Social Media Parenting Advice: The Experts Have Failed Us
Social media misinformation, experts you can trust, and some exciting books to have on your radar.
Hello Bar-Setters!
This past week, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Elon Musk of X, and the executives of Snap, Discord, and TikTok were all called to testify in a Senate judiciary hearing on social media’s impact on children.
Unfortunately, very little will come from it. As I’ve explained before…
…there are a lot of brilliant people working hard to create as much confusion as possible around questions like:
When should parents give their kids smartphones and social media? And…
Are current smartphone and screen-based childhood norms at least partially to blame for the woeful state of youth mental health?
I’m astonished that this is even a question.
The Failure to Acknowledge Reality
Following the testimonies of these tech executives, the Free Press’s Abigail Shrier gave an insightful commentary on the horrible state of parenting advice regarding social media and youth mental health, in general:
Gender dysphoria, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Tourette syndrome: the number of social contagions spread by social media could fill a diagnostic manual all its own. And yet, in the eight years since academic psychologists Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt first warned the world about the dangers of social media, the mental health expert complex has done nothing to curtail its use by teens and tweens.
Tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg feel no pressure to take responsibility for the damage their products cause. And why would they? The American Psychological Association, quick to warn the public about the dangers of systemic racism, police tactics, and climate change, has utterly failed to take the dangers of social media to teens seriously.
By failing to appropriately respond to supernormal technologies like the smartphone, the APA has done great harm to children. Parents and school leaders are not empowered with the knowledge or direction to take sufficient measures to help young people. They are allowed to believe that insane things, like being on your phone for over seven hours per day is normal teenage behavior. As Dr. Jonathan Haidt bluntly framed it:
It is insane to give a distraction device—basically, an experience blocker—to a child.
The Advice We Should Have Heard
Like Haidt, Shrier recommends that parents:
Throw out their kids’ phones! Delay access to smartphones until high school (as every tech insider does)!
And move the age of internet adulthood back to 16, AND ENFORCE IT!
We need these directives to become norms so that parents don’t have to face toxic social pressure to keep their kids from feeling left out. But, as Shrier explains, most experts won’t suggest this because it will put them out of a job:
Any parent can take away a cell phone. But only mental health experts can dispense “wellness tips,” diagnoses, psych meds, and therapy. They march into schools and lecture teens about the responsible uses of social media, which is a little like school nurses advising kids about the prudent uses of Ecstasy.
Lecturing teens about responsible social media use is like nurses advising kids about responsible Ecstasy use…
In a recent presentation, Dr. Haidt made a similar comment:
The only way to stop kids from checking their phone is a Yondr pouch or a phone locker…
…If you just say, as my kids’ school did: Oh, we have a phone ban. You’re not allowed to use your phone while in class. You have to keep it in your pocket… That would be like a heroin recovery clinic that said: You can take your heroin into our facility, but you must not shoot up in the bathroom.
It isn’t a perfect analogy. Smartphones don’t cross the blood-brain barrier. But these brilliant devices do create a compulsion far stronger than most appreciate.
For more on why smartphones and school are so incompatible, see this recent post:
And if you are interested in digging into these ideas more, there are a number of books that I’m very excited about, which will be out soon:
Shrier’s new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing UP, comes out February 27th.
Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, will be out March 26th.
The brilliant Robert Henderson’s Memoir, Troubled, comes out February 20th.
I have a feeling all three of these are going to rock our world.
Lastly, an article that came out in the Guardian earlier this month, where six world experts weighed in on whether smartphones are bad for us. It’s a great read. Three of the experts come down hard on the ills of using smartphones without firm boundaries and an understanding of the manipulative arts used by tech designers. The other three are often nuanced insightful, but they fall victim to the techno-progressive assumption, to varying degrees.
Still, it is hard to read any of their responses without concluding that our kids would be far better off if schools and parents took the advice I’ve of Haidt and Shrier.
Thank you for reading and sharing!
Carry the fire!
Shane
Shane—many times I feel that you are reading my thoughts. I am blown away that the government is more concerned about cigarettes than fentanyl, soft drinks than smartphone-social media. But I realize like Pharma ‘informed consent’ we are on our own. Truth is that there is no better method of indoctrination and neutralization—for purposes of control—especially with young people, than the smartphone. What a blessing it was that we did not grow up with a tablet or smartphone in our hand as soon as we could walk. Keep up the good work.