Future generations are entering a more digital world than ever before, but not many of us have the solutions.
New York University professor Jonathan Haidt is one of the few people with solutions to, as Dave Rubin puts it, “help young people cope with this digital madness.”
“One is to ban smartphones until age 14, but you can give them a flip phone,” Haidt said. “You can’t have a kid with the internet in their pocket all the time because strangers can access it and they can watch beheading videos.”
“The second is, no social media until you’re 16. This is what the kids themselves are saying. This is what 18-year-olds are saying. They wish social media didn’t exist, but they’re tied to it. So why not postpone it until 16,” he explains.
“Don’t let your kids spend their adolescence on social media,” he continues, noting that it’s a “really vulnerable time.”
His third rule is down to the education system.
“No cellphone schools,” he says, “we went to school before the internet. Imagine if your school had a new rule: whether you bring a TV from home, bring a walkie-talkie, bring a record player, you have to leave it all on your desk and plug it in. You can do that during class, even while the teacher is talking.”
“This is complete madness, but that’s what we did,” he explains.
Haidt’s fourth rule is a critique of how isolated children’s lives have become over the past few decades.
“They have a lot more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world that everyone had up until the 1990s. They don’t have adults monitoring them all the way to college,” he says.
Rubin believes Haidt’s advice is crucial.
“We put the most powerful technological tools in their pockets and say, ‘Go ahead and use them,’ and then what do you think happens?” Rubin asks. “A lot of evil forces are filling their brains with bad stuff.”
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