Childhood disrupted: is the internet damaging young people’s development?
Was the internet an unwitting accessory to the murder of Brianna Ghey? A developmental psychologist reflects
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.
I don't have kids. And I respect the Kids These Days perspective...
But aren't you concerned about how quickly YouTube and Facebook are known to show new users radical content? Have you read studies about how social media may be related to unprecedented mental illness in kids?
Aren't algorithms and social media at least a little different than books and television? Aren't they razor focused on making us sad and addicted?
Fewer kids are going to church to learn about who to hate, so I think it balances out.
Ah, that's down to content control. The same way my dad had to bust my ass if I was watching skinemax too much, parents have to be aware of such and take steps to both monitor and educate.
Unfettered access is risky. Unsupervised access is risky. But cooperative, communication driven access becomes a very, very powerful tool for a parent. You start using YouTube to teach things, give them the critical thinking skills to parse bullshit for themselves.
But fuck Facebook. It's usefulness is long gone, so I just block that are the router and have done with it.
Also, I have read studies about social media risks. The studies showing harm are dubious. That's why I emphasized good data. When the study doesn't involve good control participants, it's almost meaningless. When a study pulls from a limited group, it's kinda sketchy. Worse, when a study completely disregards other issues, it's junk from the beginning.
they get lazy about using/doing non device things.
That's the key. Over the generations media (from books to smartphones) got more sophisticated in grabbing our attention to the point that addiction really has become a problem. While everything fun can be somewhat addictive we now have corporations optimizing their products in that way.
I'm sure kids can develop healthy habits with phone and internet consumption but I also believe they need help by restricting exposure in order to play "conventionally". It's similar to sweets - if you leave kids to just eat whatever whenever they want, they'll stuff themselves with candy until they vomit repeatedly.
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.
In my opinion, some of your comparisons are a bit off. For example, I'd say there's a significant difference between D&D, arcades yada yada as these were generally social activities, where as you stated phone access can be completed from the comfort of their couch.
I anticipate there will inevitably be a large increase in vision impairments, neck/ upper back pain, likely social isolation and obviously reduced attention spans.
All true, however there is some truly depraved shit available online and I would argue prior to the internet you would have a much lower chance of getting exposed to that. And thats the stuff that can change you in not so good ways.
I mean, 2 girls 1 cup would have never been on any TV station. Real decapitations probably not either. Some of the graphic war footage we see today, some of it might be on TV but the real gory stuff, not really.
I know these are maybe outliers, but still, you can get to experience a lot more freaky shit these days than back in the day with no internet. And a lot easier or worse, by accident.
Edit: also being exposed to stuff like TikTok these days is a bit different than reading magazines about the latest looks. Selfies were not a thing before you had phones with cameras (and internet) either. There are a lot of differences from back then to now.
I mean, 2 girls 1 cup would have never been on any TV station. Real decapitations probably not either. Some of the graphic war footage we see today, some of it might be on TV but the real gory stuff, not really.
That stuff was available. You just had to go out of your way to go see it. The same mostly applies to today's internet.
Did your parents let you run off into a garbage dump? No. Well, mine didn't.
People seem to think that there's only a two position switch for devices: unfettered access, or none.
If you aren't supervising and communicating with your kids, you really shouldn't let them have internet access. It isn't the internet that's the problem there, it's adults not taking the time to do their job. It's absurdly easy to block or otherwise limit access to unwanted sites/services. That's the bare minimum a parent needs to learn. But it's still the beginning. You always, always communicate with your kids. You do the job, or it's on you.
And, having grown up reading crap like Cosmo and Elle, and the teenage versions of them, saying that tiktok is worse is joke. The invasive data mining is, but the content isn't. Hell, Cosmo in particular is a major stain on the beauty standards of the world. Besides, it is absurdly easy to block specific services if a parent puts in a half hour of work.
None of which matters. The point is that it isn't "the internet" or "that phone" that's the problem. If a parent isn't going to put in the minimum effort to teach their kids, the kids are fucked way harder than by anything they'll see online.
I'm only 19, so I'm part of the generation that grew up with phones. Me and my friends all saw 2 girls 1 cup and that gore stuff but I don't feel like it really had any lasting negative effect on us. At the end of the day, it was still just videos. I think watching that stuff was just kind of showing the others how tough or manly you were.
TVs didn’t have algorithms to keep people stuck to the screen. Problem is you can easily end up in a negative feedback loop with TikTok and YouTube Shorts where the algorithm starts to only show potentially harmful content. I’ve heard stories of teens who developed eating disorders because TikTok kept showing videos to these teens that were about dieting and pills made by people who were basically anorexic.
The internet, as experienced by most humans today, primarily consists of ads, sponsored content, propaganda and spin. I don't really see how it's contributing to our development in a constructive manner.
I grew up on the internet with no real parenting and I turned out fine.
wonders why I think about dying at least once every 5 minutes every day
More importantly I grew up without the internet, and no real parenting, and ended up with lifelong major depression. And I manage suicidality on a daily basis.
We blame social media the way we blamed video games, and CCCGs the way we blamed violent movies and Gangsta Rap the way we blamed Rock-＆-Roll and Dungeons ＆ Dragons. What we're not willing to look at is how we force both parents to work, so they aren't around to parent and when they are they're too exhausted from working.
In fact, no-one is okay. We have intergenerational mental illness and our healthcare grossly underserves mental health interests, which figures into why our suicide rates are creeping higher every year while Japan's (where suicide is more culturally accepted) is lowering. It figures into why the Christian nationalist movement and transnational white power movement are lousy with new members.
It doesn't help much that the old myth of upward mobility has been thoroughly debunked, that we're anticipating a global population correction in the next century and our leaders are all inheritance aristocrats who act childishly on the House and Senate floor (or in Parliament). The society that demands we do better and give 100% can't help but do everything half-assed.
So no, we can disregard this given we can't be bothered to give our kids school lunches or even a daily wellness check-in.
We blame social media the way we blamed video games, and CCCGs the way we blamed violent movies and Gangsta Rap the way we blamed Rock-＆-Roll and Dungeons ＆ Dragons.
Look, there's a lot to be critical of about parenting and the demands of current day society, but when I was a kid, being bullied 24/7 even while away from the bullies, having algorithms target my particular individual insecurities and being covertly groomed by strangers even while being actively supervised by responsible adults were not possibilities. It's not just a moral panic to blame social media, it actually created more risks for children than anything else on that list, and this is one responsible parents actually would be doing good by keeping their kids away from it.
To be fair: The internet you grew up on was quite different to the internet we have today.
But nonetheless: I think every generation (at least in modern times) has its own thing nobody else has experienced before, so most likely they will turn out okay...
"Wait the internet is affecting our youth?"
"Always has"
🌎 👨🚀🔫👨🚀
No.
We do have to adhere to Betteridge's law of headlines, after all.
I see a bigger "risk" if you want to call it like that, in AI chats, because they make you really lazy in double checking or overall searching and solving issues by yourself. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it does reduce frustration, especially with technical issues you can solve quickly that way, but the risk of getting overall unskilled in problem solving, is growing bigger. Results are masked behind another layer, creating another instance to trust, on top of already existing ones. Paird with growing AI generated content. Which can be harmful as I'm sure no AI model will be able to stop getting confused by fake content. The wishful thinking, we just filter out AI fake content, is a pipedream.
We've already observed an overall trend of young generations moving backwards in their technical understanding of hard and software, simply because there's no real need to to understand it anymore. A lot of stuff has become one click easy, one pre build purchase, one pre defined way to use something. We removed friction in setups and UIs, no longer requiring to develop a bigger understanding on how something works. The result is a lack of insight on how to solve an out of the box issue.
I'm sure older people would say the same about me, being able to Google something, instead of reading byte code and reading a 1000 pages manual. So maybe everything is fine at the end, because humans adapt just fine.
The internet however, has been there long enough that we can say there's no issue. If anything parents should focus more on providing a necessary early development and not buy them a tablet on birth-day.
Everyone said the same thing about the Internet search engines and people using libraries less to look up research. Almost all the examples you listed below that is specific to technical computer knowledge and honestly isn't even relevant to 95+% of the population. The vast majority of people couldn't care less about knowing what's going on under the hood of computers, and they don't need to. Do you know how to effect repairs on your car engine? I don't, and I don't need to, as I don't care and it's not my specialty. We have mechanics and car engineers for that. It's not like computer engineers, devs, etc. will suddenly stop going to school to learn the nitty-gritty (although, purist devs will lament how so many modern devs don't know how to write low-level code, but again, most devs don't need to).
Those kids you're so worried about will grow up, obtain specialized training in whatever area they desire, and there they'll learn what's going on under the hood of whatever subject it is they're learning. Same as it ever was.
The AI proliferation of fake content is definitely already a problem. It has been for several years, just look at all the social division caused by automated bot trolls in relation to online discourse, as well as automated fake news websites. There are solutions to these problems, it just takes the government and citizens to actively work towards combating it. Taiwan is a recent example of how this can be accomplished with their recent elections coming under intense pressure by these fraudulent systems.
AI has its problems, but I hardly think it's going to cause us all to suddenly become braindead mouth breathers anymore than we already have been.
Edit: I will add that I'm somewhat concerned what AI chatbots that become so human-like will do to socialization. But that's a whole other topic
Perhaps one day humanity will look back and ask whether the lack of Internet in the thousands of years prior damaged the development of everyone who grew up without it
And that’s the thing to expand on my other comment. Kids are who are restricted from access to devices and the internet are at a complete disadvantage to those that aren’t. But it does need to be monitored by parents.
I’ve heard of both sides from my own kids. There are kids who have been totally restricted who have secret accounts on social media and kids who had no restrictions who had social media accounts that were completely public when they were nine.
It does absolutely not need to be monitored by parents. How is a child who's being abused going to be able to get help or information offline if their parents are monitoring and filtering their internet? We need a legal right to unfiltered internet. Which is not to say we shouldn't, as equals, educate children about the risks of the Internet.
