A nice thing to say.. Made my night,,, thanks. S

@@nickb220 he is

@@nickb220all of us are hypocritical

As a school mental health therapist, phones are also the bane of my existence 😂

Me and my partner are both teachers and all of this stuff we've been talking about for over 5 years. Just happy somebody else is finally noticing it

I’m so glad i grew up with social media and cell or smartphones . I don’t even want to know the amount of time we all waste on it

That it is destructive doesn't mean that it necessarily should be illegal. I was a kid before social media. Even then, there were parents that let their kids do destructive things. That their are parents that let their kids do destructive things doesn't necessarily mean there should be a law against it. I can guarantee that if social media were a thing when I was a kid that my parents would never have allowed it no matter how much I might've pressured them. Many of us heard the line that if your friends jumped off a bridge would you jump with them? Saying my friends are doing it didn't carry any weight with my parents, it depended on what the it was. Parents could give their kids a phone, but no data plan that would allow them access to social media, problem solved. Haidt was on a morning show this morning, and the host of the show were talking with a mom and a teen daughter who both admittedly had a problem with the amount of time spent on social media. That's a case of a parent setting a horrible example. There are parents that set horrible examples when it comes to drinking alcohol as well, and that can get to be very destructive, but it doesn't necessarily means there needs to be a law against alcohol. This guy rang a bell, and I recall that Haidt did a forum back in 2016. It's worth a watch, the title is The Forum: Right to Say: Freedom, Respect, and Campus Speech and is here on KZfaq. He talks about how generations past all had a mixture of activities some of which had someone in charge such as school or Little League baseball and others where it was entirely peer to peer such as playing baseball, skateboarding with friends, playing board games or video games, etc. Both are necessary because we do have those times when someone is in charge (such as at work) but on the other hand we don't have someone in charge around ALL the time even at work so we have, as adults, to have the ability to work things out in a peer to peer way. Haidt goes on to say that those born around 1980 and after didn't have both dynamics at work but always had an authority figure around, and there is a danger to self sufficiency there and the risk of developing an ethical dependence, always looking to an authority figure for guidance. As if to prove the point, the woman (Viviana Bonilla Lopez) who was a student representative in this forum asked the Haidt if she could speak after he was done saying what I just highlighted here. Yes, please! was his reaction. Haidt went on to say that such inability to solve things in a peer to peer way leaves people ripe to be accepting of authoritarianism. When I first watched that video they had comments which have unfortunately been removed and no new comments allowed. Anyway, this Haidt guy has mentioned in other videos that he's been in education since something like the late 1980s or early 1990s and over the years he has seen his conservative colleagues be chased out of education, and that he (despite being a leftist himself) is frightened of his leftist students. Now there just might be a lesson in that if he wants to learn it, it seems he is just THAT close.

when its causing kids to commit suicide yes, thats literally the reason for making it illegal@@Anon54387

Theres no evidence for that! The truth is that american society and culture are destroying the youth, depression and mental instability had been going up in teens since the 90s

Always pointing the finger, constantly looking externally for why you think less of yourself or for validation is problem and it isnt going away with the ban of social media.

Theres no proof that social media is the cause for the rise in depression and mental illness, especially when these things have been on rise since the early 90s

What about GenX? It's always amusing how GenX gets skipped over as if not existing. We GenXers are used to being ignored and dismissed. No worries. We don't take any offense. There is some advantage to go under the radar. It creates a unique perspective. Anyway, GenX was the first generation to grow up with personal technology: video games, beepers, walkmans, proto-smartwatches, etc. And just as we hit adulthood, cellphones, internet, and laptops were taking hold. We grew up with the New Media. By the way, most GenZs have GenX parents. And so GenXers are directly involved in the present problem. We were so underparented as children that many of my peers have had an odd response in their own parenting style. Many GenXers overparent in the physical world for the reason they were underparented. But they underparent online because, though much of social media was created by GenXers, they don't realize why the changes of technology over their lifetime is so harmful. When we GenXers got into trouble, it was in the real world. Whereas media technology was just something extra to our lives. Many of us GenXers grew up with personal computers. But there simply wasn't the present online world. And tech addiction was more limited.

Gen X was not underparented. My grandparents were from the Greatest Generation. Their parents had very little involvement in their lives. My grandfather played baseball from 8 to 16. He said his parents never came to a game and he couldn’t remember any other parents coming. It was 100% the responsibility of the kids to keep track of their practice and game schedules and get themselves there and home walking or taking the streetcar in Philadelphia in the 1920s and 1930s.

Dude, my manager at my last job was a boomer, and the first to take the opportunity to go home. Then it was the gen Xers, followed by the millenials. Haidt is suppose to be so smart but man he misses the mark in such an obvious way to anyone that does even a tiny bit of research. Mental illness has been on the rise since 1990 but he conveniently starts the clock around 2010.

This has happened before. Socrates complained about the young generation that had higher rates of literacy. This led to class conflict as a growing middle class was getting educated by Sophists. Economic elites like Socrates felt moral panic about class status breaking down and the social order dissolving. A similar thing happened with moveable type printing presses, or at least once they became common. In the late colonial period, right before revolution broke out, books suddenly became all the rage and the young would be seen walking around with their face stuck in books. The older generations thought it was the end of the world. There was another moral panic about romance novels leading to suicide. And we now know from neuroscientific research that reading alters the brain and psychology. So, their fears were right in a sense. Yet all of society adapted after some generations.

And youre more likely to raise mature children. Why? Because youre being a parent by actually PARENTING, instead of shirking your duties off on to the government or media companies

Social media is far more addictive than TV, and video games for that matter. Apples and oranges.

@@AlexJaneson I accept your point reservedly. Video games are highly addictive and so is TV, especially in the past when there was no internet. The other option was radio, comparatively boring.

There are some great books about fear-mongering and moral panic about media technology during the early Cold War. Many in the older generations thought that the young were being ruined and that it would be the doom of Western Civilization. There was also a fear about the affect of youth culture that their parents and grandparents didn't understand. Many saw Hollywood and Rock n' Roll as cultural indoctrination and propaganda, possibly controlled by the Soviet commies. It was the equivalent of right-wing reactionary rhetoric about 'Postmodern Marxism'. And to be fair, it did end up turning society on its head. But everything quickly settled down to a new normal. This pattern has repeated through out history with every change in media and technology, all the way back to Socrates fear about about the conflict of oral and literary culture. More relevant to the present, there was the period right before the American Revolution. With increased production and cheaper accessibility, books became all the rage and suddenly the young were reading all the time. Like kids today with smartphones, late colonial kids walked around with their faces stuck in books. The moral panic was that the popular romance novels were corrupting the young and leading them to moral dissolution, sometimes resulting in suicide. It's amusing today, in this age of mass literacy, to imagine the reactionary right of the past fear-mongering about books. But then again the reactionary right of today is still fear-mongering about books and censoring them. The more things change the more they stay the same.

@@learningisfun2108- In the early 1990s, I was in high school. I'd spend much of my time zoned out in front of cable tv. It was highly addictive. My childhood friend also played a lot of video games as a kid. And he's still addicted to video games. It's hard to understand how addictive were old technologies. As I pointed out in my other comment here, there was fear in the late colonial period about addiction to fiction books. Any new technology tends to be more immersive than what came before. And that immersiveness is what creates the conditions of addiction.

@@MarmaladeINFP I agree. Perspective is what I was aiming for and you point out the fear people had of addiction to fiction is a good example. And I’m sure there are people addicted to fiction today (pulp fiction, romance novels) just like the addiction to soap operas. But I battle against fear mongering, like the satanic panic of the ‘80s was going to be the end of our society, remember? Thanks for your reply.

I had the same thought.

Parents in safe neighborhoods increasingly started making the same decision. News media transformed into pure sensationalism in the 80s and 90s, local news in particular shifted to stoking fear for entertainment/profit purposes, and everyone still watched the nightly news. Kids in safe areas also had their free time loaded up with structured enrichment activities rather than free play, in the wake of an economic boom where more people had college aspirations for their kids and generally "wanted it all" for their kids, whereas our parents were happy if we were fed and did our homework and chores. Childhood got turned into building an educational portfolio for college applications.

Keep in mind that it began with GenXers. Many GenXers spent their childhoods and young adulthoods in the 80s. Born in 1975, I was in elementary school and middle school in the 80s and 90s. In those years, we had a video game system, a personal computer, and a VHS player. Then when I was a high schooler in the 90s, so much more was coming on the scene as you describe.

So teaching them to never find resolve on their own and rely soley on a selected authority for everything is the way to go then? Human beings have been successfully doing this for thousands of years. What about when families had 12, 16, 20 children?! You think the kids all stayed within a few feet of their parents so all their fusses could be adjudicated? Heck no! And they arent the generation of unstable neurotics.

As a GenXer in childhood, we worked out our own conflicts in most cases. There was some bullying, but surprisingly little. Generally, because we kids were so free to play together we had large friends circles. Pretty much every kid in my class during elementary school was a kid I played with. There was far fewer social division and cliques. Maybe new technology has exacerbated bullying, as some argue.

I do have concerned that the view presented is extremely narrow and the evidence cherry picked. It's not that I entirely disagree, if I think it's a lot more nuanced and complex. This sounds like simplistic reactionary moral panic and I know that is dangerous rhetoric.

Access to firearms was wayyyyyy easier in the 1950s to 80s. High Schooler's used to take their firearms to school regularly. It was common place to see a shotgun mounted on a trucks rack. No phones, but also no mass shootings. Guns didnt change, infact they have gotten harder to reach. The culture and socialization of kids is what changed. But everyone is so ready to scream about the symptom and take a faux moral high ground than to call out whats actually going on because, well, thats just too difficult.

The threat of social media is not overblown. It’s harming children in almost every conceivable metric.

Moral panic is typical reactionary rhetoric. And it can be dangerous when wielded to problematic ends.