WTF is Wrong (or Right) with My Son?
I just finished watching the debate between Jonathan Haidt and Robby Soave about social media. Haidt is in the camp that social media is ruining our children, and Soave thinks it isn’t that big of a deal. I have plenty of responses to that debate, but something interesting happened right after I finished it. After listening to an hour and a half of how our children our doomed, I realized that my son didn’t have his Xbox all week long, and it got me thinking.
Now, before I get started, I feel like I always need to say a couple of things when writing about my son. First off, this is anecdotal, but there’s no way my son is the only kid on earth like this, so we need some research. Second, in no way do I ever write this to say I’m an amazing parent because like all other parents, I’m far from perfect.
So, my son’s mom just texted me and said, “Did you know your son didn’t have his Xbox all week?”, and I’m like “Wait. What?!”. I have my son on the weekends or longer depending on what’s going on in our lives. Sometimes, he forgets something here, and his mom’s house is literally on the opposite side of Las Vegas. For some reason he’s worried I’ll get mad if I have to bring something to him, which is odd because I not only hardly ever get mad at him, but I don’t mind driving. It gives me an excuse to listen to books.
Well, last week it was his AirPods, but this week he forgot the power chord to his XBox. Whereas last week, I brought him his AirPods, this week, I didn’t even know he forgot the chord.
What you need to realize about my son is that he’s a gamer. The kid games hardcore. He’s always playing XBox with his friends or playing solo games while talking with his friends on XBox Live. He takes after me in the sense that we’ll game until our eyes bleed.
But I wanted to write this short piece because like I said, there are so many narratives out there about how technology is destroying our kids. Whether it’s video games or social media, there is so much fear around these things. I just listened to that entire debate where study after study is cited, and although this is anecdotal, I can’t get sold on the technology panic because of what I witness on a daily basis with my son.
My son is 13 years old. Every few months, he hops on TikTok, gets tired of it and deletes it. As I just wrote, he didn’t have access to his XBox all week, and he was fine.
If you listened to the narratives around technology, you’d think these kids are feinding for technology and video games. Hell, if anyone would be behaving like this, it’s my son because he comes from a family of addicts, so that’s legit built in his DNA.
So, again, I’m no 5-star parent, but can we please recognize that something else is going on. I’ve said it a million times, but everyone wants to blame “their thing” on the rising mental health and addiction crisis, but I’m not sold on it being technology like video games and social media because of what I witness in my household on a daily basis.
Something I’ve noticed lately is that so much research is focused on the negative rather than the positive. What I mean is that we have a ton of studies on kids saying they’re negatively affected by social media. Well, why aren’t we studying kids like my son? Why aren’t we trying to build personality profiles or figure out environmental factors that have molded kids like this into being well-adjusted while they have access to all these same things?
I’ve been re-reading a lot of books about why people get conned or believe in silly things like conspiracies, and we have so much research on those people. Why aren’t we researching the people who are less likely to be conned or fall for conspiracies and misinformation?
All I’m saying is that it seems like if we focused on the people doing well, we could find better solutions rather than having moral panic after moral panic and everyone arguing about what they think might work. We have evidence of people doing fine, and we need to be looking at these people of all ages to figure out the secret sauce.
I was going to put this in a Twitter thread because it’s so short but decided to put it here. I may do some more short pieces like this, so stay tuned!
I’m currently writing a book about how we’re manipulated by the news, social media, technology, advertisers, and each other. It dives into the psychological history of manipulation, our biases, tribalism, and more.
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