As the U.K, Canada and other countries either look at implementing or start social media bans for children under the age of 16, I see a lot of articles asking “What do the children think?”.
Whether you’re for these bans or against them, I find myself asking “why”?
I know all too well that we don’t always respect children’s thoughts and opinions enough. Our media, modern cartoons, and even well-meaning adults, talk down to them and don’t give them the credit they deserve for having their own opinions.
In the process of being adults, we often rob children of formative experience in debating thoughts, structuring arguments, and even the validation and self-confidence that can come from being treated like you are an autonomous, sentient, information absorbing, creative individual.
But that aside, sometimes being the adult means doing what you have to for the good of your children, regardless of what the child wants.
We do it all the time. Vaccinations are a prime example – it doesn’t matter if your child doesn’t like needles, they’re long term health is more important than their short-term discomfort.
We did it here in Canada in 1908 when the “Tobacco Restraint Act of 1908” made it illegal to sell cigarettes to anyone under 16.
I’ll bet the children who were told “no more fags for you” were pissed off, and the tobacco companies (who really aren’t that different to social media companies when you think about it) were doing everything they could to stop it from happening. And we did it again in 1988 and 1993 when they raised the legal age of selling and buying cigarettes to 18.
What confounds me even more is that we, generally, wouldn’t ask someone who is enjoying being addicted to heroin if we should take it away from them. We as a society know that it is bad, and try to help them, both by banning the drug and helping those who are addicted to recover.
The kids are the heroin addicts.
In fact, they’re worse off than heroin users in this analogy because the heroin user can remember a time before being an addict. Most of these kids can’t. They’ve grown up with it. It’s “normal” for them.
It’s a prime example of Shifting Baseline Syndrome, which you primarily hear associated with climate change, but fits perfectly here.
With ongoing environmental degradation at local, regional, and global scales, people’s accepted thresholds for environmental conditions are continually being lowered. In the absence of past information or experience with historical conditions, members of each new generation accept the situation in which they were raised as being normal. This psychological and sociological phenomenon is termed shifting baseline syndrome (SBS), which is increasingly recognized as one of the fundamental obstacles to addressing a wide range of today’s global environmental issues.
But we, the supposed adults in the room, can remember, and that is what should inform our decisions.
For or against the bans, our opinions should be informed by our experience, the science, and the best interests of the children, and not swayed by the tears of those clamouring for the next algorithmically induced dopamine hit.
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