Social Media (and Overprotective Parents) Changed Childhood

Many adults struggle to find a healthy relationship with smartphones and social media. But for kids and adolescents … it’s something closer to a full-blown mental health crisis.
Consider this: In 2011, only 23% of American teens had a smartphone. Just five years later, 79% of them did. And between 2015 and 2022, the number of teens who said they were online “almost constantly” basically doubled.
As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes in his book, "The Anxious Generation", all that screen time coincides with dramatic rises in teen depression, anxiety, and suicide.
But while Haidt’s criticisms of the digital lifestyle’s effect on young people gets most of the attention, There’s another aspect to his indictment: overprotective parenting. At the same time that kids are often being left to navigate online life without any guardrails, parents are increasingly limiting their activities in the real world - which turns out to have devastating consequences for their development into capable adults.
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[@maximelagace]

"Helping our kids does mean letting them spend less time in the online abyss, but it also means giving them more freedom. Freedom to fail. Freedom to succeed. Freedom to get their feelings hurt. Freedom to gain confidence they never knew they could have."

[@MariaPetrovaNYC]

This is fantastic - thanks for shedding light! Jonathan Haidt's book is pretty eye opening.

[@paularhodarmer3267]

Great video. I believe you have hit the nail on the head.

[@MaddenScience]

This is a wonderful and important video! And the book is even more so. *And I love the graphics, editing, and storytelling.

[@PhD_Teacher_Ed]

Great video, thanks

[@KiteandKeyMedia]

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[@ManitouGhost]

This is gonna go viral.

[@liberta2570]

It's a tool, you choose how to use it. For education or evil. It's purposely addictive to our youth and it's ruining them from learning skills and feeling a purpose in life. All by design.

[@tulmenkov]

Agreed.

[@tulmenkov]

Agreed.

[@seethebutter]

Thanks

[@user-vy7fz9si3v]

What do we have mentel health

[@Syntopicon1]

2:08 well yeah that and 20 years of war in the Middle East and Afghanistan

[@newhailman]

I'm already a basket case, I'm certainly not giving up my Internet 😮

[@rogershuttleworth7669]

Haidt skews his figures by restricting the scope of his presentation to figures that go back no further than the year 2000 to make it look as if there is a clear connection between smartphones and social media and the uptick reported depression and self-harm. In the 1980's and 1990's the recorded rates of reported youth depression and self-harm were actually higher at their peak than they are now. All of this long before modern social media and smartphones even existed. And if you go back even further than that you find other peaks that are almost as high but bear in mind some of them are likely to be even higher than the official figures because in the early 20th Century depression and self-harm rates for groups such as blacks or immigrants were very likely not much figured into those studies. As for suicide, Haidt never tells you that suicide rates remained stable or regressed in other first world countries with access to social media, or that US suicide rates are almost at any even level with those of the 1950s. Gee, that whole "we are living in a time of unprecedented teen depression and self-harm" claim of Jonathan Haidt's is suddenly not looking so unprecedented now, is it?

[@E4439Qv5]

Ok, cool. Less competition for low-wage jobs.

[@a-s-greig]

...wow, really?

[@E4439Qv5]

@@a-s-greig Really really. Speaking as someone working on rebuilding himself out of the trauma of the public school system of the US, let those kids alone.

[@a-s-greig]

@@E4439Qv5 *"All in all you were just a... 'nother brick in the wall."*

[@rickmorgan8856]

You want truth ? You want answers ? They are in the Bible . Seek Jesus while He can be found. Isaiah 55 KJV.

[@kaiwagothedragonanimatorp7387]

I don’t think Jesus knows anything about cellular devices

[@sandiegosherlock]

Don’t forget to include gaming because it plays a hand in this too.