Every Election Day, newspapers — the ones that are still printed on paper — have a hard decision to make: what to put on the page the next morning, when print deadlines make it impossible for editors to know who won before they have to decide what to publish. Enter Jonathan Haidt. I first met Haidt, a social psychologist at N.Y.U., in 2012. When we faced this problem as the Obama-Romney race came to a close, I asked Jon to write about four issues the next presidential administration would have to confront — two the left worried about and two the right. He sent back a pitch-perfect essay describing the way “shared fear” might help unite us. Haidt did not get his wish. In the years since, he has become absorbed by the question of how smartphones and social media contribute to the anxiety and depression many children, teenagers in particular, suffer from — a different “shared fear.” Last year, we published the results of research Haidt did with Will Johnson of the Harris Poll, “Gen Z Has Regrets,” the headline of which gives you an indication of how the 20-somethings Haidt and Johnson surveyed felt about the advent of smartphones and social media in particular. Now they are back with a follow-up survey, this time of parents, which they conducted with Haidt’s colleague Zach Rausch. It turns out that parents aren’t very happy with the world they have made, either. “Almost a third of parents whose children have social media believe they gave their child access to social media too young,” they write, “and 22 percent feel similarly for smartphones. Notably, for both technologies, only 1 percent of parents thought they had waited too long to introduce them. In other words, parents regret the technologies they gave, not the technologies they withheld.” The essay is illustrated with emotionally telling graphics by Quoctrung Bui and Taylor Maggiacomo. Haidt, Johnson and Rausch show how “digital regret” dominates parents’ feelings about these technologies, but the authors have not despaired, and neither should you: “When families and schools act together,” they write, “change becomes possible.” But it has to happen soon: “With tech companies eagerly filling our children’s lives — and their classrooms — with more new and untested technologies (A.I. ‘friends,’ tutors and other forms of virtual reality), it is becoming that much more urgent for parents to speak up and for legislators to act.”
Here’s what we’re focusing on today:
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