Children are like trees, but the problems only increase. The wind bending a young tree spreads the roots of the tree on the windward side, anchoring the tree. The wind then strengthens the wood on the other side by compressing its cellular structure. This engine of growth, called “stress wood,” is a metaphor for smart parenting, as children need wind, the stress of pressure and risk-taking, to grow strong and take root in the soil of society.
Jonathan Haidt argues that the social catastrophe resulted from the intersection of two recent phenomena. One is the paranoid parenting “safety” that hurts children in their bubbles by overprotecting them from exaggerated “stranger danger” and other irrational anxieties about the real world. principle.” Another is parental neglect regarding the “rewiring” of young brains through extreme immersion in virtual worlds. This, Haidt argues, is made possible by the rapid proliferation of smartphones, giving children something age-appropriate: unlimited access to the internet.
With his just-published The Anxious Generation, Haidt hopes to demonstrate that Johannes Gutenberg's legacy of moveable print, mass literacy, and books remains more important than Steve Jobs' devices. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is dismayed by what has happened since smartphones became common equipment for children at a developmentally vulnerable age around 2010. Hite: “A child's brain grows to 90% of her full size by the age of five, but after that it takes a long time to rewire and organize itself.”
High-speed broadband arrived in the early 2000s. iPhone appeared in his 2007 year. Starting around 2010, social media companies began marketing “addictive content” to Generation Z (those born after 1995) who are socially anxious, subject to peer pressure, and hungry for social recognition. We have designed a fire hose. Gen Z is the first generation to “spend their adolescence carrying a portal in their pocket that takes them away from the people around them and into another world.”
Follow this authorGeorge F. Will's opinion
Phone-based childhoods have been replaced by play-based childhoods and unsupervised conversations, touching, and negotiating the small-scale frictions and setbacks that prepare children for adulthood. Convinced that the real world is comprehensively threatening (and concerned about overly broad “child endangerment” laws), frightened parents may not allow their children to go to the local store alone. do not have. However, they allow their children unlimited use of the internet, especially social media.
According to Haidt, sleep deprivation, desocialization, and fragmented attention spans lead to “truant'' boys who live with their parents for long periods of time, and girls who are depressed by visual social comparison and perfectionism. It is said that Soon college campuses were filled with timid and confused late adolescents. After a phone-based childhood (Haydt calls social media “the most efficient adaptation engine ever invented”), they have learned to protect their fragile “emotional safety.” He begged for a “safe place.”
Hite recommends “increasing unsupervised play and independence in early childhood,” “banning smartphones until high school,” and “banning social media until age 16.” However, there is a problem of “collective action”. It is difficult for a few dispersed parents to resist the wave of new technology against most of their children's peers.
Techno-pessimists should avoid the post hoc ergopropter hoc fallacy. In other words, when the rooster crowed, the sun rose, so the rooster's crowing caused the sunrise. Even if smartphones disappear, schoolchildren will still be (if white) complicit in a rotten country's systemic racism, or (if non-white) tragic victims, until climate change wipes us all out. Regarding consciousness, you will be exposed to anxiety and depression.
Haidt's data showing correlation (the advent of smartphones and the rise in mental disorders) suggests causation, but remember: from cars (sex in the back seat) to comic books (really) , television, and video games, a moral panic over new cultural phenomena. The Internet is a feature of this exciting era.
Mr. Haidt is always humane and mostly persuasive, but his argument does not amount to a claim that the government is trying to do what parents and schools can do. They can emulate Shane Vos.
In the southwestern Colorado city of Durango, Mr. Voss, principal of Mountain Middle School, took early and decisive action. In 2012, access to smartphones was banned during class. The results were “transformative,” Haidt wrote.
“Students are no longer sitting next to each other and scrolling while waiting for homeroom or class to start. They talk to each other and the teacher. Voss says there is no phone curfew. When you walk into a school, “it's like a zombie apocalypse and kids are in the hallways and not talking to each other,” he said.
Soon, Voss' schools reached the highest academic ratings in Colorado. This local experience provides recommendations to the nation. Recognize the potentially constructive power of denial. Just say “no.”
