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Childhood disrupted: is the internet damaging young people’s development?
(yorkshirebylines.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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Technology
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I dunno, I have a teenager, and they have friends. I have a teenage niece, plus dozens of little cousins with devices.
While it can seem like that constant access is a negative, and I've seen a study somewhere about it being really bad for vision over time, what I don't see is anything worse than what TV, gaming, hobbies, or phone calls did to my generation.
The key difference is that the kids can do all of that with one thing, from the couch. So, with a bit of willpower to enforce exercise, and limits on time to allow for family time, I think all claims about harm (unless there's good data the back up a claim) are no better than the bullshit about gaming, or arcades, or heavy metal, or d&d, or any of the other stupidity that has been claimed to be ruining kids over the years.
Kids, teenagers in specific, can require a bit more effort to shift their attention when they have a device in hand, this is true. But people don't remember how damn pissy teenagers got when being pried away from a TV. If my grandparents stories about my parent's generation are true, even before TV was everywhere, teenagers were assholes about shifting attention from their focus of the moment.
From what the one great grandparent I grew up with said, my grandparents' generation was different only in access to distractions. And, for the most part, for a kid back before TV existed at all, radio and books were just as difficult to pry an ear or nose out of.
Now, I will say that most teenagers can end up boring as fuck because they get lazy about using/doing non device things. When every interest is tied to absorbing entertainment in some form, you end up with monomanias in cycles that I don't recall from being a teenager among teenagers. Not that they didn't exist, but you'd see more diversity in interests on average. But, have you seen fucking adults now? It's getting harder and harder to find adults that aren't locked into their device in one way or another. Adults are boring as fuck too, just in different ways, and often were in the past.
Anyway, point is that until there's good data compiled, the whole "kids these days" is just as bullshit as it always has been.
Where I think kids are being negatively affected is the ubiquity of tech in general. Where, even when I was a kid in the 90s/early 2000s, I was let out of the house and would be gone all day. My parents couldn’t call me, they didn’t really know where I was. I had freedom and privacy.
Two things kids these days are sorely lacking. No privacy, from the time they’re babies. Their phones have daddyspy tech on them, their rooms are being monitored by smart devices, some of them even grow up under security cameras.
I read a study a while back about the effect of knowing there’s a possibility you’re being watched alters behavior on a subconscious level. And definitely on a conscious level. I cannot and do not want to imagine what it must be like to be constantly reachable your entire life, to be trackable, to be constantly monitored. That, I believe, is fucking up kids as they develop. These kids almost don’t understand how little privacy they had.
And even my parents were more overprotective than kids experienced in the 80s, 70s, 60s. But I still got a good hefty dose of privacy in my childhood. These poor kids today have no idea.
Gen Z here. I was given the freedom you described, but I don't really think having a dumbphone with you on a walk is restrictive (unless your parents check on you constantly). That's far from "spy apps and cameras around", like you described. I knew my mother wouldn't call me unless it was really necessary, and would myself warn her that everything's alright if I was returning late. Most of the time I could leave the phone at home with mother none the wiser, but did take it when I went far and/or late.
Well obviously they're not talking about you. I, for instance, was given an iPhone by my parents with Qustodio on it that monitored my screen time, location, search history and even gave my parents the ability to lock my device remotely so I couldn't use it.
That is, indeed, crazy. My point was that presence of a phone by itself is not unhealthy (even though I'd indeed opt for a dumbphone for a young child).