Anxious Gen Z 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

"Right now, children are going off to college and into the workplace without having been given the opportunity to risk, fail, and have the stamina to try again. That, Haidt says, is setting them up for a much deeper and tragic kind of failure," and widespread anxiety.

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Between 2010 and 2015 childhood went through a great re-wiring when "adolescents traded in their flip phones for smartphones, which were loaded with social media platforms . . "

Author Jonathan Haidt is attempting to start a movement toward "rolling back phone-based childhood and restoring play-based childhood."

from After Babel

Phone bans?

Several states are considering banning or restricting smartphones from students during school hours. The states are: Ohio, Oklahoma, Indiana, plus New York and California, for the reasons proposed by author Jonathan Haidt. 

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Kids' mental health declined in the mid-2010's when many became ensnared by their smartphones and social media, distracting them from classwork and face-to-face interactions. "Phone bans in schools, Haidt writes, are shown to increase test scores, cognitive ability, and deeper interest and engagement in schoolwork."

This author is thankful for his early discovery of the joy of actual books: 

"My friends and I used to race each other to the elementary library to snag the next Harry Potter book. I read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in the fifth grade, and devoured classics like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn before entering junior high. I may have been more bookish than the average kid, but my community encouraged a love of reading that was contagious."

from Mind Matters

Pay attention

If anybody understands that young people are often overwhelmed (see yesterday's post) and led 0ff-track by technology, it must be Jonathan Haidt. He wrote the influential book about it (The Anxious Generation).

This month he gave the commencement address at New York University, where he teaches. There was some opposition to his being chosen, maybe because he's known to have said that students come to college "emotionally fragile, never want to be challenged to grow, and therefore enter the rest of their lives set up to fail." Yes, some are sure to take offense at that.

But his message to these graduates was different. He told them to treasure their attention: to value it so highly that they intentionally direct their focus toward the highest value, the best outcomes--and don't squander their attention on distractions. In other words, make a good "choice of what to think about."

"Flourishing" is the title of his favorite class to teach, techniques we all can use to be smarter, emotionally stronger, and more sociable. Why does he teach these things? To "increase the odds of one's success in love and work," which is the path to flourishing. There's some wisdom here.

from After Babel

Anxious Gen Z

My neighborhood has children, but I rarely see or hear them. Maybe you remember, as I do, long summer days "playing outside" with friends or by yourself, making up games and discovering things and riding bikes. My neighborhood is quiet even in the summer.

But there are lots of kids at a nearby park where grownups organize sports, and the kids wear uniforms. Other than that, they're at home watching some screen on some device. Are they missing something? Lots of voices today say that they are. One of them wrote this book:

 

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Last month Haidt's book came out and is getting a lot of attention. Partially that's because he's an expert😉-- and partially it's because many of us adults already feel that something's wrong when kids don't go outside to play.

The theme is that we've "drastically overprotected children in the real world and woefully under-protected them in the virtual world." This social psychologist has lots of company in his worry about Generation Z (born 1996-2013).

from Mind Matters

(cont'd tomorrow)

Anxious Gen Z 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

All that unsupervised play that children did decades ago actually built some important skills into their lives, like risk-taking and independent decision making and problem solving. 

The amount of time that kids daily spend with friends is sharply down from twenty years ago (US Bureau of Labor Statistics). It was replaced with screen time, of course. 

Instant gratification grows from screen time, but not self-control or independence or self-reliance or people skills. Generation Z seem to have more social stressors on them today, coupled with fewer strengths and learned virtues to handle them.

Anxiety, depression, loneliness are more common to this generation than to previous ones. Yesterday's author, Jonathan Haidt, put his explanation in his book.

What's a parent to do? "For parents, raising healthy kids doesn’t just mean limiting screen time, but encouraging their freedom. They must practice becoming independent so they can more easily transition into adulthood when the time comes."

from Mind Matters

(cont'd tomorrow)