A look at the Jonathan Haidt book, “The Anxious Generation”
by Frederick Sinclair
For decades, scientists, medical professionals and humanitarians have warned of the dangers of advanced telecommunications and the potential impacts to physical and mental health as well as social development. Until recently, much of the focus has been on documenting the negative impact of microwave frequency exposure, to nature and how it affects the biological function of living beings. Convincing evidence, of impacts from the misuse of these technologies is being ignored by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Congress , the Courts, the telecommunications industry and most people. Sadly, as a result, an entire generation of children have, for the most part, been kidnapped and shifted from play-based childhoods to phone-based childhoods.
Unfortunately, it has taken the emergence of serious degradation in child development, including mental and physical health, to awaken us, as a society, to the negative impacts of allowing the misuse of information age technology. These impacts are occurring at very personal levels. Social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt has just published The Anxious Generation – How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He obtained his PhD in social psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and taught at the University of Virginia for sixteen years. This book is a must read for all parents, guardians, teachers, leaders and those who simply give a dam. From the jacket of the book:
“ Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the play-based childhood began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the phone-based childhood in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which the great rewiring of childhood has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families and their societies. Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the collective action problems that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents , teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.”
This book is a must read !
It is an established fact that the most savvy industry and technology developers in Silicon Valley strictly limit the age at which and amount of time their children are allowed on the mind controlling and addictive devices and programs they themselves knowingly create. They pay to send their children to tech free schools with money they extract from the general population of habitual users and families with troubled children. A professor at Stanford University wrote a book in 2002 titled “Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do”. Many of his students went to work as social media developers, including among them a cofounder of Instagram. Habit forming telecom devices and the internet, continue being refined and developed to hook adolescents and adults alike. It is the love of our children and primal urge to guide their development and keep them safe that may just break the spell being cast upon humanity. Read “THE ANXIOUS GENERATION“ by Haidt, to become more knowledgeable and able to counteract the devastating impacts of information technologies targeting our children.
