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Child Psychotherapist: Easy and Constant Access To the Internet Is Harming Kids
First time accepted submitter sharkbiter sends note that one of the UK's foremost psychotherapists has concerns that smartphones may be harmful to the mental health of children. "Julie Lynn Evans has been a child psychotherapist for 25 years, working in hospitals, schools and with families, and she says she has never been so busy. 'In the 1990s, I would have had one or two attempted suicides a year – mainly teenaged girls taking overdoses, the things that don't get reported. Now, I could have as many as four a month.'.... Issues such as cyber-bullying are, of course, nothing new, and schools now all strive to develop robust policies to tackle them, but Lynn Evans’ target is both more precise and more general. She is pointing a finger of accusation at the smartphones - “pocket rockets” as she calls them – which are now routinely in the hands of over 80 per cent of secondary school age children. Their arrival has been, she notes, a key change since 2010. 'It’s a simplistic view, but I think it is the ubiquity of broadband and smartphones that has changed the pace and the power and the drama of mental illness in young people.'”
has some very insightful things to say about children and social media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq8ULEfvF78
He has also written a very good book about child raising in general. I had good parents, but even so, I wish they'd had that book, or at least the insights in it, when I grew up.
is a concise summary of SJW-ism.
Not SJW-ism at all. Somebody is finally saying what many of us already knew.
I go to the mall and and every kid I see is staring at their phone, not looking at anyone around them, not even their friends who walking next to them. I go a restaurant and there are parents with children. And the kids stare at their phone the entire time, never looking at or talking to anyone around them.
It seems very abnormal and unhealthy.
In New Zealand, we haven't seen any change in the data for the last 20 years.
In the States the rate has gone down
In the UK , it has gone down.
In Wales it has gone down.
In Scotland it has gone down.
In North Ireland it has gone up.
TLDR: This person is full of shit.
There is a reported increase in 'mental illness'
There is a massive decrease in street violence.
There is an overwhelming rise in the availability of EVERYTHING on the internet.
Go figure.
When people migrate from a small village to the city, they can't go on treating strangers with contempt and fear, instead, they have to learn to live being surrounded by thousands of strangers everyday. There is some suggestion that it's the move to cities which has something to do with the civilising process (ie. a reduction in common violence), although it also has its own kinds of stresses.
Likewise, the internet allows people to interact across cities and nations and with thousands of people and frequently, and so it may be that it is a new challenge to our social behaviour. It isn't that cell phones are the problem, it may just be that the new complexity of a wider-connected environment means people have to learn new ways of dealing with it, mainly because everyone is going to be a victim to it, so everyone will need to start extending their empathy much further, not just to their village neighbour, not just the the stranger on the city bus next to you, but to "abstract" "avatars", human beings, out there. And also learn new skills for coping.
The problem with 'equalizers' is they become a vector for both the good and the bad. The point the OP seems to be trying to make is that they are not only speeding up access to information and good things like that, but they are also focusing and concentrating the type of stress and bullying that happens among school aged children.
One thing we tend to forget as 'geeks' is that new technologies have to be examined across the ENTIRE population, not just 'people like us'. Like it or not, there are potential problems that can not simply be written off by accusing anyone who brings them up as a 'dinosaur'. Technological shifts have consequences, and sticking your head in the sand never helps, it just makes you look blind and weakens your argument.
When I was a kid, I had no say as to what I wanted. Sit still an be silent. Nobody cared what I wanted.
No I would not even get something to paint with. And yes, those were real restaurants, not visits to the local burger joint.
When I look back, I am a better person thanks to that. My parents are my friends now, but not when I was a kid. They were my parents.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
There's no need for corporal punishment, just bring back "punishment" in general, and make it consistent and fitting
This. My daughter knows that when Daddy starts counting down from 5 that she had better clean up her act NOW before the counter runs out. She knows this because I've consistently used that as a message to her that she has crossed the line since she was 2. Typically I only need to say 5, or hold up 5 fingers, and she changes her behavior (often she decides she needs a timeout and takes herself to her room).
That having been said, this is a technique that works with MY kid. Just like adults are different and if you interact with them assuming otherwise you're going to have issues, so are kids. Figure out what makes yours tick and use that knowledge and you'll both have an easier time of it.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before