tools not toys

We thought we were just having fun times with devices; it turns out we were spreading nuclear waste over the entire surface of the earth. Piling up heaps of radioactive slag inside our homes. Smearing it over our faces at night. And then a generation was born into that poisoned world; we got to watch them take shape, and it became obvious how... See more

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence,

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The digital dominance of the 21st Century has sorted us into our own tailored versions of online reality, where we drown in ads and information. It's overwhelming, noisy, and ephemeral. It's hard to have a simple conversation, let alone align the globe on a future worth building.

We think social media has changed childhood and adolescence for the worse, so much so that it constitutes a “great rewiring of childhood.” Beginning in the 1990s, a childhood based heavily on outdoor play began to fade away and was replaced by a phone-based childhood in the early 2010s, when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones.

Can we

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