Social Psychologist Urges 'End the Phone-Based Childhood Now'
Social Psychologist Urges 'End the Phone-Based Childhood Now'
It's absolutely insane to me how defensive parents get about this. It's like you asked them to cut off their child's hand or something.
Look, if you don't want to raise kids and be a parent then don't.
So, I have two small children, and they have access to the internet, and I wrestle with this question a lot. Right now, I believe we're in a Gattaga type moment where parents who hold on to the past are not preparing their children for the future. Like it or not, the future of information transfer is not books, it is Youtube videos. Our children will have to navigate a complex online world with critical thinking skills that will have to distinguish between AI generated videos and reality. The more we handicap this learning process, the worse off they will be. Do they need to be supervised? Yes. Is it dangerous? Yes. But it is the future, and we need to grapple with it, not ignore it.
Lol imagine thinking the cesspool of YouTube kids is anything but soul cancer
How long would it take for a ten year old to learn about online media literacy?
What about a fourteen year old?
Can either of those children better process unexpectedly seeing something confusing or scary like gore or pornography online?
Can you - personally - teach a kid that has been hooked up to the internet their whole life to set down their devices, sit still, and be patient when they reach their early teenage years?
Most importantly can you get your young kids to 'unsee' bad behavior and/or disturbing images they see online?
I'm a Millennial, who didn't have Internet until I was 11 or a smartphone until I was 27. Are you saying I'm somehow being left behind here by not being able to navigate Youtube?!
Yeah, the response usually seems to be to take a step back and make their childhood more like “our own” (whichever prev gen you’re from), as if our childhood was better than theirs. What I feel like we should be doing is paying attention to what they’re getting into and guide them through what they’re seeing. They need to have a healthy mix of socialization and exposure to technology to prep them for the future. Unless we have a huge, society-ending event that strips electricity & tech away from us and plunges us into a new dark age, they’ll need to learn to navigate tech to have any kind of advantage or just keep up with their peers.
Dear lord, read the article for once. There's a mental health epidemic going on among teenagers and an all time high in children's anxiety. It has nothing to do with "have our same childhood" crap.
You lot can't be trusted to actually pay attention to what kids are doing on their phones. And to the comment above yours, this is the first generation raised entirely on phones and they are the worst with technology, they're basically tech illiterate. They can be glued to a device all day but that doesn't mean they know how it works or how to use it effectively.
Honestly the worse offender is social media. Most adults are addicted and mentally distraught by the likes of Facebook, tiktok, Instagram, et al. Now imagine a child who is still in development, with far less cognitive recourses and maturity being exposed to that.