Tiffany’s Reviews > The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness > Status Update

Yup.
We have to get the kids on and off the bus, and they can’t wander the library on their own. Confirmed.

I think fortunately for us, the evidence was already clear and because other parents sent their kindy kids with an iPhone on the bus on Vern’s first day, our kids have always had to grow up with the experience of being different. Sometimes it’s hard for them, sometimes we relent and watch K Pop Demon Hunters. But it’s good for them to practice being different, not caring so much what people think of them.

“…the general rule was that the more tightly people are bound into a community that has the moral authority to restrain their desires, the less likely they are to kill themselves.”
Restrain their desires.
Interesting. Interesting phrase.

This topic of the boys is interesting to me because this was a conversation we were having in my ed classes in 2010, 2011. The education world was really starting to be concerned about boys, for a wide variety of reasons.

This is a wild study result!!

From endnote 7 - the research community is closing in on a consensus that crude levels of social media use are correlated with crude measures of anxiety and depression, for girls, at or above r= 0.10, and at or above r= 0.15 for gross and boys merged. “Is r = 0.15 tiny? Not in public health.”
From 23 - so there are researchers who disagree that this is sufficient evidence. I’ll be reading these arguments later.

Yes! Finally! Let’s see how this section goes…correlation =/= causation!

“We need to develop a more nuanced mental map of the digital landscape. Social media is not synonymous with the internet, smartphones are not equivalent to desktop computers or laptops, PacMan is not World of Warcraft, and 2006 Facebook isn’t 2024 TikTok…We need to be careful about which kids have access to which products, at which ages, and on which devices.”
Hard agree. 🎤

“In the real world”
The phrase got me. I think that’s where I’m hung up on this book. I understand what Haidt is saying and agree, have said the same thing myself.
And.
The real world is where people are. And the people are online. There is no splitting of the individual, the culture, in this way. Sure, people can pretend to be someone else, but they can in “real” life too. “Peoples is peoples”.