We not only need to ban kids from social media because it is effectively creating very short dopamine reward loops that are likely going to make it difficult for them to enact successful long term reward strategies, but we desperately need to figure out a way to make it less tempting to put toddlers in front of a tablet instead of normal human interactions.
I live in a developing nation, and education especially on child rearing is lacking in the extreme. Easily 75 percent of middle class babies, ages 2 and up, are glued to a screen basically at all times in public. Cellphone holders in strollers.
The kid just sits there watching random TikTok videos usually. In these cases, the “attentive” mothers make sure it’s in YouTube kids. But these kids are getting 8 hours a day plus of screen time under age 4.
I’ve seen the first wave of results and it is truly buzzard, 5 year olds that do not act like 5 year old children. They do not interact with other people in any normal manner, jump around with a degree of randomness and apparent purposelessness that is completely uncharacteristic of non neurodivergent children.
This is most definitely creating divergent developmental trajectories. It looks likely to me to create a “lost generation” at a time when humanity can least afford to lose its long term planning capacity. I can only hope the situation is better in other places.
IMHO social media is the new DDT^Pb when it comes to children under 7, and seems to have very bad effects in adolescents as well.
Because the upper class, for the most part have some inkling about developmental psychology and child rearing, and the lowest of the lower class cannot afford phones for babies, I’m concerned that this is going to create a much more deeply stratified society.
I live in a developing nation, and education especially on child rearing is lacking in the extreme. Easily 75 percent of middle class babies, ages 2 and up, are glued to a screen basically at all times in public. Cellphone holders in strollers.
The kid just sits there watching random TikTok videos usually. In these cases, the “attentive” mothers make sure it’s in YouTube kids. But these kids are getting 8 hours a day plus of screen time under age 4.
I’ve seen the first wave of results and it is truly buzzard, 5 year olds that do not act like 5 year old children. They do not interact with other people in any normal manner, jump around with a degree of randomness and apparent purposelessness that is completely uncharacteristic of non neurodivergent children.
This is most definitely creating divergent developmental trajectories. It looks likely to me to create a “lost generation” at a time when humanity can least afford to lose its long term planning capacity. I can only hope the situation is better in other places.
IMHO social media is the new DDT^Pb when it comes to children under 7, and seems to have very bad effects in adolescents as well.
Because the upper class, for the most part have some inkling about developmental psychology and child rearing, and the lowest of the lower class cannot afford phones for babies, I’m concerned that this is going to create a much more deeply stratified society.