
Hence why my retirement (and general) plan includes replacement-level immigration. Crush those snowflakes with Operation Brownout!
“I’m calling it the great rewiring of childhood”
They missed you, but there’s a still a tiny sliver of hope for the next gen, especially when they grow up in the new Third World environment your generation championed.
My good man, even the Gazans have smartphones. Every day an Arab claiming to be Canadian calls in to the CBC on WhatsApp whinging about how Justin won’t help them get out of Gaza.
Don’t get me started on the Chinese.
If anything, Third World immigration would just make the smartphone problem worse.
What has to happen is that the Nations need to learn to do without smartphones or, ideally, even television. It would be much harder to turn young people on their local Jewish community because Israel engaged in a police action against terrorists on her own territory. If young people are bored, let them engage in physical sport, or read a book.
There’s a reason South Africa didn’t have even TV till the 1970’s. Far-sighted South Africans realized it would hasten the end of white civilization there, and they were right. As soon as Africans saw how spoiled the Blacks in America were on trashy American TV shows, they wanted something for nothing too.
Television was the most effective recruitment tool to ever fall into the hands of the South African Communist Party. And the smartphone is the most effective recruitment tool to ever fall into the hands of Hamas, never mind the Chinese Communist Party.
LOL thanks I’ll keep my smartphone and TV and mass immigration and pass on your technophobic racism.
LOL – The best part is that no matter what happens in Canada’s future, you lose.
Tv? What’s that?
You are a boomer.
I had a couple of friends who snared and ate the gophers. They supposedly only did it once; just to be able to say they had.
Do they mention the role of parents in this thing? My kids all have phones, use them alot. I have seven kids, all better informed, happier, and living good lives.
Parents need to parent. Tell your kids what you think and how you got there, then tell them what to believe in. They can think for themselves when they are adults.
I wonder if their teachers telling them that the world is going to end and they have no future might have something to do with it?
If the Putin-loving homophobes don’t get them first! Right?
BINGO!!
Or, you could take the position that half of the two youngest generations are the progeny of hippies. That can’t be good.
And then flood them with messages such as “YOU’RE KILLING THE PLANT”, “IT’S HOPELESS, WE’RE ALL GOING TO BURN UP”, and “THAT DEPRESSING FEELING MEANS YOU NEED TO CHOP YOUR D*CK OFF”.
Parents need to parent. There’s probably a correlation between these social problems and the ever increasing outsoucing of parenting (daycares). Have we passed a tipping point?
Far too many social influencers living the high life on social media
Not many welders and mechanics.
Ewwww … who wants to get tranny fluid under their fingernails?!
“So we had play dates in childhood,…”
Ugh!! Why does that grate on me? What…we’re making appointments now?
Some of us were told to get out of the house and not return till supper, because our mothers had better things to do around the house than entertain us.
That stopped because the TV told mothers that “strangers” were loitering at every corner waiting to kidnap their darlings, so the kids should stay in and watch advertisements for toys.
Needless to say, action was rarely taken against real pedophiles until one of them killed a child, and sometimes not even then. Nobody asked questions about the kids’ uncle the confirmed bachelor, or the childless Scoutmaster, or the Jesuit schoolmaster who never tired of suffering little children to come to him after school hours.
(No, it wasn’t just Catholics, fair is fair.
Until the Law of Return was amended in the 1980’s, Israel was the destination for many a pervert of Jewish extraction who fled the country when the mothers of the children he had betrayed started asking embarrassing questions.
No surprise that queer Heal-The-Worlders turned against Israel after she announced that she was no longer going to be a safe space for North American criminals.)
In my day we played in the street until the street lights came on. You learnt who to hang out with and who to avoid. You also learnt that the way to deal with bullying was to stand up to it and not obsequiously go along to get along
“Social media is a bit of a misnomer…”
Social media promotes anti-social behaviour.
God deliver us from people who think everything bad started yesterday.
The east German communists, for many years, strongly discouraged citizens of the “German Democratic Republic” from watching television from west Germany. After a while, though, they gave up doing so, even manufacturing dual-standard televisions so east Germans could watch the “black channels.”
Why? Because researchers in East Berlin figured out that GDR citizens in areas where reception of west German channels was possible were LESS likely to try to leave the GDR, not more. The west German TV made for better anti-capitalist propaganda than east German TV!
By showing people things that upset them out of context, TV made people angry, which made them more likely to do something stupid, like support black supremacist groups or stop having children because of the alleged population bomb.
The smartphone has just taken this a step further. TV is a luxury—you can throw it away without major mishap. The smartphone has become a necessity—it gets harder every year to live without one.
So every day young people, especially, are blasted with messages designed to make them want things, or want to do things, that no grownup who cared about them would ever ask they do—anything from supporting terrorists to cutting their own genitals off.
What to do? Well, the problem of a nation’s young people repeatedly doing stupid things will eventually be self-correcting when they get old enough to do real damage to themselves.
People who are upset and angry all the time won’t be too hard to “trigger” into starting a global thermonuclear war that will turn their smartphones into useless baubles.
With luck, the catastrophe will result in a taboo against ever using such things ever again, even if after ten generations or so the Nations recover enough to be able to design and build them.
And there will be peace in the Land of Israel for a thousand years.
“I’m calling it the great rewiring of childhood”
You guys seem quick to blame every freakin’ thing that Some Guy says is the root of all current evil.
Remember when comic books were Ruining Our Youth?
Remember when Television was Ruining Our Youth?
Remember when Personal Computers were Ruining Our Youth?
Video games…
shooting sports…
the internet…
online games…
social media…
ipads…
You get the picture.
I propose a counter argument. Phones etc. do -nothing- to children. They are the same as they always were. What has changed is that Mr. Jonathan Haidt, psychology professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has to publish something or he loses his job. So he made up a bunch of b*llsh1t and you read it.
He and a lot of other equally useless academics have to come up with Something New to write a paper about. So, because they are lazy, untalented and not that clever, they simply correlate whatever new thing is in the news with whatever bad thing is in the news, and publish a study.
You can show that cryptocurrency causes anti-Semitism with charts, and get it published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and keep your cushy job at the Stern School of Business.
Or, shorter version, you’re being played for a sucker by grifters. It isn’t science. It is Scientism, a scam where they make it sound all sciency while they steal your money. I read on Slashdot today that at least 2% of scientific papers published each year are produced by paper mills. 100% fabricated, and some guy puts his name on it to keep his job. I think that number is probably low.
Valid points. I lived through all of those on your list. Didn’t become a drug addict or serial killer.
But, IMO young children(as in 10 to 15 year olds) don’t need cell phones. They will survive without them and learn to interact better with their peers and others.
My kids didn’t have cell phones until they bought their own.
Every time that I drive by a local middle school around the noon hour all I see are teenagers horsing around, flicking their hair, the odd cigarette smoker, etc.
Kids are still kids.
Well I don’t disagree with some of what you said , but cell phones , algorithms , and the crap on them is a whole different animal.
Especially with the kids that are coddled.
I hear “my kids are good ” alot of course they are but are they useful?
I disagree. When my kids were young I definitely noticed a correlation between the amount of screen time they had and how angry and belligerent they became. It was especially bad with my younger child. If he spent too much time on a computer or a game console he became outright rude and abusive. I had to limit their computer time quite severely, and made them earn it through doing chores and other activites.
Do you actually have a specific issue with the data that Haidt presents?
I’ve always thought that social media was the modern equivalent of a 1922 lynch mob. Say the wrong thing and get lynched on social media. This year it seems to have become a call for rabid antisemitism.
The best thing to do is get off of social media if one wasn’t smart enough to not have gotten on it.
“useful recipes”
LOL. Kate, you’re the best.
I personally feel that this is a deliberate effort by the Chinese with Tik Tok. I don’t know, never having used it, but I understand it’s the main platform used by youths. It makes sense that it would be the CCP’s main effort to destroy us.