Dear parents,
Monday's edition of The Australian carried a reprint of a Wall Street Journal article with the title, Influencer is pre-teen dancer whose audience is 92pc men. A mum in small-town USA registered an Instagram account in order to post photos and videos of her daughter who had an interest in dance. The idea was to provide a way for the two of them to bond and share experiences with relatives. The account promptly attracted the attention of commercial interests wanting her daughter to model clothing. But that's not all.
During the course of administering her account, the mum realised that the followers, now a mid-city population of 100,000+, were mostly made up of adult men, many of whom were prepared to post their own contributions to the account, which the mum then spent 2-4 hours per day blocking and deleting. Rather than delete the account, the mum gave up blocking inappropriate users and accepted it as a part of being an Instagram influencer.
This family's experience is a microscopic episode within a gargantuan social, cultural and political problem that affects virtually everyone. Enter Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Every parent in the Anglosphere and Europe needs to read this book.
Haidt's main idea is that parents have become over-protective of children in the real world, and under-protective in the virtual world. 1980-2010 saw the gradual phasing out of play-based childhood, by which Haidt means largely unsupervised, independent free play from a young age, activity that of its very nature encourages children to introduce elements of risk. He sees this as a profoundly good thing.
Why is it that children who learn how to skateboard proficiently feel the need to add jumps, flips and, before you know it, sliding down handrails where the risk of injury is deliberately ubiquitous and its incidence inevitable?
Haidt believes that independent play serves broad and deep childhood needs for which there is no substitute. The curtailing of this activity, according to Haidt, transfers children from a healthy and happy "discover mode" to "defend mode":
"Children are intrinsically antifragile, which is why overprotected children are more likely to become adolescents who are stuck in defend mode. In defend mode, they are more likely to learn less, have fewer close friends, be more anxious, and experience more pain from ordinary conversations and conflicts."
2010 saw the beginning of what Haidt characterises as phone-based childhood. He identifies 5 basic harms of over-exposure to screens in general and any exposure to social media visited upon children: opportunity cost, social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction.
Haidt provides detailed commentary on each of these points, but everyone who sees them listed knows immediately what he is talking about because the problem lies not so much with addicted children, but social media-addicted adults, and a political and industrial complex that doesn't know how to operate any other way.
I commend Haidt's book to you. SMMC staff have already devoted one meeting to discussing the chapter on what schools can do. It's not a case of throwing out babies with bath water, but doing everything we can to ensure that home and school are environments in which our children thrive.
Thank you for your support.
Warm regards,
Ian Smith
Principal
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