"Jonathan Haidt is the leader of this particular insurgency. “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” his book exploring the decline of the “play-based childhood” and the rise of the “phone-based childhood,” has been on the New York Times best-seller list for a year. It feels, to me, like we’re finally figuring out a reasonable approach to smartphones and social media and kids … just in time for that approach to be deranged by the question of A.I. and kids, which no one is really prepared for."—The Ezra Klein Show

Share ‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’ >

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/326-the-ezra-klein-show-31142409/episode/our-kids-are-the-least-flourishing-271477952/

#podcast #AnxiousGeneration #childhood #StolenFocus #smartphones #MoralFormation #StimulusReward #HumanAttention #SocialProblems #LanguageDelays #education #kids #AI #Influence #friendships #screens #advertisement #parents #SocialMedia #MentalIllness #BigData #ScreensAddiction #SocialScience #children #brainrot #internet #health #epidemic #protection

just read Jonathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation"... i have thoughts

it was a less a serious analysis of youth mental health and more a boomer panic attack dressed up in footnotes.

his big idea? that smartphones and social media broke childhood around 2010, and absolutely nothing else contributed. not inequality, not climate collapse, not mass shootings, not racism, not the slow-burn apocalypse of capitalism. just... the phone.

you almost expect him to add "get off my lawn" as a chapter title.

he calls it "the great rewiring". which sounds like a sci-fi reboot but is actually Haidt's excuse to blame every modern adolescent crisis on TikTok and Insta.

depression? ... screens.
gender identity questions? ... screens.
girls under pressure? ... not patriarchy, just selfies.
queer kids, poor kids, disabled kids? ... briefly mentioned, then memory-holed for getting in the way of the thesis.
the data? ... cherry-picked and dressed in objectivity drag.

Haidt ignores anything that doesn't sync perfectly with his smartphone-doom narrative. his solutions? ban smartphones till 14, kill social media until 16, and throw kids into "risky play" like it’s 1956 and there's a jungle gym made of asbestos behind every school. it's policy by Norman Rockwell painting.

for all his talk of "norms", Haidt utterly refuses to explore how different communities actually experience the digital world. he's too busy assembling a diorama out of rotary phones and stoic quotes.

his "cure" is useless to the kids who need it most because they're not even visible in the diagnosis.

worst of all, Haidt frames it all like this is "just the science talking" while serving up moral panic with a stoic flavor.

of course, it's **always** the stoics.

he doesn’t just ignore structural violence, he actively erases it. his "help" is only for kids with middle-class parents and ipad guilt.

also... "the mars hypothesis".... yes, really.

he spends pages describing how raising kids today is like raising them on mars. because of gravity. because of isolation. because apparently analogies about actual child development weren't dramatic enough, and he needed to imagine Earth as a space colony of lord of the flies being destroyed by Insta.

if anyone ever tells you that social science is boring, just show them the part where Haidt earnestly compares TikTok to a breakdown in atmospheric pressure.

this isn't a serious intervention. it's tech-blaming fanfic from a man who lost an argument to an algorithm and decided to write a book about it. and if Jonathan Haidt really wanted to help, maybe next time he should stop diagnosing the future like it’s a software glitch and actually ask the kids what they think.

no wonder it's on so many conservative parenting book lists... the scholarly equivalent of someone shouting "SATAN IS IN THE SNAPCHAT" while shaking a fist at the sky.

fuck this guy.

edited to add a part

#SkipIt #NotWorthThePaperItsPrintedOn

#bookreview #bookreviews #anxiousgeneration #book #books #bookstodon #haidt

Jon Haidt, the writer of the book ‘The #AnxiousGeneration’ created a #substack of rather enlightening facts on #phoneuse in #schools. When the Lancet implies no real problems with phone use in schools, the Substack authors wrote a nice piece on the flawed research designs and conceptualisations of terms. It shows to me once more that it is imperative to take phones away from children until age 15. Writing this from my iPhone. https://open.substack.com/pub/jonathanhaidt/p/lancet-study-flaws?r=1wwxz6&utm_medium=ios

Reading Jonathan Haidt's _ #AnxiousGeneration _ and wondering how being of the D&D Generation (88-99) affected me? #dnd #rpgs #roleplayinggame

And in other news, a critical analysis of Jonathan #Haidt 's #AnxiousGeneration that questions his methods and conclusions in his anti-screens manifesto:

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenting4digitalfuture/2024/05/15/haidt/

Again, the simple binary " #screens or not" fails to account for the wide range of other behaviors that affect a child's wellbeing.

My young kids have high #screentime by anyone's metric, but their other hours are stuffed with enriching, positive activities that actively build their minds, bodies, and hearts.

Favorite Comment:

“The problem is not phones. It's overworked parents, it's a privatized society that has few outlets for young people to entertain themselves, and it's a society being socially engineered for profits and children are the easiest to access.

It is a lack of government regulations that has allowed a free for all of exploitation. People, live in the society that exists. Blaming individuals for being addicted to addictive substances is... not new or original, and it's also, unhelpful to the solution which lies with the senders, not the receivers. Tired ideas”

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

Essential Sunday Reading: danah boyd (@zephoria) and @candice_odgers rebut @JonHaidt’s “Anxious Generation”
https://alecmuffett.com/article/109533
#AnxiousGeneration #CandiceOdgers #JonathanHaidt #zephoria

Essential Sunday Reading: danah boyd (@zephoria) and @candice_odgers rebut @JonHaidt’s “Anxious Generation”

Thought: if we are “losing our kids to smartphones” perhaps we as parents should first go looking for them, and then lead the way?

In the same vein as my yesterday’s post, the redoubtable danah boyd comments on Jon Haidt’s new book:

It is deeply frustrating to watch Haidt cherrypick and twist research that I spent half my career in the thick of. I’m so grateful for Candice Odgers’ willingness to challenge him. He’s leading the public down the wrong path by playing into parents’ anxieties.

https://www.threads.net/@zephoria/post/C5J3jy2PGa-/

…and links to the same Nature piece as was circulating yesterday on Twitter, by Candice Odgers at Irvine’s School of Social Ecology:

Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers1.

These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message2–5 …

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2

Nonetheless it is inevitable that the Haidt book will play to the sunday newspapers and talking heads for the next few months.

We in Civil Society will, once again, have to be relentless in combatting gut feelings with both data and the greater benefits to society of enabling people — even children — to communicate.

https://alecmuffett.com/article/109533

#anxiousGeneration #candiceOdgers #jonathanHaidt #zephoria