I am a little uneasy about yesterdays post. I feel like I should know a lot more about girls and social media. However, the truth is I would be taking a lot of information from predominantly two sources: The Anxious Generation and The Facebook Papers. There is a third source worth considering, Alison Armstrong’s material, but that is actually about adult women, and adults, whether men or women, are materially different from children whose brains are still developing. To do that segment justice, and not simply regurgitate what I’ve already read, I would need (and want to), go to Professor Haidt’s sources. That’s one thing I love about great academic writers, they cite their source material, and typically I find in those books a wealth of useful and interesting information.

Now that I am on day 11 of 15, two things pop up for me.

  1. I am traveling for my daughters graduation, so I am not sure I will be able to sustain the content production I have been pushing for the last 10 days.
  2. I want to do some more research on:
    1. What are the “bad” games?
    2. What are the “good” games?
    3. What else are people doing to help neurodivergent kids with video games?
    4. What exactly is social media doing to girls?
    5. What is the state of the art for age verification? (Meta invests according to SEC filings $1B a month in VR and metaverse technology. Why can’t they solve the age and account verification problem? - my take: because they don’t want to. Well, Bars don’t to check ID’s either but they have. We do we let Tech companies make their own laws.)

Super Cool

My interview on the Healthy Screen Habits Podcast with Hillary Wilkinson. You can find it on Apple Podcasts here. I really love the work Hillary and her organization are doing to educate parents on screen safety. She and her cofounders were on this topic long before it became cool. If you take a look at healthyscreenhabits.org, their content is fantastic and they start with five healthy screen habits:

  1. Give you phone a bedtime.
  2. Ask what’s my purpose
  3. The grandma rule
  4. Phones away or silent.
  5. No phones in bedrooms.

And I really love their Family Technology Plan. If you want to see something happen, having a plan is one of the best ways to do it. They also have a book called: Healthy Screen Habits for Tweens & Teens which retails for $14.99 on Amazon. What I really like about these resources is that they are chock full of tips and techniques to help keep your kids not just safe, but in a space where they can thrive.

5:11PM

I spent the better part of the day at the dentist office having the hardest to reach tooth in my mouth worked on. The dentist kept telling me I had a “tiny” mouth. I kept telling her, no one who knows me will believe that. I plan to call her as a character witness in the future. Consequently, this shall be a short blog post day.

They all can’t be monster writing days I guess. As Oliver Burkeman said, “try to be Dailyish.”