Posted by:
Human
(
)
Date: March 23, 2018 05:09PM
From the article:
"Of course, social media plays an increasingly important role in young people's lives. The Utah report found that in nearly 13 percent of cases, during the week before the suicide, the victim's family had restricted their access to smartphones, tablets, video games and other devices.
"Did cutting off access to the devices help precipitate suicide in those cases? The CDC team isn't sure, but they said that more study is needed to understand whether or not "interruption to [online] social support networks, [or] distress over losing access to the device" might exacerbate already fraught emotional states."
I've been wondering about this a lot lately.
It is hard for us older folks to imagine a being, our children and grandchildren, living their entire lives on-line. For us who had a life before the smartphone, even before the internet and home computers, our high-tech life is lived with a memory of an older non-tech, analog life. There is a lot in that older life that is not available to children today who only know an immediate, digital life. How time passes is only one of many differences.
When we were young it was pretty normal to be grounded for a week, say, for transgressing a rule. Many parents today therefore think nothing of grounding a child from their electronics for a week. "No problem," these parents say, "*we* weren't even allowed outside after school when we were grounded; you have it easy." That line of thinking is extremely flawed for so many reasons. Just for one, how that week of punishment feels in real-time, and the consequences to social life, are vastly different between the two generations. I'm hearing among social worker types that, as a rule of thumb, 24 hours of no electronics is equivalent to a week of grounding when we were young.
By the way, doesn't Utah often place in the top ten States for happiness?