The U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, announced on Monday that he would push for a warning label on social media platforms advising parents that using the platforms might damage adolescents’ mental health.
Every surgeon general wants to replicate the greatest all-time success in the history of surgeon generalcy: the campaign against smoking that eventually produced warning labels on boxes of cigarettes. Murthy is just the latest.
Oddly enough, though, I don't really oppose this very much despite its being based on thin evidence. The reason is that it really can't do any harm to encourage parents to keep an eye out for overuse of smartphones and social media, and it might do some good. Just on general principles, it's probably wise to encourage moderation even if overall social media panic is probably unjustified.
For what it's worth, the more I think about this the less I think social media is really to blame for recent increases in teen anxiety and stress. I'm not even sure there's been much of an increase in teen anxiety and stress—different surveys produce different results. But to the extent there has been, my sense is that it's more likely due to how we raise our kids. By insisting on keeping adult eyes on them at all times, we transmit a sense of ever-present danger and fear. By organizing their every activity, they never learn to do things for themselves. By overprotecting them, they never learn how to solve touchy problems on their own. Is it any wonder that by adolescence, when they have a natural desire to break free of parental control, they might be more nervous about it than previous generations? And don't even get me started on active shooter drills in schools.
I won't pretend there's an awful lot of evidence to back any of this up. The truth is that this entire bundle of teen issues is a chaotic stew of fear and unease backed up almost entirely by vibes, not firm evidence. Still, there are enough warning signs to justify concern, if not panic, and skepticism of both social media and modern parenting might help.
Just no.
Or if we have to have more bullshit like this, push it in to the browser so that one click suffices for all the idiotic legal acceptances. And then I can automate that part.
What, you think nobody will pay any attention to them if you do that? Nobody reads all the boilerplate now. I use technical means to suppress as much of the stupid nonsense as possible.
I agree with this, but fail to understand how you think it has any relation to yet-another-mandated-popup.
If you disagree, please tell me the last time you gave actual conscious thought-time to a "The State of California has determined..." sticker.
I have to agree with the above.
Marking EVERYTHING as potentially causing cancer or containing BPAs is just a way of making people ignore everything.
The same for these stupid internet cook bars.
Either we have some real data (not some pathetic p-hacking of a cohort of 300 kids) showing serious level effects, or we do nothing.
None of this stupid BS that imposes a regulatory burden on companies, a cognitive burden on users, and achieves absolutely nothing worthwhile but we're all supposed to just put up with it for the rest of our lives.
“By insisting on keeping adult eyes on them at all times, we transmit a sense of ever-present danger and fear.”
I can’t resist… in the news in Michigan.
PLAINFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WOOD) — The U.S. Marine accused of breaking into a Rockford-area home and stabbing a child multiple times told investigators that he planned to kill everyone inside, court documents show. “This is as big as it gets. This case, it’s as scary as it gets. It’s as horrific as it gets. And it puts all of us in the fear zone like no other,” Judge Sara Smolenski said at Ricardo Perez Castillo’s arraignment Monday.
A Marine! Good grief. During a little kid sleepover! You just can’t believe it.
https://www.woodtv.com/news/kent-county/prosecutor-identifies-alleged-attacker-who-stabbed-11-year-old-during-break-in/
This stuff happens… always did. It’s fine. Or something.
Does a blog really count as "social media?" Yes, comments do allow a certain amount of interaction, but it's still mostly one-way, and definitely not peer-to-peer.
Blogs are kind of the OG social media. Remember in the early 2000s when a lot of just random individuals had blogs? I had one. And it connected me to a like minded group of folks who were also just posting pretty pictures of flowers and insects and birds from their yards. No one was angling to make it big, but somehow individual, nobody bloggers found an audience, albeit a small one.
Those days are long gone. Now anything you post will only be found if the algorithms promote you and they will only promote you if there is something in it for the owner of the algorithm.
We should do a better job of teaching our children to be resilient and to handle themselves rather than protecting them from every vicissitude of life. Lenore Skenazy's "Free Range Kids" website (www.freerangekids.com) has lots of resources on this form of parenting.
Getting people off their devices, esp. children, will help their eyesight.
I don’t have any real data on the state of kids today versus decades ago, other than comparing my own kids’ experience to mine at a similar age. But I do get some anecdotes from friends who are professors. And they certainly think things have changed in recent years. One friend is a professor at a community college and tells me that she thinks about 1/3 of her class is just normal kids like they always were. Another third is fine, but lack the ability to do all sorts of things we expected adults to be able to do years ago. A final third she believes has legitimate diagnosable mental health issues. That seems like a big change from several decades ago.
Family sizes are smaller, and not everyone can afford day care.
One anecdote, a newish parent was commenting that it's really noticeable when they take their kid to playdates the differences between kids that have to pre-school and those that have not. The former grasp sharing and want to play with each other. The later don't grasp sharing and constantly seek adult approval.
You don't care cuz you live in CA which has tons of warning labels on everything.
Other than Prop 65 warnings of carcinogens and teratogens, I don't recall seeing any CA-mandated warnings on anything in years. Maybe you're referring to the privacy controls on websites where you can agree or disagree with the use of tracking identifiers? The only thing wrong with that is that you has to specify your preference the first time you log into a new website.
There are also at least BPA ones.
https://www.p65warnings.ca.gov/fact-sheets/bisphenol-bpa
The whole list is pretty extreme:
https://www.p65warnings.ca.gov/chemicals
including things that make you wonder, like
"Aloe vera, non-decolorized whole leaf extract"
Another useful question is: Prop 65 was 40 years ago. If there are useful effects of any sort we should surely be able to see them by now by comparing with other states. And if there are no visible effects detectable after all this time, WTF is the point of the whole exercise?
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. You've been warned.
If true I think it's both, and they work together. Instead of playing (preferably outdoors), children retreat into themselves and their social media and games, both of which offer continual reinforcement for constant engagement. And parents today (and for some time before) are often apparently far more paranoid about some kind of harm coming to their kids. So kids in their bedroom clicking and parents not allowing them to run around anyway.
I had a typical suburban upbringing in the NE and then Arizona back in the Dark Ages. When I was pretty young we might ride our bikes to somewhere or other for hours, or run around in the fields or whatever. There was no fear about much of anything from anyone's parents.
Today the crime rates are similar or lower depending on what period you are talking about. Kids are rarely molested by a stranger offering candy like people imagine, but almost always by a close relative or authority figure. I remember the nationwide panic when some pretty little white girl was taken from the front yard or her bedroom, so one or two kids out of a population of 300 million.
A few people a year are pushed off a subway platform in NYC out of a ridership of a billion and a half a year (and the vast majority of people being killed by subway trains either intentionally jump or are drunk or faint or trip and fall off the platform) and suddenly everyone is scared and maybe avoiding the subway.
I think there's a term for this exaggeration of threats based on rare incidences.
I also think the pandemic is driving the recent spike in anxiety. Not for the usual reasons cited but just because a global pandemic is stressful! I think we've sort of glossed over the massive global trauma we all endured a few years ago.
> The reason is that it really can't do any harm
The problem is that each additional Advisory label not based on solid evidence creates additional noise and increases the sense that all Advisorys are bullshit that can and should be ignored.
I'm not a helicopter parent and I kick my kids off the screens fairly often. Here's the problem:
Nothing happens outside the screens. There are no kids running around in the streets. My kids' friends never want to meet in person. Nobody ever *does* anything.
I continue to have no screen days, but it does little good. My kids just quietly pass the time until they can get back on.
Technology accelerates and makes easier desires that are already existing.
Like how automobiles made it easier to do what people had always longed for, a personal horse and carriage. Or the way telephones made it easier for people to spread information.
Social media makes the age-old desire for gossip, cliques, ingroup/outgroup shunning and status markers easier and more powerful.
It didn't invent it, it just makes it much more powerful.
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