I hate to say I’m not going to read something but I don’t think I want to read this book. I don’t believe there’s anything new and interesting in it for me. To the contrary, I suspect it will make me angry.
The greatest harm that a screen does to a child is that the parent is staring at it instead of looking at the child. But nobody is willing to say that because it’s easier to format children than to convince adults to exhibit some self-discipline. Parents are the people who will buy the book, and Haidt can’t afford to antagonize them.
The narrative of “evil companies who hooked kids on purpose” is weak sauce and boring. We’ve heard all this before with Coca Cola, Barbie dolls (before they were rebranded as good for you), junk food, etc. Of course, companies want people hooked on their wares. Their responsibility is to their shareholders. They definitely can’t be expected to have a greater responsibility to children than those children’s parents.
This problem gets solved the moment the parents put the phones away when interacting with their children. That’s it. That’s all that’s needed. Don’t hold the bloody things in your hand – turned on or off, doesn’t matter – around children. These kids are miserable not because somebody said something on Snapchat but because Mom hasn’t had an uninterrupted day with them during their whole lives. Snapchat is horrible, definitely. But it’s not Snapchat that’s doing the damage. It’s the distracted, absent parent who interrupts every conversation with the child to stare at a little plastic rectangle. I’d like to read about that but it doesn’t look like anybody will have the guts. Or the readers if they do.
Clarissa's Blog 
On the “to read or not” front, are you planning on readintg Rob Henderson’s “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class”?
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Troubled/Rob-Henderson/9781982168537
LikeLike
It’s the same thing at school. Where I teach, government regulations lay down that students’ phones be switched off and locked somewhere out of their reach. Of course the vast majority have their phones on and out, either on or under their desks. Which is not at all surprising when they see that most teachers also have them on at all times and sometimes even use them in the course of the lesson. The level of hypocrisy is staggering.
Personally, I generally leave my phone at home, and in any case none of my students has ever seen me use it at school. And yet, even though I try to set a good example, some of my students use their phones in class. It’s cultural and it begins at home.
LikeLike
” even though I try to set a good example”
There’s a rule of horses…. if you have a horse that spontaneously starts jumping over fences there’s only one option that works…. teach it to jump on command. Then it stops jumping on its own (I’ve never had to do that but I’ve heard it multiple times from different horse people). It doesn’t work with cows (not selectively bred to pay close attention to humans and what they want) and the options there are worse… (tie it to a log it has to drag around).
Anyhoo, I’m not gonna try to put toothpaste back into the tube so I put my phone on my desk and ignore it… until I don’t, I use the stopwatch option to time some things because I don’t wear a watch and I’m not gonna bring in a kitchen timer or something like that.
Sometimes I ask “Can someone look up X real quick?”. Treating it as a tool to be used at times and ignored at other times.
I don’t know how successful that is but I’m not big on prohibitions (by the time you do that you’ve already lost).
LikeLike
@cliff arroyo
I’m totally with you. I don’t terrorise my students with regard to their phones, just make some ironic comments from time to time. I also ask them – infrequently – to look up things in class, since I know they have their phones at the ready. The whole idea for me is to demistify digital technology, though how successful my attempts will be remains to be seen. As I said, it’s cultural.
LikeLiked by 1 person