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By Michaela Gordoni
The Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt wants parents to know there’s a difference between good and bad screen time.
“A pretty good use of screen is to put on a long movie,” Haidt explained in a podcast with Ezra Klein. “Like, 90 minutes… They’re going to pay attention to a long movie about characters in a moral universe, so there’s issues of good and bad, and norms and betrayal, and…it’s part of their moral training, their moral formation and they’re watching it with another person…It’s social.”
On the other hand, screen time all to yourself is detrimental.
It’s “exactly the opposite — it’s solitary, it’s not stories, and if they are stories, they are 15-second stories that are amoral or really immoral, really disgusting, degrading things and people doing terrible things to each other,” Haidt continued. “So and then the other thing that I really want parents to understand is that this not like TV.”
TV tells a story, whereas touch screens train behavior.
“You get a stimulus, you make a response, and then you get a reward, which gives you a little bit of dopamine, which makes you want to do it again and again and again,” he shared. “A touchscreen can train your child the way a circus trainer can train an animal.”
Haidt explains how screens are causing widespread anxiety among young people in his book, The Anxious Generation. The book warns about screen use and provides a lot of data regarding the detrimental effects of screen use. It’s written for adults, but Haidt is working on a version for kids called The Amazing Generation, which will come out on Dec. 30.
Last week, Haidt called on the Senate to make social media safer for teens. He highlighted a recent experiment where adult users pretended to be teens on teen social media accounts. They found that there was a lot of unsafe content, including drugs, sexual activity, sexual language, body-shaming, and anorexic content.
“@Meta’s Teen Accounts aren’t what they promised,” Haidt said. He encouraged his post’s readers to support the KOSA bill, which would implement more online child safety measures.
When it comes to kids, teens and even adults using screens, there are many precautions that need to be taken.
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