A “gigantic mental health catastrophe” began in 2012, and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes that overprotecting children in the real world — by not letting them out to play and develop independence — and under-protecting them online is to blame.
Especially now that around every corner is an app fighting for your child’s attention.
“We have all kinds of documents, leaks, docu reports that came out in lawsuits where we hear them talking about all the harm they’re causing and all the things they’re doing to cause addiction. These platforms are designed to grab our kids’ attention and never let go because if they let go, it’s going to go to their competitor,” Haidt tells Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck on “The Glenn Beck Podcast.”
“So I think now that the case is pretty much closed, the argument that ‘Oh well, we just don’t know, we need to gather more information,’ you know, that was the tobacco industry playbook decades ago,” he explains.
Haidt calls it an “evil industry,” with TikTok, Meta, and Snapchat “harming children at an industrial scale.”
“We’re not just talking like a few hundred kids. We’re talking literally tens of millions are harmed and thousands are dead. So I do think that this is having a very pernicious effect on society, on children,” he says.
And it’s not only affecting their attention spans.
“They need to make lots of mistakes and learn from them. And then especially during puberty … when the brain is changing very, very fast. It’s rewiring from the child to the adult form. And so if in puberty, kids are not out there having adventures and flirting and getting embarrassed and getting in arguments … if they’re not out there having real world experience, it’s going to prevent the neurons from wiring up in a healthy adult way,” Haidt explains.
“In terms of what they’re going to be like in 30 years, here’s what we can say with some confidence just because these are the way the trends are. They’re going to be more anxious and more fragile,” he continues.
“We never let them grow thick skin. We never let them have those toughening experiences,” he adds.
But that’s not the biggest issue these children will face.
“The biggest one I think is the destruction of the human capacity to pay attention. Young people, they find it very difficult to pay attention to anything for more than 10 or 15 minutes. They find it difficult to watch movies,” Haidt says.
“They find it difficult to read a book, and they’re reading much, much less. Can you imagine Western civilization if we lose books? If it’s all just TikTok?” he asks, noting that while attention span might be the most common, it will also affect demographics.
“The frequency of sex and marriage was already falling with the Millennials. It’s falling much faster with Gen Z. Boys raised on porn who have very poor social skills and play a lot of video games and don’t have really much practice flirting,” Haidt tells Glenn.
“And that’s just on the boy side. The girls especially are more anxious and fragile, which is also a bad sign for marriage,” he adds.
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