Every so often a new book crystalizes an important issue that everyone knows is a problem, but no one has quite yet put their finger on. Such a book has just arrived from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt about what we’ve done to our children with smartphones and social media. Highly recommended. And see the content options below.
Short Article
For the quickest read about this book, see this article in the New York Times.
Longer Article
For a longer form article by the author, see this piece in The Atlantic magazine.
Podcast
To hear the author discuss this work on a good podcast, check out this episode of Hidden Brain.
Book
If you’re like me and want all the footnotes and references, you can always buy the book on Amazon.
Audio Book
If you’re a Spotify Premium subscriber, turns out the audio version of this book is included in your subscription.
2 Responses
PS: see also this reaction to the topic from a friend and published author who teaches at a fancy private high school:
“My 11th-graders write and read at an 8th-grade level. The majority of them are addicted to their phones. They can’t concentrate. At the beginning of every class, I walk around with a basket which they drop their phones into, and many of them look like crack addicts dropping crack pipes into the basket; many of them are quite belligerent about it too. Many of these kids can’t focus long enough to read or write.
They can’t pay attention for more than a few minutes at a time. And this is at a college preparatory school that costs $20K a year and caters to some of the wealthiest families in the city. Note to parents: throw away your children’s baby computers. Get them off their screens. The screens, the 30-second video bites, are frying their brains; their brains haven’t evolved to be raised by baby computers. Any good teacher (and parent) will tell you this.
As things stand now, these kids are never going to easily think for themselves as complete human beings. If you grow up immediately getting the answers to everything you will never think for yourself. We’ve created an entire generation of half-humans who can’t concentrate, who are addicted to screens, and who can’t function easily in physical reality. I repeat: Get them off their phones. And get them off their screens. You shouldn’t be able to look at a screen until you are 21. I am of the opinion that baby computers have done more damage than handguns and cigarettes combined, especially for young people in the 21st Century.
Most of these teenagers can’t settle down long enough to read or write, and there’s no way around this. Our technology, our culture, is creating goldfish. Just stop. Just stop letting your kids look at screens all the time.”
Thanks Kevin, The question is could we have anticipated the social media effects on our kids back in the 90s and early 2000s? I need to learn what he recommends moving forward
Cheers, Maxime ________________________________