https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/business/jonathan-haidt-smartphones-coddling.html

First He Came for Cancel Culture. Now He Wants to Cancel Smartphones
The N.Y.U. professor Jonathan Haidt became a favorite in Silicon Valley for his work on what he called the “coddling” of young people. Now, he has an idea for fixing Gen Z.

The New York Times
By Emma Goldberg

Mr. Haidt lays out an ambitious set of interventions in his new book, which include:

1. no smartphones before high school,
2. no social media before age 16 and
3. no phones in schools.

He hopes that legislators, educators, big tech companies and parents can bring these to fruition by — “I should pick a date,” he mused recently over lunch near N.Y.U. “Let’s say by the end of 2025.
The obvious parallel for this sort of tectonic shift is the campaign against tobacco, which began in the United States in the 1960s, with the first appearances of cautionary labels on cigarette packs warning of health hazards, and by 2015 had cut smoking rates by more than half.

Mr. Haidt has a comparison that’s more ambitious: the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“When you have a system which everyone hates, and then you have a way to escape it, it can change within a year, and that’s what happened in 1989,” Mr. Haidt said. “It’s different from the fall of communism but I expect it to be about as fast as the fall of communism. Because it’s a regime that we all hate.”

Do you agree?
If so do you think his rules go far enough?

Or are our kids just crash test dummies for the AI age in Beta Testing?

What's your opinion about the shape of clouds?

……it’s clouds’ illusions I recall.

bobofitz Wrote:
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> ……it’s clouds’ illusions I recall.

Ha. That song just popped up & I enjoyed hearing it again.

And let us geezers keep ours!

I didn't know Gen Z needed fixing.

The older half of Gen Z are in their 20s, so doesn't apply to them. No phones in schools seems like a decent idea. Students will complain, and more than a few parents will complain too. And that would probably increase the number of HS dropouts just to get out from under the restriction.

Other than that, great idea.

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
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> I didn't know Gen Z needed fixing.

If You don’t think there’s a mental health crisis among Gen Z, you are not paying attention.

“When it comes to our young people and their mental health, the news is not good. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for people under 24 in the U.S., and a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report last year found 20 percent of the country’s 12- to 17-year-olds had had at least one major depressive episode—results unlike anything the CDC had seen in thirty years of collecting such data. Its director of adolescent and school health, Kathlee Ethie, called the findings “devastating.” She said, “Young people are telling us they are in crisis. The data really call on us to act.”

There are plenty of recommendations for action in Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Haidt, a psychologist at New York University, starts by giving a readers a baseline on kids, why girls have higher rates of mood disorders and self-harming behavior, and why today’s boys are more at risk of “failure to launch” (that is, transition from adolescence to adulthood). And—perhaps not surprising, from the author of The Coddling of the American Mind—he argues that parents are overprotecting their kids in the real, physical world and underprotecting them in the Wild West online.“

https://harvardpublichealth.org/mental-health/jonathan-haidt-on-countering-negative-effects-of-social-media/

> The older half of Gen Z are in their 20s, so
> doesn't apply to them. No phones in schools seems
> like a decent idea. Students will complain, and
> more than a few parents will complain too. And
> that would probably increase the number of HS
> dropouts just to get out from under the
> restriction.
>
> Other than that, great idea.

I don’t think taking away their phones solves the problem, since I have kids and they have 8 other ways to access the internet. The problem is we rapidly adopt technology w/o beta testing it or asking what harm it could do to the wiring of our kids brains at a time when those neural pathways are formative. We give our kids cell phones with big screens and unlimited access to hard core deviant porn at a very young age. Never stopping to question what’s this doing to my kid’s psyche?

It's a big topic of conversation among teachers nationwide. The overwhelming majority of teachers feel that smart phones are a distraction to students, especially at the high school level. Many feel that we are overusing Chromebooks as well. But parents insist that their children carry phones. I wish the parents would give them flip phones instead.

Get off my lawn !

Rather than recognize the world is different and we need to adapt our systems and practices, let's ban our way to a no unreachable past normalcy, ignoring the new normal.

Mr Haight has some good ideas on paper but they have no realistic chance of happening. The schools have been politicized and cell phones are just a tip of the iceberg. Like all problems in today's society, there is no quick or easy fix.

Did you read my response above? Teachers would *love* for cell phones to go away in the public schools. Usually it's the parents who push for their children to be carrying them at all times. As for schools being politicized, they sure have, with all the religious whack-a-doodles pushing for school prayer, posting the 10 commandments in school buildings, etc.

Yes, I did read your post and I agreed but just wanted post my thoughts. Can agree to agree?

  
  

I agree!

Now send me your bank details and I'll duly submit my payment.

> I'll duly submit . . .



Hey, this was payment enough!!

We really f’d up when we plugged our pre-pubescent kids into unfettered access to the Dark Web with no guardrails, all gas and no brakes.
Then we put all of that into ‘Smart Phones’ and hoped they’d make our kids ‘smart’.
Instead it just made them anxious and permanently medicated/depressed.
Haight points out that when we all decide this is really bad, things can change rapidly, he points to the fall of the Berlin Wall as a time when that happened. Everybody hated the system that had obviously failed. And it changed rapidly after that.

Why not go back and eliminate TV? That's the technology that the last generation was sure ruined youth.

People really hyperventilated about that, too.

Legalize cell phone jammers in schools.

From a Kathleen Madigan comedy routine:

“My dad wanted to hire some Amish to do some carpentry work. When I asked him how the work was going, he said, ‘It’s not! I haven’t been able to hire any Amish! It turns out you can’t call the bastards!!’”