End the Phone-Based Childhood Now
www.theatlantic.com
The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

  • bigkahuna1986@lemmy.mlEnglish
    864·
    9 months ago

    Well I could only read the first 2 paragraphs due to paywall, but it’s definitely the phones causing all this and certainly not late stage capitalism sucking the energy and empathy out of everything around us right?

    • BertramDitore@lemmy.worldEnglish
      321·
      9 months ago

      I think the two (phones and late stage capitalism) are working hand and glove to fuck up the kids. Us older folks had a much easier time pretending things were okay because our pockets weren’t constantly buzzing with instant feedback and we weren’t continually forced to consume traumatic and stressful content. Sure, we had plenty of other problems, and each generation is going to deal with their own fair share of shit, but I do think this cohort has a much harder job avoiding the ugliest sides of humanity.

    • lemmyreader@lemmy.mlEnglish
      91·
      9 months ago

      Thanks for the paywall warning. I’ve opened the page in Firefox, clicked on Toggle Reader View immediately and could read all text. Here the end of the article :

      spoiler

      We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

      This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

      ​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.