Hope For Humanity (ARC): Generation alpha, the phone-based child – The social psychology of smartphone addiction.

Why are Gen Z split 50/50 on which side of the Israel-Hamas War to support?

"We have play-based childhoods up until around 2010. I've seen data in Britain, it's something like 60% of British kids in 2009, 2010 used to go over to a friend's house each week. By 2015 that had dropped to something like 20%. The thing is kids used to actually see each other in person and once they all got their phones and loaded with social media for the girls, it's video games for the boys, childhood stops being play-based which is what a mammal brain needs to wire up properly. It stop being play-based. It becomes phone-based where phones include video game consoles. All the stuff that makes your social interactions virtual, often asynchronous disembodied transitory. It's the great rewiring of childhood. 

"It happened between 2010 and 2015. It hit the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand exactly the same way. New Zealand is a little big later, but US, UK, Canada are exactly in lockstep about what happened to our kids mental health."

"Professor Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and author. He is a Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business. He authored The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind."

 

More in the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship video.