Fully agree- Policy makers, armchair education experts, and parents love to forget that kids effectively *lost* two years of education due to COVID. The sad Zoom school that kids mostly slept through didn't count. Screens, AI, Tiktok, etc- are certainly problems worth investigating, but the biggest problem was that everything just returned to normal without any formal, intensive focus on rebuilding lost skills- largely because that would have meant kids needing to take extra classes.

The thing is, I've worked in this field for a long time now. I'm getting invited to do talks all over the US on these topics, and regularly have parents tell me I blew their minds and changed the way they're looking at their kids behaviors. I've taken kids from having violent meltdowns whenever it's time to turn off minecraft to being able to turn off the game when they realize it's not doing it for them anymore and it's time to stop.

And about considering that I might be wrong- I used to think screentime was a problem, and I realized that approach was the wrong one.

But the biggest contributer to success was parents having an open mind on how to solve these problems. Parents who came in with paper thin arguments about screentime being crack and all kinds of nonsense they're parroting from FB ultimately had damaged trust with their kids, and the interventions didn't go nearly as well because the kids saw no reason to engage if the trust wasn't there.

I actually work with kids in a mental health capacity, spend time talking with kids with screentime and school refusal issues, and am a published author and lecturer on child socialization. Kids mental health outcomes are worse for a lot of reasons, but the argument that things got better for the boomers, then increasingly worse is absolutely true. And now as things are getting really bad for kids, and they're aware that it doesn't need to be this way, that's creating a lot of endemic despair- although again that's just the tip of the iceberg on an increasingly complex mental health crisis. Having genuine curiosity and listening to kids rather than insulting opinions that challenge your own is important if you actually want to figure out solutions. Otherwise, you're just part of the problem.

Although, just to make it clear, here's the problem.

-Screens aren't crack. They're a medium. Trying to take away phones at this point is like trying to take away paper. And while there *are* problematic things, it's a much better plan to actually help kids gain digital literacy, plan for use, diversify their opportunities for fun, and learn metacognition around their screen use than compare them incorrectly to drugs.

-Kids mental health really isn't good, and blaming screens is literally blaming both a symptom and a band aid. Being on a screen all the time isn't good for your mental health, but for a lot of kids, after COVID, they didn't really have much else given that going outside isn't something kids are really encouraged to do much anymore.

-Taking away screens turns kids into hackers and damages trust.

-Taking away screens also doesn't help kids build functional relationships with them. Too often the parents don't have functional relationships with screens either, so taking away the screens is just hypocritical, and sets kids up for failure later in life.

-The screentime debate is honestly being poisoned by a bunch of alarmist nonsense that wants to reduce it to the same debate we've been having since the popularization of the novel. It's a very new technology that we need to actually understand how kids interact with, rather than comparing it to mind rotting drugs. While there are impacts, I think, again, the more significant impact is on society as a whole. We're just picking on kids for the same brainrot that boomers are getting (but worse) from Facebook. And kids can smell the hypocrisy.

You're labeling a bunch of right wing, idiotic headlines that aren't rooted in any sort of reality. You can blame the left for all kinds of stuff, but honestly? NCLB did far more harm to kids learning than any of that shit, and that was Bush.

... Did you even read the comment, or are you showing that your reading comprehension levels need help?

the thing is, the kids aren't stupid. Sure, a lot of them are a bit brainrotted from tiktok, but the boomers brainrot is *far* worse. They're smart, they're able to see the writing on the wall, and they see a social contract that has no reason to continue. And we've failed them, handed them a big steaming pile of shit and told them to get better grades. It'd be laughable if it weren't so sad.

yeah, that's bs coming from an anonymous coward who doesn't talk to kids. They hate fascism, they hate the right, they hate that they're seeing their country get stripped for resources with the same energy of copper thieves. They don't like the left because it failed to meaningfully protect them, just give them lip service, but the right's insistence that 'thoughts and prayers' instead of common sense gun reform to protect them against school shootings has made it clear where things stand.

Few things happening.

-COVID. It did a huge hit on kids, on their wellbeing, social development, and academic performance. Kids are still getting over the burnout from that.

School issues. Schools are hitting a teacher cliff, and teachers are all burned out from all the extra BS they have to do. On top of that, schools are wildly underfunded for the things that actually matter, and are having a hard time retaining talent as the stress load for teachers just keeps going up, while their salaries aren't competitive.

Someone posted something about absenteeism with a 'back in my day' sort of energy. So, on that- yes, schools will still send truancy officers to check in. A lot of the time, it's kids with serious mental health problems. See the COVID burnout thing, and the next point.

The kids are not ok. If you look at kid's mental health, it's frankly in the toilet, and a lot of it comes down to the world that they're inheriting. They're facing a global warming cataclysm, the rise of fascism, and a garbage economy with no hope of ever achieving the American dream. They're often latchkey kids because both parents have to work to pay rent. They're having AI and social media infiltrating their lives, and have no real sense of community (COVID disrupted so many community programs oriented at helping kids with this, and thanks to DOGE cuts, a lot of other nonprofits that did great community work are dead.) Doing well in school is based around a social contract that ensures that it will have some meaningful payout, and right now, that social contract is a joke.

It's not 'How much homework' they should be looking at, or 'is homework a good thing,' but 'what sort of homework results in the best academic achievement. A lot of teachers use homework as a sort of ongoing assessment tool to determine if students are understanding the content- which is a really good thing to do! But, there's probably better ways to do that in the classroom where you can correct misunderstandings in realtime. And based on the subject, there's probably a lot of reinforcing instruction that would be best done at home. But trying to ask questions about 'how much' or 'is it a good thing' misses the mark completely, and ultimately is going to give you unreliable data points.

We're cooked, literally

People always point out that almost nobody needs to know all the pointless facts you learn in school in your daily life, but the reality is that school offers a lot of different chances to do all kinds of boring, tedious, pointless, and esoteric things- many of which you'll mirror in your adult lives. Sure, you might not need to know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but being able to remember all the different types of purchasing orders that your company uses and the specific esoteric tagging system they have in the back end, being able to remember all that esoteric stuff is helpful. But AI really does change things, and I worry about human cognition, as all this stuff is ultimately trained. You get smarter by thinking about things and figuring stuff out, and if AI is doing that for you, you're robbed of that opportunity.

Kids lost two years of learning from the lockdowns. Don't blame laptops for a horrible pandemic that, for some reason, everyone forgets about.

I sold a subreddit to a sex toy manufacturer

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