TagJonathan Haidt
New Report: Parents, Don’t Give Your Kids Smartphones
This has become a national health crisis.In the late 1800s, a patented medicine geared towards children called Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup was made accessible to the public. The product claimed to calm children down, help them sleep, and whiten their teeth. There was no prescription necessary for purchase, and furthermore, no disclosures of the ingredients. The stuff worked miracles. It really seemed to work. It turns out, unfortunately, that Mrs. Winslow’s magic potion was brimming with both morphine and alcohol. Nothing like getting a baby drunk to get it to go to sleep, right? Mrs. Winslow must have decided that drugging and intoxicating kids was the best way keep them in check. Consequently, medical companies started being required to disclose what was actually in their products, Read More ›
Is This a Moral Reckoning? 41 States Sue Meta for Knowingly Addicting Young Users
The lawsuit claims that Meta's platforms are harming its young users. The data backs it up.Two Notable Reads: Children and Tech and the Illusions of Photography
How much should kids be online? And is taking pictures taking us out of real life?Consider Laying Your Phone at the Altar
What if we actually did start eliminating smartphone use in our most important social institutions?If you’re a churchgoing person, do you check your phone during the sermon? Do you even bring it with you? Or when you’re having dinner with your spouse or a group of friends, is the draw to glance at the smartphone an almost irresistible temptation? It is for me. I’ve struggled with phone addiction since I was first introduced to my first smartphone at the age of seventeen, which I realize is way older than the average age kids get online today. But what would it look like to have social spaces totally free of these persistently distracting and disruptive technologies? A new article by Jake Meador at the online journal Mere Orthodoxy asked this question. He poses it hypothetically, Read More ›
Social Media is Hurting Kids. Does Big Tech Care?
Body image issues, low self-esteem, and social comparison are all typical outcomes of excessive social media use among teens and childrenSurgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a warning in a briefing this week on the negative impact of social media on kids, particularly teenage girls. Murthy called tech companies to provide “safeguards” to protect children who are at a critical stage in brain development. Early exposure to social media, numerous studies show, are correlated with anxiety and depression in young people. Murthy said, “We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis, and I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis – one that we must urgently address.” Social media could harm youth mental health, U.S. Surgeon General warns | Reuters Problems like body image issues, low self-esteem, and social comparison are all Read More ›
TikToxic: The Popular App is Feeding Teens a “Diet of Darkness”
Apart from the debate over espionage and data privacy, TikTok is a highly addictive appTikTok has gained a fair bit of fierce criticism over the last few months; the China-owned social media app is the most popular on the market, with tens of millions of users and downloads. That includes, of course, teenagers. Apart from the debate over espionage and data privacy, TikTok is a highly addictive app. We covered more on that here, but recent studies show that it’s not just the amount of time spent on the app that is troubling, but the specific kinds of content young people are ingesting every day. Julie Jargon writes in the Wall Street Journal, Data privacy, though, might be less worrisome than the power of TikTok’s algorithm. Especially if you’re a parent. A recent study found that Read More ›
New Article Compares Big Tech to “Big Tobacco” of the ’70s
Like smoking in the 1970s — known to be dangerous yet poorly regulated — Big Tech is harming kids today yet is met with little intervention or pushbackIn a new article from Deseret News, Brad Wilcox and Riley Peterson equate Big Tech to “Big Tobacco.” They argue that the online world has the same dangers and negative effects as other drugs, and go on to cite alarming mental health data to back up their claims. Similar to how smoking was found to be dangerous in the 1970s and yet poorly regulated by the government, Big Tech is harming kids today yet is met with little intervention or pushback. They start with a powerful analogical anecdote, writing, Imagine if a man in a white panel van pulled up in your neighborhood and began enticing teens to look at pictures and videos featuring drug use, pornography and a range Read More ›
Girl Tragically Dies After Doing Horrific TikTok Challenge
The 12-year-old from Argentina isn't the only victim of the fatal TikTok "blackout challenge"A 12-year-old girl from Argentina died after trying the dangerous “choke challenge” on TikTok, per the New York Post. The girl, Milagros Soto, was found in a closet hanging from a makeshift noose on January 13th. Soto’s family members think she was bullied and challenged to perform the horrible online fad while at school. Soto isn’t the only casualty of the TikTok challenge, which involves asphyxiating oneself until passing out. It’s also only one of many “fatal fads” circulating the TikTok sphere. Also known as the “blackout challenge,” Tiktok users chase virality and clout by forcing themselves to pass out. In light of the tragic death, people are begging parents to prohibit TikTok from their children. Several Twitter users spoke Read More ›
A Catholic and a Hindu Tackle Woke culture
In a wide-ranging discussion, Michael Egnor and Arjuna Gallagher look at Woke culture, abortion, euthanasia, and microaggressionsIn a recent series of Mind Matters News, podcasts, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor interviewed Arjuna Gallagher, a Hindu who lives in New Zealand. The first podcast looked at what the world’s 1.2 billion Hindus generally think about the mind and the second explored the Hindu view of free will and evil. The third podcast addressed the question, “What do Hindus think about the Big Bang?” Now, the fourth and final podcast asks, what do Hindus think of current science and culture issues, especially the flowering of Woke Cancel Culture, abortion, and euthanasia? Gallagher hosts a YouTube channel called Theology Unleashed, which has featured many guests discussing the spiritual dimension of our lives — for example, philosopher David Bentley Hart and neuroscientist Read More ›
Compassion and Religion: Darwin’s Unscratchable Itches
If one’s research is in a hole as deep as evolutionary psychology is when accounting for compassion, why not stop digging?Last Sunday, I pointed to a chapter I wrote in The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos (2021) on evolutionary psychology, best understood as the psychology we have derived from our not-quite-human ancestors. “Not-quite-human ancestors”? Well, if you believe in conventional evolution theory at all, you must suppose that we have not-quite-human ancestors. Thus, to understand the origin of traits like giving to the Heart & Stroke Fund or subscribing to popular science magazines, we must get back to a point before any such institutions could have existed but there was some sort of dim potential. But we can’t really do that because, as noted last Sunday, there is no such Read More ›