Social media and smartphones are bad for children.
Recent congressional hearings highlighted the worst possible cases, including heart-wrenching stories of children being driven to suicide by online bullying.
The lingering question from the hearings is whether federal legislation is the right fix to this plague.
What’s not up for debate: It is a plague. Smartphones and social media are very bad for children, especially teenagers.
Prominent psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes about it all the time. One good recent article on Haidt’s work put it this way:
“The tools of social media are just too sharp for young minds. On digital platforms, teens parade themselves, often to an audience of strangers, and this is leading to addiction, paranoia and despair. For girls, the effect is especially acute. … A big change was evident from 2013, when physical friendship groups started to be supplanted by smartphones and online chat.”
The more you read about this, the more you start to wonder: Why are parents giving children smartphones in the first place?
It’s tricky to ask that question without sounding like you’re blaming the parents of children who have really suffered. But many parents didn’t have reason to suspect smartphones would harm their children, especially not when major community institutions were making it clear that children should have smartphones. Coaches expected high school athletes to have the team app. The local high school required an e-ticket to enter basketball games. So did the museums and the zoos.
So, parents went with the flow and gave their children smartphones, which proved a mistake.
Megyn Kelly has a good video on this.
“I don’t allow my kids on social media, period,” Kelly said. “It needs to be a joint effort by the tech companies and the parents. We can’t forget their role in it.”
Kelly describes this as a difficult decision. Our family-unfriendly culture makes it more difficult than it should be.
Parents should keep their children off of smartphones and social media, and the culture should support parents in this.
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Schools should ban smartphones and ban teachers and coaches from using smartphone apps for coordinating and communicating with students. Zoos, ballparks, and every other institution that sees itself as part of the public square should stop requiring e-tickets.
In general, people in government, schools, and community institutions should think, “Parents want to keep their children off of smartphones — am I helping them?”
