Slashdot Mirror
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.'”
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.
There's no need for corporal punishment, just bring back "punishment" in general, and make it consistent and fitting. Why is it okay to hit children when it's not okay to hit anyone else, and generally not even okay to hit animals? Especially when, honestly, most of the hitting is done out of anger/frustration rather than "teaching".
I also have two children that are extraordinarily well-behaved (comments from teachers, other parents, etc), and I've never once hit them. I've yelled at them few enough times that I could count it on one hand. However,they know that no matter what situation we're in, no matter how inconvenient it is for me or how tired I am, if they misbehave they will be punished. Time outs, loss of toys or privileges, whatever makes sense for the situation. No yelling or hitting. In fact, most punishment ends with hugs and calm talking about why what they did was wrong.
It's usually enough to either say "One..." (counting to three) or even to say "I'm starting to get upset" and my almost-four-year old will stop and say "I'm sorry, I don't want you to be mad!" and come hug me instead of doing whatever she was doing wrong.
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.
I'm glad I taught my daughter to be careful/paranoid. I'm also glad she listened.
What we're observing here and in many other different places is the classic problem of technological advancement: Powerful tools in untrained/unexperienced hands. Each of us here has seen the internet/web grow and trivial-to-stupid data-collection services come over us like the plaque. We have a natural negative reaction to post non-anonymous content online or giving some corporation or the public all our data just because they offer a flaky lock-in version of IRC or microblogging. For most users however, that is a very normal thing to do. I cringe each time I see others exposing themselves to abuse and fraud by posting everything under their real name and data. They are one identity theft or one online stalker away from having their entire life turned into living hell.
I set up my daughters Ubuntu Netbook with two mailaccounts, one fake on with a pseudonym and one with her name. I told her to specifically use the latter only for official real-world stuff - sending in homework, applying for some course, etc. and the other for everthing else.
When she went off for a student exchange in Malaysia, she set up a another seperate pseudonymed online Facebook account for the occasion, to be able to cut it lose should things get out of hand. That's daddys smart girl.
Fake/pseudonymed accounts and a general base paranoia about all things online is a must these days if you don't want to be over-exposed to crap from immature teenagers.
I'm glad my daughter caught the drift and didn't wave off her daddys advice on this matter.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
My dad was reluctant to buy my brother and I a computer when we were kids in the mid 80s. "What do we need a computer for? What do we compute? And if you want to play with one, isn't there one in the school library?" But we whined and whined and begged and he gave in.
Big mistake. We spent all our time on that thing, taking it apart, putting it back together, programming it, instead of doing good, wholesome American activities like sportsball and racism. Now we're both screwed-up adults with engineering and computer science degrees, stuck in the dead-end tech industry.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.