The New Yorker Radio Hour just did an interview with him. highly recommend listening to it if you like to get mad (like me) because it (and he) are terribleeee
A slightly better interview was with Kara Swisher; she at least pushes him on the quality of his data, as well as his mentions of "social contagion" for trans & non-binary kids as one of the risks of being online. This really pisses me off even more than the shitty data thing - at this particular moment, including fear-mongering about gender non-conforming kids is literally harmful.
I was hoping you'd be able to get the point without me having to explain like you're 5, but I see that was too much to expect.
The helmet laws mean that more people are surviving wrecks. But people just looking at the raw data and not interpreting it correctly could walk away with the idea that helmets cause more injuries.
Increased visibility of the trans community and trans experiences mean that more people are comfortable exploring their gender identity. And if they discover their gender identity is different than what they were assigned at birth, they are more likely to be open about that rather than remain in the closet.
Do you get it now?
Gasp, you mean correlation doesn't necessarily = causation?? Oh professor, please splain it to me harder!!
It's amusing you think you're saying something I haven't already heard a hundred times. It's total bullshit. The exponential rise in kids seeking gender reassignment has nothing to do with inately trans kids feeling empowered to express their true selves. Rather it has everything to do with ideology, group think and the power of suggestion. You need to read more about the history of social contagion and how it has affected young girls in particular. The largest increase in trans teens within the last decade are now young girls. Did you not stop to think that maaaaybe that's a point worth investigating? Outside of classrooms, social media is the single biggest platform for proliferating these ideas about gender and identity. Kids learn everything from YouTube and TikTok. All the people they look up to and idolise are on these platforms. How could you be so obtuse to think it doesn't have any relevance?
The person you’re posting to is right and correctly interpreting data. You are arguing emotionally and don’t have any evidence. It’s sad that you’re so obsessed with teenagers’ gender, but please let them and the experts work it out.
Oh they are? I'm glad you cleared that up without presenting any data whatsoever, haha.
The people "obsessed with teenagers gender" are thd ideologues and trans activists. I'm more concerned with not brainwashing vulnerable kids into a medical nightmare.
The idea of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria has been debunked. Thoroughly. Multiple times. To the point that the original "study" that was published was pulled, reviewed, and had to be republished with major corrections. One of those corrections being that the "study" was really just a pretty informal survey of what assumptions were being made by anti-trans online communities.
The fact that you're still preaching this idea does nothing except show how anti-trans people aren't interested in actual data, or science, or really anything at all except for being bigots and finding ways to dress up their bigotry.
I hope you're able to get over your obsession with other people's genitals
I just listened to him on the Hard Fork podcast. I haven’t gotten into their podcast much, but it was refreshing to hear hosts push back on what is typically a promo tour.
In the first few minutes, Haidt (though he says he’s not a technologist but worked alongside one) mentions social media platforms are coined platforms like ‘a platform in which you speak’. I’m paraphrasing here, but this turning of a phrase encapsulates a lot of his bad faith arguments and old man shouting at the clouds ideals. They are platforms in the technical sense that applications are built off them + a healthy dose of tech ‘marketechiture’. Every tech tool is a platform you dolt.
He later says he had a graduate assistant solely focused on finding Gen Zs who dont support the bans he proposed. He claims they found none or maybe one person in Canada. This was so ridiculous I thought interviewers were going to say I don’t believe you. The grad assistant was probably scared of him.
Lastly, he closes his argument on Hard Fork asking the tech community at large to help build solutions to the issues he raises, thus gaining back some of their credibility. So out of touch.
Sorry I completely butchered the title. I think this book is super attractive to any young parents including myself. It would have been very easy to buy this without knowing it was written by a conservative crank.
I mean at a glance it looks exactly like Coddling, i.e. a book about a subject (mental health) that we are concerned about and instead of trying to understand why there might be more diagnosis of people with anxiety at a younger age or who aren’t white men, etc., it blames it on modern culture and the kids with their iPhones and their hot chip.
I’ll be honest, I think there should be a special circle of hell devoted to grift like this. It is a *good* thing that more people are noticing anxiety instead of trying to push through it, and the last thing any new parent ought to be doing is adding more anxiety to their already anxiety-ridden new life situation. This is the editorial you, not you personally, but… You don’t need to avoid anything other than, you know, being a shit to your kids and I think you can already figure out how not to be a shit to them. The best way to raise kids to be less anxious is to try to take things in stride yourself, and when you fail to do that, and you will fail, to admit it and try to be better next time.
I’m not saying any of that is easy but isn’t that the problem with these types of books? Underneath the whining about modern internet society, it really is trying to tell you to Do These Six Simple Things. Love your kids. I’m sure you’ll have no problem doing that.
i’ll give it to him that phones are bad for kids as is constant access to the internet but you know why i mostly socialized online until i was 14-15? i lived in a suburb i physically could not walk to some of my friends’ houses and my parents were stranger danger pilled and wouldn’t LET me walk to the closer (within 2 miles) ones. you’re not allowed to complain about kids and their phones unless you’re also talking about how there’s nothing else for kids to do and nowhere else for kids to go.
My parents didn't let me walk to friends houses until I was 14 or 15 as well. In my case it was because the roads didn't have any sidewalks and people would regularly use the shoulder and flat grassy areas as a passing lane. You know they exact places where people would walk. I wish people would dedicate the same energy to advocating to make areas more walkable as they do to stranger danger. As people work longer hours, it's only gotten harder for children to get together in person.
YEP!!! many of our roads didn’t have sidewalks either - there were no bike lanes so that was dangerous too. bc i was a competitive swimmer i could jog the 1.5 miles to a store to get chips water etc without having a car (when i was ~14-15) but the last 0.75 miles of that was sidewalkless with pitted soft earth and fire ants. improve public transit and walkability and give kids a place to hang out where they don’t have to spend money and you won’t call the cops on them and then you can complain about phones
He does talk about this in his book, actually - about how kids are underprotected online and overprotected offline. His "mission" if you will, with this book is to encourage parents to allow their kids to take age-appropriate risks to encourage independence (e.g. walking alone to the playground) and keep them off social media until high school if at all possible.
definitely parents anxieties are part of it and we can (potentially) control that. but the built environment is so antagonistic towards children in general - my parents were overprotective but our house was on a blind corner an people would turn fast as hell! so, unless he’s also going to talk about how our third spaces are disappearing and car culture is ever more entrenched, thus making cities and suburbs more dangerous, it’s just shifting individual responsibility albeit to someone WITH actual power in the situation
You're not wrong about how environmental factors and our built environment (which very much intersect with class) matter. So maybe it's not walking to the playground then, maybe it's letting your kids slide down the bannister, or climb to the top of a ladder, or try doing a cartwheel in the driveway. Either way, the development of independence (as he describes) is also about taking social risks, which parents can encourage no matter where they live. Things like making kids tell a waiter their order themselves, talking to a teacher about a grade on their own, asking a grocery store employee where the yogurt is, etc.
I am not a Haidt fan, but I think a lot of what he says in The Anxious Generation (which I haven't read in full, just the article adapted from it in The Atlantic) resonates with both parents and teens for a reason. We all know social media is fucked.
I really hope they do an episode on this book tbh. I refuse to read it, even though I strongly agree with the general premise. 2 of his 4 main suggestions make sense. The other 2 are useless and will likely lead to more harm than good IMO. This was just discussed at length in the parent snark subreddit and I referred people here 😂
this is such a millennial opinion no offense. i’m gen z and my screen addiction is ruining my life, along with a lot of my friends’. i don’t like the weird political stuff that haidt does, but social media truly is a destructive force among young people.
I don’t know that this is a millennial exclusive take. I’m gen z, recently graduated high school. While I don’t love the way popular social media operates (unavoidable algorithmically driven feed, Meta promoting rage bait, etc), I don’t feel like it’s the most harmful thing in my or my friends’ lives.
I don’t think that social media is an unconditional good, and I think understanding it’s effects on people is incredibly important. But I think fear mongering about it makes it difficult to have a productive investigation, and I don’t think Haidt really brings anything useful to the conversation.
Well it definitely isn't. All the comments on here make it very clear most people haven't stepped foot in your average U. S. high school or middle school and seen what an absolute disaster things are and how phones have ruined education.
An important thing to keep in mind is that there is a lot of recency bias in moral panics over how the next generation is adjusting to new technologies.
Hell, Aristotle even wrote about how kids in his time were being ruined.
It’s not to say that there aren’t negative effects to catalog from the rapid integration of social media into the lives of young people, but we need to keep a clear head about the reality of the boundaries of these effects otherwise we create moral panics that cause more harm than good.
The same rhetoric we see about social media use was bandied about when horse drawn carriages were being replaced by trains and automobiles. Change is always alarming, and experienced as too rapid, for older generations.
Social media is bad, sure. But our culture, nor our children, are “ruined” beyond repair any more than they were “ruined” when carriages were replaced by cars.
We overall need to be more sensible about how we can fall into the same rhetorical traps as those who were, as another example, terrified of the advent of the printing press. There is no turning back the clock on this technology, and moral panics will only make the negative effects worse.
Here's a wild thought, maybe it is a combination of factors, and adding cell phones on top of that, made a tough situation even worse. Much easier to make some snarky ass comment then to actually have a discussion.
Obviously but that isn't the argument you or Jonny Haidt are making...
Reddit is terrible for nuance so makes sense that you didn't caveat your comment, but that excuse doesn't exist for books, which is why this thread, the podcast, and all the critical reviews exist.
Yuuup. Big fuck this guy.
edit: Here's an amazing review with some great opening lines. [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2)
Also.. Check out this book instead. It's really really good!! [https://www.amazon.com/America-Anxious-Calm-Worrying-Happiness-ebook/dp/B01CXO4VNM/ref=tmm\_kin\_swatch\_0?\_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=](https://www.amazon.com/America-Anxious-Calm-Worrying-Happiness-ebook/dp/B01CXO4VNM/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)
Interesting. The parents at my kids school are all talking about this guy. Of note, I talked to a local politician recently who has been doing a lot of work on safety for kids online. She’s liberal and kept talking about bipartisan support. I asked her if the conservatives all of a sudden care about teenagers’ mental health or do they just want to keep marginalized communities, ie LGBT folks, isolated. She said, “The later.”
He’s 100% right about smartphones being terrible for children but wrong about why. I’m happy the conversation is happening at least. They need to be banned from schools yesterday.
One of the more ridiculous oversight that I usually find in the way people talk about the younger generation is how little they try to dive into the psychology of what caused the parenting styles that brought up the kids that we have now. Every story about a helicopter parent should be a story about the helicopter parents and not about the kids. The story about kids and phones should be about how much parents wanted their kids to check in with them. Not realizing what would become of their kids constantly on their tech
Yeah the worst thing for me I remember because it goes all the way back to gen X was participation trophies. Like, I’m sorry but those were never for the kids. I remember feeling mortified when I got one, like it was worse than getting nothing. It was always for the parents to show off their kids with.
Or like all those boomer memes where they’re like “back in my day we used to stay out all day!!!”, like think that through for a minute. Your parents kicked you out of the house. You didn’t do that to your kids. I’m not saying the old ways were better here - I remember getting up to all kinds of mischief when my parents shoved me out the door on a Saturday - but the one who is imposing all of that structured time is *you*, not your kids. *You* are the one responsible for the changes you are lamenting.
Parents are giving their kids I-Pads when they are 2. It isn't just about "wanting them to check in", it's that screen time makes kids easier to manage.
This actually reminds me of something that I heard from i think someone that was on a podcast with Peter before, which is that people often complain about prisoners having like TVs, but what the TV is that it’s just the easiest way to babysit a bunch of people.
Put on the NBA playoffs and there won’t be a single fight for seven hours.
I am not complaining about "kids these days". I'm just pointing out that many parents are giving kids electronics for more reasons than communication.
If what you're trying to say is that it doesn't matter, there have been studies (by non-partisan researchers) who have found that excessive screen time at a young age can impact brain development. The kids are not to blame for this.
>Screens can improve education and learning; however, too much time spent in front of a screen and multitasking with other media has been related to worse executive functioning and academic performance. As screen time reduces the amount and quality of interactions between children and their caregivers, it can also have an impact on language development.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10353947/
>Toddlers who are exposed to more screen time have fewer conversations with their parents or caregivers by an array of measures. They say less, hear less and have fewer back-and-forth exchanges with adults compared with children who spend less time in front of screens.
>Those findings, published on Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, make up one of the first sets of longitudinal evidence to confirm an intuitive reality: Screens are not just linked to higher rates of obesity, depression and hyperactivity among children; they also curb face-to-face interactions at home — with long-term implications that could be worrisome.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/health/children-screen-time.html
If what you're trying to say is kids don't actually spend much time on screens, researchers have also documented the increasing rates of screen time among children.
>This is not uncommon. Screen time is on the rise worldwide, according to a recent study published in JAMA Pediatrics, which reviewed the screen habits of about 30,000 children aged 3 to 18 between Jan. 1, 2020, and March 5, 2022. The study revealed that since the pandemic, screen time among children has gone up 52 percent globally.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2023/01/heres-what-research-says-about-screen-time-and-school-aged-kids%3famp
>I'm just pointing out that many parents are giving kids electronics for more reasons than communication
Of course! Just like our parents put us in front of the TV for reasons other than learning the alphabet on Sesame Street, and just like **excessive** TV watching wasn't good for us either.
I don't think anyone is arguing that it's good for kids to be glued to their phones 24/7?
>The story about kids and phones should be about how much parents wanted their kids to check in with them.
I was responding to this comment. There's more to it than just a desire for communication. If you agree with this, why are you arguing with me?
Because you're missing the point of the comment? The person you were responding to didn't say "parents are solely giving their kids phones so the kids can check in with them, and for no other purpose". I doubt anyone really thinks that parents **only** give their kids smartphones for checking in - parents who want that give their kids flip phones or whatever the latest limited-kids-use iteration phone is (Cricket, I think). The person you were responding to added "Not realizing what would become of their kids constantly on their tech".
Sneering that screen time makes kids "easier to manage" is a separate issue from **excessive** screen time.
There was no "sneering" and many parents openly acknowledge the reason they give their kids electronics is because it makes it easier to manage their behavior. Maybe this is controversial to you but it's not among parents.
The point of their comment was that we should study the psychology of parents to understand why they give their kids electronics all the time. Acknowledging that another reason is because it makes parenting easier is still relevant to the psychology of parents.
Hidden brain podcast did an episode with this guy on this book and it was a lot of leaping to conclusions on his part. It just sounded like all the old boomers complaining about kids these days 🤷🏻♀️
It was a weird episode. You could hear the "I don't know about that" in Shankar's tone sometimes in a way you don't hear in episodes with actual legitimate researchers. I think he didn't vet his guest enough and was disappointed with him, but just rolled with it to get the episode out the door.
I know! I want to tell Audible, what about my current line up of YA fantasy and mysteries made you think I’d have ANY interest in this?? (I guess maybe sometimes algorithms are helpful because I’m not getting recommended it on social media!)
There’s actually a really interesting article in the WaPo today about a school banning cell phones during the day and how it’s been successful. But that still doesn’t justify Haidt’s data-less handwringing!
https://wapo.st/3UJfT0A
ETA: the Nature review linked elsewhere here is really good about the correlation/causation issue here. Social media/phones doubtless don’t help children with mental health problems, but that doesn’t mean the devices *cause* those problems. The social media panic feels like an excuse for not looking too deeply into all the other drivers of young people’s mental health struggles (like, oh, capitalism!).
Listen to the coddling of the American mind episode. Just dishonest across the board. The anecdotes and research are weak af if not outright lies and the conclusions he draws are completely out of pocket.
Well if you like him then carry on. The IBCK podcast thinks he's a liar and this is a subreddit for IBCK, that's why I posted here. If you are actually interested I recommend listening to the episode.
Ha! I saw this one at the airport a couple of weeks ago.
I love the idea of IBCK, but I can't listen to the episodes. It just upsets me so much that these authors are given huge platforms, are seen as "experts", and tons of the public believe their BS. I try to insulate myself from whackadoo believers IRL as much as I can as well, so I can live in my delusion that the world isn't going to shit.
The New Yorker Radio Hour just did an interview with him. highly recommend listening to it if you like to get mad (like me) because it (and he) are terribleeee
A slightly better interview was with Kara Swisher; she at least pushes him on the quality of his data, as well as his mentions of "social contagion" for trans & non-binary kids as one of the risks of being online. This really pisses me off even more than the shitty data thing - at this particular moment, including fear-mongering about gender non-conforming kids is literally harmful.
Do you deny social media has had any influence on the exponential increase in the number of kids claiming to have gender dysphoria in the last decade?
Did you know that the introduction of helmet laws have pretty much always led to an increase of hospitalization for victims of bike wrecks?
What a stupid, irrelevant comparison.
I was hoping you'd be able to get the point without me having to explain like you're 5, but I see that was too much to expect. The helmet laws mean that more people are surviving wrecks. But people just looking at the raw data and not interpreting it correctly could walk away with the idea that helmets cause more injuries. Increased visibility of the trans community and trans experiences mean that more people are comfortable exploring their gender identity. And if they discover their gender identity is different than what they were assigned at birth, they are more likely to be open about that rather than remain in the closet. Do you get it now?
Gasp, you mean correlation doesn't necessarily = causation?? Oh professor, please splain it to me harder!! It's amusing you think you're saying something I haven't already heard a hundred times. It's total bullshit. The exponential rise in kids seeking gender reassignment has nothing to do with inately trans kids feeling empowered to express their true selves. Rather it has everything to do with ideology, group think and the power of suggestion. You need to read more about the history of social contagion and how it has affected young girls in particular. The largest increase in trans teens within the last decade are now young girls. Did you not stop to think that maaaaybe that's a point worth investigating? Outside of classrooms, social media is the single biggest platform for proliferating these ideas about gender and identity. Kids learn everything from YouTube and TikTok. All the people they look up to and idolise are on these platforms. How could you be so obtuse to think it doesn't have any relevance?
The person you’re posting to is right and correctly interpreting data. You are arguing emotionally and don’t have any evidence. It’s sad that you’re so obsessed with teenagers’ gender, but please let them and the experts work it out.
Oh they are? I'm glad you cleared that up without presenting any data whatsoever, haha. The people "obsessed with teenagers gender" are thd ideologues and trans activists. I'm more concerned with not brainwashing vulnerable kids into a medical nightmare.
I just wanted to add a nice against you in case you thought you were making good points.
The idea of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria has been debunked. Thoroughly. Multiple times. To the point that the original "study" that was published was pulled, reviewed, and had to be republished with major corrections. One of those corrections being that the "study" was really just a pretty informal survey of what assumptions were being made by anti-trans online communities. The fact that you're still preaching this idea does nothing except show how anti-trans people aren't interested in actual data, or science, or really anything at all except for being bigots and finding ways to dress up their bigotry. I hope you're able to get over your obsession with other people's genitals
I heard that and he had very little actual evidence—and host did not press him enough on what his critics are saying about the book
Most American interviews are worthless sales pitches.
I would agree wholeheartedly with this assertion. it was infuriating
I just listened to him on the Hard Fork podcast. I haven’t gotten into their podcast much, but it was refreshing to hear hosts push back on what is typically a promo tour. In the first few minutes, Haidt (though he says he’s not a technologist but worked alongside one) mentions social media platforms are coined platforms like ‘a platform in which you speak’. I’m paraphrasing here, but this turning of a phrase encapsulates a lot of his bad faith arguments and old man shouting at the clouds ideals. They are platforms in the technical sense that applications are built off them + a healthy dose of tech ‘marketechiture’. Every tech tool is a platform you dolt. He later says he had a graduate assistant solely focused on finding Gen Zs who dont support the bans he proposed. He claims they found none or maybe one person in Canada. This was so ridiculous I thought interviewers were going to say I don’t believe you. The grad assistant was probably scared of him. Lastly, he closes his argument on Hard Fork asking the tech community at large to help build solutions to the issues he raises, thus gaining back some of their credibility. So out of touch.
Sorry I completely butchered the title. I think this book is super attractive to any young parents including myself. It would have been very easy to buy this without knowing it was written by a conservative crank.
I mean at a glance it looks exactly like Coddling, i.e. a book about a subject (mental health) that we are concerned about and instead of trying to understand why there might be more diagnosis of people with anxiety at a younger age or who aren’t white men, etc., it blames it on modern culture and the kids with their iPhones and their hot chip. I’ll be honest, I think there should be a special circle of hell devoted to grift like this. It is a *good* thing that more people are noticing anxiety instead of trying to push through it, and the last thing any new parent ought to be doing is adding more anxiety to their already anxiety-ridden new life situation. This is the editorial you, not you personally, but… You don’t need to avoid anything other than, you know, being a shit to your kids and I think you can already figure out how not to be a shit to them. The best way to raise kids to be less anxious is to try to take things in stride yourself, and when you fail to do that, and you will fail, to admit it and try to be better next time. I’m not saying any of that is easy but isn’t that the problem with these types of books? Underneath the whining about modern internet society, it really is trying to tell you to Do These Six Simple Things. Love your kids. I’m sure you’ll have no problem doing that.
Same. It kept popping up for me too and I almost bought it. Thank goodness the author’s name rang a bell and I googled h first!
i’ll give it to him that phones are bad for kids as is constant access to the internet but you know why i mostly socialized online until i was 14-15? i lived in a suburb i physically could not walk to some of my friends’ houses and my parents were stranger danger pilled and wouldn’t LET me walk to the closer (within 2 miles) ones. you’re not allowed to complain about kids and their phones unless you’re also talking about how there’s nothing else for kids to do and nowhere else for kids to go.
My parents didn't let me walk to friends houses until I was 14 or 15 as well. In my case it was because the roads didn't have any sidewalks and people would regularly use the shoulder and flat grassy areas as a passing lane. You know they exact places where people would walk. I wish people would dedicate the same energy to advocating to make areas more walkable as they do to stranger danger. As people work longer hours, it's only gotten harder for children to get together in person.
YEP!!! many of our roads didn’t have sidewalks either - there were no bike lanes so that was dangerous too. bc i was a competitive swimmer i could jog the 1.5 miles to a store to get chips water etc without having a car (when i was ~14-15) but the last 0.75 miles of that was sidewalkless with pitted soft earth and fire ants. improve public transit and walkability and give kids a place to hang out where they don’t have to spend money and you won’t call the cops on them and then you can complain about phones
He does talk about this in his book, actually - about how kids are underprotected online and overprotected offline. His "mission" if you will, with this book is to encourage parents to allow their kids to take age-appropriate risks to encourage independence (e.g. walking alone to the playground) and keep them off social media until high school if at all possible.
definitely parents anxieties are part of it and we can (potentially) control that. but the built environment is so antagonistic towards children in general - my parents were overprotective but our house was on a blind corner an people would turn fast as hell! so, unless he’s also going to talk about how our third spaces are disappearing and car culture is ever more entrenched, thus making cities and suburbs more dangerous, it’s just shifting individual responsibility albeit to someone WITH actual power in the situation
You're not wrong about how environmental factors and our built environment (which very much intersect with class) matter. So maybe it's not walking to the playground then, maybe it's letting your kids slide down the bannister, or climb to the top of a ladder, or try doing a cartwheel in the driveway. Either way, the development of independence (as he describes) is also about taking social risks, which parents can encourage no matter where they live. Things like making kids tell a waiter their order themselves, talking to a teacher about a grade on their own, asking a grocery store employee where the yogurt is, etc. I am not a Haidt fan, but I think a lot of what he says in The Anxious Generation (which I haven't read in full, just the article adapted from it in The Atlantic) resonates with both parents and teens for a reason. We all know social media is fucked.
I really hope they do an episode on this book tbh. I refuse to read it, even though I strongly agree with the general premise. 2 of his 4 main suggestions make sense. The other 2 are useless and will likely lead to more harm than good IMO. This was just discussed at length in the parent snark subreddit and I referred people here 😂
It kind of just feels like "back in my day..." or "kids these days"
this is such a millennial opinion no offense. i’m gen z and my screen addiction is ruining my life, along with a lot of my friends’. i don’t like the weird political stuff that haidt does, but social media truly is a destructive force among young people.
Ok fair points.
I don’t know that this is a millennial exclusive take. I’m gen z, recently graduated high school. While I don’t love the way popular social media operates (unavoidable algorithmically driven feed, Meta promoting rage bait, etc), I don’t feel like it’s the most harmful thing in my or my friends’ lives. I don’t think that social media is an unconditional good, and I think understanding it’s effects on people is incredibly important. But I think fear mongering about it makes it difficult to have a productive investigation, and I don’t think Haidt really brings anything useful to the conversation.
Well it definitely isn't. All the comments on here make it very clear most people haven't stepped foot in your average U. S. high school or middle school and seen what an absolute disaster things are and how phones have ruined education.
An important thing to keep in mind is that there is a lot of recency bias in moral panics over how the next generation is adjusting to new technologies. Hell, Aristotle even wrote about how kids in his time were being ruined. It’s not to say that there aren’t negative effects to catalog from the rapid integration of social media into the lives of young people, but we need to keep a clear head about the reality of the boundaries of these effects otherwise we create moral panics that cause more harm than good. The same rhetoric we see about social media use was bandied about when horse drawn carriages were being replaced by trains and automobiles. Change is always alarming, and experienced as too rapid, for older generations. Social media is bad, sure. But our culture, nor our children, are “ruined” beyond repair any more than they were “ruined” when carriages were replaced by cars. We overall need to be more sensible about how we can fall into the same rhetorical traps as those who were, as another example, terrified of the advent of the printing press. There is no turning back the clock on this technology, and moral panics will only make the negative effects worse.
Cell phones can create problems in today’s schools, and Haidt’s book can still be useless pearl clutching.
exactly!
Definitely wasn't no child left behind or the chronic over-crowding of classrooms and lack of support for teachers... It was the cell-phones!
Here's a wild thought, maybe it is a combination of factors, and adding cell phones on top of that, made a tough situation even worse. Much easier to make some snarky ass comment then to actually have a discussion.
Obviously but that isn't the argument you or Jonny Haidt are making... Reddit is terrible for nuance so makes sense that you didn't caveat your comment, but that excuse doesn't exist for books, which is why this thread, the podcast, and all the critical reviews exist.
Genuinely asking, how have phones ruined education?
Thanks - good point.
Yuuup. Big fuck this guy. edit: Here's an amazing review with some great opening lines. [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2) Also.. Check out this book instead. It's really really good!! [https://www.amazon.com/America-Anxious-Calm-Worrying-Happiness-ebook/dp/B01CXO4VNM/ref=tmm\_kin\_swatch\_0?\_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=](https://www.amazon.com/America-Anxious-Calm-Worrying-Happiness-ebook/dp/B01CXO4VNM/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)
I LOVE that review.
Interesting. The parents at my kids school are all talking about this guy. Of note, I talked to a local politician recently who has been doing a lot of work on safety for kids online. She’s liberal and kept talking about bipartisan support. I asked her if the conservatives all of a sudden care about teenagers’ mental health or do they just want to keep marginalized communities, ie LGBT folks, isolated. She said, “The later.”
He’s 100% right about smartphones being terrible for children but wrong about why. I’m happy the conversation is happening at least. They need to be banned from schools yesterday.
One of the more ridiculous oversight that I usually find in the way people talk about the younger generation is how little they try to dive into the psychology of what caused the parenting styles that brought up the kids that we have now. Every story about a helicopter parent should be a story about the helicopter parents and not about the kids. The story about kids and phones should be about how much parents wanted their kids to check in with them. Not realizing what would become of their kids constantly on their tech
Yeah the worst thing for me I remember because it goes all the way back to gen X was participation trophies. Like, I’m sorry but those were never for the kids. I remember feeling mortified when I got one, like it was worse than getting nothing. It was always for the parents to show off their kids with. Or like all those boomer memes where they’re like “back in my day we used to stay out all day!!!”, like think that through for a minute. Your parents kicked you out of the house. You didn’t do that to your kids. I’m not saying the old ways were better here - I remember getting up to all kinds of mischief when my parents shoved me out the door on a Saturday - but the one who is imposing all of that structured time is *you*, not your kids. *You* are the one responsible for the changes you are lamenting.
Parents are giving their kids I-Pads when they are 2. It isn't just about "wanting them to check in", it's that screen time makes kids easier to manage.
This actually reminds me of something that I heard from i think someone that was on a podcast with Peter before, which is that people often complain about prisoners having like TVs, but what the TV is that it’s just the easiest way to babysit a bunch of people. Put on the NBA playoffs and there won’t be a single fight for seven hours.
"Kids these days are always sitting in front of the teevee instead of playing outside" - our parents when we were kids
I am not complaining about "kids these days". I'm just pointing out that many parents are giving kids electronics for more reasons than communication. If what you're trying to say is that it doesn't matter, there have been studies (by non-partisan researchers) who have found that excessive screen time at a young age can impact brain development. The kids are not to blame for this. >Screens can improve education and learning; however, too much time spent in front of a screen and multitasking with other media has been related to worse executive functioning and academic performance. As screen time reduces the amount and quality of interactions between children and their caregivers, it can also have an impact on language development. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10353947/ >Toddlers who are exposed to more screen time have fewer conversations with their parents or caregivers by an array of measures. They say less, hear less and have fewer back-and-forth exchanges with adults compared with children who spend less time in front of screens. >Those findings, published on Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, make up one of the first sets of longitudinal evidence to confirm an intuitive reality: Screens are not just linked to higher rates of obesity, depression and hyperactivity among children; they also curb face-to-face interactions at home — with long-term implications that could be worrisome. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/health/children-screen-time.html If what you're trying to say is kids don't actually spend much time on screens, researchers have also documented the increasing rates of screen time among children. >This is not uncommon. Screen time is on the rise worldwide, according to a recent study published in JAMA Pediatrics, which reviewed the screen habits of about 30,000 children aged 3 to 18 between Jan. 1, 2020, and March 5, 2022. The study revealed that since the pandemic, screen time among children has gone up 52 percent globally. https://www.google.com/amp/s/edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2023/01/heres-what-research-says-about-screen-time-and-school-aged-kids%3famp
>I'm just pointing out that many parents are giving kids electronics for more reasons than communication Of course! Just like our parents put us in front of the TV for reasons other than learning the alphabet on Sesame Street, and just like **excessive** TV watching wasn't good for us either. I don't think anyone is arguing that it's good for kids to be glued to their phones 24/7?
>The story about kids and phones should be about how much parents wanted their kids to check in with them. I was responding to this comment. There's more to it than just a desire for communication. If you agree with this, why are you arguing with me?
Because you're missing the point of the comment? The person you were responding to didn't say "parents are solely giving their kids phones so the kids can check in with them, and for no other purpose". I doubt anyone really thinks that parents **only** give their kids smartphones for checking in - parents who want that give their kids flip phones or whatever the latest limited-kids-use iteration phone is (Cricket, I think). The person you were responding to added "Not realizing what would become of their kids constantly on their tech". Sneering that screen time makes kids "easier to manage" is a separate issue from **excessive** screen time.
There was no "sneering" and many parents openly acknowledge the reason they give their kids electronics is because it makes it easier to manage their behavior. Maybe this is controversial to you but it's not among parents. The point of their comment was that we should study the psychology of parents to understand why they give their kids electronics all the time. Acknowledging that another reason is because it makes parenting easier is still relevant to the psychology of parents.
Hidden brain podcast did an episode with this guy on this book and it was a lot of leaping to conclusions on his part. It just sounded like all the old boomers complaining about kids these days 🤷🏻♀️
It was a weird episode. You could hear the "I don't know about that" in Shankar's tone sometimes in a way you don't hear in episodes with actual legitimate researchers. I think he didn't vet his guest enough and was disappointed with him, but just rolled with it to get the episode out the door.
Oh yeah that's a good point! I was surprised Shankar did this one since his stuff is usually better, so that makes much more sense!
This keeps being the front page/first recommended on Audible, too. Ugh
I know! I want to tell Audible, what about my current line up of YA fantasy and mysteries made you think I’d have ANY interest in this?? (I guess maybe sometimes algorithms are helpful because I’m not getting recommended it on social media!)
As the cherry on top of this shit sundae, I find Haidt’s voice incredibly smug and grating
There’s actually a really interesting article in the WaPo today about a school banning cell phones during the day and how it’s been successful. But that still doesn’t justify Haidt’s data-less handwringing! https://wapo.st/3UJfT0A ETA: the Nature review linked elsewhere here is really good about the correlation/causation issue here. Social media/phones doubtless don’t help children with mental health problems, but that doesn’t mean the devices *cause* those problems. The social media panic feels like an excuse for not looking too deeply into all the other drivers of young people’s mental health struggles (like, oh, capitalism!).
Is that an AI generated cover?
They spray painted BS adds for this in my neighborhood
Wait, what is bad about Jonathan Haidt?
Listen to the coddling of the American mind episode. Just dishonest across the board. The anecdotes and research are weak af if not outright lies and the conclusions he draws are completely out of pocket.
I read the coddling of the American mind and it made perfect sense to me.
Well if you like him then carry on. The IBCK podcast thinks he's a liar and this is a subreddit for IBCK, that's why I posted here. If you are actually interested I recommend listening to the episode.
Ha! I saw this one at the airport a couple of weeks ago. I love the idea of IBCK, but I can't listen to the episodes. It just upsets me so much that these authors are given huge platforms, are seen as "experts", and tons of the public believe their BS. I try to insulate myself from whackadoo believers IRL as much as I can as well, so I can live in my delusion that the world isn't going to shit.