And at 9th grade it's a free for all? Looking back the high school years would have been the worst for my own self esteem, angst, etc. Glad none of it was recorded. :)
I really don't envy my parents for having to deal with that version of me, and I did so much stuff I regret.
My self-esteem back then was hair-thin; I use to obsess about EVERYTHING, from what I say, to how I talk, to how I smell, to how I walk, to the music I listen to, etc
Just do all you can to get ahead of the idea that they are in a concrete hierarchy, because make no mistake, they are in a hierarchy. Maybe even talk a bit about guanxi, and how people that freak them out now, will change a lot.
The smokers in my class (thankfully I never smoked), use to use even more Axe to cover the smell of cigarettes after they smoke, but the funny thing is that we could still smell the cigarettes on them, but now it's mixed in with headache inducing levels of body spray
This is why I think that taking steps to keep kids off social media is delaying the inevitable. Just as there’s no safe age to start smoking, there’s no truly safe age to start using social media as it currently exists. So either we accept the negative aspects of these platforms’ existence, or we remediate them.
Exactly. Just because you have a bunch of kids smoking doesn't mean the anti smoking advice and practices don't work on most of them.
Seriously false dichotomy. You understand that you can access FB/IG from a computer, right? You don't need a smartphone to do that. Could be a desktop, with shared accounts for multiple userd. And if you do have a smartphone, you can turn it off at night, or put it on the table.
And you can use social media without taking and posting selfies. Or at least, doing so excessively.
> Look at all the Baby Boomers and older Gen X’ers that got on the Internet in the past ten years and instantly had their brains rotted despite decades of life experience. Should there be some kind of emotional intelligence ...
But that's only the highly visibly subset of them who don't resist social-validation, confirmation bias, mindlessly forwarding viral crap, slurs and gossip. The other X% that behave reasonably and refrain from 24/7 ideological foodfights, we don't notice. Certainly, the big social media with quantified vote-counts, followers, shares, and in the absence of fact-checking, are incentivizing the death of civil discourse based on, uhh, facts.
It's pretty obvious one of the main necessary habits is skepticism: inquiring for the precise source and attribution of claims, checking facts, scrutinizing your own susceptibility to want to believe a specific claim (or source) without objective proof. And by extension, picking the group of people you associate with online to be like that.
Haidt also documents how socialization and playing among children [in the US] has stopped being face-to-face and moved online within that decade. This is something that can be reversed at ages 8, 12, 14 etc. Coordinated action by schools, classes and parent groups would be great.
> there’s no truly safe age to start using social media as it currently exists.
*Only as it currently exists post-2016, not as it used to be pre-2012*, which is the exact point Haidt repeatedly hammers home. People didn't complain about MySpace, Friendster, et al: why? The culprits Haidt mentions in passing: making counts of likes, upvotes, followers visible (let alone prominently showing them like as if they're the defining thing), and the (artificial) pressure to constantly post (selfie image) content that juices them, and to compare to other people's. Also, (for adults) retweeting other people arguing. We (= US Congress) can easily mandate switching FB/IG back to a 2012 interface. (Of course, they'd lose lots of advertisers and users, boo-hoo. Push the financial incentive to them to suggest solutions.)
Consider also how widely US COPPA law [0] is flouted in allowing under-18s or under-13s to register a profile and self-certify a fake age over 13 or 18: imagine if that had to proven in person with ID, just like buying alcohol or tobacco, or driving, or buying a gun. But can anyone remember a criminal prosecution of either a parent, or a social network which knew or had reasonable knowledge that one of its users was under-13? Where is basic enforcement? COPPA doesn't appear to have criminal penalties. Why shouldn't COPPA have criminal penalties, on both the parent and the social-media company (gasp)? (in conjunction with mandating changes to remove the pressure for likes, upvotes, followers). Or, less drastically, social-media can monitor its individual users' use patterns and suggest them when that becomes unhealthy or excessive ("You've been looking at influencers for the last 4 hours. Time to disconnect and do something else?").
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
It's frustrating, because every time this comes up we have these long, expansive threads about what social media is or isn't 100% responsible for (as if the standard is 100%), or if we can't exactly identify the precise mechanism by which this or that algorithm is predatory, we just throw our hands up and say "well shucks, it's a tough question!" It's really not. Social Media in this current form is a net detriment to human civilization. I'm open to a steel-manned argument that earlier iterations - without the algos, without the doom scrolling, without the tracking - are okay, or even a good thing.
Really? I have never felt that way about social media (esp. Fb), it's only the studies demonstrating the harmful effects that have convinced me that, at least in their current incarnations, at a population level the cons of social media outweigh the pros. That there's still no good alternative to FB for taking advantage of its "pros" is my biggest concern.
I still need to be convinced that there actually exist some "pros".
You can leave children to discover it on their own or you can talk them through what it is, what it can do, etc.
I had a close friend who came to drinking later than peers, but then hit it hard. He became absolutely unbearable with almost any amount of alcohol. Might've been a personality thing or predisposition to it, but felt like the circumstance of him starting drinking harshly like he was making up for lost time was a catalyst.
Alcohol is considered a vice and we not only have laws which prohibit children from its consumption, at least in the US, it's culturally accepted that it's generally not appropriate for children to be drinking. In the US, I do think that straight prohibition-style banning of all alcohol from children is also not a good idea largely due to the example you've given where once children become adults and have free access to alcohol, their lack of experience with the substance can cause issues.
I'm personally planning on letting my children consume small amounts of alcohol while they are under our supervision to give them experience. That way, once they do have free access, the novelty is not so great and hopefully they'll be able to behave more responsibly. Treating social media as a vice doesn't have to mean full ban until they're adults. It just means we need to acknowledge that it is and think about how we want to deal with it.
Middleschoolers are suddenly blasted with hormones, and are basically accelerating at breakneck speed. Everyone's body is changing wildly, you're thinking and feeling new things every day, and it's all a total mindfuck.
By highschool, the hypernovelty has worn off. Yes, they're still developing and figuring things out, but it's not quite as much of the surreal existential body-horror that middleschool is.