Jonathan Haidt, a cultural counselor, wants to outlaw phones in classrooms. He says he’s documented” an global epidemic of intellectual disease” among teenagers. His study shows that the incident started in 2012, which is about the day that cellphones became widespread, and is a global phenomenon.
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There has been pushback on the idea of banning apps from rooms, most notably from libertarian. However, there is no denying that things troubling is happening to the world’s children.
Then, Joe Biden’s Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, has written an ops- ed in the , New York Times calling on Congress to need a reminder brand on social media sites. According to Murthy, social media presents a significant risk to a child’s psychological well-being.
According to Jean Twenge, a psychologist and author of the book” Centuries,”” Smartphones and social media ultimately changed the way teenagers spend their time outside of school.
” You take a generation of young people, they’re spending a lot more time in their rooms, only, not sleeping, not hanging out with their friends in person. That’s a very poor method for emotional health”, Twenge adds.
Haidt writes,” As the oldest people of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their problems are carrying over into adulthood. Young people are having less sex, dating less, and showing less interest in having kids than younger years. They are more likely to reside with their kids.
The New York Times reports that liberals are very busy having any children because they are exclusive to our VIPs.
Surgeon General Murthy reasons,” Faced with higher levels of car- accident- related deaths in the middle- to- late 20th century, lawmakers properly demanded seatbelts, airbags, crash testing and a host of other measures that eventually made cars safer … This January the]Federal Aviation Administration ] grounded about 170 planes when a door plug came off one Boeing 737 Max 9 while the plane was in the air”.
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But Liz Wolf, writing at the liberal site Reason, claims that Murthy’s line of reasoning is flawed.
This is a weak range. Of course, a system panel coming off a helicopter in the middle of a flight and putting a passenger at risk is much more serious than a teen using social media and occasionally suffering from psychological harm. Auto collapses, which still account for 40, 000 fatalities annually in the United States, are more urgent and need to be resolved than preteens feeling bad about themselves after spending too much time browsing.
When I was younger in the 1950s and early 1960s, television was also a relatively new phenomenon. However, my parents carefully set aside the amount of time I could watch TV ( sports were an exception ), and kept my choices open. Every child today has a phone and a TV in their place wherever they go. I understand the difficulty of parental care.
Murthy’s” answer” is no answer at all.
Despite the fact that some of the most gifted engineers and designers in the world are able to maximize the amount of time our children spend on social media, Murthy told CNN last year in a 25-page consulting that addressed many of the same issues as today’s Times op-ed,” for very much, we have placed the whole burden of managing interpersonal media on the shoulders of parents and children.” He is right that social media companies spend groups of engineers optimizing the algorithms to entice more users, but he is wrong to view it as a David and Goliath situation where parents cannot be expected to put the effort into actually raising children.
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Murthy is framing the issue in terms of politicians: “us vs. them” instead of an issue of society. We have to study either to live with the consequences or to change the way kids do their jobs because social media has harmed the youth lifestyle. Yes, it means denying kids the right to travel social media platforms ( as well as the rest of the online ), but parents have made these decisions for kids since humanity has lived on its own.
The systems that prevents children from accessing particular web sites is constantly improving. Hopefully, soon, social media sites will take it upon themselves to bar or limit access ( with the help of parents ) so that the government does n’t have to step in.
