Get Your Kids off the Internet

It's Poison

The internet has damaged the mental stability, personal relationships, resilience and well being of large chunks of a whole generation, and compromised the learning and critical thinking skills of most young Western people to some extent.

We all fell for the comforting notion that each older generation believes the worst of the youth of today; that this was just more of the same. After all, the ancient Greeks were saying similar things about the youth of their time.

But we were wrong.

Our young people and young adults are notably and observably less resilient, less mentally healthy, more aggressive and less stable than previous generations.

“Teens that spend hours “liking” their friends’ pictures on social networking sites may be significantly more likely to have traits associated with violent behaviour.”

The internet is not like the TV, or the radio. Its repercussions cannot be compared to any other new technology.

No other technology including television has done to developing minds what the internet has done to our children.

The internet is full to the brim of poisonous content being pumped directly into people’s brains.

Once, I too could be heard claiming “There’s nothing new under the sun”.

But actually, there is.

And it’s called the internet.

The Precursor Of Harms Done

Computer/video gaming addiction, even prior to the internet, was indeed linked to poor mental health outcomes.

However, with the advent of the internet, even video gaming addiction become more virulent, due to online gaming behaviors.

The Noxious World Wide Web

As a direct result of exposure to the internet, your children are watching, listening to and being groomed by predators, mentally unwell strangers, violent and risk-taking interlopers, other kids encouraging unsafe behaviour, hardcore sexual content, drug and alcohol promotion and information that is simply untrue — as well as being exposed to bullying on steroids — cyberbullying.

“Social media platforms were deliberately designed to hold users’ attention as long as possible, tapping into psychological biases and vulnerabilities relating to our desire for validation and fear of rejection. Too much passive use of social media — just browsing posts — can be unhealthy and has been linked to feelings of envy, inadequacy and less satisfaction with life. Studies have even suggested that it can lead to ADHD symptoms, depression, anxiety and sleep deprivation.”

Young people’s worldview and ability to think critically and maintain mental health and healthy relationships is being tainted.

Never before have so many violent, mentally unstable, paedophilic, misogynistic, hate-filled, phobic, unstable, conspiracy theory promoting and aggressively venomous people had access to your children’s hearts and minds.

Never before have so many who should have been ignored into irrelevancy — and would have been just two decades ago — been given the power to loudly infiltrate your children’s lives. Directly with no filter and without your permission.

There are several strings to the bow causing the rise of Internet Instability Disorder — a term I coined while writing this article.

Screen time is just one of them.

Why Screen Time Harms Our Brains

Humans are naturally conditioned to guzzle, not sip. That’s just how we’re built.

Children cannot self regulate how much screen time they use. Their brains are not developed enough to do so. And their brains are learning to obsessively require the internet for constant stimulation.

More than one hour per day of screen time is linked to depression and anxiety, and other extremely concerning issues.

And our kids are gobbling screen time. The average American teenager is clocking up to 9 hours of screen time PER DAY.

Material Damage Done

Society, parents, the gatekeepers who should be gatekeeping are not.

We’re ruining their sleep patterns, and we’re making our children more stupid.

We’re materially altering their brains by permitting them to stare at screens all day.

“Children who spent more than two hours a day on screen-time activities scored lower on language and thinking tests, and some children with more than seven hours a day of screen time experienced thinning of the brain’s cortex, the area of the brain related to critical thinking and reasoning.”

“A good night’s sleep is also key to brain development, and HMS researchers have shown that using blue light-emitting screen devices like smartphones before bedtime can disrupt sleep patterns by suppressing secretion of the hormone melatonin.

Many teens who stay up late texting are not only getting less shut-eye, they’re also lacking the deep REM sleep essential for processing and storing information from that day into memory. “So even if they stay awake in algebra class,” Rich says, “they may not remember what happened in class yesterday.”

Psychological Damage Done

Use of more than one hour per day of screen time is linked to depression and anxiety.

“Young people who spend seven hours or more a day on screens are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety than those who use screens for an hour a day.”

“After an hour a day, however, increasing screen time was generally linked to progressively lower psychological well-being”

Be honest — you know your kids are using these screens for MUCH longer than one hour per day. The Average American child is on a screen for up to nine hours every day.

Human brains are not set up to receive a constant slew of input from thousands of other minds.

“Research confirms that young adults are becoming more narcissistic…A study published in the Journal of Personality…found that, between 1982 and 2006, college students’ NPI scores significantly increased.”

“Receiving a like on social media produces a physiological high by triggering our reward cycle… due to a dopamine rush in the reward center of the brain…A follow-up study added 22 new studies to the meta-analysis and found further increases in narcissism in young adults through 2008.”

Body image and eating disorders have been on the increase for years.

We Are Giving our Children Mental Health Disorders

We’re encouraging anxiety, depression, ADHD, anorexia, body dysmorphia and mood swings.

But it’s not just the online time - it’s also the content.

Even Short Bursts of Exposure to Hard Core Pornography And Violence Is Extremely Harmful To Developing Minds

If you think your kids are not consuming hardcore pornography — you’re almost definitely wrong.

“We are in the midst of a massive social experiment that is having a seismic impact on the sexual templates, behaviors, emotional wellbeing, and attitudes of youth. Never before have we brought up a generation of boys who are a click away from viewing free hardcore mainstream pornography or girls who are growing up in this pornified culture.”

“Today teenagers are viewing far more pornography than their parents realize. And the porn they’re watching is much more “hardcore” than moms and dads could possibly imagine.”

“We know how widespread violent, degrading and misogynistic pornography has become, as well as the implications for the emotional, physical and mental well being of young people.”

It’s not that they necessarily want to watch this stuff — at least initially.

It’s that it’s two clicks away and utterly inescapable in their peer groups and online.

It’s not harmless, it’s not inevitable, it’s not normal, it’s not sex and it’s not what you think of when you think of the porn you caught a glimpse of as a teenager.

Could this be one reason for the sharp decline in sexual activity in teens?

“Teens have reported a steady decline in sexual activity in recent decades, as the portion of high school students who have had sex fell from 54 percent in 1991 to 41 percent in 2015, according to Centers for Disease Control statistics.”

“The reality is, porn has become the major form of sex education for millions of kids,” says Dr. Gail Dines, president and CEO of Culture Reframed. “And kids are learning that degradation, humiliation, and violence are central to relationships and sex.” When Rhianna, 21, looks back on her teenage sexual relationships…she recalls being asked to replicate scenes her boyfriends had seen on porn. “It wasn’t about what I wanted. It was as if you were some prototype female they got to act out their favorite videos with.”

If I was a teenage girl being told it was normal for me to be anally raped and strangled because that has now been normalised, that I must have an unattainably perfect physique and a hair free body — I wouldn’t want anything at all to do with sex either.

A Health Care Crisis In The Making

And all of this is before we even touch on the Western childhood obesity pandemic, which is related in part to availability of highly processed sugary, fatty foods but is also being caused by — you guessed it — screen time.

“Findings of this systematic review and meta-analysis indicated that internet use was positively associated with increased odds of being overweight and obese.”

If Wishes Were Horses

If I could turn back time, as the song famously goes, I’d go back and take my kids offline. We’d move somewhere remote and have only emails and such shows as I considered necessary delivered online.

Our children have, for the most part, turned out ok.

But they have had their struggles and some of those struggles were exacerbated directly by the internet.

I just didn’t know it at the time.

I want you to know what I did not know. We were part of a social experiment we did not agree to take part in, that swamped the Western world in just a couple of years.

I am so glad I grew up without the internet. I wish our kids had too.

Conclusion

This is not a moral panic, Tom Hanks in Mazes and Monsters, or backmasking records Satanic panic situation. At this point, it’s not being denied, there’s plenty of proof.

It’s just that nothing is being done about it.

The internet and over use of screen time with or without the internet, is harming the development and mental health of young people.

This is a fact.

You’re an adult. Your internet usage and the consequences for you of that usage is totally different to that of young people.

Our young people’s brains, bodies, decision-making abilities, risk-taking and critical thinking skills are vastly different from those of adults.

Who could have imagined that giving our children the internet would turn a generation into the most obese, mentally ill, disordered generation yet, one whose critical thinking skills, mental health, resilience, interpersonal relationships and even sex lives are greatly diminished compared to that of previous generations?

Imagine 100 deviants slithering through your door showing your kids violent, sexualised, harmful content and preaching insane ideas to them — every single day. You’d buy a gun.

Young brains don’t stop developing until they 25 years old. It’s obviously not possible to protect your kids from the virulent dangers of the internet until they’re 25.

But do your best to protect your children and teenagers and give them chance at being the young people they were born to be — not the damaged, diminished and mentally unwell version of themselves they could well turn out to be instead.

Get your kids off the internet.

It’s poison.

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A final thought:

I know you can’t all take your kids away to a desert island. But at least if you accept and educate yourselves on what’s happening right now to your young people as a direct result of the online culture we’re living in you can try to intervene, try to protect them.

Your kids — yes YOUR kids too — are going to lie to you when you ask them about this.

Yes YOUR kids are watching hours of unfiltered harmful content. Every single day.

Yes YOUR kids.

Yes. They. Are.

I don’t have individual answers for you. But denying this problem will not help. And getting angry at the bearer of bad tidings won’t help either.

Good luck. You’re going to need it.

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Copyright Alison Tennent 2022, all rights reserved. Scottish by birth, upbringing and bloodline, Australian by citizenship since 2002.

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